i wear the sunglasses at night | canon update catch-all

[lipochrome]

Who: Gideon Nav and CR
What: Gideon is coming out of her cocoon and doing just fine
When: October 13
Where: Cobra Kai, Bone House in Gaze

Content Warnings: Spoilers for Nona the Ninth throughout. Marked in comment headers otherwise.





( starters in the comments! )

Comments

cw: burns, body horror, graphic description of severe and fatal injuries

[lipochrome]

[ In the Nine Houses, there is virtually no such thing as clothes made from organic materials, save a particularly nasty one. There is no cotton, or silk, or wool. But there is plastic, and it is extremely flammable.

Kiriona's beautiful gilded coat ignites almost all at once, and for a split second, it's not only Kiriona's eyes that are the apocalypse. She is an apocalypse, a pillar of fire, cleansed and holy and burned away and everlasting.

Kiriona shouts, and for once, there's no scorn in her voice, no muted disgust. It's all fear, as she tears the jacket from her body and throws it on the ground, stomping on it in a futile effort to extinguish the flames. It doesn't take long for Kiriona to realize that there's nothing she can do about the fire. She realizes even faster that she is totally exposed.

Without her jacket, the first thing that Paul will probably see is the gash across her neck. It's wide open, exposing a trachea that moves, uncomfortably, with every utterance, every breath. Further down, parts of Kiriona's undershirt have burned away to reveal the top arc of what must be quite a large hole, bored right into the upper left part of her chest, where her heart should be. There is no heart, though -- only the sharp white teeth of broken ribs, and, further in, the suggestion of sagging, pinkish-red organ.

What these wounds did to Giden Nav is not hard to guess. What they are currently doing to Kiriona Gaia isn't that much of a mystery, either, as she makes a pathetic attempt to cover them up with her hands. As if that would do anything, as if Paul hadn't already seen. She doesn't even need to look at him to know he'll be horrified, but Kiriona does so anyway, because she likes pain. Or whatever.

On Kiriona's face is naked fear, sheer panic, and it is the only real expression she has shown anyone since emerging from that cocoon.

There is nothing she can say to Paul that isn't embarrassing. There is nothing she can do to make it right. How could she, when God Himself couldn't even heal her? When her father couldn't even help her?

All that's left for Kiriona to do is fumble for her bag, and then run out the door. ]

cw: burns, body horror, blood in icon

[terriblepurpose]

[This is the second time Paul has looked inside the sacred interior of a human rib cage rent apart by violence, and just like the first time, he is ruined by revelation.

He's known Gideon was dead since a cold day on the shoreline, but it had been a knowing without knowing. When she was whole and happy (was she?) it was possible to put the knowing away from him, into another world. She was dead somewhere else. She was alive here, and that was why she had to stay here, where he could keep her that way. He did not think of her end. He did not think of her corpse, except in his drowning dreams, the ones where he reaches out and never touches.

He thinks he'll have a new dream, now.

The stricken cast of Paul's face is beyond horror. It's a mercy that brilliance swallows his skull in another collapsing burst of inward pulling heat before it can be deciphered., a temperature differential that makes the rest of the hall feel only colder. Paul anchors his feet to the floor and makes himself a still torch, hand and head ablaze.

He has to be still. He has to hold himself in one place, one moment, in perfect stable orbit around the roaring of a dead star, lest he plunge after her like a hunting bird, relentless and destroying.

(It only tasted her, licked the miraculously frozen lifelessness of her. The hunger is only whetted. If it could touch her skin once more, it would find the hole where her heart was, and it would burn and burn and burn.)

A ring older than most starships, a ring reforged and reset and repaired across the hands of a hundred generations, softens and slumps on his skin like wax, gemstones cracking and combusting in varicoloured smoke as ancient alloy sizzles into ash and vapour. Paul makes a noise like something dying as Gideon flees: tiny, breathless, unheard.]