deercountry | o5 . bone house mingle!

[ He sees her balk as they reach the edge of the property. The stone wall around its edge is a crumbling ruin; the skeletons of batcats stand guard at every corner, like particularly weird statuary. He at least has the good sense not to have the skeleton servants open the door: he does that the old-fashioned way, and leads her into a marble foyer patched with whorls of bone. ]

Home sweet home.

[It's like some kind of haunted mansion or something out of an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, and Willow can't help but be taken a little aback at the sight of the house, guarded by weird skeletal... are those gargoyles? Cat gargoyles? With wings?

What.

She glances at him, but he doesn't seem to think anything is even remotely amiss, so apparently this is just a perfectly normal state of affairs. She follows him inside, and it's clear from the patches in the marble that her friend, this Captain/Cleric/Teacher - whatever, has some very specific, very unusual decorative tastes.]

Huh... There's, um, kind of a lot of bone... around here, isn't there?

[It's late. Probably past 1 A.M. or so. The kids when to bed awhile ago, still recovering from being pulled from the ocean to regain their form or just... all the shit they've been dealing with. It's been a lot to say the least.

Suddenly loud thud upstairs, just outside the dining hall and then... nothing else. If the kids were causing mischief then it's never limited to a single incident. It's a series to cacophony of loud banging, depending on what's happening and who is the instigator.

If Jod goes to investigate, he'll find Kaworu collapsed on the ground, just outside of his room and in-front of the stairs. He's sweaty, like he's got a fever, the back of his pajamas is sticking to the back of his shirt. There's puddle of salt water in the corner.]

[ It turns out God does not have self-control, actually, or perhaps that comedic timing rules above all His holy laws.

A skeleton clatters around the corner. It bows to Willow, politely, and then clatters off down the hall. John says, without hurry or concern: ]

I just think they're neat.

[Willow stares as the skeleton comes around the corner. Yeah. Yeah, this guy definitely has a thing for bones all right.

She's not sure what she expects it to do, but bowing is not it. It takes a moment for her to decide how to respond, but she doesn't want to be rude, so she gives it a little wave and watches as it carries on... wherever it's going.]

Uhhh... neat. Sure. I guess that's... an opinion. Are they a - a common thing here?

[The house is strange, and a little creepy, between the weird skeletons perched on the roof, and the less weird, but disturbingly more human looking skeletons that act as servants on the inside. It's fine, it's all fine - this is all apparently perfectly a perfectly normal state of affairs for this house, even if it seems anything but normal.

Crawling out of the ocean, and figuring out how to be human again makes for a long, exhausting day, so Willow excuses herself fairly early to go get some much needed rest. She settles into the bed in the guestroom and pulls the blankets over her head and before she's even completely settled, she's fast asleep.

In happens in the space of moments. One second, she's closing her eyes, and the next she's reopening them, and she's on the floor, low to the ground, watching herself sleep from outside her own body. It's the most bizarre sensation, and she's not sure how to process it. Some kind of weird blood magic thing? Does she astral project herself now when she sleeps? She looks down at herself and yelps in alarm when she sees she has not hands, or feet, but paws.

Is it a dream guide thing? She doesn't think so - it doesn't feel like December when she took on Puck's form with him riding along instinctively as though they were one. She can't even feel Puck right now at all- if he even still exists in this world at all.

She runs to the door and jumps up on it to try to push it open with her paws, but it's to no avail. She paws at the round doorknob, but without proper fingers or a thumb, she can't grasp it to make it turn. She throws her furry body against the door with a resounding thud, and as soon as one of the skeletons passing by pushes it open, she bursts through, knocking the thing over with a clatter, and looks around frantically. Where is everyone? Surely one of the other people in this house have an explanation for this.]

A body crawls out of the reeking, gore-slicked sea. Broken black armor covers it everywhere except for the slippery, pale caul wrapped around its head, a thin membrane it tears off with its nails and leaves to dissolve into iridescent foam in the shallows. From a great distance, a self-watching-self observes its progress up the shore, its slow rise to carefully set feet. The way it opens an unslit hand and contemplates the thing it has brought with it, out of the cold, deep places where this body had dreamed.

The wreckage of a canvas tent is where the body curls up, knees tucked to chest, sitting underneath a black-blood stained shred of cloth still hanging limply from a snapped pole like the battle standard of a vanquished army. It faces out to the sea it came from in the drowning light just after the setting of the sun, the polluted waters shimmering with strange refractions of unspeakable colors.

Everyone is reborn new, their blood purified, their hearts husked. The self-inside-self looks at the thing in its (his) hand, barbed and fission-white.

(He's not coming back.)

As the last traces of day fade from the sky, a radiant emanation blooms on the sand, soft, smeared arcs of light bent around the huddled, dreaming self. Buried shrapnel pulls itself from the sand in a shivering ring under this false aurora, each jagged tip pointed inexorably inwards.

Edited 2022-03-03 01:42 (UTC)

[Faith's been having a... difficult time ever since the Leviathan fight. She hasn't been fighting monsters, out of fear of the state she'll put herself in if she leans into the rage that came with everything that happened. (Out of fear of sinking her teeth into the veins of the beast and drinking her fill.)

Dr Bones, as she's decided to call him, did make an offer for her to come beat the shit out of some skeletons, and that's sounding more and more appealing at the moment, so she drops by.

She can be spotted in the hallway, hands in the pockets of her leather duster, looking at all the extremely over the top décor with faint amusement. She's not actually sure who's living here at the moment.]

[In spite of the creep factor that comes with staying in a house where necromancy is a perfectly normal practice, it hasn't been a terrible place to recover. It feels safe enough, and she's even getting used to the sounds of skeletons clattering about, looking after the place.

What she doesn't expect is to come out of the guestroom where she's been recovering to find Faith in the hall. Particularly since she had no idea the Slayer was in Trench to begin with.

The last time Willow laid eyes on Faith was back in Sunnydale when she Freaky Friday'd Buffy, and who knows what the last thing she knows from home is. She is abundantly cautious when she finally manages to find her voice to speak up.]

Uhhh... Faith? What - what're you doing here?

[In contrast, the last time Faith laid eyes on Willow she happened to be dead. So when she just comes out the door of one of the guest rooms in this extremely shady man's house, she feels like she's about to jump out of her skin.

She does, in fact, jump. Visibly. The look in her eyes is something like shock and guilt and obviously, a flash of anger.]

Jesus, Will. Don't fuckin'...

You didn't think to tell us you came back to life? What are you doing here?

[ He takes pity. As he waves her along towards the sitting room, he says: ]

Not terribly. But things run a bit differently, where I'm from. Necromancy isn't a spooky little corner of black magic; necromancy is magic. It's the only kind we've got. I could lay out the schools and the ethics if you wanted to hear them, but I think we have more pressing topics to cover.

[ He waves her to his couch, which is old and ornate and faded. ]

There are a few other necromancers in town. No one you need to worry about. Should I make tea?

[ The convenient thing about being God— even here, getting smacked down by bigger squid every other day— is that one generally doesn't need to walk upstairs to investigate a mysterious thump. He has a peripheral awareness of every body in the household. When he bothers to shift his attention, he can get a sense of how dire a situation is.

Dire is a big word for a kid who isn't actively dying, but he can parse the flutter of distressed breathing, the contractions of an unhappy digestive system— the hallmarks of somebody puking and being miserable. Downstairs, God rises from the chair in his study.

A skeleton clatters along upstairs to clean the saltwater. Behind it, walking slow and calm, is God. ]

Still queasy?

[ He comes to a stop beside the curled-up little body on the floor, and there he crouches to touch a gentle hand to Kaworu's shoulder. ]

For the second time, or the hundredth: across the sand walks God.

He looks no different than he had in that maelstrom of sea life and gore. He makes his way down the beach with the same quiet, steady pace. The sand shivers, magnetized, beneath his feet; unnatural colors lick up along his simple black clothing. He keeps walking.

Paul is dangerous. This is a fact he knows to his core, with a dispassionate sort of interest like a man taking inventory; and with the deeper thrill of a catching, unexpected pain. Paul is dangerous to him: that's the novelty, that's the miracle. It isn't coincidence. This is the fistfight. God is a piece on someone else's board.

He pushes through the ring of shivering shrapnel-bits with the calm resolution of a man wading into a river. At the center is a Paul-shaped thing with horrible eyes, curled small and wet and bony beneath the ripped skin of a tent.

[The boy's eyes (and ~~eyes~~) slowly drag from looking at the floor to up at God as though the effort is greatly costly.

It's hard to remember how to move them properly. Hard to remember to move his body within a single space within a single plane of existence. It's not only his stomach but his entire existence is unsettled and havering. He once had a thousand eyes and a thousand bodies and moved them across thousands of places and times all at once. Now he's collapsed to a single point and pulled upwards out of the crushing depth. (Those weren't his eyes. That wasn't his soul.)

He manages a weak nod.]

[Faith visibly startles, and Willow steps back both to give them each a little more space and in part thanks to the flash of anger in her eyes. Her words give her pause, though.

Faith knows she was dead, so clearly, she is not a brand new arrival to the town, and that look in her eyes is... what? Was she actually upset that Willow was dead? That's new, and completely unexpected.]

The guy who lives here - The Captain, Cleric, Teacher - whatever you want to call him, I guess. He, uh, helped me when I came back. He brought me here to recover. It's not that I didn't want to tell everyone I was back, it was just...

[She shifts, clearly uncomfortable. Admitting to Faith in particular that she doesn't remember Trench, including some very key, very important points isn't easy at all. Although perhaps this is the best way to get help finding her way back home.]

I didn't know how to get in touch with anyone - and I, uh... kinda - I mean, I don't - I don't really remember where I'm supposed to be - like, where the house is...

[It's a lot to absorb, the idea of a world where necromancy isn't just a branch of magic, but it's the only magic, and apparently perfectly acceptable too. She of course has questions as to the ethics of it in his world, but as he has said, it's not really the time for that.

She lets him usher her into the sitting room and settles in on the couch, resting her elbows on her knees when he admits that he's not the only necromancer in town, but assures her she the others aren't anything to be concerned about.

Of course there are other necromancers. Why wouldn't there be necromancers in the world beyond the Flesh Door?]

Yeah, we can talk the ethics of your magic another time, maybe. I guess you probably already know I can do magic too - just not... that kind of magic. But yeah, some tea would be great. Thank you.

[Faith feels something tighten in her throat, and if Willow is surprised by the slightest flash of grief and guilt for allowing this to happen, she'll be shocked when they're at the forefront.

Of course. They're starting at square one, then. She stuffs her hands in her pockets, swallowing the bitter lump in her throat.]

...You don't remember anything about this place or anything that happened here, then?

I can - [She lets out a sigh.] I know where your place is. I can take you there.

Cherenkov blue glows over Paul's folded arms, his face half-hidden against them as he stares blankly out at the dark horizon. He doesn't stir, not even to look up, motionless except for the fitful drifting of salt-stiff curls across his face in the sea-wind. The tooth juts backward from his left hand, held loosely along his upper arm as if forgotten, or meaningless.

It's the other lights that move. As God approaches, the pulsing of their half-real orbits accelerates and sharpens, plasma-lambent halos spinning out from an invisible central line that runs straight through the still thing on the sand. A scattering of unseeable lights brush across and through God's skin, the type that could be caught, ghost-images in silver, to show his holy bones.

Ten thousand disharmonious voices lashed together to mimic only one, drowned and distant: "What took you so long?"

It should be dark in the kitchen. The dawn is still buried below the horizon, the lights inside dowsed. There isn't even the dull red illumination of heat on the stovetop coils, or in the guts of the oven.

What there is, instead, is a pale impossibility: a localized aurora, a sheen of ionized particles drifting in slow blue-white, half-real ribbons around the black-clad figure sitting at the kitchen island with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A starker blue radiates from his eyes into the cool darkness of the room, shining out like the beacon of a lighthouse as he looks at nothing in particular. Besides the rise and fall of his even breath, he's motionless.

Paul hears footsteps. He straightens his back. He doesn't turn to the door.

(She told him to stay away. He should have. No matter where he looks in the black seas of the coming moments, he still can't find what to say to her to make that right.)

"Gideon," he says, with a hundred strangers' tongues, (with a hundred strangers' empty hearts, with a hundred strangers' distance), "It's me."

"Don't be afraid."

Edited 2022-03-05 18:10 (UTC)

The first few days

[The day after Kaworu arrives in the bone mansion and the afformented "salt water dinner incident", he almost completely vanishes, unable to do nothing more than sleep as his soul tries to readjust to the waking world.

Afterwards, he seems little more than Paul's shadow, only following and doing what the older boy tells him. He moves slowly, awkwardly as though he struggles to navigate his body within a space. There's a struggle to say upright, weak on feet like a newborn foal.

Currently, he's sitting on the couch where Paul deposited him, gentle running his hand down the back of a giant lizard that's sitting next to him with its head on the boy's lap. He seems more aware of what's going on when his fingers brush the lizard's skin and then like he starts to slip away when the contact vanishes. He coughs wetly and sea water, with a haunted radiance, drips down his hand.

If someone enters the room, he'll slowly turn towards you, like he has to exert great force simply to turn his head and raise his eyes. He blinks. Is that Paul? No...]

Who are...?

Later days

[After a few sessions with Teacher, Kaworu begins to resurface as a person. He no longer sleeps all day or follows Paul around. Instead, he explores the house with a playful curiosity, asking everyone what they're doing at all times, devising ways to help Paul climb onto the roof of the building, practicing his piano playing and more...

Then the pollen sets in. Suddenly, his nose and eyes are leaking all the time even though he's not crying and constant sneezing interrupts nearly everything he does. A constant state of miserable itchiness.

So, like any normal angel trapped in a human's body who has never experience hay fever before: he collapses onto the floor in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a box of tissues and sniffling extremely dramatically so everyone CAN PLEASE be aware that he's miserable.]

I hate this. Just... throw me back into the ocean. This is worse than death.

[He caps that thought by blowing his nose extremely loudly.]

[Willow shakes her head and sighs. There's no sense in lying about it, and she's a terrible liar anyway.]

The last thing I remember was going out into the ocean to come here in the first place. I mean, I've heard I've been here for awhile, but...

[She shrugs a little. It's all a blank after that.]

It'll come back, I think? It happened sometimes to people in Deerington too, and I guess... De-squidding? [Unsquidding? What even is the right term here?] Side effects wear off after awhile too. Most of it's already worn off.

[She nods at the offer - as much as every instinct is screaming at her that trusting Faith is not a safe plan, it feels like her best chance to get back where she belongs, and she does miss her housemates.]

Yeah - if you know where I live, that'd be great. Thanks.

Edited 2022-03-06 00:23 (UTC)

[ He lets it go, and leaves her to settle there as he goes to prepare the tea. When the kettle is set, he returns and drops into a musty old chair across from her. ]

So. Do you want the recap now, or after you've rested?

o5 . bone house mingle!

Late February; Willow, Gideon, Harrow.

Late February; Willow, Gideon, Harrow; Wolfwalking.

Early March; Kaworu.

Early March; Paul.

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The Soul Bends

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March 1st

Early March; Faith & OTA

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March 2nd; Gideon

OTA- Early March

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