kiriona gaia. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lipochrome) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2022-12-21 10:59 am
lipochrome) wrote in deercountry2022-12-21 10:59 am
nothing is working with me
Who: Open, but due to the content of the prompts, please PM me before tagging if we don't already have CR
What: Winter Mournings
When: December
Where: The Locked Tomb; Trench
Content Warnings: Marked in comment headers, but expect death, child abuse, self-harm, and Nona the Ninth spoilers throughout
[ starters in the comments! ]
What: Winter Mournings
When: December
Where: The Locked Tomb; Trench
Content Warnings: Marked in comment headers, but expect death, child abuse, self-harm, and Nona the Ninth spoilers throughout
[ starters in the comments! ]
finale; cw: gore
With a spray of hot, red blood, she stabs the old man through the heart, before he even volunteers. ]
no subject
It is muddled, indistinct. It is a jumble of fleeting, gore-streaked shadows, impossibilities and strangers in familiar bodies, and he should be left stunned and fumbling in its catastrophic end as the grim Corpse Prince flies straight and true through it all as a bullet might, murder encoded as inevitable physics.
But Ortus has been home often, these past cold days, and home has been in him, as serrated as the crystals shattering inside Kiriona's joints as she moves. He knows the undying, abnegating logics of this world like he knows the weight of bone.
Kiriona lunges for her old tormentor, who is no less vile in aspect for his feebleness at the cusp of death, her eyes dead as they must have been at her first sacrifice, and some shackle Ortus did not know himself clasped in gives way.
He cannot hope to match her strength or speed. He does not try. When he steps between her and the fallen Marshal, he takes her by the wrist, and he adds his force to her own as he alters the trajectory of her blade so it clatters hideously against the stone, and he spins with her as though she were fibre he would work into a thread, until she is jarred into his yielding bulk so he might drape his arm around her shoulders and gather her to him in all her coldness.
Clarity comes after instinct. He knows, now, why he has come home. He knows what purpose he has been made fit to serve.
Ortus unclasps Kiriona's wrist. He cups the back of her head and presses his painted face against her temple, his other arm supporting her against his chest and steady heart.]
Gideon. [He tells her, as soft as fresh turned soil.] I am here. I have you.
cw: violence, abuse
But Ortus won't let her. He has taken away her sword and her last chance at feeling good, at making this go right. He took it from her so easily, like he doesn't understand that this is all Kiriona Gaia has. This is what she is the heir to.
She will realize, later, that she is screaming. ]
No! No!! Let me go, asshole!
[ She takes a fist and pounds once, twice, and there is not nearly as much strength in it as there should be. Her dead body remembers what it is like to be exhausted.
Quieter, hoarser: ]
He's going to say he's sorry. He's going to. He will. He'll look at me, and know he fucked up, and I -- I -- I'll feel good again.
cw: violence, abuse
He will not.
[Ortus is the last bard of the Ninth. He knows how to wield his voice as a hammer or a knife, how to flood it with depths of contempt that other Houses should shudder to contemplate.
He makes it a woollen blanket, warm and heavy. He settles it around her shoulders and tucks in the corners.]
You know he will not. It is not in his nature. He could not be the man he is, to have done all that he did, if he were capable of knowing his error.
[He knows from long experience how dry the wells of a cruel man's heart run.]
All he can give you is what he knows how to give, and relief is not one of them.
[He pets her hair like she is a child again, the child she never was given the chance to be.]
Your happiness was never his to give. It was a thing he could only seek to take.
cw: implied child death
The blows cease. The struggling does not, not all the way. Instead, it diminishes, and what was once a thrash of anger is now the shaking of someone crying, even though Kiriona cannot produce the tears to accompany it. ]
He has to. He has to.
[ Kiriona says it like a litany, over and over, in the way that a child of the Ninth knows how to pray. ]
If he doesn't -- [ a thought too terrible to consider, but Ortus is forcing her to, and so her tongue trips over her words ] -- if he doesn't, then I'll never feel good again. I'll always be like this.
[ The worst part about Kiriona's God-given body is that it doesn't grow anymore. The worst part about being dead is being trapped.
Eighty-seven escape attempts, and she's still back here. ]
no subject
But he once cried like this, shuddering and tearless. He finds the rhythm of it again in the juddering of her body like she means to come apart as thoroughly as the obscure girl faded away behind her meant to. ]
I do not believe that.
[ The motion of his fingers over her hair settles into a slow, careful cadence. ]
I am a poet. It falls to me to know of endings, and where they come, and I cannot countenance that this is yours, to be held captive eternal by a man who made of himself only prison bars. If he holds the key to your release, and he will not give it up - then a lock must be picked, or a tunnel must be dug, or the very walls must crumble at the injustice of it.
And if I am wrong.
[ He stills his hand on the back of her head. His eyes are closed against the dark and the stone. He hears, somewhere, the whisper of saltwater. ]
I will stay with you, however you are like.
cw: child death, child abuse
She doesn't want to think about it. She no longer wants to remember. As if responding to her will, the memory shrinks, until it is just the rocks, and the low lantern light, and Ortus, and Kiriona.
Kiriona is not alone right now. She is being held. Once upon a time, there were two hundred other children, and they held her too. They died for Harrowhark, and Kiriona couldn't even follow them. She only - ]
I died for nothing.
[ There it is. The secret that is buried under the rock that must not be rolled away. A confession, building over seven months of living death and nine months of being a ghost in a skull. Crux cannot give her what she wants, and Harrow won't. All that leaves is this.
This. She has Ortus, and he promises to stay. ]
Don't leave. [ She is four years old again, and learning that all the adults hate her, and begging for them to love her anyway. Stay. ] Please.
cw for depression and talks of abuse
It's nothing. A biological process like watching an animal clean itself with it's tongue. There's no feeling to be gained from the way the blood smears on the wall, on the sword. It's not Gideon's sword - is that the problem? That it's not Gideon acting on her revenge, but the creature that was created from her ashes?
Was that the problem for them too? Was that why there's nothing in their heart but a gaping void, threatening to swallow up the entire world until it finally followed through?
They think about how badly they wanted to kill those people in their village, how badly they wanted revenge only for it to be ripped away from them by someone they thought they could trust. Would it have satisfied them then? Would freeing the Underground on the blood of those that slighted them help?
Slighted. Abused. It's the same, the only difference is whether you're an entity of death and destruction or a scared little kid.
He dies. This is the eigth time that they've been present. They speak up.]
You're going to kill yourself if you keep going.
[No judgement or even worry. They'd be a pretty massive hypocrite.]