nothing is working with me

[lipochrome]

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! ]

Comments

cw: violence, abuse

[lipochrome]

[ Even though she can't see him, Kiriona knows what Crux's face looks like. It is all twisted up in self-righteous rage. If Crux could feel satisfaction, he'd feel the satisfaction of the last laugh. He could still be alive. Kiriona can still hear the sound of a feeble old man gasping for air. She spared the lungs and went for the heart, instead.

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

[noniad]

[Ortus forms a wordless murmur against her corpse-frigid skull. She is too large to rock in his arms, but there is something of the motion echoed in the manner in which he braces against her struggling. He shrugs off her blows. He barely feels them at all.]

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

[lipochrome]

[ Kiriona's body remembers what her mind will not let her. And right now, it remembers what it was like to be held. It's an old memory, buried with two hundred brothers and sisters, but Ortus has made it fresh again.

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. ]

[noniad]

[ Ortus has only been dead the once. His corpse dissolved into lightness, into the vapour between celestial bodies. His bones will never rest in the Anastasian. He will never know what it is to be a revenant, shackled to the unchanging prison of cold flesh and frozen bone.

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

[lipochrome]

[ The thing that is in Harrow's body will reach the Tomb. Kiriona isn't concerned about that. Harrow's body will survive, and so will Harrow, and then she will leave with her ice lolly bimbo, and Kiriona will be left alone again.

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.