deercountry | o5 . bone house mingle!

Entry tags:

o5 . bone house mingle!

Who:

necrolord and CR!
What: Several teens move into the horrible necromancy mansion, and sometimes they bring their friends.
When: Early March.
Where: Bone House in Gaze.

Content Warnings: Skeletons, discussions of death and grief, violence where marked, vomit where marked. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

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Gideon steps through the lights, and they vanish, leaving behind the lingering scent of burning metal that fills the voids between stars and planets, that clings to the hulls of void-faring vessels only briefly when they plunge back into atmosphere. Paul's eyes flare with brilliance and momentary, unnameable terror as Gideon reaches for him, stilled and rigid.

There's still salt in his hair, even after he (somehow) found himself in water, before he changed into these soft clothes and fell into burning dreams. It catches at Gideon's fingers, messy and shapeless, and Paul's mouth twists horribly, tight and bloodless and crooked. There is a moment where he looks like he might scream. There is a worse moment where he looks like he might cry.

He does neither. The stool he was sitting on falls with a hollow clatter as he throws himself off of it and against Gideon like a sanctuary door, his arms coming up under hers as he clutches frantically at her back, his hands in locked fists. He's shivering, and he doesn't know why, except that it must be some other new aberration of his blood.

"Gideon," he whispers, like the hush of lapping waves, and it's not enough, it's not, but he says it again, and again, muffled against her steady shoulder.

As Paul's mouth twists, Gideon suppresses the urge to remark that his hair is 'crunchy.' Even she can realize that now might not be the time, which means that things are pretty fucking bad.

Instead, she wraps broad arms around him and pulls him in close, with all the effortlessness of someone who was just waiting for permission. Gideon is warm and steady, and she uses that to Paul's advantage. She tucks his head underneath hers, and makes little circles, like he's shown her how to do.

She could stay like this for hours. She'll stay like this for as long as Paul needs, murmuring what she hopes are comforting responses to Paul's repetition of her name. Things like I'm here, I've got you. It's going to be okay. Gideon says all this because she will make it okay, because she will not leave Paul to shiver and stare and fall to pieces by himself. She doesn't exactly know how to make it better, but she knows this.

(Gideon remembers returning to her cell, alone, and how that was almost worse than finding Harrow and her parents. Paul will never know what that feels like. Not ever. Not while she's around.)

And after a while, Gideon realizes that she probably needed this, too. Tension falls from her shoulders, a weight that she never acknowledged she was carrying. Paul came back. He died, but he came back. A piece of Gideon's heart slots back into place.

The first time Paul washed up on these shores, his body came back to him first, then his mind. He knew the precise balance of his physiology before he knew his own name, the mechanisms of survival imprinted on him since before his birth rising to life to do exactly what they were meant to do.

This time, his body has been a stranger, and there has been no respite from his mind. As he clings to Gideon, in the circles within circles of her comfort (and he knows them, he knows her), his abstracted observational self wonders at the extent of his adaptation.

It would have ruined him to know himself the first time. It would have drowned him to feel this in the rotting ruins of the beach: the way he sinks back into himself and finds the wreckage waiting for him.

Grief is an echo in every hollow space. Grief is opening the door of the home the storm drove you from and finding nothing behind it but crumpled debris. Grief is a salt-scour, a dark and crushing wave, a gravitational collapse. Grief is hot and wet around his eyes as he shudders like a thing coming apart, held together only by Gideon's anchoring arms.

"Palamedes is gone," Paul says, in his own voice, and then, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," and, finally, as if surprised, he starts to cry - shaking, near-silent, as pulsing and uncontrolled as blood flowing from a wound.

Gideon wasn't going to ask. Her plan was to just keep going back to the beach, as many times as it took, bringing fuck-off huge academic tomes and pulpy romance novels and doctor equipment, as if a dead friend is someone you can summon. Maybe she'll still do that. Paul says that Palamedes is gone, as in never coming back, and Gideon cannot believe that. So she won't. Kill us twice, shame on God.

Paul begins to tremble, and it takes Gideon half a moment to realize he is crying. Not openly, not really, but more than anyone on the Ninth ever dares to. She pulls him closer, so that her shitty black t-shirt can catch his tears, so that Paul knows he is not alone in a big, rotting house, with a grief he blames himself for.

"It's not your fault," Gideon whispers, low and soft and close, an answer to those apologies. She makes a few more circles and says it again. "It's not your fault." She'll say it as many times as it takes for him to believe it. She will say it to him for the rest of his life, and the one after that, and the one after that.

(Once upon a time, there was a little girl who needed to hear those words, and nobody said them to her until it was far too late.)

"Besides," Gideon says, when she thinks Paul is ready to hear it, "We don't really know where he's gone, or how long he'll be away. This is Palamedes we're talking about. He and Cam already made plans to cheat death once. You really think he wouldn't have a backup?"

This would all sound incredibly saccharine and sappy if they weren't talking about the nerdiest necromancer of Gideon's generation. Maybe it still is, but Gideon doesn't care. Paul shouldn't have to bear this loss all by himself.

Gideon says it's not your fault, and it draws up tears that Paul didn't know he still had left, soft and dissolving. He makes a sound caught between whimper and keen, burrows deeper against her, and her words keep falling like warm rain.

And he's selfish, and he's weak, because he soaks them up as helplessly as her t-shirt absorbs his miserable, exhausted leaking.

"I still want it to be," Paul says, clinging to his voice as wildly as he clings to her, because this matters the way almost nothing else in this hideous place matters; this might be the only thing that matters, the fulcrum of the whole wrecked world, "I want it to be my fault."

His breath hitches hard in the back of his throat, a soft gag on a trickle of bitter brine, and he grits his teeth, his head unraised.

"I wanted to keep you together." Quiet, for all the shuddering tension of him. He sucks in a sharp breath, unwinds his fingers from bloodless tightness to flatten on her back in turn as he finds his feet under him. "I didn't want you to lose him again. I didn't want any of you to lose each other. If I could have - I tried, Gideon. I tried, and he's still gone, and even if he comes back, it's still-"

"-it's not fair."

"I know," Gideon gently murmurs, pulling him in even closer, hoping that she can tuck him into a place where it's warm and nothing hurts. She's not surprised Paul wants this to be his fault. It's how he's always talked about his visions, it's how Harrowhark talks about her. If this is Paul's fault, then he's responsible. If he's responsible, then he's in control.

Being in control is a luxury that Gideon has never known, but she knows Harrow well enough to understand how hard that is to lose. And, she thinks, it's still better to lose control than it is to be really, truly responsible for the premature death of someone you loved, or someone the person you love loved.

"I know." Said again. Said like: I see you.

The whole point of this is for Paul to not be alone, so Gideon takes a steadying breath. She closes her eyes. There is a door that she keeps locked always, because there is oblivion on the other side, and she cannot let it in.

Gideon turns the key. Gideon's eyes stay closed, and they are damp, and she is glad Paul cannot see them.

"You're right," Gideon says, fighting to keep a quaver out of her voice, and mostly succeeding. "It's not fair." A deep breath, a plea for her body to not choke on this. "It fucking sucks."

And then she slams the door shut, because she has to, and the grounding circles she makes are as much for her as they are for Paul.

"But I'm glad you came back." It's still so bright in here. "I have something for you."

All Paul was able to see once was the ways that Gideon is not like her father. It had seemed impossible that her fierce sunrise warmth could have anything to do with the cool, shadowed hollowness of him.

But she holds him in the ruins. She keeps him close, even though she sees him. She knows what he is, and she still opens her throat for him, just so he won't be alone. It's different with her, but still -

Still. Something aches in him, among all the other aches.

"I didn't get you anything," he says, and he knows she'll pretend not to hear the quaver in his the way he pretended not to hear it in hers. He doesn't look at her as he balls his borrowed sleeve over his hand and drags it over his eyes when he finally lifts his head, a gesture that cannot possibly have smeared light the way it seems to. The afterimage fades quickly, real or not.

It fucking sucks, and it does. She's still glad he came back. It's too much to hold together, and for once, he doesn't try.

Paul is right -- Gideon pretends not to hear that quaver, or see the blurry light that comes from Paul rubbing his eyes. She instead opts to give his salty hair another ruffle, because it really is quite fun, and then pulls away to go grab a few boxes of snack food from the cabinets.

"Aw, man, I'm so bummed," Gideon replies, very obviously joking. "Not one souvenir from the River Beyond? That's kind of rude, I was expecting at least a tee shirt." Once Gideon is satisfied with her collection of snacks, she starts making her way towards the door, motioning for Paul to follow. "Come on. It's up in the best room in the house."

That's Gideon's room, obviously, and she takes Paul up the winding, creaky stairs to the bedroom on the left. It's surprisingly neat, given Gideon's personality, with an exercise mat set out in front of the bed like a little rug, her sword propped up in the corner, and cutouts of various women from assorted Trench periodicals taped to her walls. Gideon really works hard to make this house a home.

Gideon makes a beeline for her bed, sitting cross-legged on top of it, with the snacks set down on the mattress beside her. She pats the space on the other side of the snacks, a clear come sit gesture. "I've eaten snacks in bed pretty much every day since coming here. It's the best. No one on the Ninth eats snacks in bed; you've got to try it out."

Watching Gideon gather up an armful of food after ruffling his hair, Paul thinks of reversals and exchanges. He keeps thinking of them as he nods, mutely obedient, and follows her up the stairs when beckoned, a luminous shadow in her wake.

"No one on Caladan eats snacks in bed either," Paul offers, quietly, toeing off his boots by her bedroom door before he sits on the bed next to her. Before he can tell himself not to, he leans against her side, ever so briefly, and takes in the room around them. It reminds him of the way the young soldiers back home would decorate their barracks, all disciplined exuberance.

It's not the grim captive cell he pictured when he understood what was keeping her here, the devotional chain named Harrowhark that wraps around Gideon's heart, tethered in turn to a pair of endless black eyes. He draws his knees up to his chest and comes to bend over them, shifting slightly away to give her back her space, as if he's not already and still imposing on her generosity.

"I could go back for a shirt, if you really want one," he says, in an answer to her joke that comes late and soft, but there is an attempt, in those sibilant voices, to be joking too. "I think I saw a - gift shop? - by the mouth of the abyss. Just before the field of eyes. Hard to miss."

Gideon privately thinks that Paul's father has eaten snacks in bed at least once, but she's also pretty sure that telling Paul that would not be helpful right now. Instead, she leans a little closer towards Paul, wordlessly giving him permission to do the same. That's what all this is about, after all.

The joke isn't half-bad, if a little dry, and Gideon smiles, mostly at the fact that Paul is even trying for humor. That's a good sign. "Aw, man, a gift shop and everything? Damn. Well, tell you what. You can make me a shirt, instead."

Or: don't go back there. Stay here. But Gideon doesn't need to embarrass the both of them like that.

Once she's confident that Paul is settled (as settled as he's going to be, at any rate) she plucks a pair of now well-worn tinted glasses off the nightstand. One side of the frame is slightly bent, as if it was kept in a small space for a long time, but otherwise, they're in good condition and very, very cool.

Gideon had said that Paul's eyes are too bright, and she means it -- how is anyone supposed to get any sleep, with lights like that? But she also thinks he's stressed out, and uncomfortable, and perhaps a little out of his depth. She'd felt that way on the First, sometimes, and these helped.

"Here," says Gideon, opening them up and passing them to Paul. "Try these on."

When they're in Paul's hands, he stares at the glasses like he doesn't understand what they are, which is ridiculous. He's seen Gideon wear them a hundred times if he's seen them once, an elegant fusion of style and function that he only ever thinks of as hers. He turns them over in his hands delicately as he leans back against her, throat working silently.

The world slips behind a veil of smoke when he slides them into place, fingers light and unfamiliar on their arms. He turns towards her with his chin tucked downward, half-shy and half-furtive, although he couldn't name why for either, or what the nuanced difference between them is. (He could; it's better if he doesn't, even to himself.)

"You can laugh," he says, gratitude welling in a hundred softly mingled voices, quiet like the verge of tears, "I must look terrible."

But he thinks he might look less terrible than he did, and it's less terrible for him to look at her like this, the unsettling blue toxicity partly filtered. He lets a little, settling breath escape him, a strand of miserable tension slackening across his shoulders.

Something Paul is learning about calamities is this: in the aftermath, you continue, whether you want to or not. The flesh of your body makes its demands felt eventually, and with the glasses on, he looks at the assembled snacks and remembers that he's hungry.

"It's not going to be a very good shirt," he warns her, reaching for a little bundled bag of something or other, because she lent him her glasses, and that means something he's still turning over and over in his hands while they sit on his face.

Gideon doesn't laugh. She does grin, though, and even though there's some humor in that expression, it's mostly something else. Pride, maybe? Gideon isn't especially sure what to call it and doesn't really care, either. Who needs to name their feelings? All she knows is that Paul is wearing something that's hers, and that's...pretty cool, Gideon supposes.

"Well, you don't look as cool as me, but pretty much no one does. But that's still much better. We'll get you a sick chain and maybe a jacket with bone spikes, and then you'll look like the second-coolest person on the Ninth in no time." Cooler than the nuns, even!

Gideon goes for the snacks as well, choosing some dried fruit and chocolate blend labeled Trench Mix. There's nothing like a good Trench mix. Gideon's mouth is perhaps still a little bit full when she responds next, because it's so much more fun to talk to your buds and eat than to do the two of those separately.

"Are you kidding? I've never seen you half-ass anything, ever. I'm sure it'll be great, and if it sucks, we can just say I'm wearing it ironically."

A realization slots into place for Paul in this moment, caught between the mundane and the tragic. He's in the midst of opening a packet of smoked mushroom jerky when he has it. He is thinking about this room, and listening to Gideon weaving a future for them with her words, and she is vital and warm and alive beside him, and he understands something else about why he came back to this place, to shelter under this roof.

The world is miserable. So is he. So is she, even if she's brave enough not to show it. Things aren't going to get much better any time soon. He can see futures unfolding before him like scrawled maps, and he doesn't like where most of them lead.

But here, with her, he feels better, more safe. He feels watched over, in the way of being seen. Gideon looks after him. He tries to look after her. Paul does know what this feeling is. He just never expected it to come back to him.

"I'd like that," he tells her, bumping his knee against hers, "But now I might have to make the shirt bad on purpose, to give myself a chance. You've played your hand too soon."

Then, softer, so she knows he doesn't mean that: "You'd still manage to make it look cool." Softer still, but this time so she knows he does mean this: "Thank you."

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o5 . bone house mingle!

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cw: vague references to suicide, child neglect

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