let me look at the sun | open

[terriblepurpose]

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

Comments

[terriblepurpose]

[Sometimes, knowledge protects against fear. Knowing the right way to walk on sand, or how to use a knife like an extension of the mind itself. Pair mastery of skills and awareness of threats, and a person can venture out into the world with informed caution instead of naïve terror.

Sometimes knowledge is the whetstone fear sharpens itself on. Paul has spent his life learning how to observe and predict human threats. He has been trained in an exquisite perceptiveness of human motion and the way it can be used to kill. He can read the subtleties of a spoken human threat, and a host of ways to lean on the weaknesses that might underlie it.

So looking at and listening to whatever this thing wearing a human body like a stolen carapace might be is a precise kind of informed horror. Paul's pupils dilate to the edges of his irises as he goes unforgivably still; two heavy books hit him, one glancing off his too slowly raised arm and the other connecting hard with his chest. He staggers back, too easily thrown off balance, but it breaks him from his stupor.

Paul's eyes narrow, his pupils contracting to a murderous looking focus, but when he darts to the side and kneels behind the back of the chair he was sitting in he reaches for the open lapels of his coat, not the knife strapped to his right wrist. He shucks the long, heavy black garment, turning it inside out and then gathering it up in his hands like a fishing net.]

Is that so?

[His voice is fiercely controlled, the ripple of fear underneath it sublimated into cold fury. But it's there anyway, in the slight shift of his breathing, in the involuntary sweat slicking his palms.]

[possessum]

( He's really launched right into it. But there's no time for hesitating, for stalking from afar before moving in for the kill — he's already done that, for so long now.

...At least, he believes he has, for he fully believes this person to be Peter (not that he remembers the name in his current state, only the feel of him). Peter, whom he'd watched from afar after being ripped from his temporary host, existing only as what could be perceived as light: spectral, formless, a cacophony of flashing light and alien colours. Dancing across Earth's plane like a visitor, never meant to be there for so long. Desperate to be found, made whole again.

It's time for the final act. He will have the boy, become him. He will be reborn.

The voice that answers him is hard and controlled: not soft, not pliable the way he remembers Peter's being. It confuses him, enrages him (the boy resists him; he's not supposed to resist him) and the demon visibly bristles from where he's still stuck high up on a shelf, clinging to it with some impossible supernatural capability.

But something in him can sense that fear underneath the layer of ice below, like a shark smelling blood. The demon, so sensitive to energy, knows fear very well. He latches on. And imitates what The People had done and said to Peter, voice changing for a moment in attempt to match someone else's, coming out oddly human now. Like a parrot repeating— )

Satony... Degony... Eparigon.

( ...The words might seem like nonsense, or perhaps the boy would be able to decipher them as ancient things. Either way, there's something ritualistic to the words, the way they're spoken: with intention. The demon continues speaking in that stolen human voice, shaking with stolen human emotion. )

I expel you...! I expel you! Get out!

[terriblepurpose]

[The meaning of the words eludes Paul, but he recognizes an invocation when he hears one, he knows the power a voice can wield, and who knows what further force a voice might bring to bear here? So he has to move quickly, and he does, rising from behind his chair and facing towards the thing in a ready stance, coat in hand, prepared to entangle.

It's the voice's contortion that spurs him on to his next action. (Not fear. Not wanting it to be silenced, so he doesn't have to listen to this unholy mimicry and the devouring fury behind it.) Two can play at that game.

Whatever rides this body, the body itself is human. Paul centers himself, draws a line of focus up through his spine and then into his throat, preparing inflection, pitch, resonance. He is the rock from which authority flows, he is the instrument of command, and he speaks in a Voice that lashes out like a heavy chain:]

Stop.

[It would sound like any other word to anyone it wasn't directed at, but Paul is trained to hear himself, and he knows he has found the right register. The Voice acts on a level deeper than conscious will, the profound ancestral weight of it bypassing thought to access immediate response. The thing will fall from the bookshelf, and Paul will contain it, pacify it, see what he can do to banish it.

That's what will happen. What else could?]

[possessum]

( Truly, the words aren't for him to say — for all his great powers of conjuration, he is not a magician or a witch. Spellwork is not his to engage in but the means through which he is called to, summoned and utilised. But he doesn't have any understanding of that in the moment; he simply imitates the voice of the magician, the witch, who would be using such words. The voice grows louder and more impassioned, and shifts further still to something that becomes a woman's voice. His bird's tongue perfectly copies the woman who spoke those words, and like before, they're used as a weapon now. EXPEL EXPEL EXPEL

The boy comes out to face him. This, too, is disconcertingly unlike Peter (Peter, who hid and hid and hid until the end and wouldn't look at him, screamed and cried and ran and slapped his own face and begged himself to wake up, it's just a nightmare—) The demon is speaking still, repeating the words in some frenzied jabbering, harsh and loud and with the woman's stolen voice, until—

Stop.

And it does. Like a candle's light immediately snuffed out, the thing clinging to the bookshelf abruptly falls silent. He's surprised, disturbed, affected by the voice that came from the young man's throat. Something important, the right strand of command — and perhaps ordinarily, the demon would be enthralled by this capability; it's how he's meant to be handled, after all. With a roar of direction and intention to match his own, energy aligned in perfect harmony.

But he isn't how he should be, and the voice of command elicits only one response in him. After a tense, silent pause, the creature springs. With no warning at all, no convulsive twitches and no sounds, so awfully sudden. It's some bizarre mixture of falling and flying, the way he suddenly drops like a spider from its perch, but it's aimed at the boy — scraping his way through the air, coming right for him. It's all very fast, a matter of seconds. )

[terriblepurpose]

[It's as if the command rebounds: Paul is still, rigid, staring as the thing plummets impossibly towards him. For nearly anyone else (like the boy this is meant for, the one already consumed) the span of time would seem instant, the lapse of motion forgivable.

There is little magic, if any, in Paul's world. They've compensated in other ways. Paul is one of them, crafted from before birth and honed to the killing edge of human capacity. And still, he stands there like a dumb animal as the trap falls and thinks, stupefied by a horror so vast it obliterates all other thought, how?

But all of that sharpening still counts for something, because where the mind fails, the body reacts, and Paul twists like a matador as he unfurls his coat, spins it out like a net, and dives towards instead of away.]

Enough!

[This is shouted in a voice only his own, one tinged by what is frustration, offense, affront, and not fear. He's not afraid. He's furious. There is still a difference, however much they feel the same.]

cw: nondescriptive suicide mention

[possessum]

( He can't damage the body too much. That thought still lingers in him, despite his crazed fury. Even with Peter, they were so meticulously careful with the final shove. He fell out the right window, the one with the soft flowerbed below it. No bones even broke in the fall. The vessel's physical form was damaged, but not broken. Paimon was able to stand after, to move and walk and function.

No, physically, he must not break the body too much. It was mentally that the word broken applied to. The most important piece of it all. If any remnant of the mind remained unbroken, the possession would not hold. Like those failed hosts of the past — part of him still remembers. There was another sixteen-year-old, one who had survived the attempts, and taken his own life to escape the agony of it all. That vessel was lost forever, until so many years later when another would finally be made viable.

He will not lose this one.

But suddenly he's trapped, covered up, and the demon screams, not like the way it feels to be suppressed, contained somewhere black and tight. Wings kept painfully bound. He thrashes where he's all bundled up against the boy, rams against him as much as he possibly can. In the struggle, he lifts — and the boy with him, if he's still hanging on — right up off of the ground for a moment, then slams sideways, hitting something solid and hard — the chair. )

[terriblepurpose]

[Paul's breath is knocked out of him by the collision, the chair collapsing under their weight. Nothing punctures him, so there's that, but it will bruise, and when he tears his breath back in he realizes that a lower rib on the right side is slightly cracked.

But they're on the ground, and having a surface to pin the thing to is something. Paul twists to try to get it on its stomach, doing his earnest best to keep the thing entangled. He's been trained to stay on his feet as much as he can, but the grapple is one of the most dangerous clashes of body against body, and he's as good at is as anything else. Pain or no pain. Fear or no fear.]

I will hurt you, is that what you want?

[His voice is ratcheted with frustration and ache, breath coming in hot pants as he struggles with a thing that is too strong for its body.]

making my way through these delicious backtags, apologies for the delay!!

[possessum]

( The boy — with his unexpected resilience and firm command, with his strength that seems out of place for his willowy frame (is he even really A Boy, or Something Else?) — has captured him. The demon realises this as he's forced onto his stomach, arms trapped, all tangled up in the suffocating material. He's snapping his teeth animal-like and flailing, but it does no good.

The question is not only a question, but also a proclamation, a dual-sided concept to absorb. Is that what you want? but also I will hurt you — the demon tries to scream again, and it sounds more like Peter now, the vocal chords rubbed raw and ragged from the ancient thing that's been scraping against them. The scream breaks like a human's, emotional in its upset.

No, no, no, it isn't what he wants. What he wants is the body he was given, and while it isn't true freedom to be contained within a human form, it's at least an escape from another, worse prison. The male host will be right, correct—

There are a few bursts of flame, some catching a book or two on fire, others just manifesting in the air itself: bright, dangerous sparks. But they disappear quickly, leaving behind a singed smell; it's as if the demon is puttering out.

He resists less, and less, and then he's not struggling at all but just breathing against the floor, moaning like a wounded animal. He was wrong; it isn't time yet. The host hasn't been worn down enough, and so he can't get into him. )

Hate..... hate.... ( He breathes, and it sounds only human now, the voice of a boy around Paul's age. Though the words themselves are almost like something a child would say. ) Hate you....