deercountry | i know that the sun is here with me

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.

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."

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."

Edited 2022-12-14 05:19 (UTC)

Someone must have, she thinks. If Gideon is still alive, someone must have been taking care of her. But it's easy to tell, looking around what has to pass for a nursery, that this is absolutely not anybody's first priority. It's disgusting. The Ninth is a shithole, sure, she's heard as much, but to see that the moral rot goes down this far is almost too much.

Anna tugs gently at Gideon's fist so she isn't trying to cram the whole thing in her mouth, and offers one of her own fingers instead. Metallic and heavy, but physically clean (if not spiritually), so it won't hurt Gideon, she doesn't think.

"Don't blame yourself, Ortus," she says, her voice heavy. "You can't carry the weight of the entire House on your shoulders. Aren't there people in charge who should know about Gideon?" But she worries that it's not enough. Or that even if they know about the child, they still don't care. Her shoulders slump a little. "She deserves so much better than this."

Ortus cannot tell Anna what has happened here. At the flash-frozen age of thirty-five, he resolved to himself that no one would hear of the Ninth's darkest secret from his lips, because for all that it scarred him, he is not the truest victim. That title is cleaved between the infant in Anna's arms and the one no more than a cellular flutter inside of one of the people in charge who should know about the former. But she asks, so gentle with the weight of the asking, such a question, and it strikes him funny.

Ortus rarely laughs. It is almost always shy and soft, like he fears he might shake some aspect of himself or the world loose if he indulges in it too broadly. He does not remember until it comes out of him once more how his laughter sounded for months after this, and it is an awfulness.

He stares at her with eyes near to as black as God's and laughs like rust breaking in a hinge. It is an unsound sound, a mockery of wholesome joy or even irony, a noise that brushes against the threshold of the insane. No one who could make such a noise could be well.

"They know," he says, "That's why they hate her. She's alive, and she shouldn't be. Everyone else died. So why not her? Why not - ?"

He cracks, suddenly, like misfired clay. He shoves his fists against his eyes and makes another noise like something wet tearing, a wordless, stifled, singular sob.

It's strange to hear it coming from him. Laughter, and then sobbing. It feels almost alien, here on this far-off House that most people on the First would be forgiven for forgetting. That some refuse to even call a planet, thinking it too lofty a title for a hunk of rock and ice set in orbit around Dominicus.

During her tenure at the planetarium, and maybe when she had been indulging in some mind expansion of her own, Anna recalled looking at the projections on the darkened dome and wondering if she would even recognize people from other planets. If they walked among her and she just never knew. Her eye comes to a stop on Ortus after moving between him and the infant Gideon in her arms, oblivious to the conversation happening. With hope, at least.

"She called herself a sacrifice," she says quietly, more to herself. This is a memory, and she worries that discussing things that haven't happened yet will disrupt it like a stone in the river. "They hate her because she survived," she repeats, and it's then that she realizes the answer to her question from years ago. She recognizes every single shred of humanity within the Ninth House.

"Well, christ, Ortus." And she raises a stone in her hand and throws it against the surface of the water as hard as she can. "What can we do to get her out of here?"

There is no way off of this planet for Gideon Nav. Eighty seven attempts, started when she was four, each terminated with a ruthless terror of revelation of what she might spill unknowing from the only mouth in the House not tempered to the secrecy of the Rock. She had never understood the tenor of the hatred that anchored her to the Ninth until she was past its gravity well, but even there, she was not free of it.

Nor was she free of the sacrifice the House that she abhorred had demanded of her twice, and extracted only once. The price of its Reverend Daughter counted in the blood of its unrevered children.

This is all past. There is no undoing what has been done. He has heard it from the lips of no less than the Lady Abigail Pent. He has seen it in a Corpse Prince's open-mouthed and hungry wounds, the emptiness inside of her where her vital spark was extracted to light the bonfire of Harrowhark's power.

His hands fall from his face. He does not open his fists.

"The supply shuttle is cancelled," he excavates, his jaw set hard and hurt, "We would have to call it, and we cannot without the leave of the Reverend Mother or Father, who would not permit it. No one is to know what happened here," his voice shivers and rises "what we-"

The footsteps in the hall are hideous in their echo. Ortus flinches, and all the strengthening set of his face melts away into frantic, cornered fear.

"No," he says, uselessly, turning towards the door in a near stumble, "Not again."

There are a lot of things that Anna wants to say to that. She hates bureaucracy, and she thinks it's stupid that a place like the Ninth House is so tied up in it, because it just makes sense to have everybody help out each other instead of jumping through hoops that have already been gummed up with red tape. When resources are this scarce, why make them scarcer?

But her thoughts have to take a turn; in all her time, she has never seen Ortus react like this. Not to anybody, not to anything. She hears the echo and she's not sure which grim specter they're about to face, but her jaw stiffens, hardens. In the time she has remaining before whatever this confrontation is going to be, she takes her steps carefully back towards Gideon's crib and places her in it. In a darker voice than she wants, she urges the infant "be good" and "hang tight", and she clenches both her fists as she turns to the door. Before she can fake herself out by reaching for her blade, she recognizes that its weight is not on her back. She'll make do.

"Who is it, Ortus?" she asks, but her body speaks a different cadence: "Stand back. I'll handle this."

Gideon whines as she's put down, too young to understand the portent of approaching strides, but something in Anna's urgency does seem to impress itself on her - or perhaps she is simply too exhausted to voice a louder protest.

Ortus is still between Anna, the crib, and the door. He is not shaking. He is extraordinarily motionless, his shoulders set at an angle no good for anything, his fists bloodless and inert at his side. All that moves through him is his breath, shallow and swift.

"It is my father," he says, his voice laden with a darkness that is wholly unlike anything Anna may have heard from him before.

The door opens, and is it filled from edge to edge by a man who towers as Ortus does not tower, a solid slab of muscle and fat sheathed in the blackest of vestments, his face painted in solemn precision. His eyes are the near-black of Ortus' own. They fall on Ortus like hammers.

"What are you doing, boy?" Mortus asks, his menace quiet and inexorable.

"Leave me alone," Ortus says, quavering, his stomach a riot of acid gnawing into the rest of his guts, "Leave me alone."

Oh, fuck.

All right, fine, time to see the reality of all the stuff that she'd just assumed from the way Ortus had been talking about legacy and those interested in preserving it. She sizes up his father and recognizes him not in body but in spirit. Like Peter Lehmann himself had undergone her same transformation and received the soul of this hulking slab of a man. She steps forward, ahead of Ortus, between him and his father. She does not waver.

"He was helping me tend to the child," she says as calmly as she can with her fists clenching; she's lucky that her knuckles don't go white anymore. "The one that the House is supposed to be responsible for." She feels out of place doing this, but this extends beyond any sort of imagined fraternal bonds between her and Ortus—this is what a decent person would do. She suspects the Ninth House is new to the concept.

"If there's anything you want to say about that, say it to me."

Mortus' lightless gaze shifts to Anna like stones grinding in socket. He takes his measure of her deliberately, and Ortus cannot guess what he sees. The inclusion of outsiders in the other memory was a blessing, but here - here, what his father sees might make all the difference.

"Is that so, sister?" Mortus says, and Ortus' already tetherless stomach plummets between his knees like he's been gutted. The tiny noise that escapes his lips doesn't dispel the similarity. Mortus seems to ignore it, but Ortus knows better than that.

"There is nothing to say. If you have the child in your care, there is no reason for him to linger. Come." His father's attention stays fixed on Anna. His fingers don't so much as twitch at his side in beckoning. Ortus' feet want to move all the same, to shuffle him meekly forward to submit to whatever comes next, so long as it does not happen in this room, in front of these witnesses.

"No," he says, strangled and small, "I'm staying here. I should have stayed here."

It's always intimidating facing down a father. Mortus may not be her own, but she can see even more clearly the things that she feared in Peter. The thing that chills her spine is that stare, the way that he's sizing her up—the same way dad had looked at her while he was deciding to get rid of her.

"I'm not your sister," is what she wants to say, but if he's going to look at her like a nun then she'll play the role as well as she can. She plants her feet firmly, listening to Ortus' protest and hearing something that rings too close to her own voice within it.

"I still need his help," is what she does say. "How many people are here on the Ninth, and nobody can spare the time from praying and watching over the Tomb to look after a child?" Her words are firm, and she'd like to think she's remaining pretty damn measured given the circumstances. "But Ortus actually knows how to do it. It's more important that he stays here."

Mortus' nostrils flare. It is the only movement on his impassive wall of a face until Gideon whines in her crib, and his gaze slides over to the source of the sound. His lip curls in a sneer of contempt that Ortus feels like a slug squirming beneath his sternum, fat and slippery as a tongue.

"The child is an abomination," Mortus declares, as if the fact ought to be obvious, "If you wish to tend it, so be it. I will not have my son make his hands filthy in handling the thing."

"You're the one with filthy hands."

There is a strange, fractured moment where Ortus does not know who has spoken. The voice echoes off the walls with nearly obscene loudness, a ringing note of cold scorn, and it is only when his father's eyes return to him that Ortus recognizes the words as his own.

"What did you say to me."

"You heard me," someone says in Ortus' voice still, "I'm not going anywhere with you."

Mortus' hands tighten into massive fists at his side as he stares at his son in a paroxysm of speechless fury. He takes a step, and then another, and will seek to brush Anna aside to reach his wayward. Ortus does not flinch backwards. It has never made a difference.

Anna is at once immeasurably proud of and terrified for Ortus. Peter had never done what this father now threatens to do, mercifully, but she knows what it looks like. And though she may not have her blade with her, she still has a responsibility to defend both of them. (She's a tool. Point her in the right direction and pull the trigger.)

She takes enough steps to get between Ortus and his father again, and she clenches her fists more visibly, raising them in front of her to use her arms as a shield. From behind her guard, she asks, "Do you feel like a man when you push him around?" And it's a threat, as though everything else hasn't been so far. Her frame is slight and she knows it; she's not nearly as physically imposing as Ortus' father is, and she doubts that anyone else really could be. But her fists are truncheons with the weight of eleven years of pent up patricidal anger. "You have three seconds to back off or they'll be rolling you out of here like a rock."

This is not how she anticipated her day going, but she can't let this happen to Ortus. His father would clearly try it if she were here or not, but that's not an excuse to stand there idly. If there's a chance this will change anything, even in a memory, she has to try.

"You raise hands," Mortus says, with ponderous incredulity, "Against the cavalier primary of the Ninth House."

In the years to come after this, Mortus would pass through a slow, grinding erosion of his self that would leave him diminished in ways Ortus could not have understand without this contrast. He had known his father to have corroded under the immensity of his sins. He had not realized how much of this vast, icy menace had attenuated. It is too much to bear.

"You seek to gainsay my authority over my son," he continues, with the brute astonishment of a man so rarely challenged it has become unthinkable, "You have the audacity."

"That was three seconds," Ortus' voice says, in a cool, brittle flatness, "Last chance."

He is bending over. He is, to his own immense astonishment, picking up a hard-edged plastic crate stored underneath the bottle warmers. It is not particular heavy. It has a broken sharp edge at one corner. He is holding it as he is standing up, and he does not know what he is doing.

Mortus' nostril flare like a bull in the baiting. He makes to shove past Anna, dismissive and indifferent, and he leaves the whole of his side open. She is only a sister of the Ninth, after all; she has no strength with which to challenge him.

And she will be his red cape if it means that this room sees less of that color altogether. Anna punches his exposed side with her metal fist, a motion she hasn't had reason to practice in years (not since she learned how to fight with a sword, certainly) but she finds coming back to her like it never left. She follows it with a second blow and hopes they they're enough to draw his attention away from his son; she whips her head to the side as her second punch goes out to make sure that Ortus is actually safe.

"You don't know who the fuck you're dealing with," she says in the breath between blows. Pulling rank, pulling stolen authority, it won't do anything here. It doesn't matter anyway, does it? People like him only respond to one thing, and she needs to prevent him from speaking his own horrible truth upon Ortus.

Mortus staggers, thrown off by the force of Anna's unyielding fists. It is an unexpected, impossible series of blows, and he was not braced for it. He turns on her like a avalanche sliding down a mountainside, reaching out for her to take hold of her shoulders, or her hair, or any manner of thing he can seize.

"You will learn who you are -"

In the span of Anna's shifted vision, Ortus brings his crate up in a sweeping arc that's only smooth because he has lost control of the workings of his body.

Or perhaps it is smooth because he has regained that control, whatever his most frightened thoughts shriek in concert as he looks at the point he means to strike, not the weapon in his hands. He presses up out of his feet, but not too much. He contains his motion to the most efficient extension of his arms, not overcommitting his momentum nor hesitating to throw his weight into the act.

It is very brief. It takes forever. The jagged edge of the crate strikes his father's temple and makes as if to keep going. The blow is only a glancing one, but it rends a bloody line that gushes with the usual enthusiasm of a head wound, and Mortus bellows in more outrage than pain.

Ortus lets the crate go at the end of its arc and throws himself forward to catch his father below the arm with his shoulder, flinging himself recklessly into the drive, and Mortus knocks back against one of the empty cribs, which rocks with a hideous clattering scrape as their combined bulk jars it backward.

"I hate you," Ortus hisses, and it is his voice again, like it always was, "I hate you, I hate you, I fucking hate you!"

Edited 2023-01-20 17:19 (UTC)

She knew long ago to always place her bets on Ortus Nigenad. She learned that his still waters run so, so much deeper than anyone can fathom—and she is seeing now just how deep they go. Silently, letting Ortus speak, letting him release his emotions in a torrent, she walks over to his father on the ground and steps down on his wounded temple.

Anna may look lightweight, but a little less than three hundred pounds of android metal do not come easily. She plants her other foot on the ground, out of range of the man who Ortus hates, who Ortus fucking hates.

"Fuck you, dad," she says, grinding her heel like she's smearing shit on the pavement. There is another cool one-liner she could say here, but she refuses to steal this moment from Ortus. "Leave your son alone. Let him do what he wants."

The toppled man bellows under Anna's foot, wrapping his hands around her ankle to pry her away - or he would, if Ortus let him raise them above his shoulder.

It's an ugly, sloppy struggle. Anything Ortus might have ever learned about grappling has vanished from his mind as surely as if he truly was this age again, his training gone slack in the absence of a bloodline heir. He only reacts, fumbling at his father's sleeves and hands as Gideon, startled by the clamour, wails over the sound of grunts and panting and the roaring thump of Ortus' heart.

Then she stops, and Ortus whips his head up in a panic worse than anything that came before. If his father was still moving, he would surely take a blow to the head or the belly for it, but Mortus has stopped too. Everything has stopped, stiller than graves, the hum and hiss of the House frozen in lightless time.

Behind Anna, the white stag huffs, shaking his heavy antlered head. He can hardly fit inside the room.

Ortus sits back on his father's belly with a shivering breath, then slides off him, dragging his knees up towards his chest and clasping his arms around them. He stares at the stag with blank misery, wiping his sleeve across his mouth and smearing his paint to its final ruin.

"It's done, now," he says, absently, not looking at Anna, "You can go."

Everything stops, and Anna suddenly remembers that she is in the middle of a memory. The adrenaline is still running deep within her, and the past few seconds feel like a blur. Inside her, there is something, some knot raveled oh so tightly that she feels slowly starting to come undone. But this is about Ortus, this is about her friend, this is about the only person on the Ninth she would trust to take care of a child.

She steps away from the frozen body of his father, and she turns to face Ortus Nigenad as he speaks, even if he's not doing the same. She breathes a few times, just shy of ragged, with her mouth open.

"I'm sorry, Ortus," she says, as though it's appropriate. It's the first thing she can think of to say. But this feels like not the right time to probe further. "I wish... he'd treated you better." So it wouldn't have led to this. So they wouldn't be here in this overcrowded room together. She keeps her hands to herself, crossing them over her body, holding her upper arms like she doesn't know what to do with anything anymore. She glances at the stag.

"You'll be okay if I go?" she asks. "We can talk about it more back home. If you want."

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

no subject

no subject

cw: child neglect

no subject

cw: child death, trauma

cw: child death

cw: child death

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: child abuse

cw: child abuse

cw: child abuse

no subject

cw: child abuse (referenced)

no subject

no subject

no subject