(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

[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.)

[sizeofyourbaggage]

( It isn't a failing of yours. ) He doesn't expect her to believe him, but he says it anyway. It can't ever be said enough for something like this, as far as he's concerned. He can't know what she wanted him to understand, either, but he can tell her what he thinks he understands from it. ( On the surface you're free of him here, free to make your own choices and be your own person, seek your own power. But there's still a part of you that wants him to be proud of you, to approve of what you do. )

He doesn't try to keep his hold on her when she pulls away. If he wishes she'd let him see the struggle of emotions, let him understand her more, let him help - well, there's already been a lot of sharing today, and it's clear she's done. It's not a bad idea to give himself some time to process it, either.

And he’s always glad to talk about what he did at the VA. He pauses for a moment as he tries to figure out how to explain this in a way she might understand, when she comes from a world that has nothing much like soldiers and the very idea of PTSD is likely all but nonexistent. “When people had been through things that ripped them up inside and no one they knew could understand, I listened. When they were afraid to acknowledge it or let anyone else in to see it, I encouraged them to share. Sometimes just talking about it helped, sharing the weight of it with another person. Sometimes I helped them learn how to control their fear.”

[erbier]

She had spoken with Carata on the rooftop of the Bearings, about what it was to be beholden to a god, to have your entire world controlled by their magic, and for suddenly it to be gone. To be free to choose, and the terrifying responsibility of that. At first, she would have given anything in the world to have her choices dictated by someone else. Cathaway, the Prince, Ren, Lexa. All of them had failed to give her the support she needed, all of them so contemptibly small, inadequate in comparison. There would be no replacement for Dreus. There is only Ilde, and she must find a way to control her entire world. She has set the bar for herself very high, but the goal at least fends off the creeping entropy of nihilism.

Driven to eclipse the Godking, he lingers inside of her heart and her mind.

She knows all of this, really. She does not even particularly reject those last words that Sam shares with her in her mind. But she does leave them, like abandoned letters, discarded. She won't let them move her.

"What gives you the ability to do that?" She continues, confused. There is no such thing as therapy in the burned world. There was mention of mind or soul healers in some of Dreus's books, but as near as she could tell this was done with magic, and involved the removal of problematic memories.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

There's a last, thoughtful hum over the mental link, and the impression that should she want to share more in the future, he's open to it. Then he pulls his mind from hers, drawing up the cloud layer around his mind that he uses to keep others out.

It might be easier to resolve her confusion if he used the symbiote connection to help him explain, but he'd rather do it without it.

"Practice. I had people who listened to me when I needed to be heard, who encouraged me to share when I was too angry with everything. Who taught me what I needed to get myself centered again. When I had a decent handle on it I started helping other people, but I'm always practicing. Getting better at it and backsliding and pushing forward again, but it makes you stronger every time."

[erbier]

She can appreciate that concept, of simply trying; practicing. That is the only way she has gotten as far as she has with the symbiote, with the other hosts. She is an outsider to them, and she knows this, knows that her ways are not their ways, and has had to find her own way to preserve what is Ilde while still up to the neck with all that is hungry within the Nest. This is something she knows, a skill she has practiced. Preserving that indefinable thing that is her, through fear, through starvation, through exhaustion.

Through the suffocating love of Dreus.

She nods, her brows pinching in a bemused smile, "I struggle to imagine you too angry at everything."

What did he have to be so angry about.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

He quirks a little smile at her bemusement. It's not a perception that he's intentionally cultivated among the Nest, but he's aware that it's one he has, for the most part. His stability - his softness - is never something that he's tried to dissuade others from focusing on. It's genuine, especially compared to some of the others in the Nest, and if it's only one side of him, well.

It's not a bad thing to be underestimated.

“Should've seen me seven or eight years ago.” Serving your country, war itself - it's not an easy concept to explain to someone who hasn't grown up with it. He runs a hand over his jaw, sorting out his thoughts carefully. “I served - fought for - a cause I thought I believed in. I killed people, I lost people, and it got to the point where I didn't know what it all was for. Corruption, people who abuse their power, throwing out orders and expecting them to be followed no questions asked... it took a lot of loss for me to realize I didn't want any part of that.”

[erbier]

Her utter lack of understanding is there on her face. The idea of fighting for something out of choice, of feeling... betrayed and used when those in power showed their hands. There was nothing more corrupting than power, and Dreus never tried to deny what his did to him. He bore it for their sake, he made them week and kept them down, for their sake; for their purity. He did not need fighters, and the justice that he would serve them all would be a final one. Until then... Well. There would be suffering.

Her lack of understanding is something a little more than even Dreus's dogma, however. She knows very well that her Godking made everything twisted, but she has also never known a civilization. She doesn't know the concept of fighting for your country, for your people and your ideals. She doesn't know the expectations placed on a free government, doesn't comprehend government much at all.

Should their time in Concordia have enlightened her? To her Concordia had not seemed terribly different from Avera, the dry waste on the edges of the universe where they had scavenged for supplies and bartered with thugs. You could make it prettier, more convenient, but she assumes at the heart of all kingdoms is little more than that.

The Consensus is trying to speak to her, the voices of those who believe in such systems, those who don't, those like her who have never experienced it and don't see the point. She can't parse the dissonance, the concept too broad and open. So she frowns, mouth opening to voice a question, but uncertain which is even the most relevant.

"What did you believe in?"

Maybe there was something in that, which would explain the rest.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

He watches her, tempted to reach out across the mental link and see if she'll share what her thought process is, but he doesn't. He didn't put so much effort into making his shields what they are now to go trying to pull at other people's minds, no matter how much he wants to know what she's thinking.

But he lets his curiosity bleed out, his desire to know more.

And then it's his turn to consider quietly - but it doesn't take him very long to reply to that. He may have questioned his beliefs in the middle, but he'd known what they were very strongly when he was younger.

"Equality. Fighting to protect people I loved, a place I loved. I believed in change, that what I was doing could make things better."

He still believes that. Still believes in all of that, really, it was only his disillusionment with the people who held authority over him. There's a pause, and his offer comes out thoughtful.

"I could show you."

[erbier]

A pulsation of surprise, there aren't very many who ever offer to share with her the way she chose to share with them. They preferred their privacy, their secret things, as if that would somehow save them from the inevitable. Ren and Angel are the only ones who have opened up to her in such a way, her beloveds. Was she betraying that intimacy by letting in the life and visions of someone like Sam Wilson? But it seems a fair exchange, her burning wound of twisted purpose... for his.

So after a moment of nothing, just silence, she nods carefully.

"Of course."

As if it's no question at all.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

There's a rolling layer of clouds that covers his mind when he opens it up to her, and it doesn't fade - just shifts, thinning in parts to allow her access to what he wants her to see, and keep the rest to himself.

It's ideas more than memories, but they aren't any less clear, or any less heavy with the press of importance. The sense of freedom, of a place where the government makes decisions based on the will of the people, where rulers are chosen by those they govern and the voices of everyone have equal weight. The underlying significance of people's rights, of those who fight so others don't have to, who stand up for those who can't stand up for themselves and protect the rights of everyone. There's a flash of red white and blue, on a flag and on the chest of a man who bears a strong resemblance to Ilde's broodmate standing with a group of soldiers; one of whom bears an equally strong resemblance to one of Sam's own broodmates. Any significance may only be recognition, there - if anything, Sam's own is on Gabe Jones.

Then it tips, become more personal - the burning weight of these ideals becoming suffocating as he grew up in a neighborhood that whispered that these rights weren't for people like him, that there would always be those who had to work ten times as hard to get the things that were given to others. The dissonance of things you were told and things you saw, the struggle of reconciling belief and experience, the anger simmering below the surface, fueling the need to do something.

To be one of those who fought to protect people, to make the world a better place. That others may live, no matter who or what he had to fight to do what was right.

It's there that he pulls back, pulling himself back behind the clouds. It's not the same as what he'd done with Angel, the only other person that he intentionally gave this much of an impression of himself to. With Angel it'd been about who he is, and there's so much of that he leaves out here - and so much more he puts in. This is about sharing what he'd once believed, and what he still does.

[erbier]

She wishes that his cloudfall was something she could take into her hands. A book, or a tuft of yarn, a piece of music, something she could work through in pieces, turn in the light and examine from different sides. But it is what it is, a sense of movement and high altitude, an anthem for a country she will never know, in a world she'll never see.

That is the thing, though, isn't it. That perhaps Sam had never really been there either -- whispering -- and that perhaps it had never really existed at all. Not in reality, only in the weightless, wistless, hopes and dreams and blood. Only in the reflection of that man's shield.

She's seen Steven with it. Was it his, after all? Was that how the Station had gotten it to him: Sam's wishing for the clarion ring that brings him back to a dream he's clutched on to all this time; the tattered love letter he wrote to the world a long time ago.

It makes Ilde's heart murmur with both pity and support. Her own fatalism can't overcome itself to believe what Sam believes, but she thinks it's charming that he does and that he shouldn't stop. The same way that she hopes Steven never truly knows what it feels like to kill. She'd do ugly things, to keep their daydreams beating, she can taste the devotion on the tip of her tongue. Unable to be so good herself.

Unable, from the core.

She's surprised at herself when she feels the little dots of wetness at the corner of her eyes. It's not the sort of thing to cry about and she turns to the side, hoping he won't see it.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

It’s been one of the things that’s always carried him through. With everything he’s seen, everything he’s done, every time something’s tested his belief or proved it wrong, made him realize that it’d never existed - he’d always believed that it could. He’s loved his world, his country, as it is and for what it could be, hated what it was and what it shouldn’t be, learned that both could exist in the same place. Dedicated himself to being the change he knew could happen, whether the battlefield was figurative or literal.

People like the men and women who served with him, like his coworkers at the VA, like Steve - that’s where his faith is.

It’s idealistic and pragmatic all rolled up in one, but his feelings about it and his devotion to it are intense, and he hadn’t tried to hold any of that back.

He spots her expression, of course he does - he still feels in tune with her from their shared experiences, but even aside from that, he’s practiced in picking up changes like that. In the past he’d have said something, maybe reached out to put a hand on her shoulder or knee, but now… well. Now he has the symbiote, and he’s already gotten used to using it.

There’s a sensation across their mental link like a touch to her cheek, more reminiscent of the brush of feathers than the press of fingertips. He’s not sure why she’s tearing up, and there’s a silent question that she doesn’t have to answer mixed in with a feeling of neutrality, free from any judgment.