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]

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.