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

'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.

His smile grows. He sits, as a guest. The chair is incredibly comfortable, but Midoriya doesn't slouch. It's not his habit. Nor is filling silences unnecessarily.

He is just wondering if Paul's mother is really into tea, judging by Paul's lack of reaction to her nearly inhaling it. He blinks away from staring when Paul directs a question at him, which Lady Jessica answers. The face Paul pulls is a stark contrast from the troubled one he wore when he was preparing to face down a terrible memory. Midoriya feels like he's been given a glimpse of the real Paul, not the one life battered about. He squints back at Paul in gentle amusement.

"Your mother's right, Paul-kun. I've pulled too many late nights myself studying."

Sorry Paul, Midoriya is a good boy. A good boy who lied on his government records about his Quirk, broke his own fingers one by one to give his friend a message, violated a well-known physical assault law, agreed to the subsequent coverup, party-crashed a raid on a villain hideout, and got into an all-out unsanctioned superpowered fight with another student on school grounds. A good boy.

It's pleasant to sit here as if there was never anyone waiting for Paul in the library, listening to his mother make tea while the rain pours outside. Paul feels like the last time he felt anything like this was years ago, but that can't be true. He smiles as if he's trying not to at Midoriya and crosses his ankle over his knee, one hand on the chair armrest next to him, the other brushing back his hair.

"You're both against me?" Paul says, as the kettle begins to whistle, heated almost instantly by induction. "I can't beat those odds."

"You should listen to him more often," the Lady Jessica says, mildly, combining water with a packet of tea that fills the air with the smell of a lush tropical fruit. Paul knows it's part of the memory filling in from somewhere else, words taken from another place and time, but it still gives him a little pause.

"What's your favorite thing to study?" He asks Midoriya, both because he wants to know and wants to change the subject.

As he looks at Lady Jessica when she speaks, he misses the slight shift in Paul. Midoriya is aware that the memory has constructed or is constructing a place for him, but the specifics of what that is and how the blood magic works are vague to him. He may as well try to blend in and not cause a scene.

"I try to do my best in every subject..."

It's true. He wouldn't have his good average otherwise. But it doesn't feel right blathering about Japanese literature or hero informatics to people from a very different world. He may as well talk about what he studies most fervently.

"I study other people, in a way. Heroes I admire and want to be like. I write down anything that can help me in the future. There's not enough time to learn my friends' moves in regular class." ...Or steal his rival's. Imitation is his sincere form of flattery, but it's also his intention to surpass the people he learns from.

There's a slight inflection on the word hero. It's borrowed from English, due to the US's influence on the Pro Hero career, though the word can be traced to Greek. In his world, it carries a more specific meaning.

Edited 2021-12-26 11:18 (UTC)

Paul listens thoughtfully, noticing the particular stress on a word that happens to mean something specific here too. A hero is a figure of legend and prophecy, laden with the power to change a culture - or ruin it. But it's difficult to imagine Midoriya as a destroyer.

He walked into Paul's memory, looked at him for a matter of minutes, and disarmed the bomb he was making of it with a handful of words. That's a kind of heroism found in folktales, not epics. He changed the story that Paul was unfolding simply by choosing to remain in his own, one with a kinder ending, and there's a power in that Paul will have to remember.

"I don't think we've ever had the chance to spar," Paul says, couching what he means in the fabric of the memory, "If you have time, I'd like to, some other day. For keeping me company."

Jessica sets two steaming cups of faintly sweet, fruity tea down on a table between them and retires to a high-backed rose-velvet chair, but not before gently brushing her hand across the back of Paul's neck.

All Might, arguably the greatest hero of all time, became the Symbol of Peace by defeating more villains than anyone else could hope to. In other words, the current era of peace was bought with violence. All Might gave Midoriya his superpower, an unusual Quirk passed down a line of successors in secret. He chose him because Midoriya, scared and powerless, had jumped to save someone without thinking. Kindness, something for which Midoriya was picked on most of his childhood, was always at the root of what he did. People on TV or online usually don't discuss that when listing what makes a hero strong.

As much as he takes inspiration from others, cobbling together any experience he can, he's learning to be a hero in his own way, in the only way he can. The struggle of starting from rock bottom to managing a large, unwieldy power in an unprecedented time of rising villain activity is uncharted territory.

"Of course!" He flashes Paul a ready grin. "I've been looking for more sparring partners. I've got to practice against all kinds, or else I'll develop stale habits. I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do." The odds of Midoriya starting a new page in his notebook with Paul's name on it are very strong.

He accepts his tea with a more polite but no less warm smile. "Thank you very much." He feels calmer after the first sip. He takes his time with it, because that's what one does with tea. It both is and isn't like fruity teas he's tried before. By default, he and people around him back home serve green tea to each other, but, as Lady Jessica said, they'd be up all night.

"Likewise," Paul says, there's just a touch of cockiness in his half-smile. It's not that he doubts Midoriya's skills, but that Paul is so confident in his own. (He's going to be not unpleasantly surprised.)

There's quiet after that as they all sip their tea, two real boys and a memory of a mother. Paul closes his eyes as he savors the taste, and for once he doesn't think about how this tea must be filling a Harkonnen looter's bags, that this hidden room belongs to another set of strangers. He's home, warm in the heart of a storm.

When he opens his eyes and sees the ethereal stag standing behind his mother, both of them looking back at him with calm eyes, he accepts it.

"It's time." Lady Jessica rises from her chair and walks over to Paul, seemingly unaware of the stag's presence. He sets his teacup aside just before she sets her fingers against his temples in a specific pattern, pressing gently on this nerve bundle and that tension point, and Paul leans into her touch, eyes hidden behind his messy hair. His shoulders ease down his back, but there's a tremor in them as they do.

"Go back to bed," she says, stepping back, and looks at Midoriya with an odd clarity - surely a trick of the memory, to better simulate Jessica's perceptiveness, "Make sure he doesn't wander."

With that, she returns to her chair, still not reacting to the clearly visible stag that whuffs softly and shakes its massive rack of antlers at them as if agreeing with Jessica: it's time to go. When Paul gets up to approach the stag, he waits for Midoriya to join him. He looks a world apart from the rigidly tense and miserable young man being woken from sleep; his expression is not precisely happy, but it's wistful instead of bereft. He mouths thank you in the instant before they depart, and he means it.

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wannasmash - 2022-01-02 12:13 (UTC) - Expand

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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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