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]

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.