i know that the sun is here with me | december catch-all

[terriblepurpose]

Who: Paul Atreides, Ortus Nigenad, and you
What: December catch-all, open and closed prompts
When: December
Where: Various
Content warnings: Grief over loss of a parent, eugenics, psychological horror, child abuse, child death

Comments

Ortus Nigenad

[noniad]

open

[noniad]

winter mourning | ongoing cw: child abuse, mass child death, human sacrifice

[noniad]

She doesn’t cry like she did before.

The red-headed infant sobs in sucking, exhausted hiccups, the wet and expended wails of an infant not yet habituated to isolation. Her tiny feet beat against the back wall of her crib as she works out of her tiny socks again. No one comes to slide them back over her tiny toes.

There is a dull, rusty stain on the diagram of the human skeleton on the smooth gray wall above her crib, one tipped with five points before it sloughs down the reprinted flimsy. There are no other children in the cots around her. The ventilation system hisses smooth and nearly silent.

Gideon the Smallest snuffles in her bassinet, infinitesimal, pathetic.

The creche door slams open with a shocking burst of noise, revealing an unshorn, roughly painted teenager. He cuts across the room as shears might, limbs stiff, his black eyes wild and empty wastelands. When he looms over the infant’s ivory crib, he does so with clenched fists, and he stares at her as if he does not know her.

Gideon snorts weakly, a fluttering suction of noise that surprises her, and sinks into a thin, pallid whimper, her little fists tucked under her chin.

Ortus Nigenad leans over her cradle and he draws her up to his chest, a reedy stutter of breath in his throat. He cradles her even more carefully than he did the first time, like he’s afraid she’ll come to pieces in his arms, and looks at her screwed up, snotty baby face with a mask of tragedy stamped over his own.

“I know,” he says, pressing his gray-tinged brow to her sticky one, “I know.”

They stay like that a moment, the last not yet cavaliers of the Ninth House, and Ortus takes a hard, heavy breath. He carries her over to the changing table and sets her down, provoking a fresh whimper, and hikes her infant’s dress up before he starts to attend to her most urgent need.

“There’s formula ready in the refrigerator,” he says, low and controlled, the first acknowledgment he’s made of the stranger here with them, “Please put a bottle in the bottle warmer and turn it on. She’s hungry.”

[If interested in tagging in on this prompt, please message me to discuss first due to the sensitive nature of the topics at hand.]

[necroprince]

[What a miserable scene. Ianthe looks at this sad grief-stricken shell of a man and doesn't recognize him as anything other than a much younger version of the miserable sack of a man she walked past prior to finding herself here.

The Ninth House. She recognizes the interiors from her brief visit - her very brief, very bitter visit, and even standing a few feet away, she can make note of the familiar golden shine in those scrunched up crying eyes.

Kiriona made for a hideous baby. She wonders if that'd help her get over being a corpse. Probably not, she's rather down in general nowadays. Maybe she learned it from Mr Potato Head as she has not so lovingly dubbed him in her head. She watches it all like a vulture circling a dying animal, her eyes sharp and the expression on her pale sicky face thoughtful.

Normally, she would respond to such a request with a cutting joke or by tossing the formula at his head, but such an interruption just takes away from it somehow - the private secrecy in this moment. She jokes about a lot of things, but her appetite has always been starved. The last thing she wants to do is ruin the feast before her.

So she hands him the formula with her skeletal arm, and steps back.]

Is babysitting always this bloody sad in the Ninth House?

cw: child death

[noniad]

[The towering blonde registered for Ortus only lightly at first; another uninvited intruder on Kiriona's (Gideon's) well-being. He knows her name, Ianthe; he knows she bodes no good; he knows, now that he has seen her, that she is so terribly, hideously young, a new pallid petal pressed to flatten inside the pages of an ancient book.

Ortus of the now wears the Ortus of the then like a poorly fit coat, and he looks at her with eyes too worn for this youthful body.]

No.

[Freshly changed, the tenor of Gideon's cries changes, softer but still urgent. Ortus gathers her up again tenderly and returns to the side of her crib, reaching inside to fish for her small socks.]

It will be, now. But it was not always.

[necroprince]

[She looks down at the baby, then at the cribs around it. She had heard, of course, about the accident. Neither Kiriona or Harrowhark were ones to talk about it but those Eighth House pricks sure never shut up about it behind closed doors. She heard a few things, though their contempt for her was similarly... apparent. Not that any of those talentless morons ever liked her. He was just more honest about it. Less afraid of her sister.

It would be a hard thing to hide from the rest of the empire, the systematic slaughter of so many children. Ianthe wonders, idly, how many children she's killed while slowly destroying all hope of life in the galaxy to fuel the Emperor's deluded fantasies of revenge against people and concepts that don't exist. A few. Maybe all of them, outside of her Empire. It doesn't matter.]

I imagine not. [She leans against the wall, skeletal hand idly resting on a crib next to her, tracing circles into the material.] All those dead kids have a habit of killing the good vibes I'm told.

She's never mentioned you, you know.

[noniad]

[Ortus' full mouth thins to a flimsy-sharp line, but he says nothing at first. He busies himself stretching Gideon's socks (black, and edged with worn, time-softened lace) over his thick fingers so he can attempt to slide them over her kicking feet. It is very difficult to do one handed, but he is loathe to put her down more than he has to.]

The Reverend Daughter Nonagesimus, or Prince Gaia?

[He asks, with lukewarm mildness, stroking a wrinkled sole with his thumb in an effort to calm Gideon's squirming. She only redoubles her efforts, shooting both of her legs out straight and inflexible before wriggling them in furious turmoil.]

In either case, I am not surprised. I do not imagine they had cause to recall me fondly, or at all.

[necroprince]

[She can't help but smirk at him using Kiriona's proper name, her own lips curling into a smirk, even despite the misery radiating from this haunted nursery. So he knows, then. Must have hurt.

Good. She can take solace in that. She took a bit of it in seeing the hurt on Duty and the fucked up amalgamate that became the Sixth House's heirs. It suits them well.]

Harry mentioned you a fair bit, actually.

[The rune on her jaw prevents her from saying anything more than that, of course, because even now Harrowhark Nonagesimus is a delightful bundle of nightmares and inconveniences.]

My fellow Prince, though. The wriggling infant in your arms? [The phrasing is deliberate. If Kiriona Gaia is to be addressed as a prince, then Ianthe Naberius should be recognized as both saint and prince. Hence, the Lyctor Prince.] She never did. Guess you must have stopped looking after her once she developed a personality, hm?

[noniad]

[Harry. How Harrowhark must despise the nickname, or at least make pretense to seeming to despise it.]

Did she?

[Another tepid question, his brows rising slightly as he looks up at her once more. He marks the set of her jaw and something of the sickly light that has kindled in her unusual blue eyes.

It reminds him of Harrow. Another thing he guesses she might hate, and something he hates to think of her. But still: the affected pleasure at another's suffering, dominion expressed through small cruelties.]

And you're wrong about that. I didn't stop looking after her then. I stopped before.

[He slips back into a younger mode of speech thoughtlessly, as if his form ushers him back in time. But it's his adult gravity that drives the words (or was he braver, once, than he remembers -) in their leaden honesty.]

Would you help me with her socks? If you could hold her ankle still...?

[Ortus drifts over to her like a waterlogged branch bobbing in cold water, floating but weighed down low.]

[hauntedsavior]

Anna has never been responsible for a child before.

For a number of reasons, she'd written it out of her life. Crossed it off her list of possibilities for one reason, then another, then a third, and now... she has the chance to tend to a young Kiriona Gaia. A young Gideon Nav, she corrects herself, only temporarily crossing something else off a different list. She's never been on the Ninth House before, but she can assume that that's where she is, and she recognizes the person tending to the baby, as well. This is home to them, and she might be the first pre-Resurrection human to set foot on it. Wonders never do cease, do they?

She looks around this room and finds what she's looking for quickly enough, and it's only when the bottle is in the warmer that she brings herself over to Ortus' side. She's in her heavy winter coat, and there's still some snow dusting her shoulders, but she's not carrying herself with any tension. It's draining away as she looks down at the baby. Despite everything, it's still her.

"It won't be long," she says, a strange sense of reverence in her tone. This is a memory and she is a guest, and she needs to treat it properly. "How has she been sleeping?"

[noniad]

Ortus finishes cleaning Gideon up and returns her to the tentative cradle of his arms, his exhausted, grief-worn expression creasing with the passage of a fresh agony like a bullet. Gideon mewls miserably and slaps his chest as she waves her hands, and he catches one miniature wrist almost reflexively. His thumb fits in the whole palm of her hand.

"I don't know," he says, and his voice is shockingly young even to his own ears, adulthood stripped from him in great sheets to leave him trembling and exposed. His eyes are burning. He heaves up one shoulder to clumsily scrape them across the upper part of his sleeve, leaving a smear of face paint behind.

"I haven't been here. I was with everyone else. I thought...someone would be taking care of her, and they must have been, sometimes, or she wouldn't be..." He applies the gentlest of pressure to her hand; her sharp, fragile nails bite at his skin as she grips back. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't come back for you."

[hauntedsavior]

She looks at Gideon, then to Ortus, then back to Gideon, and all at once the things that her younger sister had told her about growing up here all seem to make sense. A child meant to be sacrificed, just a holy body and divine blood never seen as its own person. They would leave her here like this, leave her in the cold to fend for herself. Leave her in the care of whoever remembered there was a child among them, and how often did that responsibility have to fall to Ortus? Who else would care?

She doesn't know how to take care of a child. But she'll learn. She puts a metallic hand on the shoulder of the man who couldn't be more than half her age. "You shouldn't be the only one looking after her. Is it okay if I hold her?"

[noniad]

It's as if his thoughts tumble over each other, his past self and his present self in turmoil as they seek to share the same space. He looks at her with shining, baffled eyes, his chin dimpled with the force of keeping his lips pressed shut, knowing her and not knowing her simultaneously.

(Her hand feels safe on his shoulder. That's true for both of them.)

"You have to hold her head like this," he says, waveringly, and demonstrates, guiding Anna into a proper secure hold on the squirmy infant. He puts his hand flat on Gideon's rounded, heaving belly before he steps back, reluctant to look away from her even long enough to search for her lost socks in her crib.

[hauntedsavior]

Anna looks, and then mimics things almost perfectly as she takes Gideon into her arms. Holding a small human like this isn't something she's ever done—and underneath Gideon, she feels the weight of the stains on her own hands. It's maudlin to think about how many filthy things she's done with these two hands, and how many things A2 has done on top of that, but she's allowing herself the drama within her own mind. It's worse to ignore the feeling.

She tries to focus on the baby instead; her eyes meet Gideon's. Anna would be slow to admit that this is awakening something in her, but there is something unexplainable about the way she feels inside her chest—as though Woe has granted her a beating heart to match her sister's. To stay silent at this feels impossible; she listens to what her heart is telling her to do, and in the same smoky voice that she has torn down walls with, she gently sings, "How long have you waited here for someone to touch you, for someone to hear you scream? It's okay to be afraid. I'm here with you."

cw: child neglect

[noniad]

Gideon settles more inside Anna's arms than she did in Ortus', calming slightly when Anna catches her golden eyes with her own. The bottle warmer continues to hum, but it's not ready quite yet. In lieu of anything else to suck on, she jams her own fist against her mouth and makes wet, whining noises around it, her breath hiccuping with effort.

"Three days." Ortus' voice is toneless and dull. He steps back from the pair of them and looks up at Anna's face again, his face as flat as his words. "But it must have been less than that. Someone must have..."

He breaks off and stares down at his hands, opened and raised in front of him, like there's going to be something in them that he can read to make sense of all of this.

"I told myself someone must have, so I would hate them all less. So I would hate myself less." There's nothing clinging to the creases of his palms. "She was only a baby. She didn't do anything wrong."

[theflyingone]

Altaïr does not have the immediate need to attend to an infant's cries. Someone else always took care of that. His few interactions with children were to teach older boys what it meant to wield the blade. He expects someone to come in presently--but not in this manner.

His hand hovers near the knife hilt positioned at a ready angle in its sheath on his back. Everything about this sets his nerves on end. But the painted person who entered so loudly quietens his demeanor and handles the baby more delicately than glass. Altaïr's blades stay sheathed.

Altaïr knows he has landed in another person's memory by mistake, which was a possibility he'd allowed for, so he is more disappointed than surprised. This person doesn't seem troubled by his presence here. By now Altaïr knows what a refrigerator is, and he grabs the bottle from it with an efficient calloused hand, but he stalls when he looks at what is called a bottle warmer.

"I do not know how to use this." And, "Is this your child?"

[noniad]

Ortus dries Gideon's chapped skin and applies a thick cream to her before he folds her into a fresh cloth diaper, moving mechanically through the routine. He had not done it himself often, but he had seen it done enough. He knows what is the right way to do things.

"She is ours," Ortus says, picking Gideon back up and tucking her head over his heartbeat as she whines, "A child of the Ninth. But she isn't mine in the way you're asking."

He crosses the room and reaches past the man to flick the switch on the bottle warmer, then taps one of the empty partitions. There are six of them, suggestive, as the empty cribs are, of this room being intended to hold more than one sticky, unhappy infant.

"You put it in here, and it warms the bottle for you." He steps back to allow him to work, looking at him with eyes that are too flat with resignation to hold suspicion. "My name is Ortus Nigenad. This is Gideon Nav. Who are you?"

[theflyingone]

Now here's a surprise, enough to raise his brows. This is someone he knows, and the recollection shows in his voice.

"Safety and peace, I am Altaïr. We have spoken." Of wayward charges and personal failings, vaguely alluded to.

His eyes glance from the bottle warmer to the empty cribs as he sets the milk where it's supposed to go. He's fairly certain there is supposed to be more joy and clamor around a nursery. Once they progress beyond the newborn eating and sleeping stage, they get quite noisy. Altaïr's dark brows draw together again. He suspects an illness struck down caretakers and children alike, but he asks anyway:

"Where is everyone?"

cw: child death

[noniad]

Ortus relaxes at Altaïr's first words only to tense at his last, a black rolling wave that passes through him like he is the troubled sea itself. Gideon squirms in his arms more vigorously, and her vigour surprises him, his arms tightening about her in fear of her falling.

"Altaïr. The awesome one," Ortus says, his confirmation not necessary, but a buffer before the leaden thud of the words that follow, "They are in the crypts."

He has come from there, driven upwards alone by the maddening spur of worse wailing than even Gideon in her desperation could muster. Here, at least, there is succour that can be offered. She is too young to be inconsolable.

Ortus is not. He looks it as he stands there, staring downwards past his own feet, and it is as though he may still see through the rock and bear witness not only to the present, but the past three days, in all their wretched bleakness.

There is a loose bone on the floor not swept away. A single distal phalanx, the sort a young necromancer keeps in her pocket, and might use to conjure a construct to run uselessly towards the door -

"It's only us."

Re: cw: child death

[theflyingone]

Altaïr would not call himself awesome, but it's a little joke (cruel ironies today!) between them.

He bows his head slightly. "It is a great loss."

These are usual words, and they fail to capture the enormity of it. The ache in his heart tells him so. They are not enough. He envies other people for possessing an easy sort of knowledge of how to comfort others.

The bottle finishes warming more quickly than Altaïr expected, and he brings it to Ortus, habitually careful enough of his feet not to step on the odd-shaped object on the floor. His other hand gently and openly comes to rest on his shoulder.

It's a fatherly or brotherly sort of gesture. He learned it from the men around him in his life, but most often and most recently from Al Mualim. (More cruel ironies. Altaïr did not put his body in a crypt or the earth. He burned it, which is prohibited, because in the wake of seeing the wonders of the Apple, he feared Al Mualim would somehow haunt him or not stay dead.)

[ezra_of_lothal]

"On it," Ezra replies, quietly, and turns to do just that.

He's pretty sure this is another memory. Ortus's, so in that sense what happens here only really matters to Ortus, but -

There's no reason not try to help, in this small way.

And maybe in another small one?

"Most babies I've spent any time with were... Force-sensitive. A little bit empathic? So it might not work as well for her, but I can, um. Try to project calm and safety? Maybe-"

He glances around. Something terrible happened here. He's not picking up details - he's not truly psychometric. But the heavy sense of death and despair hang in the air is palpable to him.

"...shield her a little," he adds, voice low, not sure if that will make sense to the older man.

[noniad]

Ortus is accustomed to being in the presence of forces he does not understand. His awareness of the Force, that mysterious animating presence that seems to be shared by Anakin Skywalker and young Ezra, is limited to an awareness - but he does not need to know how an engine functions to understand its purpose is to move.

He remembers watching the flowers bloom and die around the feet of a troubled young man. He fastens Gideon's diaper with a folding pin and bundles her back up before he turns to face Ezra - and the only thing about him that is his true age is his eyes.

"Is there anything that you need me to do to help?" He asks, far less ponderous in his phrasing than he usually is, his hand coming up without him looking down to stroke the fuzzy cap of Gideon's red hair. "If you would try, I'd - anything you need."

[ezra_of_lothal]

"There's no - not like a sacrifice, no," Ezra says with a head shake. Because he well, just because he hasn't gotten intimately involved in the affairs of the other people from Ortus's universe, doesn't mean he hasn't been paying close attention to things said in public.

Necromancy usually requires at least a token sacrifice, he's pretty sure. Or maybe that's just what the man who calls himself John, or Emperor, or God, taught everyone under his rule.

"Focusing on - that you are here, and care for her, can't hurt," he allows. He smiles softly at the baby, letting the sympathetic compassion he feels in wake of Ortus's saying he'd do anything for her well up. His gaze goes hazy, while he focuses on his own memories of feeling safe and loved.

His mom and dad telling him bed time stories. Meals together with all the Specters, on the Ghost. Ben, from a different version of his childhood, singing lullabies.

Then when he feels grounded in those feelings, he lets the Force in, so he's amplifying those emotions out and gently wrap Ortus and the baby in then.

[noniad]

Necromancy cannot make something of nothing. Ortus does not know a magic that does not require some form of sacrifice. When Ezra instructs him to focus on the care he has for Gideon, Ortus focuses with all the intensity he can bring to bear, which even at seventeen was a great deal, and as a man grown - as a man grown and dead, he believed in a hero so completely that he called one.

This room was not always a repository of horror. The memories he needs are close at hand. He thinks of many hands at work, lifting infants from their cribs, tending to their needs. He thinks of being small himself, peering through the slats of the cribs at the newest Niners, and growing up greeting each new arrival as they came with every other child of the Ninth. He thinks of hushed voices bouncing off walls with flakes of pale green paint.

He never had any brothers or sisters. He had one hundred and ninety nine brothers and sisters.

He should have had two hundred and one, and it is the two hundredth he holds, and into her he pours every ounce of smothered love that he has carried for half his life.

Ezra's will-working settles over Ortus in a blanket of impossible safety, and a sense of dampness around his eyes. Gideon's fitful whining quiets, then stops, her little chest no longer heaving so terribly. She looks up at him owlishly, blinking her golden eyes, and reaches up for his face.

"Thank you," Ortus says, voice throttled by unshed tears, and lowers his face down so that Gideon can seize hold of the tip of his nose.

[ezra_of_lothal]

"You're welcome," Ezra murmurs, "Just glad to help."

Moving slowly, eyes still a little focused, he turns back to the warming bottle to check the temperature, even peeling back a glove a little, to make a test dot on the inside of his wrist.

He'd picked up this trick during his scant half year of helping care for newborns - from when he'd waited anxiously while Padmé Amidala had been given birth to twins, until he'd found himself on Trench's shore.

His grief that the cosmos has seen it to separate him from those versions of that part of his family is something he's been quietly keeping a lid on, for nearly a year now.

Stay focused on the love, not the loss, he tells himself. Those version of Luke and Leia are out there, somewhere. They are loved.

As he comes back over to hand it to Ortus he asks, "What's their-" Wait, her - that feels right. "Her name?"