o5 . bone house mingle!

[necrolord]

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.

Comments

[terriblepurpose]

"Iskierka," Paul says, gently, "I need that one back."

It's Paul own fault for leaving the box out. He'd even looked at it on his way out of the bedroom to check on a noise (nothing more alarming than Shinji-kun, the Omen, attempting to play with Shinji-kun, also known as Fido the First, also known as a lizard who is very much still among the living), but he'd already had one foot in the hallway, and he'd only be gone for a few minutes.

It did only take a few minutes, but it clearly took Iskierka less time than that to get bored, because she's holding one of the pencils in her beak.

(He doesn't want to think about the fact she gets bored, now.)

"I'll trade you," he coaxes, plucking up a red pen from where it lies under a partially constructed collage of words on lined notepaper.

[unsheathedfromreality]

It is Paul's own fault for leaving the box out, so far as Iskierka is concerned. If he hadn't intended to give her all these delightful toys (she had been so attracted to them only a week before, prior to waking, that they must be the epitome of playthings) then he shouldn't have left them where she could find them.

Neglecting that a leshonka's sight couldn't be foiled by a box that existed in only three dimensions. He was doomed whatever he did.

She flirts her antennae at him as he calls her name, tipping her head so far over it becomes a pressing need to pass the pencil from beak to forefeet. The pen is a greater prize, brighter in color and more intricate within, but she saw the pencil first... She considers several seconds, before stretching her neck forth with her beak gaped wide.

Give it here and she'll consider it.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul bestows the pen with one hand and deftly plucks the pencil from her clasping feet with the other, because if anyone should understand the binding nature of an offer accepted, it's her. Iskierka, a name offered up without prompting, scattered across the mouths and eyes of all and sundry acquaintances.

He rolls the pencil between his fingers, inspecting it intently, and finding it unchanged, he lets out a soft breath.

"I'm not angry with you," he says, mildly, folding himself into a knee-clasped ball on the hard wooden chair, "But I'd prefer you not touch these."

His thumbnail fits into a soft, curved dent just below the metal ferrule that binds the eroded eraser to the whittled down body.

"The more people who handle something, the more difficult the signatures are to read," he tells her, in the quiet, informational tone he uses to tell Gideon and Harrowhark about different kinds of animals, or Kaworu about human cultural rites. "That's called psychometry. Did you know that? I didn't, before."

[unsheathedfromreality]

The pen's accepted with grudging good grace, and so's the abrupt removal of her the pencil from her grasp. Paul is not wrong: While she'd had little, birdy designs on keeping both treasures (at least for a moment), her oversoul knows better than to renege on a fair bargain. She settles back with the pen in her beak and watches him--listens to him explain himself.

There is a grief here; she'd heard about it before waking, or sensed it, something. The absence of someone Paul needed--an absence not ameliorated by an Omen lurking about like an unshriven ghost. This, her Sleeper would say, is a species of mourning--this: I'd prefer you not touch these.

She sets the pen down and walks over to these, to the box of pencils that bear no signatures for her. She looks at them through the box with her head cocked, then looks back up at Paul, and through him.

Then, clearly, shakes her head. She hadn't known all that. no. comes a feeling, to add to the gesture. Then no. again, on the verge of a question, as she waves a forefoot at the box and projects an image of her (or anyone) taking ??any?? of its contents out.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul lifts his thumb from the divot of someone else's nail, where it had dug in under the flash of some insight into the nature of Darkblood particulate dissolution. He leans across the desk and puts the pencil back with its fellows, then brushes his loosely curled knuckles over Iskierka's head.

"No," he tells her, shaking his head, which is a funny little echo, if he thinks about it. "There's nothing in there anyone needs. It's why I keep the notes in another box. He wouldn't have wanted those not to be used. But you wouldn't want those for anything but a nest, would you?"

"I know it's stupid," Paul says, small and quiet, "I can't read them. I'm not a necromancer. I keep thinking I should give them to Harrowhark, if she wants them. But I don't know if that's something they do. I don't know how they mourn each other. I don't even know if we should, because they already did, once, and - maybe he'll come back."

Paul pauses. He breathes in the pause, slow and steady. He drifts on the surface of his thoughts like cut flowers in a clear bowl of water, brushed this way and that by microcurrents of air.

"Did you know that ghosts can haunt the things that killed them?" Paul closes his eyes. He sets his forehead against his knees. He does not think about a pair of drowned swords. He does not think about a pair of broken glasses. He does not think about an empty yurt and a cold fire.

"Is that why you're here?"

[unsheathedfromreality]

She lifts her head into the friendly touch, antennae folding back like a cat's ears as his hand passes over them. maybe. comes the notion, answer to the thought she'd use someone else's notes--someone else's mementos mori--as a nest. It doesn't feel right. What does is the image that follows: her couchant on the pencil box to keep anyone else from touching it. It's as good a resting place as any.

She settles beside instead of on top of it now, folding her legs beneath her and tipping her head up to watch Paul's face as he speaks to her. This isn't how she listened prior to waking, that slow and listless thing that was almost more an instinct to follow sound; she comprehends, dipping her beak now and again in acknowledgement and spinning out a slender thread of presence, attention.

Was she here to haunt him? no. It's becoming her refrain. She sends more after it: Paul did not kill her Sleeper/she is here because she wants to be/she is here because she ??adores?? him and Kaworu. Higher questions about proper acts of grief and the distribution of a man's belongings are largely beyond her grasp, though you should give them to Harrowhark echoes back along the line. Notes are meant to be used, not kept--if the principle applies to hers, it must apply universally.

[terriblepurpose]

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?"

[unsheathedfromreality]

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.

[terriblepurpose]

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.