(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

[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. ]

[wrackful]

Your brood? Yeah, that'd be if the bug let them stay awake, you mean.

[None of them had found a way to predict who fell asleep, and half of his brood was gone to it now. Hers too, if she only had two names to share, but even remembering one is dead doesn't soften his manner. The broods, the connections between them were still fallible. Mara, the only one he would've thought would've come for him, had been asleep when it mattered. In the end, it was still just you and what you had.]

[erbier]

[ That stings. She remembers he was much more flippant before pieces of his own brood left him, now that he knows-- Well. Ilde supposes she was the same. She had dismissed how much Adam Parker's death would effect Adara, until she too had lost pieces of herself.

However, her expression remains impassive, even if the wound rings out in the ether between their thoughts. ]

I would not have left you, and I am not of your brood.

[wrackful]

[She's hurting. He can feel it. He's hurting her, and he should stop. He knows it, the warning of regret already curdling in him, the rising sadistic urge to truly dig into her, make her hurt until he felt strong again. He practically flinches back from it, in his mind, in the turn of his head from her. But it dissipates in a moment, and he still can't bring himself to walk away.]

So why? [A loose gesture, a wave of his arm towards her.] If he didn't get you to do it, then you have to have a reason. [Everyone does, even if the reason is "dumb heroics". Murphy hasn't pegged her for that type, but it definitely wouldn't be the first time he'd been disappointed.] You almost cooked your brain down there.

[No one went to lengths like that without an expectation of result.]

[erbier]

[ She looks away from him. Neither of them really looking at each other now. The prevailing emotion that emanates from her is guilt. The others had gone into the city, to find Loke, to disarm the bomb, and the Darkling had come to her with the fact the fact that the boys remained jailed. She could easily have shrugged him off, that she had more than done her part, but what she had done... She remembers choking an unconscious woman while her loved one looked on. The rise of cruelty as she had debated whether or not to break Kusuma Ming's ankles for daring to trifle with her for as long as she had.

"Can I eat the girlfriend."

And she remembers watching Petre eat that woman, safe within her palace of ice. ]

I was confident it could be done. Perhaps in the future it will seem more untenable.

[ Her mouth feels numb as she says it. But perhaps in the future she won't feel like she has something to atone for. ]

[wrackful]

[Maybe if Murphy were a more forgiving or optimistic soul, he'd think the guilt was for the admission. That she wouldn't necessarily come for him - or anyone - against all odds. But to him, that's just realistic. The guilt was something else. Motive.]

You're lying. [By hiding it behind another truth, maybe, but still.] That's not why.

[He's looking at her again now, steady. Waiting to see if she admits it or tries to evade some more. His own guilt is a thin, sharp thread with roots spread wide and dug deep. It rises to meet hers, and he doesn't have enough control right now to stop it, not entirely. But he doesn't let it pull up the dark things hidden at the bottom.]

[erbier]

[ Her eyes flicker back up to his face, penetrating and frigid.]

Then I think well enough of you to lie to your face.

[wrackful]

[The corner of his mouth tugs, mirthless.]

No, lying like that is for when you want people to think well of you.

[He remembers, painfully clearly, a conversation like this with Emori in the desert, questions of her hand and his past. You wouldn't look at me the same. Neither of them had: they'd looked at each other clearer, knowing and accepting.]

But then it isn't actually you, is it.

[Just a shell of lies, and the things you kept hidden underneath.]

[erbier]

You say that with scorn, as if those will be the words to have me shed my skin.

[ She answers him with scorn in kind, icy in her anger. ]

You want to know what kind of creature you owe your freedom to, you shy from your gratitude because it opens you up to me. Well, don't fear, John Murphy. You are free of me, I have no use for you.

[wrackful]

Yeah, you'd be surprised how many people seem to think that. I'm just not a fan of bullshit.

[He'd stopped expecting real results in reaction to his words a long time ago. Truths tended to be ugly things, and people didn't like having to face them. Himself included, often enough. But it didn't stop him saying it. And he doesn't move now, for all that she's spoken like she's dismissed him.]

You didn't do it so we'd owe you. You came after us because you thought it might make up for something. Maybe make it feel better.

[Had it? He doubts it. Bellamy wore his guilt like a blanket of chains, and his own was a garrotte wire wound tight and small in his gut. It took more than one act to make any of it seem less heavy.]

That isn't any kind of creature. That's regular, ordinary human.

[erbier]

[ She gives him a pinched, incredulous look. ]

That's what you've come to nettle me for? To remind me that I am nothing more than any other human woman.

[ It nettles, and twists. She has sacrificed, to be special. Wears so many ugly marks of Dreus's favor, inside and out. She feels breathless for a moment, confused with herself. She hasn't heard his voice in her head much recently, but he rises around the both of them, the heavy rhythm of his infernal oration. A shadow in the back of her thoughts. She frowns, shaking her head as though it's a physical thing she can simply shake loose. She knows better, and her stomach pitches, churning. ]

Thank you for the insight.

[ But she is entirely too aware. It is a problem to be fixed. ]

[wrackful]

I came to say thanks.

[It's not true. He'd come because his symbiote is a screaming thing, right now, only quiet when it exhausted itself, and he'd sought the gardens to try and soothe it. Ilde had just happened to be here, and in approaching her maybe he'd had the intention. But that wasn't the track they'd ended up on.]

And I didn't-- [mean to insult her. Not like that. But he had, and his brow pinches, trying to think past the strange, heavy pressure that's started pulsing in on the edges of his mind.] You think that's a bad thing.

[He couldn't tell her it wasn't. He wasn't the optimistic one, believing the best in people. Experience had ripped that out of him, but he'd never managed to carry hatred around instead - not a general one, anyway. It was more like acceptance. People were people, as shitty as that often was.

It was usually worse when they tried to pretend like they were better, and his mouth presses into a downward bow.]

Well, it must suck being attached to the rest of us, then.

[erbier]

You have a particularly cruel tongue, John.

[ It cuts to the quick and she can feel where the blade remains stuck; bright, shining. The hurt is on her face, but in a resigned sort of way. Should she have somehow expected any better? No, she knows that lesson far too well. ]

[wrackful]

Yeah.

[His gaze drops, and he nods. She had a nicer way of putting it, but it wasn't the first time someone had told him he was a dick, and there'd never been any point in denying it. Little point in curbing it, either, except for how many times he knew he'd regretted hurting someone. It's mixed, now, feeling her hurt, seeing it in her face. He hadn't wanted to upset her. But he also hadn't thought she'd be like this.]

You can remember that next time rescuing me comes up as an option.

[Whether someone thought he was an asshole or worse, he was easy to leave behind. It had been demonstrated enough times.]

[erbier]

It was no mystery, and still I came for you.

[ She's glad to be back on this topic, now thoroughly deflected from the secret she did not wish to divulge. It wouldn't do anyone any use to hear it. It would only divide them up, the way news of Hux's true nature had done. She doesn't see the use, and when John is the only one to ask--it tells her no one truly wants to know.

She still feels the sting of his words, too true, too close, the pinch in her expression lingering. But he's hardly the first damaged creature to hurt her without intention. She'll get over it, the rest is up to him. ]

You're welcome.

[ That is certainly a dismissal. ]

[wrackful]

[Murphy shrugs. She's dismissed him, he knows, and he isn't staying put just to be belligerent. He doesn't have the strength, immediately, to fight his symbiote enough to walk away from her.]

Whenever you feel like being one of us humans and admitting why. [He points to his temple, a tiny, irreverent indication of how she can find him, talk to him, anytime she likes. He hasn't - won't - forget that she's hiding it. It's the other side of his cruelty: time doesn't make it dissipate. He remembers, bears grudges, and it's only actions which have ever steered him to a changed opinion. Forgiveness.]

Not like I can get away.

[Not the way he really wants to, from all of them, the whole Nest. But he can get away from her now, enough strength gathered to ignore the dragging, shrieking feeling that walking away causes, turning and heading back the way he came.]