deercountry | o5 . bone house mingle!

Being apart is almost a hum in the bones of his hands, which Paul flexes at his sides to keep them preoccupied with something other than reaching for Midoriya's shoulder or brushing over his hair, down the subtly visible line of his spine through his fitted shirt. He knows enough to admit to the anxiety under the impulse, but still, it remains.

"Thank you," Paul says, graciously soft, as he fills the need to hold something by taking the box two-handed. He also knows enough to remember his manners. (The name on the box only darkens his eyes for a moment - a young woman's place of safety, her retirement from the field of battle, and then Paul -)

"And you're here now." He smiles at Midoriya with only traces of trepidation in his nearly manic relief. "Let's go to the kitchen and I'll put these away."

Paul begins the short journey to the room in question, nodding to a passing skeleton as he goes.

Paul could correct her. He could explain that he has offered Harrowhark the notes whenever she wants them, in the oblique way he communicates with her. He could explicate the difference between reading the notes for what's in them opposed to reading them for who wrote them. He could outline his suspicions that Harrowhark would be doing both the same way Paul does, has (sifting for - what? for evidence of a miracle three times over?). He could unravel the whole sad mess of lost swords and found pencils and the hands that held each. He could build a wall out of words between her and him and what he meant, and it would still dissolve under her attentive, guileless affection.

There's no one else here to hide from. There's no one else to hear the awful, quiet sound from the back of his throat, or to see his jaw spasm and arms tighten around himself. But there's also no one else to perform for, which means that Paul lets the moments draw out long between them.

"What if I want him to?" Paul asks, and he doesn't know which him he means, except for all of them. "What if I want you to? What would that even mean, if I want that?"

[Paul should feel something about his own discourtesy. He should remember himself and be a better host, a better guest. Even at his worst, he's been able to find the presence of mind to conduct himself appropriately.

He takes a breath. He makes an effort.]

One shouldn't presume to know the mind of God, or gods. They're beyond our apprehension.

[It's a truism across religious systems, although Paul's understanding of it used to be much more abstract. (He watches her, when he says it. Just to see if there's a flicker that goes past the generalities of theology in response.)]

Or so I'm learning, which goes more hand in hand with magic than I realize.

My name is Paul. I don't think I asked yours, did I?

He has two friends--both out of commission at the time of the Leviathan battle--who help out at Lysithea's shop. Weeping Wafers have been a staple in the variety box Midoriya purchases for friends going through the roughest of patches.

He smiles for the first time, reflecting back a wan, understated version of Paul's, but however small it is, it does not waver. He follows quietly with less spring in his step, socks padding a little softer than they usually do. He nods to the humanoid shape clinking past out of habit, taking his cue from Paul, then remembers with a jolt that this is one of those real skeletons he saw on the ship and outside the house--up close. There is something so terribly authentic about the very human imperfections in proportion, the bump of healed bone here or there--quite different from the fake plastic things they put in science classrooms.

He doesn't ask how he's been, like rubbing salt in the wound. He can see for himself. Midoriya will let his friend have this, the usual motions of puttering in a kitchen and getting someone something to drink in an attempt to find an equilibrium.

"If I have to keep information secret, won't you explain more? I can't hide what isn't known to me."

He says, matter-of-fact, and it's not untrue but there's more to it. Kaworu wants to understand Midoriya and why he's so afraid, so concerned. What out there is hunting him? He knows Midoriya is powerful so this must be something of even greater power. A true threat, possibly from the place Midoriya comes from.

It wasn't the size that was terrifying. It was what was inside its soul. How that thing was made. So much loneliness across all of time and space.

[He wishes the Old Man where here. He would have something to say about what it's like after a battle and how you're supposed to feel. But at least he has someone, now that he understands the pain of loneliness.

Kaworu slumps against the man a little.]

Paul did everything he could. He even tried to save me.

He sticks his tongue back out at her when she blows the raspberry! Shut up! He had to stop his nose with something and this was closest. Still, he lets her up onto his arm, giving her head an affectionate stroke, rubbing an antenna with a finger. He doesn't want to think about why she's more active now than before, so he simply will not.

"Fine, fine, breakfast."

This isn't how he thought it would go. He just wanted to give everyone a friendly warning to keep any relationship with Izuku Midoriya or the hero Deku not so public. Some people even have stories of masked vigilantes in their world, so they understand. Kaworu is one of them. Midoriya thought Kaworu would simply accept that. He should have known that wouldn't be the case.

He wipes his eyes on his arm. He got carried away. It's his concern that drives him to tears even in battle. But as they threaten the corners of his eyes again, it's also what clenches his teeth inside his jaw and flattens his eyes with an iron will. He will not let the worst case scenario happen.

"Say, for example, you come across someone who has a grudge against me. If I warned you what they look like, it would show on your face. Then they would know it was me who told them. It'd come back to me, and make you a target. You're powerful," he looks at his pale wispy friend clutching his allergy tea and says this straight without guile, "but none of us are invincible."

God takes the responsibility Paul threw at his feet like a gauntlet, once, and it is another victory to count among all the rest strewn around them like haruspecy. God, who is a man, looks through the radiance of a stellar ghost, and his eclipsed eyes have never been so hideous as they are when he says It hurts more to be both. A man who is one third less a god than he was the last time he spoke to Paul looks out to sea, and he gives his third reprieve.

"A choice," Paul says, wonderingly, and the slivered metal around them trembles in echo. "Is that what this was?" He asks, as unseen lethal spectrums open inside the salt of his blood. "Is that what this is?"

Even as he asks - even as salt catalyzes to acid, as every dark interior of his body is alight in caustic brilliance - even as the scales fall from his eyes - he knows. He's known since he crawled out of the waters with the question in his hand.

"I was a choice. I was a choice to end all choices. I was born to be an end. But I wanted not to be. I wanted to be for anything. To be for them. If I couldn't be me, I could be for them. But it always ends like this. I see that. I see what I am." A tooth chews at bone in clenched fist as his voices echo with God's own gentleness. "No one else does. No one else ever does. Not even you."

He unfolds each awful word like opening petals, each a marvel of new understanding. He gleams in the night like a revelation himself. On the threshold of the choice that this is, he brings his own empty, shining hand to God's shoulder in consolation. He brings himself to his knees on the sand at his left side.

"Everything I reach for, I tear apart - and everything I look at dies - and I can't stop, and nothing - ever - stops me." He says, in a grief so wild and vast it cannot be held in any voice, the great, heaving horror of it tender in his mouth, and he does the only thing that's left to him.

The tooth changes in his hand even as he brings it up and under hallowed ribs. It sinks in clean and deep, a perfection of violence that pierces and severs and consumes.

"Make me stop," he says, only as himself, "Please, God, make me stop."

Edited 2022-03-28 15:41 (UTC)

The kid freezes, flusters, tries to act like he isn't panicking. It's not a very convincing effort, but it's a noble one all the same. John lets him have it. He knows what he looks like, with the skeletons and the eyes; he knows that, to these storybook hero kids, they must see VILLAIN stamped on his forehead.

This is going to be an interesting dinner.

"Paul's upstairs, I think," he says, just as mildly, as he shuts the door behind Oscar with a heavy click. "He'll be down in a bit. Let's get these to the kitchen."

Their walk through the mansion is blessedly free of skeleton servants, but the decor is no less eerie. In places where the marble flooring has cracked or broken, it has been patched with whorls of organic off-white. The home is grand and dark and oppressively silent.

In the universally pleasant-but-stilted tone of parents making small talk with their children's friends, he says: "So, how long have you been in town, Oscar?"

Paul has never puttered much before in his life. He still doesn't have the knack for it. He's too fluidly efficient, going through the motions of making tea and setting Weeping Wafers on plates like he's field-stripping armor instead.

"They're not so bad when you're used to them," he says, in the midst of it, after the water is set up to heat through and Midoriya has been offered one of the high stools drawn up against the counters ringing the kitchen, "The skeletons. It's interesting, actually - you can learn a lot about variations in anatomy in terms of range of motion with a moving model."

"That one you saw is Harrowhark's. Her people pledge their bones to their House, when they die. It's their way of honoring their dead," he adds, as if it's a casual afterthought, folding himself up on a stool with his leg drawn up to cross over his knee, improbably and perfectly balanced despite the backlessness of the chair. "She brought them from home with her. I think that must be comforting, don't you?"

[Oh. He was being treated like a kid.

This was new, and Oscar momentarily had no idea what to do with this. Few had bothered treating him like a kid since he left his Aunt's farm-- and the normalcy of it was almost enough to distract from the eyes that seemed darker than eternity.

Almost.]

I've been here since the dream collapsed, sir.

[He said-- with 'Sir' being used as a coldly neutral honorific until he could get a proper read on this man.]

In total, I've been away from the world I called 'home' for almost two years.

I guess that depends a little on the god. Some of them really aren't as complicated as they'd like you to think. At least, not where I'm from.

[Willow is unaware of their host's status in his world, so the Pthumerians aside, there's only one god she's ever encountered, and it was hardly difficult to understand Glory's motives when she had made it perfectly clear what she was after.

She gives him a smile and a little nod as he introduces himself.]

I'm Willow. It's nice to meet you, Paul.

"Yes." He can see that, for someone who grew up with the tradition at least, it must be. "I saw some on the ship, but we were busy..."

Harrowhark (a housemate?) has her bones, the comfort of her people. Poor Paul doesn't even have the comfort of pretending to bustle or fumble with domesticity, the efficiency of movement too ingrained in him. He talks about skeletons instead. Oh well, Midoriya thinks as he watches the plates laid out with swift precision. Midoriya settles on his stool, legs down, socks gently resting on rungs. He looks at his friend, a long black bird with iridescent eyes perched with one leg in. A person risen from the dead.

"I never got to thank you. I was too busy running away." He has to thank him, a gesture Midoriya doesn't expect of others towards himself, but one that tugs compulsorily until it's done. "If it wasn't for you, the city would have been overrun, and I'd have been killed."

It's the sort of brutal fact he's used to facing in the aftermath of a fight, but he tempers it by lightly resting a hand on his shoulder. Sometimes Midoriya finds himself filling in for something that isn't there. He feels the absence of Paul's usual touches, that trust he shows. His fingers ache with it, but that is familiar too, from the times he had to let his bones heal and strengthen the sinews around them again.

How it was made?

[ This he echoes in a murmur, but his hand on Kaworu's shoulder is still. So there is useful information here, buried among saltwater and fear. He had hoped but not quite expected as much.

To this last bit, he gives a comforting pat. ]

Don't I know it. He gave it his all. What matters is that he's back with us now... we haven't lost him, or you.

[ He takes the 'sir' with a nod of acknowledgment, apparently content with it. ]

You're one of our veterans of the dream, then. Do you think it's given you a leg up here in Trench?

[ (He sees the prosthetic beneath the clothes, and doesn't mean it as an unkind joke. Maybe as the set-up for one, if Oscar wants to take it. Regardless, he adds:) ]

I've heard it said the dream was even more chaotic than this.

She looks up sharply at the noise, quiet as it is; she looks him in the face with eyes red as rubies as weeping. No sound escapes her in sympathetic echo though sympathy there is in her silent regard; this particular contour of grief and responsibility is one her Sleeper oft revisits to bruise himself on. Whether the wisdom he's gotten thereby can be trusted if he can't even act on it himself-- Let that abide, it is not hers to say, only hers to remember and offer what her Sleeper would if he were here.

grief. control. Shards of a remembered conversation filter through: Because it is better that somehow, I could take the blame for her death through my actions, than there was nothing whatever I could have done to save her. And: We find helplessness worse than pain. To be no more than a puff of down at the mercy of the world's raging sea was horrible, for those raised to the idea of their own autonomy and importance. She is the animal spirit, the part-soul, of one who time and again drown beneath that sea; she is the part that in the end accepted drowning and forgot autonomy to survive.

She understands, from a great distance, the appeal of choosing blame over submission. (The appeal of asking others to blame one, which at least wouldn't be so lonely.)

She also understands that Paul suffers and knowing the source of it's not a remedy itself. She stretches out her neck as far as it will go and when that proves insufficient, gets back to her feet and steps across the table to him. A little echo of the sound he made is in the back of her throat as she rears up to lift wings and arms in a universal gesture of embrace. come. grieve. Again, if he needed; as many times as needed, for an Omen (like the dead) is tireless.

She is small, and the comfort she has is small, but it is his.

It's nice to meet you, too.

[It's not the way that people greet each other on first meetings back home. Paul turns the words over in his mouth for their soft novelty. It is nice to meet her, he decides.]

We don't have any gods like these ones where I come from. You do?

[Paul knows who their host is. It's been a point of contention between them. He's not sure what it is now. He is sure he's curious about what she might have to say, this other stranger in God's house.]

"You were busy." Paul doesn't fidget. Whatever he's doing with his fingernails along the seam of his pants at the knee is, therefore, something else. Midoriya's thanks have Paul's attention slanting down to a crack in the flooring, one not yet refilled with mending bone.

"I should thank you again," he says, quietly, "For everything. You had to - I think it's harder, being the one left."

It's an admission he already half-regrets. He thinks about what Midoriya knows about him, about what Midoriya knows about people, about the scattering of slips that Paul has made around him. It's not that difficult to put together when a person is speaking from a certain kind of experience.

But then again - maybe there's a sort of comfort in that. Paul knows what it's like to be the one gone as well as the one left. He didn't suffer while he was dead. He was spared the aftermath, the cleaning up, the first shock of grief. He made his way back into the world when it had open arms for him to fall into. He got off lightly. He always seems to.

"I'm sorry you saw me like that." Paul says, to the cracked floor and the sunbeam on it.

Midoriya's mouth goes dry, but he forgets to sip his tea. He just cups it in his hands to ease the stiff aches. It twists his heart to think of how it might be if his and Paul's positions were reversed the day the Leviathan landed. It's not the first time for either of them.

"My old boss died from his wounds in a raid," he offers lowly in sympathy. Unconsciously, Midoriya's hand hovers down over his stomach where this Hero was impaled. He can still smell the flowers at the funeral, and the Beastblood when Paul--

"I'm sorry. I meant to cheer you up by coming over. I just... Smiling and pretending everything's all right won't work. I should be more honest with you."

Now it's Midoriya's turn to look down. He's lied by omission before. He's lied simply, gently, to the people closest to him. He's lied to himself. He's going to do it all over again to a hurting friend. He's not great at telling lies, but he came here clothed in softness carrying several.

"I also came here to ask you a favor. Two. But it can wait a little. If you'd rather talk about something else first, that's all right."

The fragments and the feeling behind them, an offer outstretched across the distance of a desk and a mystery yet unsolved: where are you?

Paul unfolds, his knees opening into a half-lotus as he reaches back, gathers Iskierka's slight weight into his hands with the delicacy of a boy who learned to handle knives and seashells thin as breath at the same time. He's careful of her wings and her antennae, her exposed coremata, the vulnerability that Merlinus holds inside himself behind veils and names and abstracted wisdom.

But it's impossible to be in the world, and not of it. Paul is learning that too, between the hard place of this world and the rock he has tried to make of himself. He cradles Iskierka close, but not crushing, and lowers his face to her tiny ministrations.

He's seen enough butterflies on sandspurs, at the corners of animal eyes, to wonder what she might do as the sea gathers at the fringes of his lashes.

"Thank you," he says, quietly, and closes his eyes.

Midoriya moves his hand over the memory of someone else's wound, and Paul realizes that he's already decided to tell him. Not yet, not here, but he will, because he wants to.

"You are making me feel better." Paul looks at Midoriya's downcast eyes, the bruised shadows underneath them. "I didn't think you were pretending everything was all right. It's not. We know that. Sometimes -" Paul glances up, and inspiration strikes from the heavens, or at least Gideon's room "- things just fucking suck."

"But we're still here, having tea." Paul lifts his cup in his friend's direction, half-smiling all the way up to his own heavy eyes. "That's something. I'm all right to ask for favors. I promise. What do you need?"

[The comment had him making more note of his gait and pacing. Although it had been just about a year and he had adapted enough to compensate for general matters, he still found the extra work tiresome after a while and the effects of it tended to show in a certain unsteadiness in his movements. Straightening his posture and tugging at his shirt compulsively, Oscar tried to school himself into a state of apparent confidence before replying.]

I arrived there when it was just starting to fall apart. Toward the end, it was constant chaos.

[He sighed, glancing briefly towards the window. The fractures in the sky that hinted at places beyond their ken was hard to forget, even after so many months had passed.]

Saying it gave me an advantage is kinda stupid. Does living in a warzone give you an advantage for a quieter life in squid land?

[Willow considers for a moment whether or not she wants to acknowledge the Pthumerians as gods, or more like an extremely powerful type of demon. If Paul wants to call them gods, she decides, that's fine. He probably knows more about Trench that she can remember at this point anyway.]

It's, uh, mostly demons and vampires and stuff where I'm from. We had a hell god once, but she was pretty clear about her motivations pretty quick. We managed to stop her, though.

They're someone else's words, Midoriya can tell, and that someone has it right. The motion of copying Paul with his cup in solidarity then taking a sip gives him focus. Paul says... what Midoriya thought he might say. He can't look at him again, so he stares at his own hands sheltering his tea.

"My old boss had a vision of his friend dying. Tried to prevent it, change things over the years. He tried to get him to retire even. It broke their friendship."

It seems as though Midoriya isn't asking his favor, but--patience, he rambles, a habit--it's relevant. It not being his story to tell was an excuse before, on the beach by the campfire and their clasped hands. Now he says the things he was afraid to say for fear of them coming true. They spill out in a quiet hemorrhage.

"Just before he died, he discovered that the future can be changed with the converged will of many. But before that, he was so sad about his vision, for years. He'd never been able to alter an outcome."

He finally looks at his friend in his blacks and the occasional sunbeams flecked on him. "It's not quite the same, but either way... Beyond a minute or so, like in a fight, please... Don't ever look into my future."

o5 . bone house mingle!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: radiation, death-seeking, violence

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: mention of impalement, mha spoilers (anime-friendly)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject