acidjail: rights to use paid by me; do not take (03)
Mercymorn the First ([personal profile] acidjail) wrote in [community profile] deercountry2022-10-06 03:30 pm

wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

Who: Mercymorn the First, Paul Atreides, and you
What: October catch-all, open and closed prompts
When: Throughout October
Where: Various locations in Trench

Content Warnings: Depression, suicidal ideation (passive), body horror, memory loss

peripheries: (womb with a view)

[personal profile] peripheries 2022-10-24 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Kaworu's eyes look at him, wide, pained, and pleading. He's already been a victim of Paul's carelessness. He doesn't want to be a victim of his abandonment either. He doesn't want to be alone. Loneliness burns even more painful than flames.

He takes the aspirin with little complaint but shakes his head, trembling, at the mention of leaving. He doesn't want to go to the Lumenarium. He doesn't like the white walls and the antiseptic smells. It's like being back in the labs. He'll wake up alone after some disaster with no company except an unfamiliar ceiling.
terriblepurpose: (120)

cw: self-injury, tongue trauma

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-10-25 01:05 am (UTC)(link)
Paul can imagine too clearly this room full of smoke, the red, dull glow of a fire running through the walls and bowing the ceiling, and it's as if imagining it sends it running down his own marrow in merciless, starving runnels. The smell of Kaworu's burn is inescapable, not-quite-human flesh scorched coating the back of Paul's throat as he breathes shallow and shaking, skin paled like he too somehow trembles at the edge of shock.

"Crown of ash," he rasps, smoke there and not there between his teeth, "The unmaker. Indivisible divided, the sunder-star tower-"

When he bites his tongue he does it so savagely that the white that flashes across his eyes does so only inside of them, the blinding flare of pain matched to the hard click of his molars slotting into place. He shoves the heels of his hands against his eyes like brands, and they burn as fiercely. Terror holds him in its palm. The world spins on a strange and hostile axis, and it spins him with it, out and out and out unending.

He thinks, absurdly, of a paper dragonfly, hung at the end of a string.

"I must not fear," he whispers, with swollen, wounded tongue, "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."

The glaring luminosity of his hands flickers. He thinks of them on the wheel of a ship that shakes itself to pieces around him, straining against itself in every part. He is the ship. He is the hands upon it. He is the storm that seeks to break it.

"I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path." He breathes deep of iron and salt, the vapour of his arteries, and he floats on the great calamity of his selfdom as a leaf in the wind. "Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

"I don't know what's happening to me. What went wrong," Paul says, with his hands still over his face, words slurred but his own, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth unnoticed and unimportant. "I don't know why he's not healing. You have to take him somewhere they will. Please. I can't hold it like this forever."
Edited 2022-10-25 01:05 (UTC)
wannasmash: "I left the oven on." (oh no um shit)

cw: description of burning to death

[personal profile] wannasmash 2022-10-26 08:29 am (UTC)(link)
The litany is meant to be something to calm the speaker, but Midoriya has only ever heard it in the context of crisis. A moment of weakness steals over him, and his next steps scatter like birds.

Every sense, including the common one, says Paul needs to leave, but Midoriya doesn't want to let him out of his sight. He sees Paul's slim silhouette running wreathed in blue flame and collapsing dead in the street as delicately as a falling leaf. He sees a sudden blue conflagration engulfing half the block leaving nothing of Bakugou and Dabi's bodies worthy of salvage. He was not there for what happened or what might happen. Aizawa taught his students to think of the worst-case scenario. Midoriya comes to a terrified halt in the middle of doing so instead of charging forward with solutions and contingencies like he usually does.

He only moves on instinct and need, cradling Kaworu's head and resting his cheek against it as much to comfort himself as he. His face mirrors Kaworu's stricken look at Paul. He descends into a quick patter of murmuring.

"You can't leave us, you have to stay, you're bleeding, Kaworu-kun is scared--" I'm scared-- "please--"

He stops suddenly. Midoriya's Omen has appeared behind Paul in the doorway. Without hesitation, they give Paul's back a glancing headbutt designed to jostle him but not push him further into the room. It's a brusque sort of call to attention. Midoriya blinks. He remembers what he's doing. He remembers who he is, where he came from, and who he wants to be. It's the sort of shining, crystalized thought that calmed Blackwhip's first uncontrollable and destructive awakening.

"I don't know if it's like Todoroki-kun's Quirk, but you can't overheat, and you can't trap yourself inside. You need to get somewhere outside with cold water." The sound of the bath tap returns to wash away the buzzing in his ears. "I need to stay with Kaworu-kun." Because he doesn't like hospitals goes unsaid. That is a later bridge to cross. "But you need to keep talking to us with Sophia-san. Who will help you if it gets worse and you're unable to tell anyone? I won't let you be alone."