station72 | (open) catch all for downtime

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(open) catch all for downtime

CHARACTERS: Ilde
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Day 166 forward
SUMMARY: This is a catch all for the rest of downtime, whatever you want to put here please feel free to do so. I'm going to put a couple of prompts, but you don't have to follow them.
WARNINGS: Will update if needed.

EARTH.
Awake in the circle gardens, she can be found wandering barefoot in the kind of simple white smock they came to consciousness in. She checks on the plants as if visiting dear friends, first touching their stems in greeting, then bending down in the dirt to whisper to them. Every species is different, and there is no way that she knows them all, they are alien, collected from many worlds, but the best way to come to know them is to speak to them, is it not? She is all smiles, her presence in the garden like a mote of light, a warmth, that is easy to track as she moves throughout.

AIR.
Asleep in the circle gardens, she is not quite completely unconscious. It was unwise in the burned world to ever truly let down your guard. So perhaps it would be better to call her drowsing or daydreaming. She is listening to something that is not quite music, natural sounds that move through the encroachment and subsequent downpour of a rainstorm. She imagines it vividly, and should you choose to tap in alongside her daydreaming you too can feel the wet of the rain, see the many colorful birds taking shelter in the leaves of the garden... A soft whisper beneath the sounds of the rain is a poem that she memorized, the words winding like a trail of beautiful gems that lead to where she lies breathing peacefully in a secluded corner of the garden.

( Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash the Body whence the Life has died,
And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf,
By some not unfrequented Garden-side... )

FIRE. -- Wildcard training prompt.
She likes the concept of ranged weaponry. She rotates through them when she visits the range, sometimes a gun, sometimes bow and arrow, sometimes throwing knives. It pleases her, the careful and meticulous execution of aim and forethought.

WATER.
She has made it as far as sitting at the edge of the pool, her legs dangling over the edge. The sensation is interesting to her, not merely the feel of cool water, but the luxury of being able to sit here like this, to take her time. There is something sinister about this collection of beautiful clean water, an utter irrationality that is hard for her to identify. Something about all those years bathed in fire has made her frightened to quenched within this glittering pool. A sigh. She pushes herself off the edge abruptly and lets herself sink, her mind going blank with it, sinking into blackness. She stays under a long time before finally resurfacing, paddling her way with slow inelegance back to the edge, where she crosses her arms on the tile, head down, and tries not to the think.

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[ Sam was right... She likes this place, it is beautiful and serene, and she knows better than to think those plants do not require careful tending despite how immaculate they look. She had not imagined such a hobby for Cathaway, it intrigues her, soothes her somewhat from the feeling that is not fit for any of this. Only somewhat.

She frowns slightly at the way the woman greets her, confused by her words, her tone. Was she waiting for her? Does it matter? They are both here and there are things to be said, just as there had been things to say to the Prince. Quite different, however, between one and the other... ]

Yes. I must speak to you.

[ Must, or surely she would go mad, drowning in herself and all that has changed. ]

Do I belong here?

[Cathaway makes no move to rearrange herself at the edge of the pool, however she does pat the floor beside her - a clear indication that Ilde join her there. It is, perhaps, not as comfortable a place to sit as a chair or the lush green turf of the gardens, but it will do in the moment.]

You wouldn't be here if you didn't.

[It's as simple as that. If she weren't suitable, if she didn't belong, there would be no reason for her to be in this place - for the symbiote to have called to her, for the enemy to have found her and chased her here. She is where she is suitable.]

[ That was what Ilde had thought too, at first. She had no other logic for how she had ended up here, it was too grand a scheme to be an accident, but... She comes to sit down next to Cathaway, staring off at nothing. ]

I am different, from all of the others.

[ It was so obvious, even with Ren. ]

I am damaged. My brood is damaged. We spread it to everything we touch.

[ Even sharing their strong dysfunction, it did not entirely ease the sense of being so strange. ]

[She's glad for the company, however difficult. This place is quiet and as much as there is a sedate comfort to the pool and the lilies growing there, the task they present, it brings with it a sense of melancholy that is best avoided by the presence of the living.

Cathaway listens, as careful and attentive as she ever is, and offers her hand. It's an inert motion, no humming mental power behind it. Rather, she offers the simplicity of contact, some measure of comfort if Ilde wishes to take it.]

We would be nowhere if it weren't for the variety of life here. The differences between hosts is what makes us stronger as a group. Your weaknesses can be overcome by the strength of others, just as your strengths can make up for what others might lack. [She smiles, sympathetic and gentle.] One mind can poison others, but almost always only by an unwitting hand. That you're concerned is a good sign.

[ She turns her head to stare at Cathaway's hand. For a long time she had been touched by no one but Dreus... and now... She thinks of gently removing Ren's gloves, wrapping Angel up in her arms, holding Sam's hands through the throes of his prophecies, Steve's hand beside hers in the dirt of the garden.

A sigh, she takes the woman's hand although it is not quite with pleasure. ]

My strengths are of no use here.

Nonsense.

[Her hand is light, inert; Cathaway makes no motion to close her fingers around Ilde's. Rather she simply lets the girl's hand rest in hers, idle where her voice is firm - fervent, even. She has no patience for self-deprecation.]

Your strengths simply have yet to be applied where they're best suited. Don't pretend to tell us there is no economical use in a girl who appears soft but is capable of cutting. [Is is tacky to say that, given the exact circumstances of events on Avera-9? Perhaps.] Or a young woman who knows the natural world like her own hands? You simply must apply your talents more precisely, more strategically. Whether you know how to do that now is unimportant. There are people among you who might; use their expertise to direct your hand and in time you'll know how to do it on your own intuition.

[ She frowns down at where their palms touch, frustrated. It did not feel like self-deprecation. She felt inadequate to the situation, something which she kept to herself while asserting to those around her that she would not let them fail. It is what she does, soothes and shores up others, leaving her nothing much for herself besides the peace and lack of expectation of her plants. If only she could be left alone with them... but she knows they will send her out again. That her broodmates will grapple and suffer with their place in all of this and she will have to respond to it somehow, and now Angel has begun looking to her for comfort and advice as if she knows anything. Lonely. It's all very lonely. ]

You mistake me. The person I am is of no use here.

[ The pretty vestal whose only real calling was to exist, a coveted porcelain prize who moved peacefully through a landscape of death. A pet for Dreus to treat well, an outlet for whatever sense of decency lingered in his thoughts. She has never been a person of her own. They want her to think and act on her own intuition? Her intuition is to kill. Her intuition is to love no one. Her intuition is to tuck herself away where she can daily repair the cracks in herself.

She must be someone else now. Somehow grab onto the spark that brought here -- I am not yet ready to die -- despite the tenacious longing she has to be with her King, to be dead with her King, rather than a traitor who perhaps ran; or who perhaps fought for herself. She doesn't know what the line is between the two.

For a moment she thought she did, she began all this believing this is where she should be.

But the loneliness is yawning wide. ]

[There's an immediate response, an uncharitable and difficult one, but Cathaway holds it for a moment of consideration. It isn't the sort of thing said to ease pain, to be gentle or careful and most hosts would react poorly to the thing that springs to mind to say; but is Ilde most hosts? Does the unpleasantness of it outweigh the value of the truth?

No, she thinks. It doesn't.

Cathaway doesn't withdraw her hand, but her fingers are very light. If the girl wishes it, it would be easy to separate. She sighs - a warm exhale, heavy like work. When she speaks, it's with an attempt at gentleness - an expression of fondness. It's true that Ilde has some danger inherent in her, that there are things she might do to undermine their efforts as had happened on Avera-9, but the same could be said for any host (young or old). The same might be said for herself, couldn't it? It doesn't shake her resolve, doesn't mitigate her fondness. Ilde is unhappy, unsatisfied or unfulfilled and she takes no pleasure from it.]

It's true that the person you were has no use here. But the person you are now does. A plant cross-bred and transplanted can't be the creature it was born from. That is the reality of the situation. None of us are the people we once were, Ilde.

[Not her, not Cathaway, not any host or symbiote.]

Then who am I?

[ It is immediate, perhaps the underlying seed kernel by all this self-doubt and alienation. Unable to feel connection to the others because she has lost understanding of herself. Ilde sighs herself, her hand lifts away from Cathaway's not out of disdain but to rub the heel of it into one eye, pushing her messy curls out of her eyes. ]

I know that can't be answered.

[ Added quickly, an edge of sharpness, before it can be mistaken for a literal question, that was far too pathetic and she knows that. She thinks openly of Angel's face lit gently in a dark room, her questions about what it is to define herself for which had no answers. She thinks openly of Anakin's casual explanation of the self, as if such a troubled creature actually knew. ]

It has never mattered before, he loved me and that was all.

[ He. The shadow of a large man, muscular, terrifyingly graceful for his size and his power which radiated off of him like the sweltering mirage of the sun. He voice chants ugly things, echoing in the sunlit amphitheater of his palace. ]

[She can feel him - the dark shape of a presence like a miasma in the room: dark and horrible, huge and beautiful. It's a weight that tries to rest on her shoulders, the back of her neck. It tries to press her down, to supplicate herself before the shadow. To become substrate.

Cathaway lifts her chin. She straightens the line of her back. It is nothing. That shape, the heavy hand, that darkness that honed the edge of his love for this girl can't find her here.]

His love shaped you into the person who was suitable for this place. That you've been removed from him doesn't undo that; it doesn't change what he gave to you. You can't take water from soil once you've put it there, can you? It's there still in the foundation of what you will be. [A pause. Her hand remains between them, palm up and supplicated.] Forgive us; we don't know only the pieces of him and your world - what we saw in your dreams before you were hatched. Perhaps there's a way to do his love for you some honor, to give it some respect, while in this place?

[Preferably something that didn't involve significant loss of life, but given the circumstances? What little she knows of the man and Ilde's home? Perhaps such a thing is not possible. But if she wished it, Cathaway would happily arrange whatever she required.]

[ She is drawn in many different directions at the thought. Sometimes, quite often, she longs to be with him, to feel his hateful warmth against the back of her neck, to be a witness to his chaotic sermons, his wild orations. And then... not quite so often, she catches herself feeling quite bold. At peace with the culmination of his destiny, for she cannot imagine any other end than the foretold immolation when those creatures threatened their world. At peace with it, and greedy for her own destiny. She does not know if she was won this new opportunity through her grace, her virtue, her chastity or... if she has made a deal with a devil and is now on a slow spiral into her downfall.

She needs to know. She cannot bear to know. She remembers, vividly, what Sam had told her while in the throes of his trance: The burning man would not spare you. Your wake is catastrophe, Ilde Vilmaine, sacrificial virgin, eternal child of end of days, all you grow from the ashes of rot. End of line.

Her cheeks flush with the emotion of it, but in the heat of it all, the swirl of it, she knows what she wants. She knows what would bridge this gap for her, something selfish, and perhaps cruel, but... ]

I... Would like... [ Hesitance, rethinking the words, her true intensity, ] I want... I want the others to experience him. Just once.

[ To understand his immensity the way she does. Not in fractures, controlled and contained so as not to hurt anyone, merely... merely to make them understand. Not to question or pity. ]

[A dangerous exercise. But even so long on the Station, in this position and this form, there is a persistent belief to with the woman named Cathaway subscribes: that the truth is worth knowing. Not that the truth can't damage, that it is incapable of frightening or ruining or causing loss - no, all those things are possible. But all those things must happen in the pursuit of knowledge. Truth builds security, strips them to a place where all are required to either find stability or be swallowed by it.

So:]

We see no harm in such a thing. Would you like us to teach you how to share it with them?

[ She exhales a trembling breath. She doesn't know why the lack of rejection is such a relief, tacit acceptance of her selfishness? Or maybe a sign that it was not so selfish at all. She says nothing for a long moment, just letting the relief sink in to her, bone deep.

Perhaps there's a way to do his love for you some honor, to give it some respect, while in this place.

Maybe that was simply what she needed. Some kind of ritual to mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Show her devotion one last time? Like the burning of a totem, smoke in the night to carry her prayers.

Inhale. Exhale. Each still shaking. The idea is tantalizing. Horrifying. ]

Yes. I would like that, very much.

[There is no harm in the sharing, in the stretch of knowledge, in the diversity of truth between two minds - between three, four, eight, a thousand. Is it selfish to wish to be understood? To want to be close to others? To desire a place to belong? If those things are selfish, then the Nest is a selfish bitter place. No. Better to be dangerous than uncommitted and Cathaway would never mistake Ilde for that. Not now - not from the first moment she knew her.]

Of course.

[She moves then, taking Ilde's fingers gently in hers. She doesn't hold her entire hand; she doesn't need to. It's the barest touch, as wind across the back of some bared neck nape.]

Direct contact is sometimes helpful for us as you are so very small, but for you it shouldn't be necessary. Still, you'll need to be within close proximity given the limitations of your mind. Having everyone in the same room might be the most convenient option. When you're ready, you must dig into your own mind and bring what you wish to share forward.

[There's an image that accompanies it, a brief fleeting sensation of something coming apart. A nut being cracked. Pieces chipped from a stone. A knife taken to something soft, a belly full of something gentle and wanting. Cathaway speaks in a lull, a rhythmic patient lullaby. Cables made of wire come unwound, each stiff strand bending to the will of her mind in a slow spiral which radiates outward, winding out to surround them both in the most delicate version of a cage. They are small birds and when they molt their feathers the universe falls in pieces with them - stripped back like shredded wallpaper, behind it a pool and water lilies exactly like the one they sit by now, but removed. Distant. A memory of this place.

They sit where they sit now, just there at the edge of the water. But they also stand in the pool. They are two places at once, two people. They are Cathaway, young and bright and sharper than she's ever been after there at the edge of the pool, and they are a stranger (never a stranger; there is so much love for this person, for this man that is also them) carefully pulling apart the lilies and cutting away what's strangling or wilting.

I don't see the point of this, they say from Cathaway's mouth.

There's nothing wrong with reminding yourself of where you came from, they say as the older man. They snip some green away and toss it, dripping wet, into Cathaway's lap. Cathaway-They makes a disgusted noise, but the fondness surges through them like something involuntary: an endless feedback look. Her and him, her and Ilde, as bright and as mottled as the light here.

As the light here.

Here. This place. This pool. This moment. Cathaway slips her fingers from Ilde's and the moment fades, though the golden sensation of it stays lodged high and brilliant in Cathaway's chest. It's a good thing to remember; it's been a long time since she thought of it.]

Would you like to try?

[ The sensation is familiar. So much alike to holding Angel's hand in the marketplace of Avera and slipping away into her world of illusion, of electric pulses and tiny falsehoods layered upon themselves to create a semblance of depth. They had cobbled together a vision of a garden, tumbled through a landscape of inversions in the way their thoughts and memories synced in their opposition. It is so much alike to painting dreamscapes with Steve. It is so much alike to opening herself up, letting Ren replace her terrors with his lack.

Yes, she can do this. The muscle memory has begun to be familiar, and with the taste of Cathaway's hypnosis still on her tongue... She can replicate this. Ilde holds on to the sensation, the subtle ringing beneath her skin, glittering in the depths of her thoughts. She sits up onto her knees to face Cathaway, lifting her hands to the woman's face, staring into her strange eyes for focus, a look of utter determination on her own face.

A reversal of scenery must take place, a memory of darkness and humidity and earth rather than the cool brightness of this place, but the similarities will make it easier. The older man who guides her in how to tend to her plants. Crouched in the dirt plucking weeds, trimming wild branches, winding vines gently up a trellis.

You will be safe here, girl.

She had been perhaps thirteen, weary and devoid of emotions to give, sitting at a distance and watching a decrepit old man gather fruit from laden branches.

Here, eat.

Her first piece of fresh fruit, sweet white flesh beneath a pinkish skin. Delight and astonishment, pleasure beyond anything she has ever known. The old man watches her excitement with weary eyes set in an ancient wrinkled face. No happiness shows on his face, even when the child that was once Ilde looks up at him in wonderment.

She has not thought about that moment in so long. Her mouth fills with the taste of it.

Her hands leave Cathaway's cheeks running the tip of one finger along her own lips... ]

[She could press her fingers into that dark, loamy earth. There might be some comfort in it, in the burial; for now, what she takes from the memory is the sweet taste on her tongue - fresh and ripe and bursting with juices. It is young and flexible and her mouth feels wet for it even as the scene slips, as the memory comes unpeeled like skin folded backwards.

There's a synchronicity to the moment after. Ilde's hand slips to her own mouth and Cathaway's fingers lift to hers: a brief scuff of fingertips to remind her that the taste in her mouth is memory as much as it is fact. Still, for a moment where their mental link sits like a passageway with two opposing doors, both of them yawning open, the pleasure of the taste is as obvious and unquestionable as breathing. She runs her tongue across her teeth, looking to feel every piece of it though the action strips the tang more quickly.]

Good. [A moment's breathless satisfaction.] Very good.

[ Ilde frowns at nothing, her hands flexing, testing the shape and resistance of nothing. That was almost too easy, as if she still has room to expand. Too easy, too simple. There was a reason that Dreus himself was so difficult to explain, to fully articulate in his majesty and his horror. She sets her jaw, frustration and anger welling up inside of her, heat prickling up her throat, a fire abruptly stoked. She doesn't even need to look at Cathaway at all, the tunnel is already there, a spiral of breath and heartbeats that encompasses the electric current of memories.

Ilde's hands curl, tight enough that her short nails bite into her palm, as she drags the image of the Godking to the surface and pushes its reality out into the room. At first it is just him, a shape, a shadow. He is an enormous man, not quite to seven feet but his musculature is that of a titan's, his shoulders broad, arms and legs intimidating in the loose knee-length trousers he wears, and nothing more save the colorful sashes that hang from his hips.

The layers fill themselves in from there.

The wild intensity of his stare. The subtle scent of his insanity... a sweet and fruity perfume intermingled with the acrid smell of sickness. The infernal heat that radiated off of his body, that smothered thought, twisting insides with cringing nausea at the same time it seemed to swaddle and relax, making one exhausted and drowsy. And beneath the heat is the magic, only consciously identifiable by a slightly strange taste in the air, like ozone, an odd humidity, cool and bright just at the back of the tongue. It warps things around him, make them more beautiful, ethereal and shimmering from within the depths of a perpetual heat stroke.

And then his voice begins, deep as thunder, sometimes soothing in its rhythm, sometimes terrifying in its frenzy, but no matter which tone it takes it grips. His orations echo from every direction, filling Cathaway's pretty little sanctuary with its deviousness.

It takes so much of her energy to flesh him out, that Ilde cannot focus on the rest of what the scene should be. The smell of spoiling flesh is distant, unavoidable, but she cannot evoke the shadows of the palace.

She tries, flexing the muscle. All she manages is the sense of a dry wind stirring torn banners... before the muscle twitches in pain and suddenly everything collapses. The vision of her king dissolves into sand and leaves no evidence of his presence behind him. Ilde makes a little murmur of pain, sitting back. That fevered anger is still muttering under her skin, frustrated with her limitations, with herself, and worked up beyond what she should be. A tantrum so not unlike what sends Kylo Ren reeling, twisted thoughts and twisted emotions taking all sense of control away. Not coincidence at all that twists and turns of those two hatchlings snagged on one another.

The girl rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes, curled in around herself, breathing heavily. ]

[The universe consists of a thousand different points - small lights like stars in the darkness. This one contracts, then expands not unlike an animal breathing. In it, the water smell in the air is crisp and smooth; the light is gentle; there is a comfortable quiet of the Station as it sits pinned in the center of a thousand folded places. And then it slips. Melts, then cracks - turned brittle by the sensation of heat, flaking away into the shape of him.

She can taste him thick in her mouth, weight like a hot stone on her tongue. For a moment all the sweltering fear of that place finds her, slicked with offal and dried grit under her fingernails. She feels the sizzle of her blood, boiling; flesh turned to ribbons, woven into fabric, twitching the heavy swollen breeze--

And it crackles. Loses its track and fades. For a moment Cathaway holds her breath - half expecting the image to find its footing again - and then that too slips out of her. She gives through every angle of her: sighs and touches her throat as if to steady herself. She's sweating under her clothes, hard enough that her scalp prickles with it.

When she recognizes Ilde again, buckled over and trembling, Cathaway's hand falls from her throat. She forced the lines of her shoulders straight, casually so, and moves to rearrange the fold of her legs as if she means to stand. Instead she stretches her hand out; she touches Ilde's shoulder, a square solid point of contact that has nothing to do with sharing or feeling and everything to do with simply steadying the girl.]

Come here, girl.

[She turns her knees, pivoting where she sits on the too smooth polished floor of the chamber as she removes her hand from Ilde's shoulder. It's a simple thing to dip first her feet into the water of the pool, then her calves. Cathaway shifts forward, moving to stand in the thigh deep water among the purple and pink lilies. She holds a hand in invitation to Ilde.]

You've done very well. Your brood could learn much from you.

[ She wants to scream, wants to tear something to shreds. It's the emotion of the damaged, overwhelmed by emotions that she cannot define and they prickle hatefully under her skin, urging her to do something destructive. She knows those emotions are there, but has tried for a long time not to feel them, not to allow herself to crack open so obvious and bloody. It made her vulnerable, to lose control. She thrived on control.

She stares at Cathaway without comprehension for a moment, but then is stumbling her way into the water, hungry for the chill of it, anything to cool her fevered mind, to take her thoughts away from ash and fire.

Her exhale is heavy, and she pushes right past Cathaway's hand to lay her head on the woman's shoulder, trembling. She pushed too hard, she let her emotions roil too much, like a kettle overflowing with froth. ]

Can I become more than he was.

[ Heresy, but in a way it will be the only thing to set her free. His had been a religion of might. ]

[The water is cool, but not chilling - comfortable in comparison to that bitter memory of heat and sweat. It strips salt from skin; it gentles. Somewhere in the pool there must be some source to the water because it stirs around their legs, not quite inert: a soft eddying like a murmur of the subconscious turning slowly under their own minds.

She doesn't startle from the invasion of space, though for a moment Cathaway makes no moment to encourage the nearness. Even like this, thigh deep in the water, Ilde feels like something sharp and bubbling. Something waiting to spill over. There's an electricity to it that is pleasant, that for a bare moment Cathaway hesitates to settle.

Then she sets her hand gently across the girl's birdlike shoulder blade. It's a very loose version of an embrace, fingerpads drawing small circles there.]

First tell us, was your king's power all his own?

The story is that he was born with it. [ This story has a different tone from the way she usually thinks or speaks of him. This is the fable of Dreus, not her own personal experience with him. She has been told the Godking's story so many different ways in her life, whispers of his deeds and his arrival in their world. The world he had claimed as his. ] A prodigy. There used to be others with such powers, but they are all gone now.

[ Assassinated them in broad daylight for all to see. ]

None could best him.

[ In a way, however, this does not answer the question. The question that it answers is that Ilde does not know. She does not know if it was truly all Dreus, or if something other had taken up root inside of him and used him as a vessel... ]

[She draws back then to cup Ilde's face between her hands. Her touch is very frank, as is her attention. This is not a fine story she is telling the girl - no fable, no pretty fiction. She holds her at some fractional distance to say it because what she says should be taken as fact:]

Then you are already more the what Dreus was. He is one god in a single universe, and you are here - at the edge of more than he could know to count. You could be as strong as there are numbers of stars in the multiverse if you and those around you would allow you to be.

[ It does not fully placate her, but it is a thought. All the opportunity in front of her would afford her much. She closes her eyes tightly, simply aware of Cathaway's cool hands on her face, the gentle water around her legs. ]

I have never imagined a future before.

[ Soft-spoken, breathless. A confession, and a hope. ]

And now you have too many to count in front of you.

[She regards the girl, her tightly shut eyes, and doesn't withdraw her hands. It's a sentiment with the propensity to be overwhelming, isn't it? When standing in a place with no roads, how do you begin to make one?

With work, she thinks. With a boldness that might be called senseless if it failed. With blood and sweat. These things aren't easy. They never have been and never will be, but--]

If you're determined to find one, then we believe you can.

[A tired idea - where there's a will there's a way -, but no less true for it.]

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(open) catch all for downtime

np gurl

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