deercountry | i've looked at clouds from both sides now (𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥)

Entry tags:

i've looked at clouds from both sides now (𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥)

^{Who: Peter Graham + you! Prompts will be placed here.
What: Canon update business, potential event things, tba.
When: Through the month of November.
Where: Various places in Trench / tba.

Content Warnings: This character comes with demonic possession by default. There's a gif including nudity (non-sexual, just a couple of people shown naked from behind) in one of the posts.}^{Additional warnings will be placed in individual spaces.}

^{( On Peter's birthday and Blessed Month, he will go through a canon update that's given him updated memories. For weeks 1 - 3 he will mentally be MIA, and Paimon/Charlie may be interacted with. On week 4, Peter will return. Closed starters will be placed under the appropriate posts. Please hit me up @ plot post / plurk / large bat#2354 / pm if you're interested in a starter / if you'd like to plot for the month! )}

Threaded | Flat

weeks 1-3 / PAIMON week 4 / PETER

Edited 2022-11-04 02:01 (UTC)

^{CW: cults , rituals , sacrifices , dead bodies , mention of death by fire / immolation , mention of death by throat trauma , mention of suicide by hanging, mention of attempted suicide, associations of car accident, demonic possession , severe identity confusion , self harm , suicidal ideation}

( There are people kneeling at his feet, and the smell of rot.

There is a birdcage, and a life-sized doll, and some parts are wooden but other parts are made out of a little girl. There is a crown made of something's skin.

His eyes are impossibly wide and wet and straining. He cannot speak, or move. He cannot do anything. He has been crowned their king.

HAIL PAIMON

The memory of that final night plays out for him now; Paimon lives it, guided by those open palms and hushed whispers and wide smiles. The People have guided him here and through it. And he has torn through humans to get here, to this place, to this moment: a man is scorched alive, screaming, until he becomes curled-up fingers and black char (the shape of him is Father). A woman hangs, impossibly, from attic rafters, a piano wire wrapped around her neck. She cuts through her throat with jagged, sawing motions (the shape of her is Mother.)

He has torn through humans, but he has been ripped from them, too.

There is the squeal of tires and it hurts to breathe, and Peter is screaming and then he is torn from his body and it hurts, it's emptiness, he's too much and he isn't supposed to be here and he needs the warmth of his new host and he will break Peter apart and claw his way in—

There were others, before. Other Vulnerable Ones, other hosts, botched and ruined. They'd do anything to escape him. (They find a rope and they go to their mother's bedroom. They hang the rope around their neck and their legs are dangling, and they're dead now and the ritual isn't finished, and he can't finish being put inside them.)

There are secret things and old magic uttering truths that flutter against him in too many voices, and the lights are too bright and the languages are too loud, and he stands there with too many names and too many past lives scraping up under his skin. The skin is broken and bleeding in places, but it fits better now. His eyes fill with tears. He is afraid.

Hey hey - no no - you're all right...
Charlie. You're all right, now.

You are Paimon.

He doesn't understand. (But he does, and the rising cacophony, the swell of light and sound and power, it comes from within him. These are things that have always existed. These are paths that have always led to this outcome. These are Truths that could never have been escaped, or reshaped, or denied.)

He (she, they) is a god, and a king, and a child, and a bird with wings snapped broken.

HAIL!

He is in a strange, slimy place, and then he is breaking free of it, of that shell, that cocoon. Long limbs curl and then reach and then scrape. An insect transformed into something else, reborn.

But he is wrong, so wrong; everything is Wrong. He can't recognise the room he's in, that safe and soft place. There is a girl with pale blonde hair and round grey eyes, and he does not know her. He scrambles away, incapable of speech, throat pulsing with clicks and chirps, with a throat strained and gagging, with hands against his eyes, clawing at the bandage that isn't really there, bulky and strange and painful against the mutilated centre of his face. He can't understand how to scream, so he moans, and later, he wails.

In the days that follow, Paimon is lost and strange, sometimes not Paimon at all but Charlie, and sometimes a mix of them both and sometimes the absence of either. Sometimes he is others, names he doesn't recall and can't comprehend. He's still in ways humans are not, alien and unmoving, and then he's fitful and violent against himself, a seed buried in deep and trying to escape its pulpy wet flesh, smashing his head against walls or clawing at his chest and stomach, trying to break out of his cage.

Later in the month, he begins to remember things and to understand things (The People, he knows their faces now, he knows the sounds of their voices and the scent of their spices and the way they smiled, and he knows he would rip them piece by piece by piece by piece), and Peter is gone, and his Witch is aching, she is broken, and this is how it was always going to be.

Nightmares ravage him, in wake and in sleep. Sometimes he misses his mother and his father and his brother and his grandmother (his eyes are always leaking). Sometimes he hates them the way nothing human can hate. It transcends emotion; it is simply energy, ancient and beautiful and horrible.

There is a crown on his head, and his feathers lie in pieces on the floor. He stares at himself in a mirror in a hallway, and his neck is long and thin, and his fingertips brush the hollow of his throat. He could snap it easily, he thinks.

His tongue scrapes upwards, against the roof of his mouth. He shudders when it happens, a convulsive ghost that slithers down through him, soft and cold. Cluck. )

Edited 2022-11-06 18:09 (UTC)

^{CW: cults , rituals , sacrifices , dead bodies , demonic possession , severe identity confusion , hallucinations of facial injury / broken nose ; drug (marijuana) use ; depression}

( As November draws towards its close and snow begins to collect against the city, Peter Graham returns.

He's no stranger to only somewhat existing within himself, to a disorientation that perpetually borders and fluctuates between the natural and supernatural, but this is... different. For nearly an entire month, he's been overcome with the Other, not merely suppressed by it but broken from it. He's shattered glass and thin liquid spilling through cracks, he's the cracked remains of a lightbulb after it's sparked and fizzled out, singed around the edges. (Ruined, he thinks. He already knew it.) There was little room left for Peter in this crumpled-up body, on that night. The night he lost everything that was left, everything that belonged to and was Peter, and became some thing else instead.

Something rings in his ears over and over again, loud and abrasive amongst the hushed whispers of strange words, of pieces of old languages that chill him to his core, manipulating the energy around him, preparing him for something soon to come; satony, degony, eparigon —

I EXPEL YOU
PETER
GET OUT

aazas, liftoach, pandemonium

He remembers, but it comes through like the aching moment just after a dream: awake but uncertain, memory grasping desperately for remnants of the thing even as it's progressively trickling away. Memories that aren't entirely his play out scratchy like old film, and his mind can't understand, can't process, (can't cope).

He's sixteen years old and there's candlelight flickering all around him, and his mother is dead. What is left of her is kneeling at his feet; he's only able to recognise her as His Mother by her night-clothes. Beside her is something he's not able to comprehend is his weeks-dead grandmother, flesh rotted black and crumbling in. From behind him comes the buzz of flies, and when he (someone else, there's someone else inside him and they hurt more than anything's ever hurt before) turns, his wide eyes take in the last remaining piece of Charlie Graham, its eyes and mouth hollowed out like a mask, a leathery crown stretched out over its withering skin, and the drone of insects.

Peter is back now, and he's just turned twenty years old this month, but he keeps forgetting that he has, and he's sixteen again sometimes and it feels like his nose splits wide open and the pain is so intense it almost knocks him out and maybe he's imagining it but he can feel the slick heat of blood pooling down his nostrils, and sometimes he's fourteen and his bedroom smells like paint thinner and his throat aches from screaming.

And sometimes he's not Peter anymore; he stands there staring, mouth tipped open slack and eyes wet and swollen up black, and then he remembers enough of Peter to hurt, to grieve, struggling through the locked-up tightness within himself, throat strained and eyes too wide, until he's able to break. Then he does and he cries, too much; he spends hours on his side and crying. He sits with his back pressed against the wall and his face pushed into his hands, and he gasps quietly over and over and over again.

His father and mother and sister and dog are dead and he is left all alone, all over again. There's a young man kneeling at his feet, and Peter can't remember his name anymore, but they were friends once, not long ago. There's a photo of his grandmother hanging on the wall of a treehouse and he knows it, finally, what's always been there.

He wants to die, he thinks, but it's too late for that.

The leathery crown is lifted from Charlie's head and placed over his own, and the woman is lovingly stroking his curls as she straightens it into place. He is seeing all of this through somebody else's eyes. They used to be his eyes, but they aren't anymore.

HAIL PAIMON

The last week of November is cold and quiet and unforgiving. Peter's there but only barely: exhausted and heavy and wet-eyed, gaze held wide and buzzing until it's gradually falling half-lidded with the weight of heady smoke. He keeps himself numbed down that way, despondent and still. There's mercy in that he sleeps often. He can still be found, reached, spoken to — he isn't actively hiding himself away this time. He isn't doing much of anything at all.

We've corrected your first body and give you now this healthy male host

Everything's gone. Peter closes his eyes (they used to be his eyes, but they aren't anymore) and thinks of how he never got to say goodbye. )

Edited 2022-11-04 00:36 (UTC)

𝐚 𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐚, 𝐚 𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐫𝐝, 𝐚 𝐤𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐬....

[ Well, so this is the day.

It's unusual, admittedly. The kind of unusual where you're not sure how to feel, and what you're doing is weird (and you know it's weird), but it's not as bizarre as some part of your brain says it should be. The one that says you're dumb, you don't know what you're getting into, and instead of panic or anxiety, all you do is agree, but also know you're still doing it, so?

Guess this is what life is when your pretty good buddy in a horror city happens to possessed by a demon king, Robby guesses.

There's a lot strange about Trench that makes the journey to Luna and Peter's place...kind of familiar, in that sense. But if there's anything different from researching on magic and corruption, going to blood banks and reading up on crazy shit, it's the Peter element, for Robby. Like a reason to be more sure, or give less of a shit about the absurdity, because that's his friend's life. Does he feel like he might be grasping in the dark for sense?

Sure. But he'll do it for a friend. You don't get many of those, in Robby's experience.

Needless to say, he'll be outside their house around the agreed upon time, either a knock on the door, whether by fist or a knocker.

Knock knock, friends. It's Paimon 101 time. ]

Threaded | Flat

from up and down, and still somehow

it's cloud's illusions i recall (𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬 𝟏 - 𝟑)

i really don't know clouds at all (𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝟒)