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.

[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.]

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.]

[The last two days in February, Willow spends recovering from her deep sea adventure. The newness of being human again wears off slowly, but steadily, and finally the last of her wobbliness seems to disappear entirely. It ends up being replaced with a new problem, although at first she doesn't realize it's actually a problem and not just something weird happening in the house itself.

There's mushrooms of all different shapes, sizes, and colours imaginable and they seem spring up everywhere. It's not until she tries to brush one off a skeleton's shoulder, and it explodes into a shower of smaller, rainbow coloured mushrooms that seem to float through the air like dandelion fluff that it occurs to her that something just doesn't seem right. These don't behave like normal mushrooms.

She reaches for whoever's closest to try to get their attention as she watches the tiny fungi float through the air.]

Hey. Hey, you're seeing this too, right?

Semi-closed to whoever opens the door
Midoriya, known to some as the hero Deku, doesn't come over to people's homes uninvited. He is expected. A young man, high school age, short but solidly built, arrives at the door wearing a faded blue jacket hoodie and his backpack. He has the hood up over his dark green hair, which bears signs of damage and is in need of a trim. He wears a simple black cloth mask stretched over his lower face and neck. Facial coverings are sometimes a fashion statement among Trenchies, but it's unusual on Midoriya.

It's just a precaution. He remembers, a lifetime ago, when he and his friends snuck off to Kamino at night, and he crossed his arms in front of his face, comically trying and failing to be covert. He wishes he could ask his homeroom teacher for real tips now.

He's probably overthinking it. Just in case, he needs to ask a small favor of anyone he has met or will meet.

Sitting (OTA)
If the curtains are open, he sits out of view of the windows, politely occupying his square of space. The residents keep their shoes on ~~in this nightmarish dystopia of a house~~, but he removes his red sneakers unless told not to. He's pocketed his mask and unzipped the jacket worn over a plain black shirt.

His thick curls are scraggly and uncharacteristically coarse. There is still a sleepless roughness around his eyes. Despite receiving magical healing, a few scrapes mar his skin near the back of his jaw. His face is not twisted in Corrupted sadness like it was when the month changed over, but it is restful, serious, and worn. On the face of a person who lived his life looking at the world wide-eyed in wonder, surprise, and earnestness, it is a drastic change.

"I'd like to ask you a favor if that's all right," he says in a quieter version of his usual politeness. "It's a small one, but it can be easy to forget."

It's 3 AM, where are you? (OTA) cw: scars
Midoriya is standing silently in the dimly lit kitchen, a victim of a sleep schedule he ruined over multiple weeks. He's wearing his pajamas (T-shirt and basketball shorts) and a voluminous bedhead. The large, blotchy scar on his well-muscled upper arm and the ones on his hand are old ones from home. Since November, he's been covered in even more scars, but they pale next to his new ones, ragged slashes still redly fading.

He hopes to find a midnight snack without disturbing anyone. In his hand he examines a box labeled Cap'n Trench.

Illarion's Omen Iskierka--strange combination of bird and moth that she is--has been in and out of the House of God for much of March. She has left some of her notes lying about the place, heaped on tables or pinned to skeletons or tucked under pillows and couch cushions. Otherwise, she has been largely inert--crouched in Paul or Kaworu's room like a gargoyle, or drifting through the common areas upside-down or right-side-up with no more animation than a balloon.

Sometime in the last week of March that changes. She becomes far more animated, far more interested in the doings of the household, its comings and goings. Much of her time is still spent in ceaseless red-eyed watching, though she'll often whistle a query when someone's doing something particularly interesting: Will they tell her about it? More rarely, she might steal a pen or a button or a toy to relocate somewhere else in the house--or spend her time hanging upside-down from towels and draperies. Further woe betides anyone in the kitchen--Omens don't need to eat, but she'll expect a share of whatever they're fixing, if she happens to be lurking around. At least she sings prettily for her dinner.

Edited (language smoothing) 2022-03-19 06:20 (UTC)

There is a stranger outside of the Bone House.

While this itself might not seem unusual, the nature of the stranger was. A young lad with a mop of disheveled hair tied back into a little tail, wearing an orange flannel button-up and sunglasses in the afternoon light looked around for a moment--as if bemused by the number of intact skeletons rather than the bones themselves, before shrugging and knocking at the door.

Whomever answered would meet one (1) Oscar Pine, waving awkwardly with a nervous smile.

"Uh... Hi. I'm Oscar, and... Paul invited me over for dinner?"

Feeling awkward, he held up the package he brought, the rainbow icing on an 18 pack of cupcakes obvious though the window in the packaging.

"I brought cupcakes?"

... And himself, a not quite sixteen year old boy with the souls of hundreds attached to his in a conglomeration that was hard to define the individuals within.

Late February; Willow, Gideon, Harrow.

Late February; Willow, Gideon, Harrow; Wolfwalking.

Early March; Kaworu.

Early March; Paul.

Early March; Faith & OTA

March 2nd; Gideon

OTA- Early March

Backdated to March 1st or thereabouts