wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

[acidjail]

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

Comments

[lipochrome]

Big Boy tentatively inspects the offered hand, bringing her muzzle up close to it and flaring her nostrils. Whatever she smells, it doesn't frighten her, and she nuzzles in closer, in greeting. She passes through the hand, still insubstantial, and it feels like ice against living skin. Big Boy does not seem to notice, or if she does, she doesn't mind.

Kiriona looks on at the entire scene with disgust.

Paul is a not-human thing inside a human body; Kiriona is a soul in a body no one should ever inhabit. That should give Kiriona some comfort, but all it does is affirm how badly her return has been for him. How he wants Gideon, not Kiriona. She can't give him what he wants, so why be around him at all?

She shouldn't take the bait. But he wants Gideon, right? So be it. Gideon loved picking fights.

"Yeah, well. It's been a long six months." She does not step closer. "Way to make me feel good about myself though. Like, damn. I think I look great." Kiriona's smile is a scar stretched across her face. "The perfect expression of cavalierhood, and of the Emperor's will. All the ladies are jealous. You look it, too, and lemme tell you what, it's a bad vibe."

[terriblepurpose]

The relief of the cold passing through his hand is staggering. If Paul were anyone else, he might choke on a hitching sob, whirl to pursue Big Boy for the sake of remembering what it's like: winter rains, deep bays, the bite of frost, the high and howling winds off the northern shores.

But there's Gideon become Kiriona, and she's right. He wants her, picking fights. He wants that more than cold or succour. He wants it badly enough to have come all this way for it, at the very threshold of the house of someone he wishes was as uncomplicated as his enemy. He stays where he is.

"I apologize. Perhaps I'm being unfair." Paul looks Kiriona over properly, head to toe, taking his time from the crown of fronds to the shiny boots, with all the crisp white and gleaming braid in between.

"You look like a gilded prick," he says, thoughtfully, tipping his shining head to the right. "Is that better?"

[lipochrome]

Gilded prick? Kiriona snorts. Paul's going to have to do better than that if he wants to offend her. She grew up on the Ninth, after all, and she's just spent the last six months with no one but Ianthe for company. Ianthe, of all people! Ianthe would talk circles around Paul. The image is almost funny, were it not frankly pathetic for the both of them.

"More accurate, I guess. Although it still just sounds like you're mad about my makeover." Kiriona shrugs, attempting to project an air of extreme nonchalance and cool. (That always works, right?) "Die mad about it. I'm not gonna take fashion tips from a guy who looks like he hasn't had a real shower in a week. Like, damn, even the dead girl knows you smell like shit."

They could do this all day, and part of Kiriona wants to. Then she'd neither be loved nor alone, and that's the best possible outcome, right? You can't get hurt like that. You can't think that things might get better, and then set yourself up to be hurt.

But ew, bad, yuck. That's way too much navel-gazing. Kiriona is better off leaving that shit to Ianthe.

"Look, what do you want? You're really killing my vibe out here, you know."

Big Boy, meanwhile, has moved on from Paul's palm and is now inspecting the large worm. Kiriona tries not to pay attention to either of them.

[terriblepurpose]

The sand worm stirs at Big Boy's approach, the blunt point of her closed mouth parting slightly to sample the air before gingerly inching closer for the other Omen's investigation. She stays low to the soil but not in it, as close to submission as anything of her mighty stature can be.

Her Sleeper makes a sound like the roll of rasping teeth, a shuddering approximation of a laugh. He shifts to his left foot, right heel rising as he digs his toes into the dirt, an old restless tell. He smells like the shoreline, and it is less palatable than poets make it out to be. He sinks his foot back down and brushes at his salt-struck stiff curls, tucking them behind one ear.

"I want to hear what you have to say," he says, "I didn't think you'd answer if I called. This seemed like the next best thing."

As if showing up on someone's lawn as an avatar of devouring flame is only the next natural alternative.

"So here I am." He spreads his hands at his sides, palms out to her. "Hoping I didn't waste a journey."

[lipochrome]

So he won't leave until she talks to him. Got it. Message received. Kiriona, privately, thinks it's a real dick move to show up to someone's house on fire to get someone to talk to you. Kind of manipulative, maybe. But she also knows she's not above dick moves, and for once, Kiriona doesn't choose hypocrisy.

Kiriona closes her eyes, pauses, then opens them. She sighs and runs her fingers through her hair, and that's a tell, too. The weakness of a living girl, on display on a dead body.

"Fine. But once I tell you, you've gotta go away." Kiriona doesn't wait to find out if he's got that. It's a demand, not a request.

"Anyway. Like I said, it's been six months. I'm different now, if you couldn't tell." She huffs a laugh at that, a twisted, wrong version of the Gideon who used to laugh at her own jokes. "But you don't want me like this. I can tell. Nonagesimus didn't want me dead, and now I've gone and disappointed both of you."

"Doesn't matter, though. You know, neither of you bothered to ask me what I want, but since you're, like, the world's most fucked-up version of my houseguest, I'll tell you for free. I wanted this." Kiriona spreads her arms wide, as if gesturing to the scene around her. "The status. The power. The all-important father, and the Cohort leadership, and especially the parades, and you can go fuck yourself if you think you're going to take it from me."

During the entire speech, Big Boy says nothing. She only shivers, tucking herself as close to the large worm as she possibly can. It feels like nothing.

For Kiriona, it's mortifying. "Cut that shit out," she demands of her soul, and the last of it falls apart into the barest cloud of ash-gray smoke.

[terriblepurpose]

The manipulation is shameless. Paul has reserved his shame for everything else. This is the least terrible thing he knows how to do in this moment, the alternative to so much more and worse.

That justifies nothing. He is not particularly concerned with justification. At least not his own.

"I'm asking now," he says, softly, as her Omen breaks apart to the shivering dismay of his own. Her armored plates rasp over each other as she probes the space Big Boy left behind, bereft of the intangible vibrations that marked her presence. A person might call it play acting, knowing as they do that Omens are not confined to the mere five senses, that it causes them no harm to be dismissed - but Paul thinks that it is more that a being may take on the behaviours of the shape they are set in, whatever it may be.

The whiteness of her coat is awful against Kiriona's corpse-cooled skin. The vivid hue of her hair stands out like a rusted bloodstain.

"But if we're talking about not bothering to ask, why do you think I want to take anything away from you?" Slow and measured, as calm as his Omen is not as she snuffles at the dirt. "What made you decide I don't want you? Like this. Like anything. You think you're the one I'm disappointed in?"

He doesn't let the questions settle. He doesn't expect them to be answered - not truly, not like this. Not after the next one he'll ask.

"You think I don't understand wanting your father?"

[lipochrome]

Paul knows her well. Kiriona keeps her cool through Paul's first round of stupid questions. It's unclear why he's even bothering to ask them at all. He's still not asking her what she wants; he's still just assuming. Besides, what is she supposed to tell him? That she will never forget the way he looked her, fear laced through his wide eyes? Does he want her to explain to him how fear is just one step on a surprisingly short journey to disgust, how, after bearing the disgust from an entire planet for eighteen years, she cannot risk bearing his?

Fat chance. He is awful like this, too, all burned and grieving. He should hate her for what she's done to him. She hopes he still might. It would make this all so much easier.

Then Paul asks that last question, and he must hate her, because why would he ask her that if he didn't?

"Fuck off. You don't understand." Kiriona's voice is rising, the last of her control slipping away. She is so lucky she cannot cry. "You had one for sixteen years. Sixteen. I had fucking zero. You want him because that's what you're used to, like you're fucking entitled to it." Entitled to his father. Entitled to hers. "I want --"

Kiriona takes a breath she does not need. "You should go. Don't come back."

She is so lucky.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul is eager to please, obedient to a fault. It's a tectonic flaw, the crux of the long chain that carried him from a cold beach to a cold earth, the anchor that holds down so much of what he's done for her.

Paul wants Gideon to be happy. He wants her to be safe. He wants her to have all of the things he believes her to be entitled to.

The thing that stands on the lawn wants this for her as much as he does.

The corona around his head flares like a star. The light is pitiless and consuming; it swallows shadows and casts none before it, arcing into refracted halos that spin in shivering orbits above him. His Omen raises herself up inside the stark, fragmented colours that pour off of him with the iridescence of a chemical fire.

She's finally being selfish. There's part of him, in the conflagration of rejection, that's almost glad for her.

"If that's what you want," he says, and he doesn't recognize the language, cannot know if she will understand the words, but he knows she will understand the shape of the sound. He turns to his Omen and scales her, impossibly, finding handholds on her hide that he should not know exist, but there they are under his fingers. She sings for him, and her song trembles in the dirt. He flattens his hands on her back when he's astride her and looks down at Kiriona, Crown Prince, in the seat of her dominion.

"No faith that we betray," he tells her, in clean, short Galach, ice crashing into cold water, impossibly human out of the hellstorm of brilliance still sheathing him, "You call, I answer. Remember that."

With that, he digs his knees into his Omen's sides, bidding her and the crown inside of him to follow Kiriona's command, turning back towards the sea. He won't look back to her, or the house that looms behind her. He doesn't need to. He doesn't forget.