deercountry | The Clock Froze Around Midnight, I Can Feel It In The Room [October Catchall, OTA]

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The Clock Froze Around Midnight, I Can Feel It In The Room [October Catchall, OTA]

Who: L Lawliet (Lazarus Sauveterre) and CR old and new
What: Catchall for October; includes event prompts and slice of life wildcards.
When: Throughout the month, dates are ambiguous unless otherwise noted
Where: Various places in Trench (flexible unless specifically noted)

[October is a season of change and loss, and in Trench, it’s not really any different. L nevertheless feels a sense of restlessness that manifests in snappishness and irritability; exceeding what usually visits him in the ambivalent season of his birth.

He goes about his business anyway, keeping to his own odd schedules and doings in a mostly solitary routine. He avoids contact with others this month, not least because the typically stoic detective is struggling to discern when his mood will shift and his tears might start flowing and refuse to stop.

It’s better, perhaps, to guard what he’s always known to be raw in a month where he can feel it so keenly and plaintively.]

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[Of course he isn't so easily fobbed off. She knows the lengths he's willing to go to for information, and she expects that everything she might tell him will be snapped up and tucked away in some shadowy crevice for future contemplation.

It's so unusual to ever capture so much of someone's attention without demanding it. She can hardly be blamed for taking her time with it. Besides: this is a less fraught realm of the treacherous kingdom of isolation.]

But who ever bothers to cultivate resilience?

[Her tiredness is sour and ancient as she promised it might be, her oval face hardened like a polished opal.]

It's much easier to condemn the creature of necessity than to cosset it, is what I know about it - and that, if you must wonder, is why I am out here, on this dingy little beach, instead of closed up in that very unGodforsaken house.

[He blinks his overlarge eyes, peering at her as though genuinely surprised she might not know this. He doesn't, after all, believe that he read her wrong.]

Resilience is what happens when you love something more than anyone in the whole world will ever love you. I'd have thought you knew that.

[His eyes are flinty and hard, but the creature at his side looks simultaneously devastated and furious, as though he's been gravely insulted or struck through the heart. Unseen hands wrap around L's throat; it might as well be the mist rolling in over the sea.]

Spite is a form of sustenance, and so... you would be out here, I think. John won't take your friend from you, out here.

[It's her turn to look at him with dark, hollow eyes veiled by her light-colored lashes. Her attention flicks only the once to the ghost's hand useless at his throat, but Cytherea stirs sufficiently that Mercy lays her hands over where Cytherea's rest beneath the blanket she's swathed in.]

Take her from me?

[If spite is a form of sustenance, an army could grow fat on the venom Mercy sinks into that indictment. Cytherea shudders and sucks worthless air, and Mercy pivots to her, lifting the taller body up and forward with practiced skill, rubbing her back in a small, purposeful circle.]

He'd have to admit that she wasn't his at all to take her from me...so he never will. Presumption is one of his most dreadful habits - but what am I saying? You already seem to have it all so neatly stitched up. I hardly have to tell you anything!

[He's stung her back, and the barbs come quick to her tongue in answer.]

[His gaze lingers, oddly and curiously, on the way Mercy dotes on the girl who is, so clearly and tragically, either dead or near enough that it wouldn't matter either way. Serious, indeed, if an immortal necromancer can't touch it, or else it's a feature-not-a-bug that allows that immortal necromancer to exist at all.

He half-raises his thin hands, a gesture that is more placating surrender than possible to perceive as any kind of threat.]

I have my guesses at the truth. They're not usually pleasant... it's why I'm alone today, and most days.

[He's not even a prophet, he thinks numbly. He just has inconvenient instincts and bleak understanding of selfish hunger and jealous pride, and he has realized, over years, that he might not even need more to see the hearts of humans.]

There truly is a lot I don't know. At least, I hope so, or I struggle to discern a point to it all.

[The gesture of submission does seem to soothe some of her puffed spikiness when she catches a glimpse of it sideways, slender hands and dark hair paired with that lent sweater. She breathes out through her nose like something industrial venting, and it's not far from the truth. Even this long perfected adjustment to Cytherea's so familiar lungs taxes her, these days. Sweat has broken out across her exposed skin, though blessedly, it isn't streaked with blood.]

But your guesses tend to be closer to the mark than most...which is much more why you're disliked than their relative pleasantness. People swallow all kinds of hideous lies, as long as they fit what they already believe, or flatter their cynicism, or happen to be convenient...but ugly truths? That's what they balk at.

[She clucks her tongue, though not at him, a little popping burst of sound.]

Consider that my guess. I, too, strive to keep them educated, rather than pleasant.

[Mercy contemplates Lazarus' double again, clinging and loathsome.]

Pleasantness is another word for insipid, if we are being honest, and I did not come out here in search of yet more saccharine pap. Be unpleasant as you like.

[The perspiration draws L's attention and curiosity, chilled as he is even wearing the borrowed sweater. Several possibilities present, from illness to strain, and none are exactly comforting.]

Your guess is as on the mark as mine tend to be.

[I'll admit that I guess you do get it. Most don't, including the burned-up phantom that follows him hatefully.]

I like having the luxury of being honest. The unpleasantness is merely a side effect that typically can't be helped without a heaping side of artifice. It goes without saying that you can be unpleasant if you want, too.

May I?

[Despite the mutual permission to be unpleasant, Mercy's rhetorical query is not. The hardness of her expression gives into contemplative serenity as she holds him fully in her eyes, head tilted heedless of the loose strands falling across her face even as she persists in her ritual appeasement of her own hungry ghost. Her hair sticks to her shining damp until she tucks it back behind her ear.]

I do prefer honesty, luxury that it is...and whether it went without saying or not, you did say it.

[It's still such a novelty to have him address her as though they exist on the same plane. As if she is a human being who may be given consideration or not, spoken to as one person speaks to another, and not as a saint or a monster, or the horrid combination of the two.]

I did consider your proposal. [She says, as if it was moments ago, not months between their encounters.] The answer is yes. I will be your ally. You certainly seem to need another, given the one you already have.

You do have a ghost. It looks like you, but horrid, and run through a kiln to bake slanted wrong.

Edited 2022-10-27 01:16 (UTC)

[He reserves any comment for after he's heard her fully. He sensed, early on, that she evaluates details in a manner not dissimilar to his own, and he'd prefer not to fail a decisive test or reveal himself to be either overeager or unaware of the gesture's significance.

He nods comprehension, but while he's still formulating an outline of terms they might agree to to ensure the alliance's long-term suggest, she makes an observation that surprises and shakes him. He glances over his shoulder, seeing nothing, but still disturbed by a very accurate description of someone he did, in fact, know.]

I hadn't known. He would look like that... but he wasn't run through a kiln. He doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire, then lived for a few more years, to his chagrin.

Does he at least seem glad that you think we look alike? If you could make a ghost's day, you probably made his.

[The ghost soundlessly grinds his teeth, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring down L with his good eye.]

[Like recognizes like recognizes like. It is a pattern Mercy is too old not to be aware of, and one that motivates her to dispose of so many of the niceties and pretenses of acquaintanceship. When she is incorrect about him, as she expects to be, she will also expect to be corrected if it serves his ends to do so, and allowed to languish in ignorance if it does not. That's already a stronger foundation than most allegiances she's formed in the past five thousand years or so.

She can make certain educated guesses about Lazarus, but she is struck again as he speaks of his companion how limited the extent of them are compared to most of the tedious, predictable people she might meet. A small quirk touches the corner of her mouth as she draws her own ghost in to lean against her, breathing still ragged, but not so desperately torn.]

You aren't a necromancer. It can't be helped.

[She shrugs, loosely. It is what it is.]

Now, why would he do something as dramatic as that? And no - he seems terribly displeased, as a rule. Thus, the mention.

[The blunt observation is a nettling little reminder. L isn’t a necromancer, and there are therefore ways he will never be on the Emperor’s level, or even Mercymorn’s. It means that he has to be devious and creative and clever and careful, to compensate for being, after all, just a man.]

He had an obsession. Obsessions destroy people.

[There’s a lovely irony to L saying these things about someone else.]

Not before making them indestructible, for a little while. It’s the kind of fierce and pure focus that takes on its own life and motivations.

[He suspects she knows exactly what that’s like. Perhaps for her ghost; perhaps for another she burns for, with love and fury.]

[Cytherea's dead eyes finally roll off her fellow ghost and stick to the flesh and blood man, blue as chemical shocked pools underneath their corpse haze. When she shows him her teeth, more a drawing away of curtains on a stage than a snarl, they're pink with blood. She does not stir from lolling against Mercy's side, otherwise, and there is no malice in her regard, only something too diffuse to be interest, too present to be insensibility.]

Or for a long while.

[Mercy says, and even the words feel eroded in her mouth. They coat her tongue like silt.]

Did he realize it, in the end? His obsession?

[You, she might as well say, although she cannot guess in what way, but: you, you, scrawled plain to see all over this botched imitator desperate for attention he couldn't receive even if Lazarus saw fit to bestow it on him.]

Or was it all for nothing?

Edited 2022-10-31 07:54 (UTC)

[L's dark grey eyes meet the apparition's, unflinching though it's an uncomfortable, perhaps even a painful, shade of blue to behold. Is she smiling or grimacing? Something in-between? Something not quite successful due to her physical limitations? What does near-death do to the expressions that humans recognize as like to them?]

I don't know what he realized, at the end. We had nothing left to talk about. It could have been different, if he hadn't killed so many innocent people, but...

[He trails off. If he hadn't killed so many innocent people, odds are that L's notice wouldn't have focused so swiftly on his failed successor.

She knows. He can see, clear as day, that she knows that he is the objective, the reason, the figurehead. Can she guess that there were others, as well?]

It was all such a terrible waste, if that makes it "for nothing."

[He cants his head, considering Cytherea, her strange countenance and the fierce, protective way that the women with the rose-gold hair remains at her side.]

You said something very true a few moments ago: I'm not a necromancer. What makes her different from Gideon? As she is, now, I mean. There, but not? I can't see him, so... I don't know if it's the same, with Beyond.

[He names his ghost, and the reaction he can't see is one of shock and offense. It's as though L swore in a holy place, to voice the name aloud.]

[Another person, on their second meeting with a stranger who has done so little to endear himself beyond declarations of honesty any liar could fashion, would do something to conceal their curdled hurt at terrible waste. They might do something to staunch the wound that opens so readily in Mercy's grievous regard of that sweeping pronouncement.

But that person would not be Mercy, whose hunger parts like an ancient sea on either side of him, looming and withheld. If there is pain in it, it is the pain of a glutton, unslaked, avid for another round of the same course.]

Cytherea isn't his creature.

[Mercy strokes her fingertips up the corpse's elbow, nudging and negotiating her back into her shallow hummock. Her eyes only flit lightly to Lazarus' ghost, skating back as if he (Beyond; now, there's a name) has lost intrigue for her.]

That's what he despises about so many of these ghosts, you should know. That they aren't his creatures. [Mercy twists to rearrange the blankets neatly around Cytherea's shoulders, as habitual as the clearing of her lungs.] The Ninth infant is his construct. She 'lives', or dies, or ceases to be, at his beck and call. A necromancer has ultimate power over their construct, in nearly all cases...but for things like my lost sister, and your avid ghost? Those are creations of an art we have yet to apprehend.

[These are not secrets. These are things any school aged necromancer might all but intuit at the briefest exposure to this world's reordered rules of death's dominion. But to an outsider, deprived of the art? Mercy can't imagine, except for what she catches out of the corner of her eyes.]

But I'd be up for putting a ghost ward on you, if you'd like. Gesture of good faith, for whatever that's worth. [When she looks back to him, her hands are tucked between her inward tilted knees, the traces of her want still about her unshuttered eyes.] To keep from harming you - to banish entirely - your choice, really. Your spit, your blood, or mine. I'd advise the first, when it comes to necromancers. Saliva is less potent than blood both ways.

[It's been centuries, more, since she had such an unknown pupil. She does not even begin to know what he does not know. Potential curricula unfold before her like horizons.]

[L is beholden to a great deal, in his life. There's the duty of a civil servant, of course. There's the restraint of reputation, and the deprivation of being a consummate professional. But being beholden to another man, especially one who calls himself "God," is where he balks and demands his freedom. He can think of nothing worse than being one of his creatures, and nothing more beloved than being what John hates.

He listens and retains. If he were a school-aged necromancer, he'd be learning and on his way towards greatness. As a mere man, in the presence of someone 10,000 years old with unspeakable power, he can only listen and retain.

And yet.]

You'd offer that? I'd want him gone, of course. Letting him remain, and merely removing his ability to harm me, would insult what he burned his life away for. I want to keep my life, but in my way, I can't help but honor the reason he burned, even if it only existed in his own mind.

[Don't defang him, just to keep him shackled here with his obsession and his insanity. That's the worst thing I can think of; that's the worst thing John could do to me, in some horrible and unspeakable future.]

For a ward... why is less potent more desirable?

[With her hands stuck between her knees and her hair all in disarray about her, the slope of Mercy's dawning smile might have something of the classroom about it yet, the often wished for but rarely bestowed subtle warmth of the strictest of schoolteachers beneath a calculus level. Mercy thinks it might be the kind of smile that they would have all had her grant to Harrowhark, doomed, damned infant that she was, and is.

But she'd had nothing of any value to Harrow to teach. Here, there are so many new arrows to place in this young man's bristling quiver, and such satisfaction to take in being the one to give them to him.]

Blood carries a stronger imprint of the flesh and the soul. With blood, it's easier to place a curse, or break a ward. It's a substance that can be wielded immediately, or simply held against you for some future date, even if the thalergic energy within depletes rapidly. Saliva is a weaker resonance, and because it's of you, the wards crafted of it won't do you harm.

[Her smile deepens as her back straightens. She reaches a hand out to touch below his closest knee through the cushioning of the woollen blanket she instructed him to pull over his poor, lonesome limbs.]

A lesser necromancer might require your blood to craft a true banishing ward, but I am not a lesser necromancer. [If she's certain of nothing else, she's certain of that.] It's more desirable for you, and less for me.

If we are attempting honesty, you and I, I might as well start with a weakness, don't you think?

[He nods, listening, as his ghost appears to grow more agitated, sensing that his time with L might be coming to a close very soon.

L, however, still has some questions and a few misgivings. There's a madness to Mercymorn, and while it's something alive that he admires deeply, there's also something deeply, shudderingly destructive about it.

He stiffens, at attention, when she touches him, drawing those lonely limbs a little closer to his core.]

So it's a test, of sorts... isn't it? Which of us is weaker? If a lesser necromancer would have a harder time with saliva... and a lesser man would balk to offer blood, there's something you should know about me.

[He pulls up the sleeve of the borrowed sweater, plus the thinner undershirt beneath it he was wearing when Mercy found him. Just a little; just enough. There's a careless patchwork of scars old and new, there, where blades have bit the skin again and again for the value in the veins beneath.]

You'll find that I've never had a problem bleeding for what matters, so... I suppose the only question I have left is why it's a weakness, and what that would do to you.

[Mercy's hand does not move, not to reassure or retract. It is drawn along with the curling up of Lazarus' legs like a clinging bit of surface dross on a rippling pool, for all the apparent effort or awareness Mercy shows it.

It's her other hand that rises up to hover inches above Lazarus' lacerated forearm, so vulnerable and inviting. Her fingertips are so acute in their desire to touch that when they instead come to rest on her own bared arm it almost looks like a surprise to her, too. But there they hook beneath the elbow of her arm still tenuously connected to his tucked knee, his offered naked flesh of his forearm left innocent of her fingerprints.]

I see.

[Mercy studies his lacework scarring with an aesthete's sensitivity, noting the intersections of knitwork skin and languid veins. There is an impressionistic abstraction to it all, in composite.]

Don't call it weakness, then. Call it a calculated risk. Call it - an attempt at fairness, if you must, although I'd really rather you didn't call it anything.

[Something folds and knits as tightly behind her expression as all that scar tissue. It leaves only the imprint of a distant feeling as she lifts her hand from the safety of her own arm, sets two slightly curled fingers on the bunched cuff of fabric he's drawn back for her inspection of what lies below. She swallows, hard and dry.]

I'm perfectly aware you're willing to bleed. [She tugs at his-her sleeve, over-sharply.] Is that your test? See how much of you I'll take, if you offer it up?

[Since Shoyo left, L hasn’t been touched, not really. Even when Shoyo was here, the detective was selfish with his bare flesh in a way that wasn’t quite shame and wasn’t quite coyness, preferring to keep his skinny body covered up and the acts of physical intimacy between them lavishing, but one-sided.

Is it a form of betrayal that he’s baring his oft-tapped arm so easily for Mercy, now? He doesn’t think so; sacrifice has always been the easier thing to ask of him than vulnerability, something he paradoxically rejects now by insisting that actually, he can take the harder path.]

It isn’t nothing…

[But he doesn’t insist on naming it, and she grips the sweater between them. Even clothed, he aches to feel contact again. It’s strange how quickly it became routine for awhile in Trench after years of receiving none at all from anyone.]

It’s my own calculated risk. As a necromancer you know what you can take, short of killing me… and as my new ally, hang fairness. It’s important that you’re not weakened.

[Mercymorn and Cytherea could pass for blood sisters when they both stare at him after that pronouncement, their unmatched eyes hardened to glittering stones in equally bloodless faces.

Mercy has a necromancer's build, which means there's not much to her. When she pushes down his knees to flatten out so she has room to seat herself just above them, her own knees don't go all the way to his boney hips. With the blanket cushioning between them and the distance she preserves between them, a person couldn't fairly say she was sitting in his lap as much as just past it. Not that there would be any person to see, besides their companions - and not that anyone could mistake the ferocity of her clenched jaw for tenderness or ardor.]

I don't know which concept I find more appalling - that you don't know what you're offering when you tell a Lyctor they can take what they want from you short of killing you, or that you do.

[There's a hot, undifferentiated upset percolating in her that she focuses on to the exclusion of anything else, like the flutter of his pulse above his collar, or the extraordinarily unwelcome wanting ache in her teeth. She looks at his face again, probing dark eyes and pallor for his conviction. Her hands are locked fists on her thighs.]

Blood and spit, if you're so eager to give both up. [She says, her voice plunging into cool darkness like a shove into ice water.] Say 'ah'.

[He lets gravity take him closer to the earth so that Mercymorn can pull them closer. At the edge of his lap, her slender frame feels insubstantial, but he's not wearing Augustine's face to hide his reaction to the alarmingly severe expression on both the Lyctor's face and Cytherea's. He swallows, blinks, and otherwise manages to retain his composure unflinchingly.

He's not sure, in fact can't be. He isn't a necromancer, and can only gamble with the cards that have been revealed to him over his time in Trench, the Emperor's dreams, and his dealings with Bone House.

Curiosity keeps him invested in all such matters, more than certainty.]

"Ah."

[He doesn't quite bare his tonsils or dislocate his jaw. He does think of the last time he opened his mouth precisely this wide for someone else, and maybe that's why he doesn't just ask if he can't just spit in her hand. Do the same unspoken rules of intimacy apply?]

[Mercymorn had called Lazarus reckless the last time. She thinks she will have to amend the assessment as he holds her gaze and his nerve simultaneously. There is calculation of risk behind the impassive opacity of his compliance, however askew the mathematics may be, but it's more than that. Another mystery she's yet to get her hands on.

Mercy brings up her left hand with the last three fingers held together and slips them past his parted, chapped lips, the blunt edges of his front bottom teeth. They glide across his tongue and press it down, her curled index finger brushing over his cool cheek until the ragged tips of her bitten nails threaten to intrude on the quivering, delicate threshold of his throat. She lifts his jaw with the pad of her thumb to enclose her digits in the wet warmth of his interior, far enough that his teeth dent her skin.

She imagines, for a heady, dissociative moment, the force of a bite that goes all the way to the bone. She lets the thought pass, and strokes the root of his tongue to coax his salivary glands into secretion.]

Show me where you want me to take the blood from. Use your hands. Wrist? [A light scrape of keratin over papillae.] Tongue? Lips?

[The dispassion she speaks in is at odds with the slow, circular caress of her fingers, deliberately teasing at his gag reflex, however much of one he has.]

Edited 2022-11-01 20:35 (UTC)

[Mercymorn isn't wrong about his recklessness.

She might not even be wrong about the concerning strain that runs through him and all but claims him. It's a bewildering sort of docility, a slaughtered lamb's gentleness, the gilded smile of a child destined to be buried alive in the mountains.

He accepts more than he thought he'd have to, through his lips, until her multiple nails make him need to cough. He doesn't, settling for a halting half-breath instead as she teases as his gag reflex, trained down by this point to at least 80%.

He doesn't want to bite her. He doesn't want to snuff the light out. Instead, he does what she asks, sort of, by stroking the narrow beam of her forearm with his own fingertips.

One of them, narrow and tapering, traces a word along her forearm in answer. Y-E-S, it looks and feels like, though he is preoccupied with her hand in his mouth that is stifling and coaxing his ability to speak more plainly.]

Edited 2022-11-03 21:11 (UTC)

[The delicacy of his feather-light touch on the smooth span of her inner forearm has predictable physiological effects. A visually imperceptible dilation of capillaries, the slight raising of her fine, downy arm hairs. The hitch of his Adam's apple as he struggles with and overcomes his reflexive desire to dislodge the obstruction of her, the muscular but tentative flex of his tongue.

She watches the flutter of his pupils in the stone-grey rings of his irises as she slips her right hand up his left arm, deftly rolling the sleeve up to his elbow with the folding of her thumb. She angles the limb at a downward slant, puts his fingers on the blanket outside of her knee.]

Don't move. This isn't my sweater. It would be a shame to spoil it.

[She pushes her fingers a quarter inch deeper into his mouth, glancing off the tender bell of his uvula, before she pulls them free with a slick whisper. She examines the clear, shining gloss that spreads between them like webbing when she spreads her hand, then closes them back into a cup she sets beneath the crook of his bared elbow.

His skin splits with the furrow of her brow, venous blood drooling from the new wound to spatter into her waiting palm. Cytherea sucks in a hard, ravenous breath, squirming enough to roll onto her side to watch it trickle.

Mercymorn's expression remains impassive, serene. She bends her slim neck like a reed to observe the flow of blood, her thumb pressed above the wound to help hold his arm still, whatever she had to say about him doing it himself. It's the smaller signs that give her away: the pale colour that flushes her throat, the subtle quickening of her breath, the pebbling against the front of her undershirt.

Predictable physiological effects.]

Ghosts have a ravenous appetite for blood. [She says, with strange lightness.] Did you know that, when you asked?

[It's a struggle every second, because any human body will beg for oxygen. The reflexes he's suppressing exist for a reason, after all; if airways aren't cleared, death will inevitably occur.

He likes Mercy because, he reasons in the moment, he kind of likes to flirt with death.

He's tapped his own veins many times for the blood that will buy him things, craft marvelously pretty jewelry, allow him to go above and beyond any abilities his natural birth provided him with. Maybe that's not a necromancer's burden; it could be less, a blessing of birth, or more, a price to be paid over millennia. Regardless, his pulse increases as she rolls up his sleeve, because every other time he's taken a blade to his skin, he's been in control, however carelessly he cuts, however he rationalizes that he's never been or never will be beautiful, and so he isn't actually ruining anything.

It's striking, to him, the way he and Mercymorn are from radically different backgrounds and experiences, and seem to understand one another surprisingly well.

She takes just one last opportunity to try to make him gag, and finally succeeds. His hand starts to reflexively go to his mouth to catch spit and anything else that might result, but her prior order keeps him still. He plays enough with scalpels and blood magic to know that a false move can prove fatal relatively quickly, especially when one is already not exactly of hale constitution. He might be better, if his protein intake was what Shoyo aspired to, or if he didn't rely on his veins so often for currency, but he needs time and material to trade for his cases, his hobby, his beautiful gift that set him apart and beyond in his own world.

Beyond, the man, is afraid. The ghost over his shoulder knows that what's about to happen will separate them again, and his agitation and silent, furious screams say as much... but L remains unaware of them, fixated on the redhead and her wispy, pale-as-death companion.]

Whose sweater, then?

[He asks once her fingers are free, once he's recovered from fearing he'd choke or expel. It's surreal to watch the slick glossy fingers wet with his own saliva, but it is, after all, what they agreed on.

They also agreed that he'd bleed. He'd insisted on bleeding, and while he knows what a necromancer can do, roughly, he still expects at least the friendly warning of a blade. None comes; his arm is filleted open by some unseen and deftly sharp force, and the absurdity of it nearly severs him from his awareness of the moment in favor of a spiral towards disassociation. He's pale and his breath comes harsh and shallow, but he still watches, because it's different, and strange, and makes him wonder and think and work in ways that he doesn't usually have to.

It's like wine, for its headiness, or perhaps it's just the blood loss. He breathes more deeply, feeling nauseous and like he can't quite manage to get enough air, as she collects the paleblood that will look red until exposed to moonlight.

Mercy is unwell, or else enjoying this more than she should be allowed. Faintly, he wonders which it is as his blood slides out and away from him, into the cup she has for collection.

He sounds faint and slightly slurred when he answers.]

I knew that the price would be high. I always assume that, you know... I never believe that anything worth having isn't expensive.

[She can feel all the frailty of his body pressing against her Lyctoral senses like a hundred needy whispers. The little hands of want every infirm body projects without knowing what an imposition it is to have them tugging at her hems, incessant in their yearning to be made whole.

Mercymorn slips her awareness inside of his blood in her palm like another ghost. She traces down the flickering signs of neglect to their roots. She could brush her fingers over the spongy hollows of his bones and know less about them than she can sift from the stray cells of his marrow. She could cut him open like a tree and count his rings and know less. He is so delicate, so vulnerable. Any little thing could destroy him, and here he is, pliant in the very cradle of her hands.]

God's, of course.

[As if she really does think it should be obvious - she, who has known God for all the time that exists in the universe that matters one bit, cannot be bothered to recall that others have not watched him dress himself for ten thousand schlubby years.

There's enough blood for her purposes now. She knits the slit in his elbow whole with a not ungentle swipe of her thumb. She considers leaving behind no mark. She spins up a thin webbing of scar tissue to seal the wound instead. A durable reminder. A covenant.]

And at least you have some sense.

[Perhaps she is enjoying herself. What of it? Should she not? How long has it been since she got to work properly, to her own satisfaction? How long has it been since anyone has looked at her the way they should look at her, in the crown of her glory?

Subtle grace puts it stamp on her flushed features as she dips her fingers into the blood and swirls. She keeps her hand cupped underneath her dripping fingertips as she lifts them to his chin and taps him there with her thumb, a tiny upward nudge.]

Up.

[A painted ward on his throat, and then she can really work. Cytherea's breathing comes in hard, shallow gurgles; Mercy pays no mind to Lazarus' shadow's raging. He can't stop her. Very little has ever been able to stop her.]

The Clock Froze Around Midnight, I Can Feel It In The Room [October Catchall, OTA]

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cw: chronic illness

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cw: ritual self-harm

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cw: weird

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cw: weird, ritual blood letting

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cw: weird, ritual blood letting

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cw: eye trauma, blood ritual

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)