As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

[peripheries]

Who: Everyone in the Leviathan player plot. The plot is open! See the ooc post here
What: A mysterious call makes those return to the beach...
When: Early April.
Where: Throughout the trench but mostly the beach.

Content Warnings: Possession, hallucinations, being consumed by another, lack of control.


A Call From a Lost Beloved

Sleepers will start to hear the voice of someone they left behind urging them to come back. The voice (or voices, depending on the Sleeper and their connections) all repeat words along the same refrain, altered to fit however the Sleeper remembers those they left behind in their worlds:

They are missed. They are needed back home. The promise of freedom from time in the Trench is a lie. Return to the sea.

At first, the call is subtle. Sleepers can ignore it as a manifestation of their own subconscious regrets or anxieties, or treat it as another strange phenomenon of the sea. Over the course of a week or so, however, those being called will begin to suffer from inexplicable malaise, sapping their physical and mental strength to resist the call. At the same time, life in the Trench seems increasingly meaningless: nothing but a stop gap, purgatory.

Return Home

Sleepers will find themselves at the edge of the beach with no memory of walking there. Instinctual fear conflicts with a strange familiarity. They’re happier at the beach than anywhere else in the Trench.

It’s safe there. A place where they feel understood and accepted for any wrongdoings of their past.

If a Sleeper is pulled away from the beach, thoughts of returning will consume them. The more time they spend away from the beach the more exhausted they become, building on the first stage of compulsion. They hear the ocean and the call of their lost loved one beyond the sound of crashing waves. They dream of the ocean. Sometimes they even spit up seawater, the ocean forcing itself onto their lives on dry land.

Do you fight this alien feeling taking over? Or is it comforting? Does it soothe a secret ache that’s been buried? Or is it even alien? Is some of it… could most of it… just be… you?

Part 1: Quick Summary

• Sleepers hear the call of their lost beloved which eventually grows to hallucinations


• Life in the Trench feels increasingly meaningless. It keeps them from their loved ones


• Sleepers may fight the feeling or find it comforting. They might even not feel it is alien, but a manifestation of their true feelings.

A Welcoming

As the call intensifies, those afflicted by it will start to not only hear their lost loved one, but to see them in crowded places. The lost loved will smile, frown, look confused, or otherwise express whatever the Sleeper would be most affected by before turning their backs and heading towards the Farther Shores.

But no one else seems to see them.

If a Sleeper resists the beckoning of their beloved, they will suffer an intensified version of the call’s strength sapping power. Those who succumb to the call will find their well-being returning to them with every step they come closer to the sea, and total relief will suffuse them if they step into the water. Every woe and worry that afflicted them, supernatural or not, fades away, leaving only a sense of peace and completeness.

This is the trap of the call sprung. Sleepers who surrender to the call of the Leviathan will be subsumed by it, turning into puppets for the Leviathan’s insistent compulsion to return to the shore.

Those who become puppets will cluster by the water’s edge and with each other. Contact between the afflicted comforts them, and these waylaid Sleepers will often be found huddled together, holding hands, or otherwise making contact. They will also attempt to lure any as yet unpossessed Sleepers closer, even going so far as to ambush and seize lone Sleepers to drag them into the water in an attempt to force them to give into the Leviathan’s call.

Unheimlich

Finally, the Leviathan’s ghost rises. In the Waking World, the borders between life, death, and other states of being can become blurred, and the remnants of the Leviathan carried in the memories and souls of those it affected boil back to the surface.

This manifestation is a pale shadow of the mighty Beast, but a pale shadow of such a monstrosity is still a terrible thing. Mutated, rotten echoes of the Leviathan’s amorphous form bubble up in the surf, writhing masses of tentacles, carapaces, teeth, and the seabed itself lashing out at any who approach them.

The possessed Sleepers join in its attacks on the living, now seeking to force Sleepers into one of the Leviathan’s many maws. Some may use violence to do this, while others will try persuasion of a less physical kind - but the majority will do both, if capable of it, beseeching their fellow Sleepers to give into the Leviathan’s pull even as they wrestle them towards their dire fate.

Further complicating the fight are the hallucinatory projections the Leviathan’s remnants force on to anyone who comes close. These projections take many forms: some appear as visions of the Sleepers’ lost homes as they left them, while others take the form of their worlds distorted and ruined by their absence, their plans laid to waste, disasters unaverted, and their loved ones suffering without them.

Other projections are smaller, once more appearing as their lost loved ones, but this time, as corpses or monsters - corpses that can be resurrected and monsters that can be restored if only the Sleeper gives in, or so they claim. The increased power of the Fated Beast means that the illusions are now visible to everyone.

Worse yet, some of these illusions are made of flesh, no less an extension of the Leviathan than its teeth and claws, and no less capable of doing real harm. A false friend may have the very real power to attack a Sleeper, or pull them into a cold but loving embrace, and the crumbled walls of a forgotten home may hem a Sleeper in and impede their progress.

Those who fall victim to the Leviathan (or those brave and foolish enough to seek to communicate with it) will be drawn into communion with the restless dead mind of the creature. They may catch glimpses of their own pasts and imagined futures while entombed in a digestive polyp or linked to a biting tendril at the base of their neck, and stranger still, they might catch glimpses of the Leviathan’s memories and feelings. There is no rhyme or reason in these visions, which are shaped by the Sleeper’s own mind as much as the Beast itself.

The Sleepers who resist the Leviathan will struggle with some or all of these aspects as they fight to return the Beast to its grave and retrieve the Sleepers it has already captured. Segments of the Beast can be destroyed with sufficient force, making it a battle of gradually whittling away parts of the Beast’s corpse. Concerted attacks, like in the original fight, will be more effective than individuals working alone.

Rescuing the taken Sleepers will take more than mere violence. The possessed Sleepers must be reminded of their ties to themselves and others within Trench by someone known to them, someone willing to reveal a vulnerability of their own - the depths of their feelings for the possessed Sleeper, a confession about other Sleeper no longer with them that they miss, or some other anchoring truth stronger than the Leviathan’s draw.

The strategy of revealing emotional truths will also help combat the Leviathan’s illusions in the rest of the fight, something Sleepers may discover when their words not only remind their possessed companions who they are, but dispel parts of the Leviathan’s power along with its control. Clever Sleepers can leverage this outside of freeing their fellows from possession, rebuking the Leviathan’s projections with affirmations of their selfhood and the things they care for in Trench.

Part 2 Summary

• Those who have submitted to the Leviathan’s will are called to the beach. It is comforting to hold hands and be with others that are possessed. They will also attempt to drag non-possessed sleepers into the sea.


• The corpse of the beast is resurrected. Its powers cause the walls of reality to start to break. Pockets of Sleepers homeworlds, as they are or destroyed in the Sleepers absence, start to appear as do corpses of loved ones (alive or dead).


• Those eaten will have similar hallucinations or even see some of the Leviathan’s own memories


• It is possible to fight off the corpse with coordinated attacks.


• Rescuing a Sleeper from possession requires said Sleeper to be reminded of their ties to the Trench. Revealing emotional truths to a possessed Sleeper will weaken the Leviathan’s hold and confessing their own emotional truth will break them free and weaken the Leviathan’s power.

Comments

Izuku "Deku" Midoriya | MHA spoilers for his canon point

[wannasmash]

Part 1a (optional) - A Call From a Lost Beloved: Nature Is Healing
cw: mention of teenager's corpse
Midoriya likes the beach and volunteers to clean it regularly, but he shuns a particular stretch of it. It's where the blood flowed most, where he laid Paul's ruined body down on a rocky outcrop and then lost all memory of the rest of his bloody part in the battle. He became terrifying, a scared young man in pain.

He stands at the water's edge in a warm hoodie jacket. His green eyes are wide, but not as wide as they were a year ago, and they regard the surf. He removes his shoes and socks and wades ankle deep, shivering in his jean shorts. He bows and speaks (to the waves?).

"I'm sorry I didn't come here sooner. I know it's not your fault, what happened here. I'm going to clean this place up like the rest of the beach."

Part 1b - A Call From a Lost Beloved (cont.): Mom?
cw: hallucinations, grief
He looks up. Is that a handkerchief in the waves? His? Midoriya moves towards it as if tugged by a string, his subconscious knowing while his mind plays catch-up. He was always prone to forgetting it, and the only person who took the trouble to remind him to carry it was--

"I miss you, Izuku. I'm so sorry I ever let you go. Please, come back to me like you promised. Time is running out. Come to the sea. Come home."

Izuku Midoriya takes off running into the waves towards the short, soft woman with tearful green eyes like his.

Part 2 - Unheimlich Maneuver
cw: hallucination zombies, being subsumed into a digestive polyp, potential violence
Fear, you learn, is an absence. It is anathema. It is a beloved rescued at last, but the body no longer houses the person in it. Paul once again lies with his limbs at odd angles and paleblood pouring out of his solar plexus. Kaworu is slim and irreparably crumpled, and his darkblood scatters too fast for the sand to soak...

Midoriya is no longer the bereaved conqueror in the memory, nor is he the fallen beloved. Midoriya is here in the present fully kitted out in his Hero gear. He is silent but for a small strangled noise of surprise out of his gulping mouth. He shivers uncontrollably. He is possessed, not by the Leviathan, but by a drive to save others that eclipses all common understanding.

Midoriya moves without thinking, heedless of the inconsistencies of the Leviathan's illusion. His hands automatically go to staunch Paul's wound, and he presses against flesh, and the two bodies sit up and gently wrap him in their frigid lovers' arms. Danger Sense cleaves his head in two, but Midoriya is too close to react in time.

He is encased in flesh, and the bodies and the beach were never there. The shape of his face and hands frantically scrabble beneath the thick translucent surface of a round, slimy growth ringed with defensive tentacles. He still can't stop as he tries to resuscitate and embrace all at once.

He screams.

Part 2 - Unheimlich... 2!
cw: violence
He clutches his right arm because, once again, he overdid it with his Quirk. The fabric there was blasted away by his own power and revealed a large dark brown splotch of a scar on his upper arm. Will he ever learn? Midoriya's eyes have lost their green to Corruption, iris and pupil both clouded over like a dead fish's. His fangs gasp for air between pallid lips.

But he can still move. He trudges, one step at a time, through the blood and water on this beach of death. He wades deeper through the murky red with a new determination born of understanding. The Leviathan lost someone beloved, and Midoriya refuses to let that happen again.

Harmless sparks of his Quirk's energy billow off him. Midoriya whirls with super strength and speed to dodge a time-defying stinger with almost prescient accuracy belied by his beastlike movements and hellion snarls. Though others on the beach may falter at the solid hallucinations, Midoriya's Danger Sense reveals them for what they are.

He looks like a monster, but he comes in kindness for others and for the Leviathan. He extends his clawed hand...

Unheimlich Maneuver (violence, gore)

[terriblepurpose]

Paul has long thought one of the mercies of dying is that the dead so rarely have to reckon with the things they leave behind, their fragile mortal shells and the brute labour of burial and grief.

When he sees Midoriya fall to his knees to staunch a hole in a dead and lying thing, Paul has an answer to a question he never wanted to ask, an answer that he didn't need. (He's always been able to imagine it; he's always been sorry, and never known how to say it.)

Midoriya screams. Paul doesn't. He needs his breath to propel him across the beach and to drive the terrible efficiency of his knives, carving open a path to the stricken Hero through the rotten dead and screaming shades.

(He isn't fighting alone. He doesn't look at the dead man on his left. They still work in perfect synchronicity, the rust of lost time scraped away so much faster than Paul thinks he can bear.

He bears it anyway.)

Paul puts a knife through the side of his double's head and twists at it like he's dislodging any other kind of sucking parasite, bracing his foot against the fusing lips of the mass enclosing Midoriya. A larger hand snakes around his side and seizes the doppelganger by the hair, levering it back, and Paul tells himself he doesn't feel the closeness of the cold at his back.

[wannasmash]

Sometimes in the coldest hours of the night, Midoriya jolts awake and nestles closer to make sure the Paul in his arms isn't the lifeless one he pulled out of the Leviathan's mouth.

His eyes dart wildly even as they cloud over at the onset of his Corruption. Danger Sense guides Midoriya by telling him where animosity is--the corpses both moving and still--and where it isn't. He recognizes Paul's boot (how often has he seen him remove them at the door and tap the dirt off?) and closes his slippery scrabbling fingers on it. He feels unaccountably weak and drained, but he has to save him. He tugs and wriggles like escaping the Sleeper caul once again.

He almost thinks the man with kelp in his hair is an impromptu mariner from the docks who came to join the fight. Then he thinks he remembers the furrowed brow and strong movements, not to mention his height. Someone he's seen and knows of, but has not experienced, like from a photo or TV show. This man should be friendly. He isn't. Danger Sense can be fooled, but it can't lie.

His mind sweeps in a panic over these points of note and only takes the trouble to categorize them as threat and not threat. He has to save him. He springs with his legs slipping on mucus and flesh and clumsily tackles Paul away from the stranger.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul loses his grip on the knife stuck into the squirming mess he only lets his eyes skim the outline of, fingers slick with bloody slime, but that's all right. That's all right, because it happens when Midoriya surges out of the closing trap in cloudy-eyed panic, and Paul's hand is free to cup Midoriya's head protectively against his body as they fall and skid together.

"You've got me," Paul says, heart frantic, fingers knit into the wet wreck of Midoriya's green curls, "You've got me, you've got me."

The stranger doesn't pursue them, even though like this, it would be easy to attempt a blow against Midoriya's back, so haphazardly shielded by Paul's too-slim arms slung over his shoulder and across his lower back, Paul's remaining knife pointed uselessly off to the side. Instead, from past their feet comes the slopping, hacking sounds of swords meeting friable rot.

Paul doesn't look down. He's staring at the sky, his mouth still moving, making noises that might still be words. The clouds shiver above them, double, triple. He sees the ocean hanging behind them, immense, overwhelming, and he knows that he's seeing things, and knowing doesn't make it stop.

They have to get up. He knows they have to get up. That doesn't do anything, either.

[wannasmash]

Sand kicks up and clings to the slime matting down Midoriya's hair slick as seaweed trailing off any number of false corpses and creatures raised by the Leviathan. For a moment, Danger Sense quiets as the large figure's attention turns to what is left of the hostile writhing polyp. Midoriya doesn't like having his back to them. He needs to move. He can't.

"It's not him..."

It's meant to soothe Paul, but his voice is a frail gasping thing. He says this as much to himself as Paul. He struggles to raise himself in a crouch over him. Tears stream down his face, but he can't truly cry. He's too scared, breath coming in short bursts.

"It's not him, Paul-kun. It's just a copy. It's just a copy..."

He means the fake corpse of Kaworu, but it's beyond him to clarify. He rolls off Paul and slumps on his side with a faint cry. The abyssal despair still traps him in a mire that impairs his usual battle-ready actions. Some part of him still reaches for the memory of the figure wreathed in the power of air before they were cut down. Some part of him still needs to go to war with eyes on the inside and teeth on the outside.

"Where's Kaworu-kun?" he gasps like a beached fish. Confronted with his ruined double, he needs to make sure he's truly alive.

[terriblepurpose]

Forcing himself to sit upright feels as though it takes nearly as much from Paul as his mad dash across the sand. His arms and legs don't feel as though they belong to him. He has to manipulate them as though through the wires and levers of some clever mechanical puppet.

But he does it, for Midoriya, for his question. He does it because it has to be done, and because there is still breath in his body, and because he's never yet learned how to lay down and die.

"I don't know." The words slip off his tongue like lead. He twists sideways to get his knees under him, gripping the hilt of his knife with numb, bloodless fingers. Where's the other one? He had it before, slippery seconds ago.

"We need to find him," he says, as if Midoriya doesn't know that. Paul lifts his head, scanning the chaotic, shifting field, its dizzying impossible geographies. One angel, somewhere in all of this, as badly affected as they are, worse.

His other knife hits the sand in front of him. Paul picks it up from where it lies inside the long, broad shadow of the person who threw it.

"Come on, Paul," the dead man says, gently, "Get up."

He does. He staggers sideways to where Midoriya hunches, and offers him a hand, his blade spun around to hug the inside of his forearm.

[wannasmash]

He can't stop twitching and gulping for air as if he truly were a sea creature only capable of pushing saltwater through delicate fanned flesh. He coughs granules of black sand mixed with blood. The intrusion of a third person on the bubble of his perception forces his body to take note, and he raises himself on one elbow.

His hand goes to take Paul's, but he aborts his movement. Did he not just break free of these clammy shades? And here is one more who knows Paul's name. His elbow crooks to bring his hand over his shoulder. He looks with two full moons at the tall corpse. His thumb joins his middle finger in the telltale sign of readying Air Force as he calls the suffusing warmth and slight wind of One For All's Full Cowl more easily than breathing.

"Stay away from him!" he growls, pulling his lips back from fangs to the gum.

[terriblepurpose]

"Hey." The dead man lifts his hands, holding his swords upright and relaxed in lieu of being able to show Deku his emptied palms. "I'm not going to hurt him. I'm not going to hurt you, ei-"

"Don't talk." Paul's voice shouldn't be able to cut through the clamour, cold and flat and quiet as it is, but he manages. "Don't."

His shoulders are a tightly wrought line of miserable fury, every wretched feeling in him compressed down to that heart-of-a-star heavy outward sign. He doesn't look at the dead man. The dead man isn't returning the courtesy, his clouded eyes more horrendous for their softness.

"It's not going to hurt me," Paul says, even as it's patently untrue, the hurt so vast and deep it irradiates the air. He reaches down to close his hand around Midoriya's wrist, a restraint that can't possibly truly hold him. "Just - don't look at it."

[wannasmash]

He would hear Paul's voice whether he muttered or shouted. Midoriya's ears have by now attuned themselves to the voices of his beloveds and bring them to the fore. His arm is warm with lambent power, but the wrist parts of his gauntlet remain still. Paul's fingers have a gentleness that feels foreign in the midst of all this. Midoriya doesn't shoot the corpse.

He doesn't look at it.

His legs shake as he rises within the curve of Paul. The flesh sapped strength from him in fighting it, and the vision like a memory was so real... That fear of death in the midst of battle closed him in a stiff grip, but it's not his own death he fears.

Blackwhip sprouts from his back and spreads its arcs defensively around them both like a many-tailed scorpion. He starts stumbling along. Danger Sense needles him every time "Duncan" tries to communicate, and it's muddled with pings from the other threats on the beach. His head hurts.

"I saw... It made me remember stuff. Not my memories. I was on the beach, and they were fighting, and then they weren't... Someone I loved died."

His voice breaks, and if he weren't trying to protect them both and stay upright, he'd have breath to sob.

[terriblepurpose]

This is one of the devastations of love: Paul wants to crush Midoriya to his chest at the same time he wants to send him as far from here as he can, all of Midoriya's power and determination be damned. He needs to keep him close to they can find their missing third, still invisible to both sets of Paul's eyes. There is nothing he can do to reconcile these feelings.

"We won't let it happen again." Paul follows Midoriya within the halo of Blackwhip's reactive reach, while the walking corpse trails at a remove that would make a strike slightly more of an effort. (Not impossible. If Midoriya wants to take the dead man apart, he'd be able to in an instant, and there would be nothing Paul could do to stop it. Paul doesn't feel anything about that.)

The edge to his words makes it obvious he knows what Midoriya is referring to. A stranger's heartbreak crowds into his chest beside his own, and it's too much, all of it. Every part of this is too much.

"And it's not happening now. It's just - a defence mechanism. Squid ink, poison barbs. Don't think about it. Think of something else. Think about - think about the cave."

[wannasmash]

"Which cave, Paul-kun," he nearly spits in frustration. Falco's cave with the fossils and all the awful Titan flesh? The cave Paul hid in when all he could do was burn everything he touched? His eyes are clouded by the need to keep everyone safe so they can smile together again.

Danger Sense warns him to look at the surf, but it also warns of something from below. He only has time to make one move, one he does without hesitation: He shoves Paul out of harm's way.

Branches of coral burst out of the sand, dead-bleached but impossibly alive and lancing into Midoriya's legs and stomach in a way no coral could or should. He grunts with surprise and pain-concealing adrenaline. He stomps, sending shockwaves of sand everywhere, but the spines grow rapidly enough from a deep-buried root to immediately replace what was shattered.

He grasps them fruitlessly with gloves slippery with blood. It soaks the sand in less than seconds.

Emaciated bipeds rise out of concealment in the surf. Their skin is spotted with scraping barnacles and hard spines, each one a weapon. The same hard coral infuses them and flowers misshapenly on their heads. What once could have been human corpses dash at them across the sand.

[terriblepurpose]

Our cave, Paul doesn't have the chance to dredge out of himself before he's pushed. The secret, quiet underworld of buried stars and the earth's warm, slow heartbeat.

There are things he loves in this world more than he thought he could learn to love anything he wasn't born to. Perhaps that's why its betrayals still have the capacity to undo him. Midoriya shoves Paul to safety, Paul too light and sure on his feet in his startlement to stumble, and the same earth that shelters and nourishes spews jagged reified loathing into Midoriya's body.

Before Midoriya even touched him Paul's eyes flared like dark-burning stars. The touch anchors; the touch draws out. A fine and blazing skein of now connects them, two bodies moving forward through space and time -

- and then the skein contracts, and Paul and Midoriya are striding up the beach. No coral lances, no tide-drowned horrors, only Paul's hand digging into Midoriya's elbow and yanking him sideways with a stricken expression.

Midoriya will remember. Paul knows that, not knowing how he knows that, and he banks on it to keep Midoriya from fighting him off or protesting his intervention. His eyes are still gleaming black, studded with shuddering pinpricks of brightness that surge and dissolve in time with the glittering Darkblood spiralling out of the corner of his mouth.

[wannasmash]

It's too different from the anticipation of crisis, the prediction and response to a battlefield threat, whether it be freezing in place with fear or moving without thinking. Midoriya could not have imagined being rent apart in such detail, and then--suddenly not. There is too much wrong here. Visions of the future should be under Paul's purview, and Midoriya has never seen his eyes look like galaxies.

Midoriya does stumble. His lungs and limbs struggle with the confusion of only having the memory of pain. He senses no danger, and he ignores the figure of Duncan. He continues in the direction of Paul's tug to try finding some cover. He thinks of those things that wore his beloveds' shapes before trying to subsume him, and he's frightened by this change in Paul.

"Does it hurt? What's happening? Talk to me, Paul-kun," he begs too urgently, gloved fingers loosely closing on his forearm. Are you still you?

[terriblepurpose]

Does it hurt?

There are times where Paul draws a hard shutter down between what pain feels like and what pain is. The subjective experience of pain is a deterrent from allowing the body to come to harm. Pain itself need not be understood as a feeling to be usefully integrated as a warning sign among other warning signs.

Duncan trails after them, his death-dull eyes creased with worry. Midoriya pushed him out of the way instead of saving himself, and would do it again and again, brave and selfless as he is. Does it hurt?

"Yes," he says, in another burst of strange tasting blood, and an internal clock ticks over a line. He doesn't let go, not yet, but he could, the one crisis evidently averted.

"I turned it back," he manages, by way of explanation, "I -"

Coral lances upward into Duncan's body. The world flickers with black static. The skein contracts.

Paul and Midoriya are striding up the beach. Paul grabs Midoriya's elbow and yanks him sideways. Darkblood trickles upward from his nose and his mouth.

"Duncan, move!" He barks, roughly, and the corpse obliges. An internal timer continues to tick.

[wannasmash]

He's where he was not minutes ago, and Paul is dragging him out of the way again, this time with more blood coming out of his face and an order given to their shadow. Midoriya doesn't question why Paul preserves this corpse's safety. It is natural to avoid known sources of pain. It hurts.

"Stop it. You're hurting yourself. That's Darkblood."

His voice doesn't shake, but it hints at the possibility as he grips Paul's forearms, as if that could forestall future uses of this power. He touches the tips of his gloves under Paul's nose and shows him the dark glitter clinging to his fingertips. It's incongruous; Paul has always been a Paleblood.

Already his mind is cataloging the data observed. How many times has he encountered a new Quirk and studied it in the midst of a fight? Paul bleeds with each use, and there is no way for Midoriya to know the damage inside without proper examination from a medical professional. Paul can choose a point in time and bring someone with him. Paul has preserved both their memories. (Paul's last command to him to think of their starry cave has flown from his head.)

Midoriya knows enough about visions of the future to know this is vastly oversimplifying it, but at the moment he is only interested in the practical application of keeping Paul out of trouble.

[terriblepurpose]

The first time they faced this Beast, Paul lost himself in a conflagration of grief and rage. The last time Paul fought a true battle on this sand, he'd held the hungry tooth of what had devoured him and set himself alight once more. This time, he breathes smoke and stains Midoriya's fingertips with a residue of ash.

Paul doesn't know what color his eyes are.

"As soon as we get away from here, I stop."

He doesn't know where he finds the words, or how he wills them to stilled steadiness. He knows where they don't come from. Not panic. Not the false assurance of his most desperately hollowed out selves. Not the relentless engine of his will alone, by which the universe might be so cruelly shaped.

He doesn't care what color his eyes are. He can see through them clearly, and that's good enough. The expression on Paul's face when his attention flicks from the smear of Darkblood on Midoriya's fingers to his wide green eyes is still only Paul.

"Trust me?" He asks, shaky and human, as a dead man trails in their wake and the world keeps breaking around them.

[wannasmash]

We. His face falls like a dying leaf that knows another must follow. He tried to push Paul away already, and Paul simply hung on by bending time and space. Midoriya would waste time trying to do it again, and that would leave Paul to the mercy of his shadow and the monstrosities emerging from the surf.

"I'm not trying to get away. I'm trying to find Kaworu-kun." His throat is tight.

The green in his eyes is still in danger of being clouded over with white. He has never been afraid of Paul's power, only what he does with it, mostly to himself. He supposes Paul must feel the same whenever he sees him hurt himself with One For All.

He steps closer, almost as if he's seeking comfort from the ghost of pain that stutters his deep breaths. (He's ignoring it in favor of adrenaline instead.) He loosely circles his arms around Paul's waist and bows his slime- and sand-covered head in surrender. The difference in their heights is more apparent when he's near, and he can seem so small when he isn't standing solidly.

(Do you trust me? Paul asked him before they clasped hands.)

"Okay. I can get you into the air. You can stop there." He hopes.

It's the same quiet tone of voice he uses when they must shower or bed. It's a thing that must be done, and they will feel better when they do it. Somewhere, Kaworu waits for them--or worse, he is unable to even think about waiting for them. Midoriya can't let that be.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul wraps his arms around Midoriya's shoulders and curls around him in a fragile semblance of protection. Nothing that could hurt Midoriya couldn't take Paul apart, and he knows that. He also knows he'd rather burn those seconds of being rent to nothing to give Midoriya more time than he wants to ever see Midoriya bleed.

Life is difficult that way. The things you want least tend to happen. All Paul can tell himself, as he's told himself before, is not this time.

"All right," he agrees, simply. They can sort out miscommunications in the air, if they have to. "We go up, and we find him. No one left behind."

The dead man swings his blades through a heaving tubular jelly mere feet from them. Paul looks at him with his chin tucked over Midoriya's sodden curls. He imagines, or thinks he imagines, a thousand black threads trailing off the corpse-body illusion of the first person he loved who died for him.

"Duncan," he says, like it costs him nothing to say it again, "Don't die down here."

Duncan grins over his shoulder, teeth shining with dark red tint in the frame of his death-paled lips. Paul tightens his arms around Midoriya.

"Anything for you, my boy," Duncan says, laughing, and Paul doesn't care if it's real. He doesn't need it to be. He just wanted to hear the words.

"I'm ready, Izuku-kun."

unheimlich

[peripheries]

Kaworu watches everything happening to Midoriya like it's happening behind a glass barrier that he cannot breach though he too is on the desolate beach, moving within the flesh of an undead beast. Midoriya is still on the surface, while he is already submerged. Water has a delicate surface but the current underneath pulls and pushes with unbelievable force.

He wants to stop it and save an innocent from a terrible place. Yet... he wants Midoriya to come to him. He wants to make this place less lonely. Maybe if the flesh takes him, Midoriya will be with him here. Still, every scream pierces his chest like a dagger.

"You shouldn't fight it. It will hurt more."

He calls, unsure if it would be heard.

[wannasmash]

He can hear his voice. Kaworu isn't dead! That crushed body was a fake, and he's finally found the real one. It cannot possibly be a bad thing to be one flesh with him, to hold and be held... But Kaworu is over there, and he's over here. Not together. That doesn't add up.

"Kaworu-kun!! Kaworu-kun... help me..."

He activates his Quirk, and his scarred hand bursts out covered in blood and slime. It's oddly flushed from overdoing it with his power, but he will endure any pain, any hardship. The Leviathan lost their beloved. Midoriya understands that pain enough to avoid it at all costs.

He can't see. He nearly chokes on sea salt slime. He writhes in the abyssal softness to face the direction of Kaworu's voice and yells with waning strength.

"Let him go!! He was never yours! He's our person, precious to us! I know you lost someone, and I understand. It's a hole in your heart. It won't happen again! No one is dying today, and Kaworu-kun is getting saved!!"

1b

[lludw]

"Wait."

Another boy, younger, has been standing near the waterline, apparently digging his feet into the sand. He reaches out to grab Midoriya's arm with a hand that is slightly radiating cold.

"You...see your mother?"

Lucius looks between Midoriya and the sea with an expression of concentration.

Re: 1b

[wannasmash]

He falters ankle-deep in the water, but it doesn't seem like this person means harm by grabbing him. (The hand is cold, but so is the seaside air, so he doesn't think much of it.) He looks at Lucius with tears standing in his eyes.

"It's her..." He turns his head to look at the sea again and cries out, "Mom!"

She doesn't move to her son. For anyone else, she doesn't exist. The waves are empty.

[lludw]

Lucius's grip on the older boy doesn't slacken, but he doesn't tighten it either. "I don't see her."

He sees Lydia. His mother.

"I think..." He speaks slowly, his tongue weighted down by a reluctance to believe what he's saying regardless of the logic of it. "I think there's something making us think people are out there. They're not really here."

[wannasmash]

"Izuku!" the shade calls. Midoriya shakes his head even as he feels the tug of heartbreak in his chest again.

"But..." he protests, resisting the urge to run to her again. "She's there. My mom. She's just like I remember. She was so worried about me... You don't see anything? I'm just... seeing things?"

He tears his eyes away from her to look at the person he's actually talking to in the here and now.

"'Us'? What do you see?"

[lludw]

"...I see a pale woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. She's...wearing old, worn-out clothes."

That should be distinguishing enough, he thinks. Lucius resists saying that she's his mother but, well, it's probably not hard to guess, given his own coloring.