deercountry | let me look at the sun

Entry tags:

let me look at the sun | open

Who: Paul Atreides, open
What: Event catch-all
When: Month of December
Where: Archaic Archives, streets of Trench, the forest's edge, memories
Notes: Go ahead and contact me at

terriblepurpose or by PM if you'd like to discuss any starters or suggest new ones! For tagging in your character's memories to Paul, feel free to start with whatever your preference is.

Content Warnings: Violence, body horror (lockjoint), death, religious extremism, extensive Dune spoilers, suicidal ideation, funerals, grief

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Get dressed and come with me," his mother says, laying a stack of clothes on a desk underneath a softly glowing round light, and then she steps from the room without another word. The boy sits up in his bed and rubs one eye sleepily with the heel of his hand, wearing only a loose pair of sleeping pants.

"Hello," he says, "My name is Paul. You're on Caladan, my homeworld. Nothing here is going to hurt you."

He stands up and stretches, arms overhead, then brings them down and flexes his fingers at his sides, giving the newcomer a level, evaluating look. He looks like someone who, at the very least, decided to treat this seriously, and Paul makes his decision.

"I know you don't know me, but I'd like to ask you for a favor," he tells him, collecting his clothes from the desk and pulling a folding privacy screen from the wall. "But I should know your name, first."

Edited (typo) 2021-12-10 20:25 (UTC)

Paul specifying that nothing will hurt him does not put Midoriya at ease. However, Midoriya knows that, technically, he did just break into someone's memory all kitted out. He feels he should be thankful he isn't being treated like a burglar.

Being spoken to jolts him out of his silence. He lowers his mask with one gloved hand. Under it is a plain, freckled face that is more suited to smiling than the tense frown he wears now. He always looked younger than many of his classmates due to his height and his open, expressive eyes. They're at odds with the ragged, newly darned tears in his clothes. He glances where the mother disappeared before speaking.

"Nice to meet you, Paul-kun. I'm Deku. I'm sorry for barging in like this. What do you need?"

His voice is soft for discretion, but his usual pensive, quavering indecisiveness is clipped away. He's speaking clearly like he's at work. He's in his hero costume after all, and giving his hero name. Helping someone else is just part of the job description.

"There's nothing to apologize for," Paul says, quietly and firmly reassuring. "It's all right for you to be here, Deku."

Paul rarely talks to people his own age, and he is a little surprised to see the face under the mask. It feels - more bearable, to be in this specific memory with someone less likely to assume a superior position.

Outside, there's a storm, the rapid beating of rain against a window of smoked glass somehow muffled and softened but still ever-present. The room they're in is built from dark grey stone, like the rest of the palace complex, and full of a night chill. Everywhere, the accrued pieces of Paul's life as it used to be: a curved piece of driftwood on the desk next to a small collection of well-worn books, an abstract angular black sculpture, a weathered model of a sea faring sailing ship.

"All I'm going to ask you to do is nothing." Paul begins to change behind the opaque screen, apparently unconcerned by the presence of the other boy - being a duke's son involves a curious mix of his body being completely inviolable, and also a matter of the state. "And to let me hide you."

He blinked and looked around the room instead, to give him some privacy, but the embarrassment is fleeting. It's not so different from changing in the boys' locker room. Midoriya has other, much more pressing concerns. He takes a step forward into the room, shoe tamping quietly on the stone floor. His frown deepens as he looks at Paul's book collection without really seeing it.

"Do nothing? What's going to happen? Why do I have to hide?"

His voice doesn't carry the high shaking note of a hapless bystander, but the brisk purpose of someone called to be something different. Midoriya runs towards danger. He has self-preservation instinct, but on top of that is a pressing need to save others. Paul's mother woke him in the middle of the night and told him to get dressed with no explanation. Now Paul tells Midoriya he needs to do nothing. Why would anyone--his teacher, his senpai, his old boss--tell him to do nothing, except that they know he's going to be tempted otherwise?

Paul steps out from behind the screen in black pants and a formal white shirt, shrugging on a black, militaristic looking coat he begins to fasten with almost invisible hooks. He looks at Midoriya with a certain apprehension, adjusting his initial impression of the other boy.

"Nothing is going to happen." Paul shakes his head, belting his coat at the waist and sitting on the edge of his bed to pull on black boots that rise to just below his knees over equally black socks. "Someone's going to threaten to kill me, but she won't. Not here."

And because Paul is learning to anticipate that other people have a different type of reaction than he's used to when discussing things like this: "It's only if I fail her test, and I know that I won't, because I passed it when this happened. I want to hide you so I don't have to explain why you're here, not because you - or anyone - is in danger."

That should be enough reassurance, he hopes.

Death for failing a test is pointlessly violent and cruel to Midoriya. He stares carefully at Paul, dubious about its validity and the safety of reliving it again. But the crackling of his nerves dies down.

"...OK."

This is Paul's territory. Midoriya is a foreigner here who lacks context. As long as the worst won't happen... He shifts his weight uneasily and opens and closes his right hand, a habit he picked up after healing from so many injuries to it. He's ready to go.

"Is this test some kind of training, Paul-kun?" he asks gently. In contrast to the tenseness in his shoulders, his eyes open up with unabashed concern.

'Paul-kun' again. Paul isn't sure what the modifier means, but it doesn't sound unfriendly, and he's used to having his name altered or being called something else entirely. He'll accept anything that doesn't sound like 'messiah'.

"...yes." He's not hesitant so much as thoughtful, standing up again to return to his desk, where he produces two stylized eagle wing pins from a box and pins them to his collar in front of a small gold-edged mirror. "That's why I want to do it again."

He keeps his back to Midoriya as he rummages through a drawer, whatever his hands are doing obscured. He suspects the other boy would have something to say about Paul nicking the side of his wrist and pressing a droplet of blood to the edge of a red ribbon bookmark before he turns around with it in hand.

"This is what's going to happen next," he says, offering Midoriya the token, "If you take this, no one will be able to hear or see you unless you try to get their attention. We're going to leave this room, and follow my mother to the library. I would ask you to stay outside, but I don't think I'll be able to hold enough focus to make that possible."

"That's where the Reverend Mother is, the one giving me the test. She's going to ask me to put my hand in a box, and I will, and she'll put a poison needle at my neck." Paul says this quietly, his eyes flicking down. "It's going to hurt, but it doesn't do any permanent damage. No matter what it looks like. After that, she's going to go. That's all there is."

It's true and a lie. Those are the things that happened, and they aren't even close to all that there is. But Paul wants this with a dark, pressurized intensity, and he can lie well enough to himself to justify it even if Midoriya's open desire to help makes him squirm.

cw: mention of physical child abuse

His eyes bore into him as Paul looks down. He has a lot of questions, like why Paul's own mother would participate in this. He thinks of a very young friend of his, who was the ward of someone who hurt her. She didn't know how to do anything but wait quietly for the next round of pain. She even had trouble asking for help. He wonders if he shouldn't just grab Paul now and find some way to escape. But, back then with Eri, he had to wait until the right time or risk getting them all killed. Here, it's unclear what he's waiting for, but Paul seems to believe it's worth some pain.

When he sees the wet spot on red, he recognizes blood magic. One of his first friends in Trench, Luz, nicked her own wrist in a similar manner to show him the properties of her paleblood. He doesn't have time to appreciate the novelty of being about to do something like paleblood dreamwalking. He takes the talisman and slips it into one of the red pouches on his belt.

He passed the test the first time, didn't he? Why do it again?

Midoriya has to conclude this test is not like an exam. It's importance lies elsewhere, perhaps a test of his spirit. Only the fact that it already happened prevents Midoriya from vehemently protesting. Didn't he himself delve into this magic expecting to relive something harrowing? Nevertheless, letting someone else walk into something like that makes his chest twist in painful knots. He's unable to disguise the low tremor in his voice.

"Is there some kind of signal you can give me, if something goes wrong and you need help?"

It's a good idea, good enough Paul should have thought of it. Anchoring reaction to his sign instead of Midoriya's judgment will, hopefully, prevent reaction at all, Paul sure that he won't use it.

So he nods, face drawn and troubled, and raises a hand in front of his chest, fingers fluttering in shapes - a curved crescent of the hand, then thumb and ring finger crooked to cross visually without touching physically: now. It's the first time he's used Atreides house sign since he came to Trench, a thought that in this shade of his old home is suddenly unbearable. He drops his hand and starts to say something-

"Paul." His mother calls, soft, urgent, and afraid, and Paul glances at the door with shutters slamming down behind his eyes. His hands close reflexively into fists, release, and he takes a short, sharp breath through his nose.

"Watch my left hand for the sign." His right will be in the box. He looks back to Midoriya, face still purposefully blank.

"If anything does go wrong, and it won't, but if it does," Paul says, and where before he was making requests this is delivered as an order from someone used to giving them, "Don't let her open the library door."

Despite his best efforts, the faint notes of his fear come through - that isn't his mother, not really, and Paul is aware of that with a quietly painful intensity. But the idea of watching anything happen to her is still something that makes Paul's hands itch for knives. If this well prepared, compassionate stranger can provide insurance against it, Paul is grateful for that.

Before his hero training, Midoriya was a young social outcast, a nerd with no friends. He acquired a knack for observing people instead. This evolved as his interest in the hero profession became more than just a dream. He kept an eye on those whose spirit he admired, techniques he wanted to emulate... and those in distress. He watches Paul's face and the cracks in it. Of course Paul's not a robot; despite trying to remain calm and concise, he feels very strongly about all this.

Midoriya recognizes the reflexive need to protect in Paul's fists. It's like looking in a mirror.

He knows how to keep bystanders safe in emergencies. He was tested on this for his provisional license. It's part of rescue and evacuation procedures. He's already laying it out visually in his head: Paul's mother and the door would be behind his back. Nothing would pass.

He feels the shift in tone. It's the difference between his old boss asking everyone to settle down in a meeting, versus telling them to press forward in a raid. He has his orders.

"Got it."

Some of the tension in Paul eases when Midoriya agrees, with a faintly shaky exhale. Everything else about this is difficult, and he's grateful for the gift of not having to work quite as hard here. Much in the way Midoriya is evaluating him, Paul is looking right back, and he thinks he can have some confidence in what he sees: sufficient discipline, compassion, and skill to accomplish the task if needed.

"Thank you," he says, very quietly, as he steps towards the door, "I'll still be able to talk to you, so if you need to ask me anything, do."

It's time. Paul's right hand rests on the handle of his door, and he says, this time to himself and not Midoriya, barely articulated: "I must not fear."

It has the tone of a mantra. Paul opens the door, and there she is again: the Lady Jessica, Bene Gesserit trained concubine to Duke Leto Atreides, the mother of the ducal heir. If Paul's facade has cracks, hers is a shattered pane of glass being held together by inertia. Looking at her now, Paul wonders how he didn't see it the first time: she knows the danger he's about to be in.

She inclines her head at Paul, slightly, and turns in a silken rustle of black skirts as she begins to walk down the hall. As promised, she hasn't noticed the second boy, and Paul follows her at a sizeable trailing distance, staying parallel to Midoriya as they walk.

He nods. His lips purse a little as he follows Paul out the door. He's familiar with muttering things to himself in trying situations, usually to help himself remember techniques, but also because he tended to fixate too much.

He keeps to Paul's side, slightly awed that his mother can't hear two sets of footfalls. She wears the same face Midoriya once saw on a child not even old enough to write: a screaming, crying fear locked up with a tight silence. This doesn't bode well.

She knows what's going to happen. Is she in trouble? Is someone threatening her?

He doesn't ask; there's no point until he knows more. He only knows that Paul ordered him to keep her away should the worst happen. Paul and his mother cut noble silhouettes in stark black. Midoriya thinks of his good friend, Todoroki, and his very complicated family. His eyes flick to Paul regularly. Midoriya is responsible for watching over both him and his mother, or else why even call himself a hero?

Black on grey silhouettes are a theme of this place. Everywhere they pass in these dark halls - a floating mechanical gloworb the only source of light, a warm golden tinged illumination that fails to push back the deepest shadows - is dominated by black and grey, the other colors muted.

There are brighter wings of the palace, but the duke's family sleeps in the most secure part of the complex. This is an elegant bunker hardened against attack, and Midoriya may begin to notice the chokepoints, blinds, and defensive positions built into the overall design of the building. This is a place constructed by people so long at war it has simply become their architecture. Paul and Jessica both belong here, like knives in a sheath.

"We're going to see Dr. Yueh first," Paul explains under his breath as they turn another corner, "He's here to make sure I'm healthy enough for the test."

His heart is strong as ever, and Paul suspects - he cannot know, no matter what it feels like, he can't possibly know this - that Dr. Yueh knew he would be tearing that heart out in short order. It should make him angry. It should fill him with a murderous rage, a hatred that burns the earth in front of him. But as they turn the final corner that Jessica slipped around first (she has not looked back, not once) and Paul sees the two people he would have once said he could trust implicitly standing side by side, equal fear and worry in their eyes-

All he feels is empty.

"You can stay here until that's done." Paul says, still soft, his eyes fixed on them. "This won't take long."

For all his preoccupation, he sees the protectiveness in Midoriya more clearly by the moment. Paul is used to having a guard, and he recognizes the flicker of eyes and the careful matching of pace, the way he scans the environment around him. So he gives Midoriya a tight, reassuring smile and nod as he steps forward towards the next piece of this memory, and keeps his left hand in his line of sight. (He doesn't think he could stand it from someone older. Not for his pride, but because it would remind him too much of the people who will never echo his footsteps and guard his back again.)

The air is close here, like the basement he helped raid during his work-study, but otherwise very different from the maze of civilian water lines and little-used halls. It's military, but bears the signs of being inhabited long-term, not just stationed.

Midoriya places his feet where they would put him in the best places to protect Paul if something came around this or that corner. His eyes cover the rest. (He's better than he used to be, but he's not the greatest at watching his own blind spot.)

He's here to make sure Paul will be OK, but then Paul goes and reassures him. That fills him with a mixture of admiration for Paul, frustration at his own inadequacies, and a strong desire to measure up to the task ahead. He returns his smile with a shaky one of his own.

"If you need help, call me."

Even though he's been assured no one but Paul can hear him, he can't help matching his barely audible volume. He finds himself a stretch of wall out of the way and stands stiffly and awkwardly. He's not military or police; when left to his own devices, he looks more like a wallflower at a high school social function.

"I will," Paul breathes, and he finds himself believing it as he watches Midoriya take up his stance out of the corner of his eye.

Paul wonders if he used to look like that, before this night. Sometimes it feels like he's aged impossibly since this, even farther away from anyone he might have called a peer. The only people his age he ever talks to are the sons and daughters of other noble houses in passing, and that's always governed by the underlying logic of jockeying for position and probing for weakness.

But most of the time he doesn't feel older. He only feels alone, another layer of distance between himself and the rest of the world.

"What is this?" He asks his mother, and the last time he did this, he was confused and worried, already angry at whatever would dare make her move like a thief through her own home. This time, his voice is gentle, accepting.

"The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam is here. She was my teacher at the Bene Gesserit school. She’s now Truthsayer to the Emperor himself. She would like to meet you." Jessica's voice is hushed and strained, her hands clasped in front of her tightly.

"Why?"

"She wants to know about your dreams." Paul doesn't ask how, this time. He hadn't really needed to ask then. The only people he'd ever told about them were her and Duncan, and she can't even look at him.

"Why is Dr. Yueh here?"

"He only needs a moment." His mother turns away from him, abruptly, and takes a few steps. Paul watches her go longer than he remembers, because when he turns around, Dr. Yueh is already close.

Midoriya will be able to see the same thing that the memory of Dr. Yueh sees that makes him take a step back, as if tugged on a string: an expression passes over Paul's face somewhere between grief and anger and pained confusion, and then it's gone, and Paul takes a step towards Dr. Yueh to close the gap.

"It's all right," he says, in the Suk School subdialect that Dr. Yueh taught him when he was four, and even if Midoriya may not understand the words the meaning sounds the same in any language, "I know this isn't your fault."

"Young master-"

"I said it's all right, Dr. Yueh," Paul says, returning to a dialect Midoriya can understand, and the doctor with a black diamond mark on his forehead that means he can never betray the House Atreides touches his trusted hand to Paul's skin once more. His assessment is carried out without tools, only the probing motion of his fingers on the side of Paul's face, but it seems to provide an answer that satisfies him.

"Be careful," Dr. Yueh says, very quietly, and then speaks over Paul's shoulder, "His heart is as strong as ever, my lady."

The Lady Jessica flashes a rapid series of sign at the doctor, and Dr. Yueh fades away into another darkened hall. Paul thinks about the first time he broke a bone, and how the gentle doctor who told him he was a very brave boy is almost certainly dead, or wishes he was.

His mother is already starting to walk away, the rest of the journey shorter than the first stretch. Paul turns and walks back to Midoriya, steps quick, and motions for the other boy to join him the rest of the way.

"That wasn't exactly how it happened," Paul says, gathering himself, "I didn't think about- it doesn't matter. We're almost there."

"He didn't know what was going to happen here," Paul adds, only a few steps later, and he doesn't understand why he sounds defensive, why he cares what Midoriya thinks about a dead man, why he cares to defend Yueh at all, "He would have told me."

[OOC: I am. so sorry about the length of this. why did I do this with a movie that has no clips of all scenes easily available. the rest will be shorter!]

Paul didn't leave and enter an examination room like Midoriya thought he would. Midoriya doesn't know what the doctor is doing until he reports his assessment. He can examine someone by touch, somehow. The other dialect is meant for the doctor alone, a personal aside. Still, Midoriya recognizes one person reaching out to another in the wake of almost lashing out.

He watches the doctor go. He falls into step with Paul again. He listens to Paul falter over what just happened.

"It matters to you," he counters gently after some silence, "because you're a kind person. Otherwise it wouldn't hurt, and you wouldn't feel like you needed to explain." His eyes dart ahead, knowing they don't have much time, then back to Paul. He adds firmly, "Don't forget that."

Normally he wouldn't be so forward with someone he isn't close to, but Paul asked for his help. Being on a guided tour of someone's traumatic memory is a special circumstance. He knows he's not just going to be a silent bodyguard for Paul's mother, or simply take his words at face value. Midoriya has seen the same burning anger and hurt before on more than one friend's face. If Paul is set on putting himself through emotional hell, he may as well look at himself properly with eyes unclouded.

They're almost there. A handful of steps, the door in sight, and yet Paul doesn't move. He's standing rigidly where Midoriya started speaking, staring at him with wide, stricken eyes.

Kind. He thinks Paul is kind.

"No," Paul says, and he isn't sure to what, shaking his head once, sharply, "I don't-"

And then his hands are fumbling with one of the pins at his throat, pulling it from the fabric as the tiny metal fastener on its back pops loose from its sharp needle point that he digs into the meat of his thumb. Blood wells up and runs down the side of his hand, Paul careless about the depth of the puncture wound in his urgency.

"I changed my mind," he says, his voice tight with shame, and it's his turn to not be able to keep looking at someone, "We're not doing this."

"Paul?" The Lady Jessica's voice is half-raised in alarm as she turns at his outburst, her expression brittle. She wouldn't have done this to him if she had a choice. He believes that. And what does that say about him?

"It's all right, mom," Paul says, softly, and he presses his bloodied thumb into air that holds the red smears suspended as he starts to paint a glyph that hurts his eyes to look at, a writhing shape that's not quite real. Forget, it tells her, and his mother's face goes blank as he works.

He expects to be blown off. It's happened before. This visceral reaction is far worse.

"Paul-kun--"

He tries to keep his voice suitably low and fails, a crack puncturing the dam of what he thinks a cool Pro Hero should sound like. Midoriya's hands jerk towards him. The drawing of blood turns out to be not an uncontrolled outburst, not completely, but instead more magic. He stops and refrains from touching him or the pin. There is always that invisible cushion of respect surrounding others, governed by eight million unspoken rules and Midoriya's own careful handling. It can be ripped away, but it doesn't always have to be. All of his unabashed concern is in his eyes, thrown open to give or receive anything.

Still, Paul's overdone it. Midoriya produces a gauze pad from one of the first aid pouches on his belt with trained efficiency. His tremulous voice, in contrast, is completely unschooled. He hasn't forgotten where he is or what he's been asked to do, but his objective has unexpectedly shifted.

"Here. I--"

--shouldn't have said that? Things that could have saved his own friends injury and heartache, had he spoken up sooner? No, he's not sorry for what he said, only sorry for the larger wound that isn't on Paul's hand.

"I meant to encourage you," he speaks a little faster. "When you lose sight of who you want to become, bad things happen. You don't have to face the pain today. You can rest if you want, or try something different. But if you never do, it'll hold you back. I learned that a little while ago."

Paul is used to being able to cover his reactions, deflecting attention this way or that, a subtle conversational game of feint and parry he excels in. There's no way to do this here, no way to pretend his outburst was anything but a clear and direct response to what Midoriya said.

So at first, he stays quiet. He lets Midoriya attend to his injury as his mother stands silent and unseeing a few paces away, if that's what he wants to do, mutely offering his hand when he sees the gauze pad he's holding. He notices the readiness of the response, the competency of the action. He's still talking, saying things Paul doesn't want to listen to, doesn't believe.

The boy that could have listened died in the room they aren't going to step into. He didn't know he did, he kept acting as if he hadn't, but he did. All that walked out of there was what's left here, whatever it is. This thing made of foreknowledge and death that pretends to be a human being.

(So why does he keep listening?)

"I don't want you to think of her like this," Paul says, looking only at his hand, his voice very soft, "This isn't how she is. My mother. This didn't only happen to me. It happened to her, too. You reminded me of that."

This specific moment, the terror of knowing she couldn't do anything to stop it or protect him; and the one he imagines came long before he was born: when Jessica put her hand in the box and had a needle at her neck. She knew exactly what he was going to feel.

"Do you want to meet her? The way she really is." Is, is, never was.

He gently takes his hand in his gloved ones. He's only firm when he presses to stop the bleeding.

There are Sleepers with hard hearts who say it's too painful to visit memories of lost loved ones. Other Sleepers might look at them once, appreciate them, and then put them from their minds for months, years at a time. That's normal wherever they come from. Where Midoriya comes from (Japan, Earth, 21st century), that's like being a wanderer with no origin.

What Paul suggests carries a very different, specific meaning for him, intentional or not. Paul has invited him, a stranger, into his house to pay his respects to his mother. Lady Jessica dwells in memory made sharp as a photograph by magic. Inko Midoriya smiles in a picture frame in the living room next to incense and pastries. This is reserved for the dead, which Inko isn't, but she is similarly separated by the veil between worlds. It might seem a little morbid, but to Izuku Midoriya, it's a casual comment over tea, or a smile over his shoulder at her as he leaves for the day, natural and without thought.

A whirlwind twists up in his chest, grasping his heart painfully. Then it passes as quickly as it comes, leaving a chronic but not entirely unwelcome ache. This isn't two months ago, when just the mention of everyone back home might bring him to tears. He catches a small breath.

"It doesn't matter what I think. I want to help you." His voice shifts slightly, a slight formality to it, but not cold, "Thank you very much. I would like to meet her, if it's alright."

How can he refuse?

Edited 2021-12-18 12:13 (UTC)

Paul and Midoriya might both be surprised by how much they understand this gesture the same way: some things stretch into the future for millennia, patterns of human behavior that hold true vast years and distances away from their terrestrial cradle. This is a gesture of respect, even if it's only an image.

Paul smiles at him, a heart-sick little tug of his mouth, and turns back to the glyph. He blows softly, and the blood brightens and then scatters into motes of silver dust that drift towards the Lady Jessica.

"You did help me," Paul tells him, watching his mother's face as it animates again, her eyes blinking against the dust. She looks dazed, at first, half-asleep, and then Midoriya can watch her gather herself up like she's drawing a mantle over her shoulders. Her back straightens, and there stands the lady of the House Atreides, as dignified as an empress and far more beautiful.

"Paul," she says, and steps towards him, her hand coming up to cup his face, and Paul turns into her touch with a sharp, shaking breath, "What's wrong? Why aren't you in bed?"

"Nothing," Paul almost whispers as she runs a thumb over his cheekbone, tilting his head this way and then that, "Bad dream. Deku is keeping me company."

Her eyes go to the other boy, sweeping him from head to toe, and whatever Paul has done has fixed Midoriya in the memory as someone meant to be there, erased the magic of the ribbon - there's no surprise in her look, only a reserved gratitude as she nods to him.

"You need your sleep," she chides both of them, gently, "Come. I'll make you some tea."

When she goes, Paul turns to follow at once, heart caught in his throat, but he does spare Midoriya a quick glance, a half-smile underneath his bruised-looking eyes.

His heart swells. Paul wouldn't say he helped him if it wasn't true. There's no reason to lie.

He hadn't expected to greet Lady Jessica right away, still in the middle of digging for a band-aid for Paul while missing his own mother. He straightens like he's been called to attention and is about to be inspected. He's about to say it's nice to meet her, but she includes him in her conversational sphere, like she's met him before, like he belongs here dressed in his green hero costume amidst the blacks and grays. She draws the two of them away in the same effortless way his homeroom teacher quiets the classroom with a look.

Midoriya is not a good actor. He still looks slightly caught unawares, but he dips his head in a nod at her and follows. He catches Paul's faint smile and mirrors it, encourages it.

"I'm sorry," he says to Lady Jessica. "I wasn't trying to keep Paul-kun up."

Midoriya's apology is met with a slight dismissive gesture of Jessica's hand, her voice firm but not unkind: "You are responsible for my son's safety, not his sleep."

Her implication: Paul is safe, and she is pleased with Midoriya for that. Paul notices she doesn't stand on ceremony, and he feels the stirrings of his own offense on her behalf - but Midoriya can't know, he reminds himself, Paul never told him. What's important is the attitude, not the form (as his mother would remind him), and Midoriya speaks to her with more respect than most who would call her 'my lady' to her face. It makes Paul feel oddly tender towards them both, memory and boy.

"I made him come with me," Paul says, moving closer to Midoriya as they walk, as if in solidarity. "He's been good company."

Jessica opens a door hidden in the wall with a press of her fingers to two niches in the stone, machinery humming almost soundlessly as it sinks in and slides away. Inside is a niche of a room, with a few overstuffed chairs of different styles, tapestries on the walls, and a tiny mobile kitchenette set, all illuminated by a floating orb that activates and rises as the room is revealed. She steps inside, trusting them to follow.

"I hope you've been good company to him as well, Paul," she says, and she's still chiding him a little, but so gently as to also be comfort. I hope you haven't been too upset, is what she means.

"I've done my best," he says, and glances at Midoriya, as if to say - see? Here she is, my mother.

Midoriya doesn't come from a time of lords and ladies, but layers of politeness and inflection have been a soft requirement since he was small. His politeness is the casual kind, meant to put others at ease while still humbling himself. It does not erect formal walls, but respects that some might exist, and welcomes others to build them higher or tear them down. It is, like him, awkward at times, but well-intentioned. Whatever doesn't translate is present in his attentiveness and the unassuming way he takes up space (or doesn't). It's different from the brisk, alert way he followed Paul out of his room, nerves high, limbs ready to spring like loaded guns.

He glances, just once, into the hallway before entering the room behind the other two. You are responsible for my son's safety. He's not quite sure what his new magically-created role is here, or how he should address her--or, for that matter, her son. He's thinking about the other people around them, how they spoke. Ordinarily, he should do the same, but Paul only ever gave him his name, just the one, and nothing else. That could mean a few things... Midoriya addressed him as he would most other young men his age.

He's not used to being duplicitous, but he does pass a secret smile back to Paul. I see. It's not broad; the presence of someone else's mother, a bone fide lady, commands the room and his manner along with it. The Midoriya before the memory changed was candid and ready for anything. This one carries the vestiges of having been shy and observant for years.

Paul notices and appreciates the subtlety of respect, more important than any words - and there's a way about the shyness and observation in his posture that makes him feel...something. A mirroring shyness, perhaps, as if Midoriya's change in manner means Paul can do the same.

He pats the back of the most comfortable chair as he looks at Midoriya, inviting him to it. It's an ancient squat thing with a modestly high back and armrests, broken in over years and refurbished at least three times, barely any of it original. Right now, it's upholstered in a worn blue velvet, the springing insides stuffed with some material that conforms instantly to weight and pleasantly captures the heat of the body. He sits down in another chair, his an alarming green, and sinks into it readily.

Neither mother or son speak for a while, but this silence is much more comfortable than any that proceeded it. The door slides shut as Jessica opens a cupboard, produces a locked box she opens with a press of her fingers, and leans over it to breath in - an open mouthed thing that also involves her nose, like a cat scenting for prey. Paul seems to think nothing of it (used to his mother's constant watchfulness for poison, and her skill at detecting it) as he turns to Midoriya and says:

"Is there any kind of tea you like? Or at least a kind of tea. We have green, black...some floral, I think."

"We have it," Jessica confirms, setting the box down and produces a literjug of water she performs the same ritual over before pouring it into a black, square kettle. "No caffeine after sunset. It's a dependency."

Paul pulls a face behind his august mother's back.

let me look at the sun | open

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lol a tag will be as long or short as it needs to be

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