(OPEN) I Was Deep In a Dream and I Didn't Know It

[erbier]

CHARACTERS: Ilde & You
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Pick a day.
SUMMARY: Just Ilde things, here for the rest of downtime, whatever you want to do with it.
WARNINGS: Will update if needed.

EARTH I.

Ilde lives in the garden. She is the barefoot girl in the white dress, always somewhere amongst the tiers of the Circle Garden. She speaks to the plants, she waters them, and there are even several plots that she has tilled in herself, visiting the slowly sprouting tendrils every day to be certain of their progress. She does not sleep any longer, but she can be found resting amongst the plants as well, tucked out of sight behind a frond, or up on the highest tiers of the garden where few bother to trek. Solitary and quiet, on most days all one might pick up from her as she works is the repetition of a poem,

( 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... )

EARTH II.

She has many broken eggs to visit in the Nesting Deck these days. Some of them known to her since she first awoke with her own brood, others who came and went in the span of their stay on Concordia, and so many more that she will never know. She tries not to linger over it excessively, does not make it the majority of her hours to stand in the great aerie and pine. She can do nothing for them, all she can do is wait. Sometimes she brings flowers from the garden and other trappings; ribbons and braids, little tokens, but mostly she sits with the pods. Murmurs to them too softly to hear, recites poems, sometimes sings.

And sometimes, she goes back to her own pod and returns the connection to the port at the base of her skull. Preventative medicine, she hopes, so that she will not slip back beneath the dark waves herself. The coma, falling out of sync with the symbiote, was far too vulnerable. Too cold. Too lonely. And there were hosts depending on her yet to be here, to be watching; wide awake.

AIR I. -- Ambient

She can be found drowsing in the circle gardens, never quite completely unconscious. She comes from a world of walking shadows who hunt and feast on unwary humans, she does not like to be completely off her guard. She will, however, lie out in the grass and listen to something that is not quite music, arrhythmic chiming and instrumentation that twines with natural sounds such as birds or water or wind. Those who who know her well know this is the kind of noise she favors.

Lying with her eyes closed, and the her hands folded neatly across her stomach, she will daydream. Filling the gardens with psychic fantasies: birds and creatures she has seen, either in books or memories or Concordia's menagerie, raindrops, rainbows, clouds in soft colors that stir at the touch of a gentle wind. Her visions move with the music, everything fluid in its shapes and its colors, just like her odd music. You can watch, but 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...

AIR II. -- Opera; Basing off of The Magic Flute, but not literally that because...alien multiverse.

She had been introduced to the concept of the opera in Concordia. The grandness of it all was very foreign to her, there was no theater such as others knew it in the burned world... However, she found the basic concept accessible enough: the tale told through song. She found the idea of different voices representing different characters novel and interesting. She is much more attentive to the opera than she is to the more ambient music, sitting up and alert as she picks apart the words.

"The Queen of the Night has just told her daughter that she must kill the high priest... He is unworthy." [ X ]

There is an eagerness in her voice as she explains the story, there is a familiar fairy tale aspect to the theming of it, but it also has something more arcane and complex, some alchemical logic just under the surface that delights her.

AIR III.

She likes to weave things together. It is busy work for her hands, mindless work when she just wants to sit in peace and do nothing, think little. She has always spent a vast amount of her time simply doing nothing, being calm, breathing slowly. It was how she had survived her time in the palace of the mad Godking. She would hide away in the garden, sit in the dirt, and recite her poem. It was an ancient ballad, written long before the world was scorched, and the little book of verses had been from Dreus's own collection of things saved before the fire flooded everything; he himself had taught her to read it. Its words filled her mind, and kept thoughts out.

Her woven totems are made from all manner of junk and scrap she finds around the Station, string and strips of cloth in different colors and textures, wire and tubing. She doesn't take the task terribly seriously, and thus doesn't see much need to find fine materials. Sometimes they are simple braids, marked with beads and bobbles. Sometimes they are elaborate webs which she makes by looping strings round and around some other object she's found. It keeps her peaceful, and if asked she will say,

"The weaving makes me think of all of us."

And how they are connected.

WATER I.

In the burned world where Ilde Vilmaine had been born, there was little water remaining. What water was left was hidden deep underground, the wet luscious temptation that lured fools into the darkness where they would be beset upon by all kinds of monsters, not just the shape-shifter shadows who stalked the aboveground, but also all kind of mythical beasts whispered of in tales. It was all she had been able to think about, when she had first seen the Station's pool. How beautiful and yet how unsightly its opulence was. It had awoken a fear she had never known before, the thought of drowning in its still, perfect waters. Strangled to death by its vengeful nature. The fire in her quenched. Some absurd alchemical symbolism that she struggled to rationalize, or perhaps it was some equally absurd fairytale of a spirit who filled its pool with souls. (Was it so absurd in a land like hers, with magic and flesh-hungry umbra?)

She stills of those things when she looks upon the water, sloshing gently in the confines of the pool, but the emotion is gone. She had surrendered it, allowed it to be supplanted with memories that were not her own. When she enters the water, the vast expense of black is what she thinks of, and that is how her mind stays as she swims.

There are many reasons she prefers to swim alone, and that is merely one. The other is her vast displeasure at having the deep ugly twist of scarring that goes from around one shoulder, all the way across her back, down around a thigh, ogled while in her suit.

WATER II. -- First come, First Serve

She goes in, and she does not come up.

FIRE I. -- Wildcard Physical Training

She is always looking for someone to spar with, and she has been taught very well not to pull punches. She has a preference for weapons, but she'll put down her knives if you prefer to fight empty-handed.

She also very much enjoys competition at the range.

She will play agility games as well. She doesn't know much about sports, but will play if you explain the rules.

FIRE II. -- Serious Business Psychic Training. Please See OOC

Ilde is a Rho, and this is right for her. Her mind -- its strength, and its creativity -- is her jewel. Her symbiote feeds on the immaterial, drinking deep from the black well of her memories, all the ugliness and terror that she has suffered in her short life, and it inflicts those emotions on to others. She no longer likes to sleep, in part, from her many nightmares, but they make a valuable weapon in the waking world.

She has been practicing a trick, with this grisly imagination of hers: summoning the God who burned her world here, for all to see, and for all to know. So that she will be understood, when she tells the others about the place she has come from.

It cannot be done imperfectly, it will not satisfy her. It will not make her believe that they truly know what it felt like, and so she has been building him in her mind, layer upon layer. Even the smell must be true; the sickly sweet stench of his madness. She has practiced on other hosts, once or twice, but after all the strain she had put herself through on Concordia, she is ready.

One must consent to her vision, connection to her memories is a vital component. Memory sets the stage, but can build her little more than a scarecrow. Perhaps intimidating at a glance, but hollow inside and smelling of rot. Only her symbiote can make the terror real.

Real enough, for a moment, just long enough to truly know him, as she had known him...

Dreus Fenn has the stature of a goliath. A mountain of a man who had always appeared before her in nothing more than his loose knee-length trousers and a sash around his waste. The mere sight of him is aggressive, like he has the strength to crush every part of a man with this bare hands: he does, she has seen him do it. His sweat slicked skin shines with a twisted inner light, displacing the world in a hallucinogenic halo around him. His eyes from within his close shaven head have an unnerving intensity before he is even near, as if he slices inside of your thoughts, razor sharp so that the sting of it takes a moment to become aware of, and then burgeons stridently through the temples.

It is a mere insect bite compared to his nearness, the asphyxiating heat that radiates from his body is infernal, like being boiled alive. It is oppressive, an overbearing shock to the system: low oxygen, overheating organs, it initiates a helpless drowsiness. The cloying scent of him -- sickness and overripe fruit and large sharply perfumed flowers -- curdles the stomach, both caustic and candied.

But beneath the heat is the soothing sweet touch of his undiluted magic. He seeps of it, a power that he cannot fully contain inside of his body and so it permeates the air like a drug, 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. He balances you there, dizzy and suffering but given just enough succor to accept. He dazzles, he fulfills, he gives strength where strength fails. A distracting counterbalance to how his corrupting flames blaze, spoiling meat and hearts.

And then he speaks. Deep as thunder, his voice hypnotic whether he speaks in a carefully soothing rhythm or in a maddened frenzy. His orations echo from every direction, filling every crevice, and once heard... Will never be forgotten. Like a coiled snake, it waits in the darkness for you to be unsuspecting that it remains. He speaks in a cadence that seduces, an unnatural charisma that exudes from his deep sonorous voice. The richness of his tone evades all resistance, his words and the images behind them echoing in the depths of the subconscious. They ring there, resonating so perfectly, pitched just so.

His eyes are fixated with their hateful, irascible, heat, their manic intent, and they make it impossible not to listen fully...

"Bow down."

Comments

WILDCARD, Day :008

[polyphonos]

One day, Ilde thinks of the garden and the Station takes her there - not to the circular gardens which she knows so well, but to a different place entirely. This garden looks exactly like one she might imagine given the thought. It's tiered to her specifications, ordered to her particular delights. It isn't large, and there's something alien and strange to the Station's walls and dimensions even here, but surely it's close enough to count. Moreover, there are places where the flower beds are fresh and unplanted; there are small seedlings learning to grow; there are plants who had gone wild waiting to be pruned and tended.

In the center of this particular secret garden, Cathaway has taken a seat on a stone. She is brushing her fingers across the fronds of some alien fern, delicately examining the segmented leaves with their gentle organic fuzz. She looks up when Ilde appears, and a small sliver of pleasantness murmurs like a breath across the link wound between them.

"This place you've made is nice."

[erbier]

For a moment, there is the question of whether this is a fantasy or a reality. She has used the imagining of a garden often as an exercise of control over burgeoning psychic ability, and of course it had looked just like this. Her eyes catch most excitedly on the tiny grove of what she knows must be fruit trees, they are arranged in neat little lines and one day it will be a beautiful, protective place to lie quietly in their shadows. Ilde inhales the smell of it, the sensory nature of it all slowly convinces her that this is indeed present. Her attention continues to skitter around them, but she comes towards her elder host, taking in the woman's peaceful appreciation.

Her feelings for Jane Cathaway are often difficult to navigate, torn between the desire to fall peacefully into her guidance or to kill her and eat her, absorb all her power, remove her as a rival as Dreus had demonstrated to her with his legacy. Even in the violent, jealous thoughts, however, there is respect and even pleasure. Cathaway's hand has steered gently all this time, and never against her will, only in response to her own entreaties. Even when she did not realize she was making them. Perhaps this secret place and its visitor are evidence of that...

"Hello, Cathaway," she greets, tone soft and placid. "It seems... perhaps too perfect to be true."

[polyphonos]

A bubble of her amusement rises to the surface and breaks, smaller fragments of that pleasure moving as minor effervescence between them. She lets her hand fall from the fern. "It's true, we promise. It will be for as long as you require it to be here. It might be swept away once it isn't, but the Station will maintain it for as long as you need it. This place is like our lily pool or our private rooms. It's just for you, and whoever you wish to find you here."

And for whoever shared her need - not a general want, but hers. Maybe Steve or Ren might have enough of her in them to reach this place on their own, but Cathaway doubts it.

Not yet. Not as they are now.

[erbier]

Ilde smiles sadly at nothing in particular. Perhaps she did not want to be found, perhaps she was ready not to share her garden with anyone, to have made it for herself... It would be the first time that she was not inheriting a garden someone else had created. She had not planted it, but she had dreamed of it, immaculately placed every flower and shrug by its uses more than by its name. She looks forward to introducing herself to them all.

She seats herself on the ground beside Cathaway's perch. "Tell me more, about us."

For Ilde, this is still something which means 'of the same creed' more than 'of the same mind' not that any of the other hosts tended to care, some of them actively cringed when she talked about them as a collective group. No matter how benignly.

"What is the Station, to us? It lives, it exists outside of time and space, it can give me a garden I have only ever dreamed of..." But how, but why.

[polyphonos]

Cathaway draws her heels in slightly to make room for Ilde there, twitching the skirt of her wrap aside with an easy flick of her wrist and a small chime of the charms there. "Think of the Station like the child of your mother's sister. Do you know the word cousin? It's related to us, but it's not the same as us. It channels our thoughts and energy, and with close enough contact it begins to bend to a shape that we prefer. That's why the Life Support deck has rooms, and why there are spaces for beings like us to live. The kitchen didn't come pre-installed."

There's a sensation of something like laughter under his skin, in the shape of her words, but it's not audible. She smiles. "It's in the Station's best interests to keep us safe and supported here. Without us, we believe it would become...inert." Die isn't the right word. Not really. "Comatose, maybe. We believe it would go into a stasis period if it wasn't supporting hosts. All life desires to somehow self perpetuate."

[erbier]

Ilde does not know much about family ties, she had never known her parents, let alone their own, their siblings. All she knows of such things is that in the burned world they were all Dreus's children. However, she thinks on the shadows, the creatures cast into the world by the flicker of the pyre that was the Godking. Some were nothing but hunger, shapeless, thoughtless, hunters only. Others were so near to being people of their own, some even had enough conviction to resist their maker. She thinks of Ba-Rahmy, the fairest of them all, chained up in the palace where his father tortured him, unable to die until Dreus did. Would he ever?

Ilde makes a soft hum, reaching out absentmindedly to flick one the charms at Cathaway's wrist, she likes the sound of them. Peaceful chiming little things.

"Can we do anything, to please it? To know it better?"

Perhaps she is falling deeper in, she could have referred to herself there.

[polyphonos]

The charm in question, a small gold diamond with black lines laced through it, sways under the touch and clinks faintly off the small alien bird hanging next to it.

"Be kind to it. We must treat it like we would a precious friend." She thinks - very briefly - of Steve Rogers and his thin wrists, Sam Anders who sleeps now but would quietly prefer to be dead, and Angel whose close cropped hair will go soft and downy and curled as it slowly grows unattended. Or maybe Ilde thinks it. Or maybe the proximity to the girl encourages the her thoughts to drift in that direction, a compass needle meandering toward some magnetic pole.

"But otherwise, you simply continue to do what you're already doing. Be open to it, and the Station will be open to you."

FIYAAHHH

[wille]

[ Misato doesn't fancy herself a good teacher. That role requires more patience, more generosity and more willingness to translate her half-formed thoughts into words recognizable by another person. But she's a decent combatant, a fierce and relentless one, and if it's stamina and mental fortitude against surrender that Ilde wants to develop then she has found herself the right sparring partner. A half hour into it and only now is she starting to break a sweat.

Her only weapon are fists wrapped in bandages, knees and elbows, but she wouldn't begrudge the girl for picking a close-range weapon. The fight should stop when the first blood is drawn or when one of them taps out.

It's now the lull between their brief bursts of scuffle, eyes on each other, predator and prey, which is which. This time she moves in to strike first, feigning a missed punch to Ilde's face only to swing around to deliver a kick aimed for her torso. There's no killing instinct behind her attack, it's just a spar, but she's not about to disrespect another woman by holding herself back either. The girl can handle it.

ilde: a tl;dr of violence

[erbier]

[ Ilde Vilmaine had arrived among the hosts with more intimate knowledge of Death than most. Death is a figure that is everywhere, slips into your body with every breath you talk, laughs into your ear with every stumble, hounds baying at your heels. She had joined them all with very little emotion on the concept of death, her only metric was her own survival, something she monitored like a hawk. She would quickly and ruthlessly remove any potential threat before they had time for action. The element of surprise had seemed best to her, when she had little by way of strength or power. She had to be quicker, and smarter.

She had killed a street thug on Avera, he had come too close to her after being dismissed, had set off too many alarms with his aggressive smile, his cronies, the knife he had been flipping in his hand as if it were a toy. She had taken her own knife directly and unhesitating to his throat, pushed deep, twisted, and ripped in one smooth motion that had sent blood spraying, and his body dropping. And she had thought nothing of it until The Prince took her aside, took her knife, banished her from the encampment, and explained to her the sanctity of life or some-such in his own round about way.

It had shocked and offended her. No one had ever dared place their values on her before, no one who was any less than her Godking. How dare he. He would continue to berate them when the rest of her brood caused several more deaths, when the first host died alone in the streets, targeted as one of their members. Ilde was no more sorry than Kylo Ren for her actions, but when Steve Rogers told her he had never killed anyone before-- She faltered. Uncertain if that was a weakness or something lovely about him. So she tried to promise not to put blood on his hands, now that they all belonged together.

She weathered the Prince's blame, reached out to him to learn non-lethal means of defense, but what he taught her amounted to nothing in Concordia. She tried. She tried to pretend to be the girl 'Saffron' who aspired to stardom. Tried to be softer, subtler, but at every turn she found herself more and frustrated by the restraints. Until Mara Jade joined them, and bridged the gap between lies, manipulation, and violence. Concordia even had virtual fighting, where one's imagination was the limit for the destruction, and there Ilde had practiced the things her symbiote could bring to the table, pushing flashes of panic and nightmare as she struck.

She still favors the idea of not fighting at any length, of keeping distance, of always having one more trick hiding up her sleeve to remove herself from an altercation, but... this is for training. And for release. On Concordia she had been unable to throw herself entirely in to her training with Mara and with Bruce, lest they injure her and those injures had to be explained to the gossip streamers who bothered her everywhere she went. It is almost a relief to feel Misato's strike sink in to her fully, to be part of reality again after all those surreal days of pretending to be someone else. It had been distasteful.

The things she had done to end their time there, had been distasteful. Even now, she continues to cultivate some of those seeds and it burns in her gut, a painful winding that makes her more than just a little happy to be hit and to hit in kind.

She faces down Misato with a grimness that has no hesitance nor fear behind it. Their early exchanges demonstrate basic literacy in attack in defense, that a match between them is acceptable, although it is now theirs to discover whether or not it is even.

Misato feigns a strike, but Ilde has been taught to let the opponent move first, to ready for such things. She is ready when Misato's shoulder dips as she pivots her hips to kick. The motion Ilde makes to block the kick to her ribs is fairly small, shifting her right arm down and in to protect her center. The strike strings up her shoulder, but there's no such thing as a painless fight, and she is immediately ready to counter, surging forward to see if she can knock Misato off balance entirely before the other woman returns her foot to the ground. Regardless of her balance, the same elbow just blocked with swings up and around for her head. ]

oh my god

[wille]

[ Misato cares little for technique, for prescribed orders like a punch follows a kick follows a feint follows a dodge, because fighting is no art. There's no choreography as far as she's concerned, no beauty in the movements, there's only win or lose. And so she goes in empty of expectations for how her opponent should respond. She simply notes Ilde's block, the solid elbow against her shin, the push that follows threatening her balance enough to have her falter but not fall.

The stumble is enough to cost her the few moments it would take to perfectly block the swings for her head, and she catches two blows against her arm and near her wrist that will surely bruise and ache tomorrow, before managing to duck low and aim a straight punch for Ilde's stomach. No holds barred. ]

it's over now!!!!

[erbier]

[ She's gone too far in, raised her forward arm in order to swing it at Misato's head. She has no particular choice but to take the hit along her ribs. It isn't the most painful thing she's ever experienced, although as they once again square off her grim concentration is a bit more fiery than before, pain had a way about it.

It is her turn to lead, and she does not waste time digging back in, her moves are not frenzied but they are continuous. It was too easy to plan ahead an action or two, too easy to block and anticipate, so she simply keeps after Misato, strike after strike. ]

[wille]

[ Pain does have a way of lighting the fire in someone. Misato betrays a smile, pleased with herself, licking the corner of her lips as the adrenaline causes her heartbeat to echo against the side of her skull. She's ready to block by the time Ilde comes back in, but one can only use one's limbs as armor for so long, for so many blows, before what starts out as aches turn less and less bearable. It shows from the wince on her face, a grimace when the woman hits a spot already sore from a previous blow.

Retreat is one option, but that is always last on her list.

Instead she makes a bid to grab one of Ilde's wrist with the intent to twist her arm into an uncomfortable enough position that the woman will cease her persistent blows, but the move also leaves her open, with only an arm held in front of her face as a rudimentary defense. ]

[erbier]

[ Ilde's breathing is only a little heavier than it was when they began. They are working hard, but her stamina has always been necessary, and strong. Her increasing control over the minute workings of herself allows ever more strain to be put on it. She locks eyes with Misato, knowing that if it comes to stamina alone... she has been a host longer. She will win that battle. If it comes to skill, she thinks Misato will. She has more experience in this kind of prolonged sparring. She is more creative in her responses, she will catch Ilde off guard eventually. ]

I concede.

[ She says, keeping her arm poised carefully in Misato's grip so as not to pull it the wrong way. ]

For today.

AIR III

[wrackful]

[Murphy hasn't been in the gardens yet. He's seen them, skirted them, but the weirdness of there being a place like that on a space station had made him turn back, every time.

Now he's seeking familiarity. Still reeling, the loss of Kate and Remus pulsing like an open wound in his head, his feet lead him to soil, to green growth, and eventually, to Ilde.

He hesitates, at the edges of the space she's using. A small part of him not wanting to intrude; a larger still uncertain of her, of his interactions with her in the past. But the idea of turning and leaving is weaker than the still-bleeding wound in him, the dragging pain which can't bear solitude, and he rubs his thumb and forefinger over his eyes, taking a step forward.]

So you're the one who's been leaving flowers at the pods.

[Because he recognises some of it, the things she's weaving.]

[erbier]

[ She looks up from her project. She would have left him be to wander the garden uninterrupted. She found it peaceful, others do as well, perhaps that was all he wanted. But he speaks to her, and so she stops, sets her things aside and gives him her full attention. She dresses much differently here than she had in Concordia. Her dress is plain white, her hair down in messy half-curls, feet bare. This seems to suit her much more than all the colors and patterns of the bustling city. ]

I do, yes, so may others. Some trinkets for their time away, so they do not feel forgotten... should they awake.

[wrackful]

[He smiles like she's told a joke. It's a sharp expression, grim and bitter, and his eyes aren't the cold amusement they might be otherwise. For the moment large pieces of that are stripped away, leaving misery exposed.]

Yeah. Like we could forget them if we wanted to.

[Not that he really lays the blame on them. They don't know, and none of them can control this. But the pain in his mind is still barely bearable, and he can't help the anger that comes with it. He keeps himself from moving any closer to Ilde, like it might spill on her, disrupt how comfortable she seems here in comparison to the times he'd seen her down in Concordia. But he still can't bring himself to leave.]

I didn't say thanks. [Abrupt, but a better topic than bitterness.] For getting us out of jail.

[erbier]

[ As though, rebuked she looks away for a moment, thoughts twanging with pain, but then it would not be the first time that John Murphy has cut to quick of some unrealized feeling. It reverberates between them, the empty places where lost broodmates linger like ghosts, a strident dissonance of nothingness.

But because he chooses to bite at her does not mean she must reciprocate, nor recoil.

Instead, she tells him much the same as she had told Bellamy: ]

I would not have left you behind, whether there were to be thanks, or not.

[wrackful]

Because he dragged you into it?

[He doesn't wait for an answer. The Darkling had been the only one Bellamy could contact, and The Darkling had brought Ilde down there. She wouldn't have known otherwise.]

You know you could've gotten stuck down there with us.

[And with the overload of her power, how she'd barely kept her feet under her, she almost had. It was a stupid, risky move, and Murphy's too much choked down frustration not to bleed anger for it.]

[erbier]

You misunderstand our relationship.

[ The Darkling may certainly think he's her better, but she has warned him, soft as a knife that she is not one of his toys to be manipulated. That she is watching him, and if he touches something of hers that he should not touch, he will suffer for it. They have an understanding of a great deal more complexity than what Murphy describes. ]

And there is no chance at all that Steven and Ren would have left me there for long.

[ Simple facts, it all feels very obvious to her. And truly... what of it, if she had been stuck there beneath the earth with them? It would not destroy her. ]

[sizeofyourbaggage]

Maybe it's strange for Sam to be here, after their talks about the symbiote and its consequences, after Sam has made his hesitations clear. But he's also seen a glimpse of her world and wanted more, spoken about the value of being able to understand her experiences, suggested using her ability in other ways. He is Rho, as well, though he has only slowly become aware of the boost it gives to his mental abilities.

His eyes are closed as he sits cross legged near her, breathing slow and even, all but meditating. He's more than aware that he's in for a very unpleasant experience, but he's also aware that knowing that is likely to in no way prepare him for it.

And he's right. There's a constant war between disgust and adoration, a bone deep terror and every instinct in him screaming at him to get the hell away at the same time as it would be so damn easy to let himself be soothed, supported, warmed. Dazzled. Trapped, controlled, not considered a person, and it's only that Sam is held to the memory by Ilde's ability that keeps those feelings from pulling up his own memories.

Bow down, the voice says, and were Sam not already sitting, maybe he would.

When the memory ends, when the touch of Ilde's symbiote ability no longer fills his veins with a terror that makes this real, he holds himself very still, trying to come down from it. He feels like he needs a shower, to scrub his skin clean - he needs something to ground himself here, away from the shared experience. One hand reaches into his pocket, curling around the coin he keeps close by, and still he stays quiet.

Without quite being conscious of it, his mind reaches out for her, seeking something to hold onto that's here.

[erbier]

She lets him go quickly. She is not doing this to hurt him, she is doing this because it is the only way to explain herself. To explain that while she calls him Godking, she knows he is little more than a madman. But he is a madman who can burn a world to nothingness, if that is not a power godly, then she must not know the meaning of the world. She comes forward as she feels Sam's mind reeling from the infliction.

On her knees in front of him, she leans in and wraps her arms around him, chest to chest, her back arched in an uncomfortable way but it is a compromise between knowing that physical anchor is necessary and not knowing if he really wishes to be that close to her.

To her: The one tainted with those memories. The one able to summon that goliath from her thoughts, to evoke him like a demon at her call... The one who bears his madness inside of her heart after long years in his court. The one burned along her collarbone and arms from his adoring touch.

( You've done well. )

It took a great deal to resist the Godking's presence. She has seen it, from time to time. Either from those too utterly bereaved to react or from the witches, who carried in them their own demons, leaving no room for the Godking in their hearts...

[sizeofyourbaggage]

He releases the coin the second her arms are around him. Sam knew this about himself before, that touch was grounding for him, but it's only increased with his time in the Nest. His arms wrap around her in return, pulling her in close until he can rest his forehead against hers.

The praise makes him shudder, works his way under his skin and settles its hooks into his bones at the same time as it soothes something in him - leftover from the presence of the Godking that lurks in her mind combined with Sam's own innate tendency to focus on others, to be needed. He lets it go, letting his focus return to the present.

For a long moment he breathes, in to the count of seven, out to the count of eleven, and repeated over and over as he re-centers himself, as he grounds himself in her arms, in the hum of their connection.

( Thank you for sharing that with me. )

It's the only response he has at the moment, the one that's the most familiar to him. As a soldier, as peer support at the VA, there have been so many terrible things that people have shared with him. Every time he's thanked them for having the courage and strength to share it with someone, with him, and it's all he knows to do right now.

[erbier]

She understands nothing of soldiers nor their scored hearts. Her only conception of it are fairy tale knights who bore such things with a silent stoicism Only to have their pain and sorrow torn from them and returned like blades by cruel wizards and demons. She supposes that is her role now, her power. And, as she always does, she wonders if Dreus would be proud of her.

But she had never met a knight in her world. Dreus had no faithful fighting for his word. There were only the bandits who lived holed up in the canyons, wild men who preyed on the caravans during the waking hours, and then retreated to their hiding places as darkness fell. Thieves and rapists with cruel minds and an exultation for their own miserableness.

No, she does not understand anything about a veteran, nor his concepts of courage and strength.

( It is not a gift... I have burned a wound in to you for my own selfish means. )

[sizeofyourbaggage]

He'd explain it to her, if he could. If it was a thing that could be explained. It'd never been something that those who weren't soldiers even back on his world could understand, though, he suspects it would only be more difficult with someone from a world like Ilde's. Easier, maybe, with the symbiote connection, if he could do something like she'd done for him-

But at the moment he's still trying to pull himself together, and the thought of opening such an intimacy doesn't occur to him. Even as he holds her close, takes comfort in her arms, runs his fingers through her hair.

( It's not selfish to want people to understand you. To know what you've experienced. This used to be what I did, back home - only without the symbiote part. )

[erbier]

( I am no longer certain what it is I wanted you to understand. Perhaps that it is no failing of mine that I followed him... But he would be disappointed in me, to make such excuses for my devotion. )

But she no longer answers to him, and she pulls up and out, like breaking from below the waves, pulling herself to her feet. There's a redness in her face that suggests a struggle of emotions as she turns away, but when she turns back it is gone, and she is only somber, as she always is.

"Why do you say this is what you did, back home?" she inquires curiously, also more than eager not to dwell on what she's done. Why she's done it. Sam agreed to the exercise, and if nothing else it was still that. It was no small feat for her to bring her Godking into his mind, and each time she enacts the rite, she grows that little bit stronger. (And for that she is still grateful to him. Still devoted for all that he has imparted upon her. Still faithful. Never truly free.)