eternalised, objectified | january catch-all

[terriblepurpose]

Who: Paul Atreides, Ortus Nigenad, Mercymorn the First and you
What: January catch-all
When: January
Where: Various
Content warnings: Body transformation, memory alteration

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[hauntedsavior]

"Oh, this visit is for pleasure," she insists, one hand pressing against the doorframe while the other slips into the pocket of the borrowed hoodie. She's feeling for something that she knows won't do much to Mercymorn, or whatever's inhabiting her, but it can at least get her message across. If she needs to make use of it, she will; she's getting the feeling that there won't be any avoiding it.

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."

[acidjail]

She shouldn't have sympathy for this. There's overwhelming odds it's a ploy of some kind, another manipulation tossed at her to winnow John out of wherever he happens to be (and she's already half-wishing he'd wander out of wherever he is to take this situation off her hands), but even with the obvious falsehood of those sad eyes - because of the obvious falsehood of those sad eyes - a spark of compassion gets touched off all the same.

"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?"

[hauntedsavior]

"I'm sorry that I don't know you," she says, and the words spiral into the black hole that's replaced the fission bomb that's replaced anything human within Apollonia. She steps away from the door, pushes off the frame, stands on the steps. The moment doesn't stun her for long; nothing does, anymore. Her fingers close around the fragments of bone that she'd been able to dig up, the ones she'd been preparing to cast as a halo around the head of the Man Who Became God. She doesn't throw them yet, but her fingers ball into a fist with nothing but a thin layer of fabric protecting the stolen body of the Saint of Joy.

"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?"

[acidjail]

The Saint of Nothing Yet lets out a ruffled sigh like the choppy waters of a troubled pond, then steps outside, closing the front door with a gentle click behind her. Her breath mists in the air, but the sunshine manages to warm her cheeks. She can handle a few minutes out here.

"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?"

[hauntedsavior]

Her face falls flat. Yes, it would make sense that Joyless would need some sort of explanation. It would make sense that the person perpetuating this lie, this grand lie that began with John and ripples throughout every other aspect of Fealty's life, would require more fuel to keep it burning. Whoever this is, whichever person is wearing the face of her only friend, it's by merit of that and that alone that Apollonia is willing to talk. Willing to take this at, as it were, face value.

"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."

[acidjail]

So much space dust, this stranger who knows her says, and she's getting so tired of the hard, sharp shivers thrumming down her spine. She takes a short, quick inhale, too shallow and brief to be calming, and a puff of smoke manifests on her shoulder.

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?"

[hauntedsavior]

Just as well. Apollonia is getting tired of speaking around things. She is deterred only for a moment by the appearance of the small butterfly. Something strikes her as familiar about it, as well, in a way that slides off her mind in the face of something of far greater importance. (It's something that seems important to not-Mercymorn. Apollonia does not wish to destroy it. Not yet.)

"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?"