deercountry | Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Who: Paul Atreides and all his CR
What: Throwing everyone’s favorite Duke a surprise birthday party
When: Forwarded dated to April 1st
Where: Bone House in Gaze

Content Warnings: Drinking, underage drinking, drugs (both fictional and not), drawings of space worms, skeletons, will add further warnings if necessary

When you arrive at the house in Gaze, (affectionately known as Bone House), a skeleton will open the door and offer to take your coat if you have one. No need to take your shoes off or anything!

The large house has been decorated with black streamers and confetti. In the entryway and hung on the railing to the second floor that overlooks the entrance to the great room are large banners that say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL” (though one looks like it used to say “Jaune” but was just painted over? Whatever).

In the Living Room, there is a large board and various colored markers for people to write messages to the birthday boy. There is also a table full of bottled water and various couches, chairs, and beanbags to collapse into if the party gets to be too much and one needs a quiet place to rest or a place to chill if you’ve imbibed too much… well, whatever you had.

It is also where all the food and drinks are.

There’s an extremely large charcuterie board with the usual meats, cheeses, and olives as well as an extremely eccentric collection of snacks ranging from individual sized Cheez-it bags, to humungous bags of Doritos and salty chips, as well as nearly every kind of Oreo one can imagine.

There are also various cakes, all angel food. Some are misshapen, some have an attempt at being frosted with whipped cream and fruit, one even says “Happy Birthday Ka-” before that was hastily covered with a bunch of strawberries jammed really close together.

At the island, a skeleton is playing bartender. Surprisingly, it can seem to take and understand individual orders, but there’s always a constant flow of tequila shots being made and sent out to the great hall to be served by another skeleton.

And, no, of course it’s not going to check your age to see if you’re legal. It’s a skeleton. Why would it care?

The Great Hall is the center of activity and where everyone is encouraged to mingle and have fun. There is a skeleton on the grand piano in the corner gleefully playing piano covers of the hits from the Shrek Soundtrack with the occasional cover of “DaRude’s Sandstorm” when it has another one to help out.

In another corner, on huge piece of paper that spans nearly 6ft wide and 8ft tall is drawing of an Arrakis sandworm and it’s giant maw. The game is Pin the Tooth on the Sandworm and it’s… very easy… because the worm maw is most of the board. Even if the skeleton spins you as you’re blindfolded, it’s pretty hard to lose. If you manage to do it, which is likely, the skeleton running the game will award you a tequila shot! If you lose, the skeletons will award you a tequila shot (but it’s rail).

(It’s a drinking game, isn’t the point to drink?)

There’s also a table that has many candelabras on it, numbering up to seventeen. They’re still lit and burning even though there is a sign that says “make a wish!” even though it almost looks like a shrine for the dead.

…It’s maybe clear that the concept of “birthday candles” was greatly misunderstood.

There is also a skeleton dealing out small doses of “Spice”, a psychoactive drug straight outta the Duneverse. However, you must check in with this Skeleton to get a dose. There will be no “permanently melting your brain with ancestral memories” at this party!

Teacher’s/God’s/Jod’s/The Emperor Undying’s study, adjacent to the main hall, is closed and locked. Though, the lock is fairly easy to break if someone really wanted to get in. There’s not even skeletons guarding.

That said, many things are warded with eerie runes of blood and bone.

So, fuck around and find out.

The upstairs is generally off limits. Party goers can climb up the stairs, and it’s encouraged if they want to look over the Great Room from above, but all of the bedrooms are carefully guarded by more skeletons who will SCREAM VERY LOUDLY if you try to enter and will become hostile if done by force.

Of course, this won’t happen if you are with someone who lives in the house.

Enjoy the party! Mingle away!

((ooc: if you have any questions or anything, please hit me up at

worldtype)) or via PM.))

Birthday Board | At the Party | The Morning After | IC Party Games | Spice Dealer

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"I felt it," he insists, as much as one can when floating in bliss. He flicks through memories in a haze. An excuse made for someone who caused pain, a panicked grip, a shoulder soaked in tears, a chorus of voices. Context is not quite there, but the feeling is.

"Despite everything." A dark, foreboding intensity, followed by twisted pain, anger, and grief. It's not his, just the memory of all that on someone else's face. More than one person. More than one friend forgot who they were and lost themselves.

"I feel it now." The hairpins slip out of his hands. It's so bright. The colors are too much. There are voices where there weren't before. He has to protect Paul from it, shield the flame of his benevolence from going out, or maybe save himself from drowning. He wraps his arms around his head without smothering.

The sense of being engulfed is more than physical. The well of intensity that opens inside Midoriya is of a kind Paul knows well, and for a moment, he struggles to define a boundary between them. For a moment, it feels like being swallowed.

But Paul is learning how to swim in these black waves. He doesn't pull away. He reaches back, slipping his own arms around Midoriya's back and stabilizing him against Paul's seated form. This is the type of thing that would send traceries of sharp alarm through him; that maybe should be now, even as he finds himself still calm.

"I've got you," he assures him, unhesitant and steady, "I'm here. We're all right."

He soars high and plummets far into the deep. He feels everything and nothing, but Paul anchors Midoriya against him. He finds the shape of him and his calm. He doesn't dare try to delineate himself beyond this press. He traces the rest of the world--the room, the couch--from Paul instead. He follows Paul's breathing, so loud like everything else, but he can do nothing about his own shattered equilibrium. The old words of his mentor, echoed in Paul's, come back to him: Everything's all right. Why? Because I am here.

"You've saved me. Then grow..." he tries to invite Paul, who has been so kind to him, to that giving place. Midoriya doesn't feel himself go limp, eyes open and unseeing. In a swirling void, he's standing in a floating corner of a blown-apart room. He faces a semicircle of people seated in high-backed chairs. He's cold sober. Ephemeral swathes of the same inky smoke his Omen wears form half his body. He can't walk because he doesn't have legs. He struggles to speak because he doesn't have a mouth.

His voice is muffled and unintelligible at first. "I never thought I'd see you again..." he can be heard muttering in the waking world, soft and grieving. Then his voice turns brisk but respectful as he speaks with others: "It was an accident, but I did train for it... Uh, where does all that come out of, exactly? ...No records from that time..." And in a guttural urgency, "...is here... Destroys anything that..."

Minutes feel like hours. Then this ill-advised peak tapers off. Midoriya has a young, healthy metabolism. His eyes move and focus. He's no longer standing and cold. He's warm against another pulse and still riding on a spice wind. Giddiness, confusion, heartache, and a devastating burden crash onto him in waves. He can't tell one from the other. He takes a deep breath. His face is wet.

Paul is still there, but the calm that suffused him is not. When Midoriya takes a deep breath Paul takes one in unison, perfectly synced, his fingers shifting from the medial points of energetic resonance on Midoriya's face - browbone, upper jaw, low jaw - to the pulse point on his throat. Even in the throes of spice, his touch is steady and practiced.

This has involved shifting Midoriya back on the couch and looming over him, their positions reversed. Paul sinks back on his heels and looks his friend over head to toe, drawing his hand away from the side of his neck only after he's satisfied by the rhythms holding strong there.

"Midoriya-kun?" Paul asks, softly, his eyes wide and his pupils wide within them. His already smudged eyeliner is beyond repair, his hair newly tacked to his forehead with sweat. He wonders if Midoriya can feel the lingering traces of Paul's own racing heart.

"Who were you talking to?"

They breathe together in a rise and fall. His eyelids flutter in a leveling daze. Something is at his back--the couch. He's lying now, watching Paul over him touch his neck in a specific place. Vitals. Yes, he was out, away being burdened with a million thoughts. It must have looked strange to Paul, who is now also changed. Midoriya is sorry. This was not what he expected. In retrospect, he should have allowed for the possibility. One For All was always uncharted territory... This has happened before; he can explain it away.

It would be better if Paul had said nothing at all.

This intake of breath is sharp and sudden with comprehending fear. His eyes widen to bare their tiny red capillaries. The heightened awareness that was so blissful before betrays him. He can feel every panicked beat, every chilled extremity, every curl of his hair crushed against the cushion nevertheless standing on end. The tears and sweat on his face freeze, and he trembles palely. The experience itself was fine. That's not what terrifies him. He asks, low and desperate,

"What did I say?"

"Nothing that anyone else heard," Paul says first, and he finds his hand has flattened on Midoriya's sternum through some reflex operating at a half-conscious level that escaped his notice. As painful self-consciousness sweeps through Midoriya, it finds its mirror in Paul, who for one brief, buried half-second of strangling phantom threat looks at the base of his throat -

There is no threat. There is no danger. Paul presses down only lightly. His other hand remains braced on the couch.

"It sounded like you were making report," he goes on, all of that having taken less time than the breath he took between sentences, "Do you want me to repeat it?"

He had been paying attention, which is synonymous with committing to memory. He could speak it back to Midoriya like a recording now, or tomorrow, or in a month; it would make no difference. As Midoriya's heart thunders under Paul's hand and frissons of spice dance through his blood like auroras, Paul is poised and intent, waiting to see what that will mean to his friend.

His chest trembles with shallow breaths under Paul's hand. Paul's eyes go to his throat, looking at vitals--or something else. Paul is--on edge, ready, catching it off him and feeding it back. Midoriya knows that can happen even without boundaries of self muddled by spice.

Calm down, Midoriya tells himself, trying to break the spell his instincts put him under. Move. There is no danger. Nevertheless, he wants to rise, curl up, and hide his exposed mortal points from the world--head, neck, heart and lung, arterial lifelines, he's studied well--to tell his body that he is safe.

Paul, mistrustful, full of unsaid things, could be ensnared in something he shouldn't. Midoriya is an honest person. There's always the chance that one day he might have to be completely honest... but he wants to protect Paul more. This gives him purpose, other than the one for which his power was passed down. This frees him.

"Yes," he breathes, barely audible. "Very quietly." He lifts a hand, slow but not shaking now, and attempts to complete a different circuit of emotion, one that is made of a gentle but secure curl of his fingers over Paul's.

Shame curls inside the pit of his gut as gently as Midoriya's hand over his on his chest. Paul nods, eyes shaded down, and brings himself close to Midoriya's ear after a quick, merciless inspection of their surroundings, even though he knows they're as relatively isolated as they were before. He may have been waving people away - emphatically.

Then shame fades, along with most other feeling, as Paul slips into the recall-response loop that comes so easily to him he forgets, in his willingness to accommodate a friend, will be a novelty in a moment that calls for familiarity.

When he opens his mouth to repeat back Midoriya's words precisely as he heard them, Paul's mind hums as cleanly and automatically as clockwork, thoughts transformed to mechanical algorithms. It's as if a pond's surface skimmed over all at once with thin, glass-clear ice - nothing unpleasant, but unexpected, and changed.

"That's all," Paul says, sitting back on his heels, and the ice thaws back into lightly wind-frothed waves.

His fingers twitch tighter for a moment. No need to be ashamed. He's sorry he unsettled him--Paul, his dear friend, who, if he went for his throat, would be slammed across the room without hesitation.

He remembers--brief in the heat of training, longer in meditative contemplations--visualizing embarrassingly ordinary things like a door unlocking or an egg not exploding in a microwave. He knows the feeling--or lack thereof--of learning to use his Quirk automatically without thought.

It's not the same. His Quirk is will and passion accumulated and very carefully released. It's not a quartz movement coolly ticking away his own words and intonations back at him. It would be impressive, if Midoriya wasn't wishing those perfectly recalled words could instead be abandoned in the void. He gazes past Paul's hair at the ceiling. He keeps his hand to remind himself he's really there.

"Thank you," he murmurs when his friend's mind unflattens from its odd, mirror-like state and he can see his face again. He picks over the disjointed words and contextless emotions he let slip, from the view of an outsider. Snippets of one side of a conversation churn up what is still fresh in his mind: grief, burden, and a threat--not present, but known. He finds Paul's eyes. His own are soft with a gentle affection.

"If you don't want to die instantly... or even if you want to keep your limbs... you won't tell anyone about this." The words by themselves would be a threat in someone else's mouth, but they are only fact, accompanied by his usual incandescent kindness and the returning warmth of his hand.

Midoriya's words shiver through sensitivities of threat apprehension strung through Paul like spiderweb, each one decoded, processed, and encoded again in the space of a near-instant. It's a flare of perceptual awareness that skims Paul's eyes over pale (but not blue) as long as it lasts, dissipating into untroubled calm.

"Not a word," Paul says, solemnly, reversing his hand to grip Midoriya's scarred one, "By our friendship and my House."

Then he smiles, as bright and fleeting as the Paleblood in his eyes, but (he hopes) more reassuring. His breathing shifts back to a less measured rhythm as he releases Midoriya's hand to clasp his shoulder instead, letting himself sink sideways and forward against the couch in the wake of all of that.

"It's a good thing I was here," he tells Midoriya, in slightly shaken relief, as if the looming possibility of 'dying instantly' or 'losing limbs' never came up at all, "I don't think you should have any more spice."

He tightens his grip in response as Paul does, scars pulling slightly against familiar hilt-callouses. The warning is done. Saying any more would be too much information to be safe. His job is done, and if Paul would like his hand back... Midoriya tends not to keep comfort for himself. He can't smile back, but he can answer numbly,

"I didn't want to take it alone." However inadvisable it all is in retrospect, he was always going to have a safety net somewhere. "I knew I'd be safe with you."

He presses his lips and eyes tight, breathing in. He tries, with the natural cycle of taking good air in and expelling bad, to purge his unease. Something else replaces it. It's all so much, so much, and he's just one person, hardly worthy, carrying the hopes and efforts of several others.

He allows himself a rare, brief indulgence in shackling self-pity. It trickles from his eyes, retraces the wetness on his cheeks, and flows back into his hair. Then his face smooths over, and it passes in the space of a few sighs. His eyes fall open again.

"What was supposed to happen?" he asks in a small voice.

Paul judges that the moment of potential toppling crisis has passed. As such, he twists around on the couch to slip his free arm around Midoriya's shoulder in what he hopes will be taken as comforting solidarity.

"There's no thing that's 'supposed to' happen," he says, gently, not letting his attention fall to the gleaming dampness still on Midoriya's face. "I've heard of things like this before. You didn't do anything wrong."

That's not exactly what Midoriya asked. It may not be exactly what he meant, either, but it feels important to Paul to make sure that's established. They both like getting things right. They like having done what they were supposed to do, and if he knows Midoriya, there's a risk of him imagining he's spoiled something. And he says he knows he's safe with Paul, and Paul wants that to be true in every way it can be.

"It's just meant to make you feel good. If it didn't, that's the spice's fault, if you think about it. It should know better than to be unkind to you." That makes sense to Paul, in the moment.

"I am sorry for the trouble," he says anyway in a thick and slightly rueful voice. It wasn't what he expected. Midoriya accepts his own folly in it, but he doesn't dwell on it. One For All really is uncharted territory. He just wanted to know, in a lonely moment, what he missed out on--what other people have that he can't have.

He shifts and attempts to sit up more properly within Paul's arm. He can't say he agrees with Paul's assessment, but he does accept his sentiment. It does comfort him enough to mirror Paul with his own arm slipping around him. The heightened sensations of fabric, warmth, and the shape of his friend are a balm. Even the coolness of his tears is soothing, and he forgets to wipe them--not that he was ever particularly ashamed.

"What have you heard? What things?" he murmurs, looking at him with hazy disquiet.

"What trouble?" Paul asks, magnanimously, lifting his hand from Midoriya's shoulder just far enough to make a flicking dismissive gesture. Swept sand, he thinks, not remembering why.

"And just - stories. Any drug can be dangerous." It's a well-known fact where Paul comes from, as commonly understood as the dangers of fire. This of course means that many people ignore the risks anyway, plunging into reckless abandonment or the spiralling loop of misuse.

"Spice gives a specific kind of insight. Not everyone is meant to look into themselves in that way. That's not a reflection on them," Paul assures Midoriya, and now he's inventing. Under strict orthodoxy, it does reflect on them, and poorly. Those who are not masters of their own minds are unpredictable, and prone to be mastered by them.

But it's Midoriya tucked under Paul's arm, not some abstract stranger. He's trusted Paul with his secrets, with the keeping of his name. He's not pathological, not in any way Paul has ever sensed before that many voiced communication.

"You're all right." You're safe. "Don't get caught up in it."

"I see," he says levelly and feels the ripples settling. "I won't." He punctuates this with a slight squeeze to reassure Paul. His thoughts stroll quietly by, carrying what Paul has told him and his own knowledge, some of which he can't say.

Someone does a drug, has a bad trip, the usual. The only weird thing here is the Quirk passed to him, but he knew that anyway. He's not possessed or mentally ill either. One For All's collection of vestiges have always remained at the subconscious level of every wielder, including him. He's only had contact with these less-than-ghost imprints a few times. Midoriya has always had his own will.

"I am still sorry," he murmurs more quietly. "I freaked you out. I shouldn't have. I still feel high, but not as much now. It won't happen again."

"Midoriya-kun, I'll fight you if you keep talking like that," Paul says, with a boisterous cheerfulness not his own, "I swear on my House and my honor as an Atreides. It's fine. You're fine. You didn't do that on purpose, did you? No? So what are you apologizing for?"

Paul's universe is not one that's kind to any apparent deviation from the norm. For all their advancement in some areas, there are others they've regressed, whole arenas of thought Paul accepts implicitly because he's never been exposed to anything that would persuade him away from them. Illnesses of the mind are primarily viewed as either biological defects or moral faults, both of which should be overcome by force of discipline, and if Paul sometimes struggles to accept that, it's only another failing on his part.

(And if he finds himself, at times, pathological - that's a thought which has no place here.)

"How about I get us some more drinks, instead? Water or liquor, your choice. We may have some fruit powders left for the water, if you'd like that." When in doubt, Paul's found resorting to beverages a good trick.

Midoriya isn't in the habit of mentioning people not present by name--a subconscious regard for privacy--but someday he will have to tell Paul more about Kirishima, the gregarious yakiniku guy. For a moment, it seemed as though Paul was channeling his spirit.

He smiles and thumbs away his tears. Midoriya isn't prone to hiding and turning his emotions in on himself to save his dignity. His outpourings give him the superficial appearance of being weak. Anyone who knows him experiences the opposite. He has been uncommonly resilient since he learned, at the age of four, the world isn't fair, especially to people born like him. This makes him want, all the harder, to clutch his friends' hands when they shake, wrap them in kindness when a forlorn cloud strikes, and shield them from their fears.

He shifts, passing Paul a quick but grateful hug. (If he presses the tears he missed into his shirt, what of it?) He puts his hands out slightly when he stands, not for balance, but because the air is fascinating cotton. He admires colorful motes dancing on Paul's dark hair, and he makes his peace with the spice.

"Not actually looking to pass out again. Water's fine." He thinks, too, he'll go for a starchy snack rather than eldritch Tang.

The brief hug is returned firmly and warmly before Paul follows Midoriya's cue to stand. It's good to be on their feet, Paul thinks, even if his head performs an interesting series of acrobatics when he does rise from the couch. He counters this with an arm raising stretch over his head. It's good to be moving in a direction away from that tense, strange series of moments.

It is fine. Paul reminds himself of that as he slings an arm around Midoriya's shoulder again and proceeds with him to the kitchen, where water and possibly eldritch Tang await them.

"If you do, you can stay with us," Paul assures him, grandly, because they're still having fun - they're going to have fun, he's determined, until Midoriya forgets all about whatever has him so upset. He's always looking out for everyone else. Paul may not be as good at it as he is, but he's capable of this much: of closeness, of hospitality. Of a glass of water and secrets kept. These are the critical things in the world, at least for tonight.

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Birthday Party

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