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deercountry2022-10-13 05:17 pm
hearthebell) wrote in deercountry2022-10-13 05:17 pm
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.]
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.]
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
[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.
no subject
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.]
no subject
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.
no subject
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.]
no subject
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?
no subject
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.]
no subject
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.]
no subject
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?
no subject
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?
cw: ritual self-harm
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.
no subject
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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'.
no subject
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?]
cw: weird
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.]
cw: weird
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.]
cw: weird, ritual blood letting
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?
cw: weird, ritual blood letting
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.
cw: weird, ritual blood letting
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.]
no subject
A man like that, L believes, can do anything. If only for a little while, until all that's been borrowed must be returned.
Wholly unaware of what it's like for Mercy to feel the unfiltered complaints, L believes that he's enduring this stoically for all its unfamiliarity and oddness. He cracks a satisfied half-smile to know that the sweater is John's, appreciating the trophy. He likes reminders in general, which is why Mercy might notice the scar seems to please him, like every other he's acquired in Trench.
He obeys, tilting his sharp chin. Mercy's tone had registered before the word it carried; he'd still instantly understood and reacted almost as quickly, like an instinct.
His eyes remain on Cytherea as Mercy works. He feels a restless sense of unease; it could be attributable to the violent fight Beyond is waging futilely against Mercy's efforts. It could also be because everything about Cytherea strips the gruesome mystery from death and the longer, nastier ways to reach it.]
Does he seem to be suffering?
[His throat bobs under her touch when he speaks, barely even curious. The question sounds like it's an obligation, something a good person would ask for compassion's sake. It doesn't reach his eyes, though; it's likely many things can't, or wander there in some wrong and mocking reverie.]
cw: eye trauma, blood ritual
Mercy paints the ward on Lazarus' throat in crisp, swift lines, using the curve of her smallest nail for the fine detail work. The lashings of mingled blood and spit are like the most delicate strokes of a watercolour brush over his thin, fragile skin. She focuses on spiralling outward from the vulnerable hollow of his clavicle, her expression still placidly focused. Her eyes only flick up lightly at Lazarus' question, a bird hopping from one branch to another, before they return to the matter at hand. ]
God is always suffering.
[ In the clinically cold halls of the Eighth House the portraits of the Necrolord Prime depict an impression of noble and perpetual sacrifice, the Emperor Undying lifting the souls of the Resurrected from the River with hands stripped down to the bone by the ravenous dead, the God of the Nine Houses sheltering his beloved subjects from the slings and arrows of their enemies with his own bowed shoulders. Mercy always insisted on personal approval of each new work out of the cloister cells.
To be God is to suffer. She thought someone ought to appreciate that. ]
But if you mean moreso than he was...this most recent cavalcade of fuck ups does not represent a high water mark in the annals of God's mood.
[ Perhaps this young man will appreciate it, even if not in exactly the way Mercy used to think it should be appreciated. ]
no subject
Mercy infers someone else in the question, who interests L far more, to the angry heartbreak of Beyond's likeness. He doesn't stop her or clarify, merely nods through the giddy shock of being further informed.]
Because he recognizes them as fuck-ups, or because others do?
no subject
Both.
[ She sits back on her heels once more, bringing her hands together now, folding them palm to palm like prayer, like a choirbook. ]
He is sensitive about shortcomings and failures in himself...his own greatest critic - but it's been a hideously long time since anyone but me was critical of him past that. Duty only ever wants to please him, and Patience is indulgence, and she... [ she glances at her own heaving ghost, a shadow falling across her face to almost make her mouth look soft ] ...she never had the heart for it.
He never has, either. Perhaps that's why he loved her more.
[ She opens her palms.
Other spirit magicians require the trappings of the flame and the offering, the invocation paired to the theorem paired to the will. Mercymorn helped invent several of them.
She hasn't needed them in a long time. L's blood and spit flickers with blue spectral fire in the curved cup of her hands, and she is as serene as a shipwrecked figurehead as a salt wind blows the wrong way from the sea. ]
Call to your ghost. Remind him of his name.
(no subject)