in the ghoul-haunted woodland [catch-all]

[necrosaint]

Who: Harrow Nonagesimus; Sarah King; CR new and old~
What: Blended February/March catch-all, kept together because the first quarter of the year is the nuttiest. Prompts will mostly be open!
When: Note individual starters; probably all February and March.
Where: Around Trench.

Content Warnings: Note individual starters.

Comments

[butnotyet]

And now, suddenly, the light is on.

It hadn't been; the moon's out, there's a window open, and presumably to someone used to the dingy recesses of the Ninth that's more than enough light to read whatever bit of poetry she's looking at now — but for those who are more used to stations and ships, or at least houses — those who are desperately hoping, at their one-year-anniversary here rapidly approaches, that the month of April is not in fact going to be spent entirely devoid of sun again — look, for fuck's sake, Harrow, turn on the lights when it's nighttime, would you?!

Augustine doesn't bother to say that, of course — not this time — he just flicks the switch himself, when he walks into the space that his not-quite-never-mate is not exactly visible in.

(There's a piece of Augustine himself in there, too, above and beyond the bond he has that's the same as Harrowhark's, with the shrike — a piece of his own bone, which she has surely spent at least some of her time investigating, stretched and shaped and extrapolated into a quasi-impossible sequence of spinning cuffs. Suffice to say: he isn't surprised by the cocoon.)

"Why are they all black?" he asks, not looking for the chick who has sometimes been his student, and sometimes been the shrike's sister, and sometimes been his own sister besides. His gaze rests steadily on the cocoon itself, instead.

[necrosaint]

The Ninth House doesn't really differentiate between daytime and nighttime, and thus Harrow doesn't, really, either. She hadn't noticed. It probably doesn't surprise Augustine that she didn't notice, and she barely reacts when he turns on said light. She doesn't jump, at least. She doesn't twitch noticeably.

"Why is what all black," she says, instead of what does it feel like to be inside and outside at once. Even though that's really what she wants to know, of her Lyctor-twice-brother. Not because she doesn't know that things are all black, but because there is more than one thing that's all black. "The answer is probably no red was available," is tacked on before he gets a chance to clarify.

[butnotyet]

"And no white, either? You could at least have crafted a few out of bone, in that case," he half-objects, half-grumbles, and then holds his hand out and waits —

And, five seconds later, a twist of black smoke and scale coils through and around his hand, depositing one of the shrike's very own feathers into his palm.

"Thank you, brother," he murmurs more softly, and steps (with a wood-elf's silence shadowing his tread) over to the display to find the proper place to put it.

Then, and only then, just in case it somehow wasn't completely obvious, he adds: "The feathers."

[necrosaint]

"Then they would be bone, and not feather, and they would not be in the right place or the right configuration. If you had not yet figured out that the reason the feathers are all black is because they're mine."

Not that Devyata—whose tone of voice that absolutely was more than Harrowhark's—doesn't have a bit of red on her, too. But there are so few of them she hadn't wanted to shake any off, and none of them are presently visible.

She keeps watching, to see if he's adding feather to the cocoon-shrine, or more to her nest. Not that she can imagine why Augustine (or Alfred, for that matter) would care about her nest—why should anyone from the past truly care for her? To them does she not exist to be a source of mockery, a broken shell that was a failure as Lyctor?

[butnotyet]

"... don't you know how to make feathers?" comes out somewhat more perplexed; they mostly are just keratin, much like hair, that's why shrike hair is feathers, just more like a Silkie's than a raven's — wait.

Right, yes, of course, it isn't that he doesn't remember Devyata, exactly, so much as ... he hadn't realized, before this exact moment, in the middle of this response, that the chit of a girl in front of him isn't Harrowhark, with memories of Devyata, any more than she is Devyata, with memories of being Harrowhark. She's both of them, somehow, more thoroughly blended than any of his complicated and confused memories have ever become.

(There are no traces of Lord Deathless's physique when Patience enters a room, after all; no feathers here, to spare — only something in his movement, sometimes, and in his memory, almost always.)

"— I need to talk to you, about him, anyway," he adds, somewhat more abruptly, but — kinder, somehow.

[necrosaint]

That's because they're both real, Harrow and Devyata. That's the difference: she really happened. Maybe not all in the same universe, and maybe it's a bit complex to call Augustine's Nephele experiences false, maybe more like unreal, but Harrowhark Nonagesimus has embraced the alternate self that has helped to pull her from a painful loss and a traumatic response to any number of events. They have been happy to become each other. She's happy to be them and her.

"I know how to make my own," she says, something in her tone belying duh. "I have never thought about the complexities of changing their coloration."

She isn't going to ask him to leave, even though he's picking on her; he is here for her cavalier. He is here for her family. She will placate him even if she isn't overfond of doing so, even if his questioning stings at times. The kindness must be a lie, a trick of the soundwave. "Do you."

[butnotyet]

"It's all in the phenotype," which is roughly half-mumbled, because instead he's fishing around in his pocket as much as he is in his thoughts — and pulling out, of course, his cigarette case.

He pulls out a cigarette, and sets it on the altar of the shrine. (And he does not light it, because bird lungs don't handle smoke very well, even if they're undead.)

And then he pulls something else out of the case, as well — something that looks sort of like paper, or at least like vellum, and also a bit like origami that's at its last-stage-but-one, the point when it's all crushed down flat and is only about to have a shape that makes sense — and the curious thing about it, of course, is that for this, he's actually turned away from the shrike, the shrine, the both that he currently is, and is using his body to block any sight of the whatever-he's-holding from where their brother-bondmate's unseeing eyes might be.

(Just as well, really, that Iskierka isn't hovering in the rafters to record everything for him to see later.)

"It's about this," he continues. "Something that he asked me, when he was a Prince."

(The P always gets capitalized, in Nephele; doesn't it?)

[necrosaint]

Well, obviously could be about phenotypes, and it could be about Princes being capitalized, and either way, she doesn't actually get around to saying that, either.

She blinks at him, the motion slow and clear enough that he can see each tiny feather that now permanently adorns her eyelashes if he looks closely enough, even though the majority of her hair is normal Dominicus system human necromancer hair, with a few feathers scattered amongst it.

"Something you do not want him to know," she says, and then points out, "He is my cavalier. Is it just, then, that you share it with me?" An original Lyctor would know the answer to that better than anyone, wouldn't he?

[butnotyet]

"Something he does not want himself to know," which is both a correction and a clarification, overall. "Something you already know, for that matter, from the shrike-blood you share. His Princehood itself, and the details of it, and how it came to be."

A conversation that aches his heart, to remember: when Cassowary asked him, or a him he was at the time, to arrange this.

"Who could know the way his mind works better than the one whose mind it is, after all?"