deercountry | As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

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As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

He's not leaving Kaworu like that again. He remembers Kaworu's frail sleeping form covered in Warmblood and his cloak where he gently placed him behind some rocks. Then Kaworu pierced him through the heart with his words as Midoriya knelt and begged him to come home with them. Home is where they are, the three of them.

It's like a hole in my heart, Midoriya said once when describing what grief felt like. Paul contends with one now in the shape of a man called Duncan.

The breath Midoriya sucks in is the beginning of a sob, but the arm that slips away to brace Paul with his hand is steady. The legs that bend to give them the thrust for a proper escape are sure, as Paul's must be. They've practiced together many times.

Midoriya's Full Cowl sparks harmlessly around them as he jumps. The air is wet, storm-warm, uncannily electric, but free of the stink of sea rot. Float keeps them in the air with its familiar stomach-dropping feeling as he hovers at the zenith of an arc.

Beyond the blood and sand, their angel waits for them.

The higher they go, the clearer Paul's mind becomes. At the height of their ascent he exhales, letting his forehead rest against Midoriya's head under the weight of his exhaustion, and he lets the dark, glittering net of time fall from his fingers.

His eyes are undergrowth green ringed with heavy salt-soaked lashes. The last traces of Darkblood evaporate from his skin, leaving behind only a bare blackish residue like the smudge of smoke.

Far below, an effigy fights on the sand. Their angel sleeps in the arms of a dead ocean. The world is made strange and grows stranger. Only here in the the clarified air far from Mariana's domain does some semblance of sanity return, but Paul can still feel the call of the roiling, grief-stricken madness below.

He pries his hand from Midoriya's shoulders and fumbles for his Hero's fingers, his grip icy and numb. Wherever he finds them, he recklessly knits them together. He won't fall. He never falls with Midoriya.

"Together," he says, and then he points to where they need to go.

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As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

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