[open]

[erbier]

CHARACTERS: Ilde
WHERE: Around
WHEN: Day 20 onwards
SUMMARY: 2 boys down, 1 to go.
WARNINGS: I sincerely hope Ilde somehow injures every single person who tries to talk to her. I am here to burn my CR down.

She had woken at the same time, with three other broods. Adara, Shaula, Castor; stars aligned. It had been a cacophony of new minds, of confused, heart broken, frightened things uncertain of just what they had done in answering the call that had brought them here. At first, Ilde had been so certain that the noise of it would drive her mad, she had told Cathaway was much. She had been alone for such a long time, the sounds of people talking and laughing had been too much, rubbed senses raw that had lain dormant for years. Had pushed on her a love and a longing that she had only ever really felt for Dreus, a figure of might and destruction that none of them understood.

Until she found Ren, in the garden she had already decided was her own, and taken his hand to place it down into the soil, for comfort. Instead, she had found the great black cloud that lived in the back of his thoughts. The dark thing that pushed and pulled him, the longing to be free of wrongdoing, to be made a tool, of use, of purpose. Worthy. Special. Their weakness and sorrow had wound together in an instant, brutally tight, thorny. He had hurt her, every moment that she had loved him. She was used to that. She was used to the conflict that tore at him, destiny and power. It was a comforting purpose to her. To love things half-mad with the destruction in their fingertips, she could weather their tirades, their fury, be one soft thing at their side. Planting seeds of comfort, peace, one at a time.

She would be his, if he would be hers. A blood promise, of purpose and belonging. No secrets.

But he is gone now. She feels their bond loosen, letting blood flow again to numb limb, and they begin to burn. She reaches after it, but the mind that has been hers to touch all these months loses all shape, her fingers slip through it. She can do nothing. And then it's gone. Her strings feel cut, a pointless, limp thing now and she sits down where she is without a word. Hurt buzzes in her chest, betrayed.

She could have tolerated any one of the other hosts leaving, none of them really mattered, except for him. She had relearned how to cry when Sam Anders had gone, she doesn't need the lesson repeated. Her cheeks flush with it, tears rolling down her face. Of course he is gone, like all things go. She picks herself up slowly, feeling sick, and angry.

She truly does have a garden of her own, now, and the Station's hallways align themselves for her seamlessly, taking her back to her own private place. The door shuts behind her and is gone. She stays there for the first few days, unseen, but her toxicity is visceral, a stain on the horizon.

Better not to see her.

---

The Nesting Deck
[ Everything she had thought perhaps to love lies silent in their pods now. Little eggs housing empty minds. She no longer brings gifts, and brushes away withered flowers she had left before, angry with herself for the act to begin with. She is filled with regret, for all she gave, for all she had deigned to take. She sits in the different pods, looking in on the silent faces of all the people she shouldn't have wasted her time to love. All she longs for now is to open up their safe little eggs and throttle them all.

She hates the way they linger. ]

The Training Wing
[ She has never cared for the exercise equipment, has always chosen to keep herself active through actual weapons practice. Always quiet and focused, but now her silence has an electricity and the practice dummy is shredded by the time she is done with it.

She'll take it away to sew back up, almost as vicious with her needle and thread as she was when she knifed it to strips in the first place. ]

The Recreation Wing
[ She's picking through the clutter for a book she can and would want to read. She scans the first few pages of each, hoping for one in her language and her mood darkening the longer it takes. ]

The Hangar
[ She comes down to pick through some of the junk that has been brought back from various planets. She likes to use the various metal pieces to craft with, since there is no one around to use them for their intended purpose... She is struck with the thought of it. Their real purpose being here. Just scraps of junk, breaking one at a time. She loses interest in the project, leaning back against one of the protruding arches from the wall that make the hangar such a tall space, a ring of junk around her. She fiddles with a piece of wire, winding it into a meaningless knotted shape. The sharp edge of it is tearing up her fingers, and she watches as it spots on her white dress dispassionately. ]

The Pool
[ She swims slowly in the dark, retreading a memory that he had once given her to help her overcome her fear, it's the closest she ever feels now. ]

Around
[ She keeps reaching into the dark, reaching after nothing, and the sting of what she lacks awakens in her over and over again. The bursts of reaching, desperation, and then of despair are hardly hidden. Each time, the dark anger boiling up grows only more black. Poisonous. ]

Other Wildcards
[ Bring it on. ]

Comments

rec wing

[adamance]

[In contrast to Ilde's dark mood, Lexa has carefully locked away her emotions when she felt Hux pull away, the now-familiar sign of losing a broodmate. He had been the final one. And while some of them had slept and returned (she had done the same, after all), the more time passes, the more she doubts that will happen with any of them. Not Nate. Not Rhys. Not Ahsoka. And now, potentially, not Hux. But she'll have to see if that's true.

It's a waiting game to see how she handles it.

The conversation with Prince lingers in her mind, like remnants that she can't expel. She knew what it meant then, and now the situation doesn't even offer her opportunity for diplomatic approach to repair her circumstances. There is nothing she can do. But Lexa is not one who's quick to be lost to hopelessness, to dark thoughts; she's been there before, here and back home when she lost Costia. She refuses to do that again.

So, for her own reasons, no sentiment wafts off of her. It's a decision she made before sensing Ilde, and one she holds to once she does. Some part of her likes to stand in contradition to others.]

You won't find what you're seeking. Whatever it is that you are seeking.

[erbier]

[ Immediately and without any particular provocation, the desire is there to whip the book currently in her hands at Lexa, but if there is anyone in this Station besides Steve she might be inclined for a modicum of control with... It's Lexa. She's the first, not Ilde. The first to be whittled down to nothing, and she tilts her head. Is it better, or worse, on her own? Is it quiet, does that make Lexa happy, to no longer have to share with them? Or is the awareness of their bodies like deadened limbs.

It looks like maybe she might have something to say, but then she turns and continues to look through the books all the same. Desperation to find a little piece of something that could belong to her, and her world, her memories, instead of all this junk that is meaningless to her. ]

Do you think so?

[ A distracted vocalization. She knows what she wants. She wants the book of poems that she memorized long since. She wants the one that had belonged to Dreus, that he himself had separated out and kept from the fire. She's started to drop the books instead of placing them back where she took them from. ]

[adamance]

[To some degree, the willful dropping of the books agitates Lexa. Perhaps it's because books are so hard to come by in her world, and so often left to be nothing more than remnants of what they once were. She's still read as much as possible, as much as she could manage, but it's never felt like enough. She knows that the first great fire burned so much of humanity away, taking their stories with it.]

Yes. And I believe you know that, too. And you knew that upon coming in here.

[Presumptuous, but Lexa doesn't like to beat around the bush.]

[erbier]

[ She drops the thing in her hand and turns, eyes narrowing. It wouldn't be the first time Lexa has made her snap, and in that way she wonders if she is actively being provoked. If she should heed the lesson she had tried to teach Petre: None of us are wise when we are... angry, or hurt. But Ilde is very tired of being wise, of treading carefully. She has been abandoned, disrespected, and she does not have the patience for any more of these small people, their flawed ways and their weak minds. ]

Don't think to tell me my own mind, Lexa.

[ She warns, the storm in her eyes. ]

You should leave me. I have no use for you.

[ The softest words she has for anyone at the moment. ]

pool. already cw: for drowning??

[unsea]

[ The tar-black cloud of Ilde's poisonous mood draws him in, in due time.

There is silent refusal, to reach out to her mind-to-mind. It burns, the lost connection between he and one he had spoken of as brother. The only reason he comprehends "sympathy", is because Rey sleeps in the same darkness that Ren ( and so many others within Castor ) do. With pants rolled up to his knees, he trails his feet through the waters she swims in. This is the last place he wishes to be. Close to her, and all her thorns, especially in this moment. Yet the waters are calming, and bring a numb neutrality back to him. The confirmation that no matter what closeness the symbiote brought, he should never allow it to possess worth.

There was no power found within such bonds, only these phantom pains.

( He wants to reach out now, and lay a hand upon her throat. To press her below the water and hold her there. Be rid of her on his own terms. ) ]

[erbier]

[ She doesn't want him there, any more than he truly wants to be there. No more than he had truly wanted any of them to come down into the catacombs and watch him mourn his mother. Her name. Baghra, my mentor and my mother. But one tolerated such things, it seemed, for the sake of others? Let them try to exert some influence into a world where truly they had none.

She simmers at the far end of the pool from him, angry that he thinks he can be here with her. That he dares. That between the two of them they could not have done something to keep her broodmate alight; afloat. He's as useless as anyone, and yet he sits there, playing at a sympathy neither of them have. He wants to drown her.

She acts upon drowning him, dragging him into the water by his ankles. There is no chance to hear her coming, she can turn her body off these days, silent and without aura until it is too late... The same trick she had used to get close to the guards and help rescue his wayward broodmate. She doesn't think about what it will do to Bellamy if she hurts the shadow boy. She doesn't care, not even for a moment. ]

[unsea]

[ His existence is a challenge to her. A beacon that dares her to raise her pretty little hand to his person, and she rises to it effectively.

He blinks, and she is upon him. Like a waterborne monstrosity, dragging him down into her domain. Ilde has given much of herself to the nest, and gained power from it. Even as he is submerged alongside her, clutched in her hands, he shares that thought with her - nasty and without hesitation. And look what you have to show for it, he thinks. The comatose, the deceased. Nobody left but her and Steve, and though she drags him below, he reaches for where she grasps him and seizes her by the delicate column of her throat.

He doesn't care either. This isn't grief he shares with her, it's loathing.

What good are you? He wants to know of her, that all her newfound power couldn't spare his brother-in-kind this fate. ]

[erbier]

[ She is all but one of the very monsters she feared, and she is becoming ever more aware of it every day. That it's her role to play, that the girl who had loved things and grown things was not so much a farce as a thing of the past. Gone now, infected with power. Dreus had always, always, warned her of what power did to you. She should have died with him, in their world. Stayed the way she was, for him, but she had been selfish and lived on instead.

She is a terror, full to bursting with hate for the world of the living.

Oh but he is hardly a living thing. He is a corpse of a man, continuing on in a constant solitude from which he will never be free. Fed on his own self-righteousness. Anything which might truly satisfy him will betray him in the end. Pretty Alina would never take his side, and then there is Ilde, who cannot stand that he thinks he can challenge her. They will all lay at her feet, one day. Even Ren. Even Kylo Ren will lay dead at her feet, even if she has to drag him from that pod and lay him there herself.

The water around them is all but gory with her thoughts, with her fetid desire to never feel this ever again, to save all others from what festers in her. Not so difficult, perhaps, for her to understand how Dreus had become so warped.]

( Let me set you free, little shadow. )

[ A hateful crooning song, alluring as it is horrifying, and she only pulls him closer. He will drown far sooner than she will. ]

the hangar

[headinjuries]

[ It's not the same kind of blow it had been when they lost Giorno, at least - it's not the same, when it's not your own brood. The difference between losing a finger and losing an arm; they both hurt, but one's a hell of a lot easier to get over than the other.

All things considered, Sam's always had mixed feelings about Ren. Ren was not, it was obvious, A Good Person. But he'd taught Sam more than anyone else had about how to handle the unfortunate side effects of having an alien bug-larva-whatever in your head (a lot more helpful than Bruce's "don't use it" advice had been, to be sure), and he was...well, he was Ren. Overly dramatic, kind of a dick sometimes, but there was only so much weird mindlink stuff you could share with someone before you started feeling some kind of attached.

Feelings are hard, this is why he never tries to explain them?

In the absence of his preferred way to clear his head, though - because while he technically could pop out the airlock again, he's not sure he wants to make another multi-day venture out of it - he's fallen back to just doing the mundane stuff with more gusto, because maybe if you get really, really into making a sandwich, at least it'll distract you from a couple of thoughts?

Or really, really into scrounging up something for Pidge to make doors out of, as it may be.

He "hears" Ilde before he sees her. Feels? Whatever you want to call someone who's radiating so many bad vibes that anyone with a sense of self-preservation would probably think twice about whether they wanted to be in the same room, let alone arms' reach.

Sam's never been great at the "self-preservation" bit. ]

Hey. Um.

[ Wow, Sam, you're so good at this. ]

I know "are you okay" is a really stupid question, so let's skip that one, but...is there anything I can do?

[ Even if the answer is "fuck off," which he's half expecting since that seems to be a common response for these kinds of things. ]

[erbier]

[ Her eyes flicker up sullenly, and she lifts one of her pricked fingertips to her mouth, an absentminded gesture. One of the children, of course it is. Someone she doesn't really want to show how ugly she's grown on the inside. She liked him, as she had liked some of the other younger hosts, but they're gone now -- of course they are.

She thinks back, on what it was to be a child. There had been so little time for it, as soon as she could walk well enough to keep up with the caravan, she did so with no assistance. There had been other children, at times, come and gone, few her own age. Always younger, rarely older. Few made it to birth, let alone to adulthood. What is usually an amiable interest in his past is instead bitter today, jealous, angry at herself for all the things she's felt.

She's only five years older than him, but the gap is expansive. ]

I was looking... for something to keep busy with.

[ She answers carefully, letting her gut-rending hatred, her sense of worthlessness and betrayal roll around inside of her. Aware of it, not quite certain she's inclined to control it. ]

But I lost interest.

hangar

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ The hangar is not only the place where he and Clint have chosen to sleep, it's one of the few places tall enough for him to fly. With the loss of more of them - well, Sam has been flying a little more these past few days. It's what he's in the hangar to do now, and he takes to the air before he notices her.

Her pain calls to him: all of it. Sam's seen many sides to her - blushing and giggling when reunited with a lover, frustrated and uneasy with the mask she must wear for the public eye, all the appearance of gentleness, the cold chill of her attitude towards the symbiote and her integration with the Nest, the quiet suggestion that somehow doesn't feel like suggestion at all, the presence of the Godking she'll never be free of.

He hasn't seen her grieving. It's an emotion he knows intimately, one he's both comfortable with and unbearably wary of. Like he is with her, maybe, for whatever level of comfortable he can ever be with someone he doesn't necessarily trust or really know - he's let her experiences in his head more than most others, shared more of himself with her.

He should stay away, probably, but he comes back down anyway, walks to stand by her side. Stays silent, for a long moment. ]

Are you angry or apathetic?

[erbier]

[ She doesn't want him there. It burns around her, an unpleasant portent in the wind, a toxic smell. ]

Go away, Sam Wilson.

[ She articulates through grit teeth. ]

I have no patience for your sermons today.

[ She presses her thumb down on the little piece of garbage she's been twisting in her fingers, focusing on the way its unfinished edge hurts. ]

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ Sermons. He’d never thought of the words he spoke that way, and he’s not sure how he feels about that. It doesn’t matter, though, not at the moment.

He leans against the wall of the hangar, not quit settling in, but not leaving either. Might be smarter to, might be better for his own well-being - and he thinks of that, sure, but he thinks of other things, too. ]

Good thing I don’t have any today.

ᴛʜᴇ ɴᴇsᴛɪɴɢ ᴅᴇᴄᴋ; sorry, i really lost my head.

[blooded]

( it's an ugliness damon is well-acquainted with that calls to him today. festering, hateful anger borne of murdered hope, like angry vines choking out everything that could have been more. it's not a feeling he can ignore, even if he thinks maybe he should. what waits for him at the end of his search won't be pretty, he knows.

ilde is pretty, but what's inside her today is not. she sits at the pods, staring into them, and she'd look normal except for the grief and anger pouring off of her in thick waves. there's no way to reason with this kind of fury, he knows from experience. there's nothing to do with it but meet it, let it rage and burn everything in its path until it kills itself for lack of fuel. usually, he wouldn't care. other people's demons are not his concern.

but this is a fire that burns inside him too, and if it goes unchecked, she'll self-destruct the same way he has so many times before.

rather than say anything, damon reaches out with his own mind, touching ilde's through the link. he doesn't flinch from it, but calls up his own darkness, reaches for the ball of fury and desolation katherine left in him, and shows it to her. she's not alone, see. whatever she's going through. he feels it too. )

[erbier]

[ She does not know this man, this creature. She took pains, really, not to pretend to know new hosts that well. They were, none of them, their best selves when first awakening, there was too much change, too much confusion to judge them all at once. In a better state of mind she might have merely turned him down, simply been unready to connect, to be touched, to be sympathized with...

Instead, she opens up, lures in his focus to her and then snatches hold of it in a hand adorned with claws. His memories of grief and anger inspire no softness in her, they are just more of the same. Smallness, wretchedness. She digs her cruelty in and calls to him to remember what an ugly little monster he is.

The expression on her face changes not at all, a sullen downward turn to her lips, a deep-set tiredness in her eyes that was always there. But inside is always different, on the inside she is rapturous on a pyre well-stoked, longing for the flames, the end, the end, the end.

After she has shredded down his offering to nothing but bleeding, she flings it back at him. Now a useless lump of flayed emotion. ]

( You are... unwise. )

[blooded]

( he doesn't flinch as she tears into his offering, nor when she tries to make him remember what a monster he is — it's not as though he's ever forgotten. if he were his brother, maybe it would have more of an effect, but damon has never been one for denial. he knows what he is, and he doesn't hide from it. what would be the point? ignoring it wouldn't make it less true.

I've been told, is the only real response she gets before the link between them begins to flood with blood. it's thick, plentiful, clinging to their legs as it fills the space between them and shields the rest of damon's mind from ilde — that which he doesn't want her to see, anyway. what he does reflects back at her from the surface of the pool of red, scenes of carnage and destruction wrought by damon's own hands and teeth. a building on fire while he tears into the necks of the people who wronged him, a slaughter of innocents to teach his brother a lesson, a boy's neck snapped at an unnatural angle. all to try to exorcise the venom that bubbles inside him, waiting for a reason to be unleashed.

is this what she wants? does she want to hurt, to rend the world apart for giving her something wonderful and then stealing it away again?

they can't kill anyone here, he suspects. but if what she wants is to destroy, there's no better partner than him.)

nesting deck

[wrackful]

[Murphy doesn't like the nesting deck. He's only heard about tombs in stories, but it's what it feels like, so many people sleeping indefinitely in their pods. But necessity trumps dislike, and using his pod soothes his symbiote, eases the pain for a while. It had been getting better, he'd been able to go longer between uses, but then Peter had fallen. Murphy hadn't even tried to fight against it, and the past few days have been more in the pod than out of it.

He's stirred, now, by a cloud of darkness nearby. Pain and anger cutting through the haze of comfort the pod offers, like a cracked bell struck, the note sour and sharp. It pulls at something in Murphy, something that chimes the same, memories of hatred and rage. He opens his eyes when the image of Connor choking rises, his hands pressing the bloody rag down tight over the other boy's mouth, vicious, sadistic satisfaction as the life had gone out of him.

Bygones.

He tears himself out of the pod, out into the deck proper, but the feeling doesn't dissipate. The black cloud is the smudge of another figure upright in another pod, and he knows he should let her be. But he's never been that great at leaving things alone, especially when the anger's trying to claw its way up in his skin.]

You know you can't kill them.

[Voice raised, carrying a little too easily in the quiet space. It's a theory more than anything proven, but if Seviilia hit an off switch when she got too close, he figures they all do.]

[erbier]

[ She comes down to meet him, since he has made the mistake of addressing her. She jumps down, landing with a thud on bare feet. Her eyes flicker up, sullen, blue. ]

Why do you feel the need to challenge me over something so unwise.

[ The malice she extends towards him is not at all tamped down. He, much like Ren, has such a way of saying the cruelest things to her, perhaps it is nearing time to extend cruelty towards him. Ren is gone now, she will have to bear the insults he left behind with no hope of recourse. Never treating her with the respect she deserved, she had always hoped to work herself to death and bring him to his knees, but he's left her here. The worst betrayal, to slip off into the darkness before she can even overcome him. ]

[wrackful]

[Murphy doesn't flinch for having it all directed at him. He knows hatred, knows anger, and it doesn't faze him. He isn't even all that surprised that it's coming from Ilde. He'd had a glimpse of it before, when his questions about her place in the mission had brought it out of her. This is more, a lot more, but everything has roots.]

You're not exactly being quiet about it.

[There's no point answering her on the deed itself, the festering desire that had pulled on his mind, his memories. If he tells her the truth right now, that it won't help, that it'd only leave a deeper rot, she won't hear him. He wouldn't have.]

But I'm guessing you already know that.

[Because this is the kind of anger that wants challengers. Wants someone to lash out at. She's blazing with it right now, and it isn't because she wants to be left alone. It's a beacon.]

the hangar

[inflori]

[ He doesn't care that she's hurting. What does draw him to her isn't any kind of empathy - he's had enough of that with Aoba, with the loss of all the other hosts - but her blood, her wrath. They're both elements that feed each and every demon. He's gone days without a taste of human flesh, and while it's only needed every few months, he'll always be gluttonous for a taste. Just a taste.

Petre is with her soon enough, quiet at the entrance, watching. A small smile twitches at the corners of his lips.

[erbier]

[ Wow Petre she just wants to be left alone and she looks up at the little vulture with a scowl. ]

I've not patience for this, Petre. Leave.

[inflori]

[ Petre narrows his eyes without hiding the smile that grows. He remembers how nice she was to him. How she held him and made him think of better things - of Diana. He could smell the garden on her neck, almost as strongly as he smells the blood on her fingers now.

Kindness only goes so far, though. Hers has reached its limit, and he's only going to concede in that he won't openly mock whatever it is that she's feeling now. (He still thinks he's the only one with the right to sulk, but at least Ren didn't prove him wrong. He couldn't be trusted. Now he's gone, and he hopes he stays that way.

Only because he wanted to matter more to him. Asshole.) ]

No.

You're bleeding.

nesting deck.

[deployed]

[ Almost everyone who visits the Nesting Deck does so radiating grief of some nature. Bellamy had found Ahsoka here once, after Anakin had been consumed by fire, and tried clumsily to offer comfort. He hadn't been back since. Whatever there was to be found here, Bellamy had tried to keep his distance. He'd been observing Murphy's pilgrimages with faint dismay, but today isn't about Murphy's habits.

Ilde's hurt and betrayal hook into Bellamy too deeply for him to shake. This sensation is familiar to him. He remembers feeling those twin urges when Clarke had walked into the forest and left him behind; he remembers crumpling under the weight of abandonment and resentment. He can't be sure whether he's drawn to Ilde in hopes of comforting her or in hopes of feeding the fury in her. It's hard to keep her emotions from dragging up all the old wounds he'd tried so hard to heal. ]

Ilde.

[ He doesn't know what more to say. His emotions are churning indecisively beneath the surface as he comes to a stop beside her. ]

You shouldn't stay here.

[ Staring at them does nothing. The silent appeal goes unheard. Whether or not they wake isn't decided by who pays them the most attention. Bellamy tries to hold on to logic in the face of the overwhelming wash of Ilde's emotion. ]

[erbier]

[ She gives him a heavy-lidded, sullen look, her anger fuming beneath the surface of her skin, a hot spring of tar, despair. Still, his resonate understanding of an emotion she finds hard to articulate is interesting to her. Too many have come to her claiming to understand, but she hasn't been particularly convinced of it. It doesn't make her any kinder, she wants to dig her fingers in to it, pull it open and look into the wound to see if he truly bleeds the same as she does. That dark look of hers is too much like a snake, carefully coiled. ]

I cannot go to my garden.

[ She tells him stiffly. The only person she has bothered to articulate this to. ]

I will harm the plants.

[deployed]

[ There's danger here. Bellamy isn't ignoring the destructive edge to her anger. Maybe he's underestimating what Ilde's capable of in her grief, but he isn't worried about that damage turning out to be more than he could handle. He's counting on the newly-established trust between them to deflect the worst, and his ability to talk her down from the rest. ]

I wouldn't let you.

[ Though he won't push her to the garden. But he can't let her stay here, standing over their slumbering nestmates and staring at what's out of reach. ]

It's a big station. You don't have to go there.

[ But as big as the station is, there aren't a lot of options that provide the kind of distraction he thinks Ilde needs.

Even thinking he knows what she needs right now is a presumption. Bellamy is aware of that. Recognizing her anger gives him a starting point, but it's not enough to come up with a real solution. ]