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

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[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?"

[noniad]

Ortus stays focused on Gideon's soothed little face, her sharp infant nails scratching at his nose as she grabs harder than he thinks a baby her size ought to be able to.

He doesn't mind. His only worry, fleeting and irrelevant, is that she might scratch herself with them - but her face is free of blemish, so she must not be in danger of hurting herself.

"Gideon Nav," he tells Ezra, voice faintly distorted by the bend of his neck and the closure of his nose. It stings to pull away for more than one reason, but he trades his nose for the bottle, which Gideon latches onto with ferocious intensity. Her eyes shut in concentration as she sucks noisily, little palms clasping at the sides of the bottle that Ortus holds at the angle he'd been taught in this room not so long ago.

"The same one you might know. Only smaller."

[ezra_of_lothal]

Ezra smiles gently.

"I don't know her well, but we've geeked out about swords, yeah."

He'd seen the post of John 'reintroducing' her to Trench. The panicked and sad messages in the group Paul had set up. And ultimately refrained from inserting himself in the conversation because he didn't think he knew enough to be of any help - simply quietly ached for all of them.

[noniad]

"She loves swords," Ortus says, with soft, sorrowful absentness. He does not rock or jostle her as she eats, for fear of dislodging her latch. "From the first instant she was handed one. Within the year, I knew I would be eclipsed by her skill."

"I did not tell her what a relief it was." The baby in question, furiously sucking away, does not respond to his gently lowered gaze. "I ought to have told her. I do not know if it would have made any difference, but...there are things that should be done even if they come to naught."

[ezra_of_lothal]

"You're afraid she never knew you're proud of her?" Ezra asks, very softly.