Paul Atreides (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
terriblepurpose) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2023-01-07 10:45 pm
terriblepurpose) wrote in deercountry2023-01-07 10:45 pm
terriblepurpose) wrote in deercountry2023-01-07 10:45 pm
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There is no burning black void inside of the body in front of her that veils its inner workings. There's only one occupant of this form, and her astonishment is giving way to bewildered irritation.
"You're going to have to be more specific," she informs the stranger, "And approximately seventy five percent less antagonistic. My name isn't Mercymorn, I haven't the slightest idea who you are, and narrow down the 'he'."
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"You were always such a kidder," she says, but this absolutely has no pleasantry behind it. "To forget the Saint of Fealty herself. What was it you called me once? The only wretch among the Emperor's entire foetid cadre you'd consider feeling bad about throwing into the stoma?" She presses a hand to her chest and feigns honor. "It touched my heart to hear something so sweet come from those poisoned lips. So," she says, getting back to the core of things—and ignoring the rest, because her own sanity relies on a leaning pillar of lies that the thing puppeting Mercymorn's body should be careful not to tip over.
"Our beloved Emperor. He should live here, yes? Kindly point me in his direction."
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"I'm afraid these aren't office hours." She cocks her head, the stray strands of hair loose from her bun floating around her face. "I recommend having your people get in touch with his people to schedule an appointment."
It's bravado. Of course it's bravado. But bravado has gotten her fairly far to date, and she balks at the idea of giving this 'Saint' unfettered access to the man she still can't really imagine as an emperor of anything.
"Is there anything else I can help you with? Directions up the road?" That's a little petty of her, but she doesn't appreciate the hostility. She doesn't appreciate all the little implications people keep expecting her to pick up.
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Not that she usually practices that level of discretion.
"Come now, whatever your name is. Don't make this difficult for either of us. Just let me inside and I'll have a lovely little conversation with John, and then I'll be out of your hair." It's a hell of a request to be making when she's putting her weight against the doorframe like this, leaning forward and trying to make big puppy-dog eyes in utterly transparent and false obsequity.
"You've known me for nearly ten thousand years," she says, "Haven't you?" There is a godawful, shitty feeling of dread in her heart at the idea that this may not be true. That something else that she's taken as a constant, that she's been clinging to for a myriad as a critical part of her identity, has been stolen from her. "You can trust me."
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"I'm sorry that I don't know you." The looming doesn't take her aback. She holds her ground as the taller woman takes over the doorway, however she has to crane her neck, but her expression softens. "You're not the first person I've disappointed. But I don't, and I don't know how you know John, or what you think he's done."
She's not good at this. There were always other people better suited to smoothing things over and managing the disgruntled, but none of them are here now. (None of them are anywhere.) She tries to think of what they might say.
"Why don't we talk about this outside?" She suggests, dropping the crisp iciness of her tone. "Maybe we can figure this out. How does that sound?"
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"Fine." She says it tersely when her body has already all but agreed to it. "You sound insane, but fine." Not-Mercymorn is the one who is insane here. Of course. Not Apollonia. No, she remembers the truth. She remembers what really happened. She remembers that Mercymorn is a real person, that the two of them have spent centuries on the Mithraeum together, that they've loathed each other and everyone else around them with such directness that it could only be called their own utterly distorted sense of friendship. These are simple facts about Apollonia's life. Irrefutable, because she lived through them, and she remembers them so clearly.
But for the doubt, she would do fine. But for the doubt, she would be able to hold the objective truth of her own reality before her like an aegis.
"Do you think you can explain your way out of this?" She feels her stomach twist. It's all a lie. It's all a lie, and none of it was ever real, and she will never know the truth. Even the things she felt she could trust are crumbling away. John has found a way to destroy her so completely that she's being written out of other people's lives. This must be Hell. "Truly?"
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"No." She shakes her head; a strand of her pinkish hair pulls free and flutters across her cheek. "I don't think I can explain my way out of this. For one thing, I don't know what there is to explain, or what I'm trying to get out of, which presents some obstacles, don't you think?"
She leans her back against the door and folds her arms over her chest, looking up at Apollonia with wrung out weariness.
"If I'm being honest, it would be a nice change for someone to explain something to me," she says, then brings her hand up to rub under one eye, lifting the wire frames of her glasses with her knuckles. "You seem to have a lot you want to say. I know the look. What am I trying to get out of?"
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"I know that you aren't trying to protect him," she says. "Not after what he did to you. Though if you're still so insistent on this ruse of not being Mercymorn, then perhaps you really don't recall. Perhaps you don't remember the way he brought himself back from the hell that you sent him to and turned you into so much space dust without even thinking twice. You wouldn't remember him doing the same to me a moment later, then, would you?" Her skepticism is beginning to get the better of her. She remembers her own obliteration; shouldn't Mercymorn? Perhaps she needs something to jog her memory.
"All I want to know is where he is. Tell me, or I'll find him myself." She doesn't bother threatening this woman; Mercymorn would know what the implicit threat is. Mercymorn would recognize her. Apollonia would not be so cursed as to roam this world searching for people who should know who she is but do nothing but plaster confusion and fear on their faces as she passes. (This thought strikes deeper within, to a part of the death whorl within her that somehow feels more ancient than anything so far.)
"I want him to know," she continues, "That he can't be rid of us this easily, and that just because he's created we problem children, he can't simply unwrite us when we become inconvenient to his narrative."
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She's not used to that, either, but that doesn't stop her from reaching on instinct to cup her fingers protectively around the tiny pink butterfly that's formed there. Light gleams off its multi-coloured wings, which are far too delicate for this temperature and this wind. One of them brushes her palm, gently.
"Whoever this man you know is, he's not the one I do." There's more patience, this time, even if it's never been her strong suit. "Because the man I know - the John I know - he's never done anything like that to me."
Not that she can remember, and isn't that the itch of it, scratching along the inside of her skull? The butterfly against her palm strokes her skin again, a pass like the flow of a silk scarf, like smoke should feel when you hold your hand over a flame.
"If I told you where he is, what would you do?" Her heart is speeding up. She wonders if the stranger can tell. John always can tell, these days. He thinks he's better at hiding it than he is. "If he did all these things to me, to you. How are you going to make him know what you want him to know?"
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"There is love in me the likes of which He has never seen," she says, the words committed to memory. She has scarce few that she can rely on, and this, these quotations that she's taken as holy in the same way as she has every piece of scripture from what the world used to be, is one of her anchors. "There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other."
This is a vague answer, another implicit threat, but it has always brought clarity to the red-eyed storm within her for as long as it has taken her to speak the words, and often for several minutes afterward, as well. Her eyes focus on the woman in front of her again like pulling herself from a minor fugue. She can feel, now, the heartbeat before her. She can feel far too much of it—not-Joy's atria expanding and contracting, her lungs filling. If she focuses, she swears she can feel electricity running through this woman's nerve cells. (But that had always been Mercymorn's specialty, and Apollonia had never once been able to come close to imitating it.) What's more important is that she can feel the core energies of the universe flowing in an unusual way. She narrows her eyes.
"I've told you a lot about our God," she says. "What is the last thing you remember of him?"