deercountry | 14 . winter catch-all

He was strung up-- and not for the first time. Bereft of his shirt and his shoes, as well as the prosthetic that was based on the borrowed schematics of Atlesian tech and Ruby Rose's brilliance, the scar on his chest was visible for all to see. A lesser person would have lost themselves after such an onslaught-- but Oscar hadn't been alone. Ozpin had helped him endure the torture during that blurry haze of a day, with the memories of the pain punctuated by long stretches of silence... Or his vocal chords straining under the intensity of his own howling.

-- this time, for the first time in a very long time, he was completely and truly alone. Even without access to the magic of Remnant, Ozpin's presence in the back of his mind was a quiet comfort that he could rely on in a crisis. But in that moment he had nothing except the tingling in his hands that indicated a lack of blood circulation, the fearful tempo of his heart, and the stories in his head.

His blood went cold when the insectoid being burst into his room. Startled out of his traipsing along the edge of unconsciousness, he instinctively felt himself struggle to pull back. This was --

"John." He gasped. "John. That's you, right? Oh no no no..."

Oscar shook his head, loose locks falling into his face as he did so. He wanted to go home, but not like this!

Edited 2022-11-27 00:28 (UTC)

The monster approaches with a low droning hum of wasp's wings. It moves slowly, in this moment, as though curious; the trapped teenager doesn't seem to strike it as threat. He's an oddity, and she buzzes closer, the raw skull of her head cocked towards him in blank fascination.

This is when John, looking wholly human and not at all like a wasp monsters, staggers in the door behind her.

"Shit," gasps God, who is not looking his best. He staggers like he hurts, gasps like he's out of breath, which should all be frankly impossible. When he recognizes Oscar, his expression breaks into frank worry. "Hey— easy."

This is apparently directed to the wasp, not to Oscar. Bizarrely, she listens: she halts in the air, arm's reach from the boy and wings still thrumming.

He wanted to sass. He wanted to squirm and complain-- but his own visceral fears from previous times that he had been strung up and treated like a punching bag had instinctively kept him still. While the Zealots were nothing like the numbing rage of Hazel Rainhart, they still saw an opportunity to test his limits.

It was as if they knew from looking at him that he had been tortured before.

"You're.... you."

Oscar trailed, his voice shaking while he heaved a visible sigh of relief. Bugs and John were not a good pair, in his recollection. The last thing he wanted to deal with was a corrupted and out of control Emperor John Gaius.

With Hazel, he knew there was a way to talk his way out. That wasn't an option once anyone went Beast Mode.

"Glad someone thinks so," says John, and he approaches at the awkward limp of a man with a not-quite-healed bad foot. He puts a hand to the wall to steady himself, then makes a low irritated noise when the metal sears at him, and shakes out the new burn like he's offended it's getting in his way. The wasp-monster, in a shiver of Omen smoke, falls back to hang by his side.

"I've got him," he says to the bug. She watches impassively.

To Oscar, he says: "Holding up alright?"

"Oh, I'm just hanging out."

Yes, it was painful to say. But, cracking a dumb pun helped Oscar keep his mind off of the overwhelming helplessness he felt while he was suspended in the same position that was one of the hardest moments of his short life.

Jaw set, Oscar sucked in a breath and tried to will his fingers to stop tingling.

"They didn't do anything too bad," he explained. "They were testing the limits of my Aura, and didn't care if anything broke through. Then they turned it off, drew some blood, and left.

In that moment, John Gaius decides he actually likes this kid a lot.

His expression opens to brief incredulity, nearly impressed. There is a flicker of a smile at his mouth, a smoothing of the ever-present lines at his brow.

"Could be worse," he agrees, as he steps close enough to touch. "Hang in there while I get you down."

Get it.

Still, he's remarkably gentle when he reaches up to the restraints.

Though he was gentle, Oscar still recoiled. He didn't like being touched on a normal day-- but this, after hours of sustaining physical pain for the sake of the Zealots and their research, had his nerves jumping as if they coursed with electricity.

"I don't have much choice,"

He said dryly, trying to hide his discomfort with sass. With his prosthesis stashed somewhere, he didn't have many options.

A small part of him was just glad he was still wearing his pants.

When the restraints give, John's arm is immediately behind Oscar's shoulders, clumsily supportive. He lets the kid tip against him, even if it makes him stumble a little on the too-hot floor.

"There we go," he says, wryly encouraging. Lenore hangs in the air and watches them, head tilted in alien incomprehension. "Now it's a family vacation."

"We're-- kinda missing the carousels and the corn dogs!"

Oscar fell against John and held fast, trying desperately to cover his surge of panic with sarcastic quips and a disaffected detachment. The floor was hot-- everything was hot-- and he had no Aura to help bolster him while he gripped those thin arms tightly to compensate for the lack of leg.

This was... bad. He hadn't realized quite how bad until he was freed.

Looking up, there was finally no quips in his eyes-- just worry.

"How are we even gonna get outta here, John?"

"You look worried," he says, low and rueful. As though this isn't a circle of hell, a declawed god and a tortured teenager in somebody's creepy pressure cooker. "Come on. I've seen worse. We'll find the corn dogs yet."

He shifts Oscar's weight on him and weighs the options. With contact, he can still read the patterns of thalergy and thanergy in this human body as clearly as he can see the floor under their feet. Whatever they've done to him, they can't strip all of what he is; he's hazy-eyed, not blind.

"Any guess where they've put the leg? I can fix you up with something, short-term, but it won't be quite the same style."

He doesn't want to tip his hand by fucking up something as basic as a limb regrowth, especially with Sleeper anatomy fighting him the whole way down. Might be safer to stick with the basics.

"I've been in pretty tight squeezes, too." Oscar said quietly, hanging on tight but also prepared to bail if needed. John didn't look to be a man that was blessed with great physical strength-- and Oscar wasn't about to make himself a burden right now.

"This time was like the last time," He explained, thinking of his torturous stay on the Whale. "I haven't seen much anything outside this room."

It was harrowing to admit. He didn't like the weight of relative helplessness sitting on his shoulders.

"Do you think they have a storage room somewhere? I don't want you spending what you don't have in case we get in trouble. We'll really need it, then."

He wants to say he won't be spending anything, that he doesn't work like that, that he's God. Now's clearly not the fucking time. John caves to the about forty other things he's worried about right now, and keeps carrying the limping, one-legged teenager.

"Let's go poking around."

He tips his head to Lenore, and she shivers out ahead of them, all smoke and wasps's wings. She can play their scout. They'll know she found something if the screaming starts.

"This is my first visit, so you'll be our tour guide. If trouble finds us, leave it to Lenore."

Oscar didn't look forward to that screaming-- but, if it meant ensuring their safety, it's a possibility that he would not balk at. Holding fast to the Necrolord himself, Oscar was just glad that feeling was starting to return to his hands.

"I dunno, John." He said quietly. "All the halls kinda look the same, complete with the bad lighting and no windows. I'm not sure that being tour guide is as easy as you're saying."

He was just a teen, after all. Sure, he had the memories of an ancient, body hopping wizard, but he had none of the control or the lived experiences. That, and he didn't know the first thing about what he was doing in regards to blood magic. Striking a balance was hard-- and he was realizing that he would need to rethink his methods with every awkward step that they took.

"It really does have an ambiance." He is being doggedly, relentlessly casual about this, like he will pry a decent joke up from the overheated grates of the floor. "That classic slasher-film energy. I respect what they've done with the place."

They start finding doors. John catches in a doorway and hesitates there. What's inside is bad by any reasonable metric— a lot of disassembled bodies, parts of people— but that isn't what holds him up. The problem is that he has to fumble and grasp for an awareness of whether all that flesh is still alive, when he should be able to know from a planet away. Now he can barely figure it out from fifty paces.

"No survivors." He doesn't think to tell Oscar not to look. He just squeezes his shoulder and continues them on. Would've been a nightmare, if they'd found more fucked-up chained Sleepers: he knows the trouble of trying to shepherd a flock you can't actually handle.

(He might have made it clean, but he would not have left them behind.)

Edited 2023-02-03 16:35 (UTC)

Curious eyes can't help but notice the carnage of mangled bodies contorted into unnatural shapes. Oscar stared for a moment too long, heart and stomach squeezing up towards his throat in the seconds it took for his mind to register what it was that he was viewing. Only John's voice and the squeeze on his shoulder kept him moving-- hobbling step by imbalanced step as they tried find escape from whatever hellish dungeon they were in.

"It'd be a miracle if anyone survived that..."

He trailed, tearing his eyes away from the gore to focus in on the path ahead. The monotonous, continuing pattern of the hallways was dizzying. But, it wasn't like they had options.

"Not one of mine, I hope."

The God jokes get weaker when he's limping along with a kid tucked awkward against his side. They stumble on like that for a while, following the droning thrum of wasp's wings; he orients to Lenore like a compass to true north, drawn along behind her in mindless synchronicity. It's a little eerie, given how she is.

Still. They don't hit trouble; there isn't any screaming. By some genuine miracle— definitely not one of his— they find a storage room, unguarded, and John shuts the door with a low grating metal-on-metal rasp. Inside it, with Lenore alighted and still beside the shelves and shelves of Sleepers' things, John draws a breath of relief.

"Oh, thank the Brothers...."

Oscar groaned at the sight, letting go of John so he could sink to the floor for a few moments of heart-rending quiet in that nightmarish den. They both deserved a break-- Oscar wanted nothing more than to just sleep for a night or a week, but they needed to get out first.

"Just-- just give me a minute?"

He asked breathlessly, knowing full well that they probably didn't even have a minute to spare.

"Our luck may not hold that long."

He sounds grave but not unkind, or at least that's the goal. While Oscar catches his breath, John goes rifling through their captors' prizes. His monstrous Omen stands still as a guardian statue, her great insectoid head swiveling gently to track John's movements.

14 . winter catch-all

1. Cw: child endangerment, reference to torture

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cw: glimpse of bodies, gore

cw: glimpse of bodies, gore

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