[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

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. ]

[unsea]

[ He laughs at her, this little feral creature she's become - that thinks herself the alpha and omega, now that she's glutted upon gifted power. The sound is spiteful, because she thinks she can free him - and from what? What does she think she can command, on borrowed power and borrowed time? She's a flower girl, ablaze in the own inferno of her dark desires. Truly lovely, but she'll burn herself on that some day.

Angel. Ren. He doubts that Steve will out-stay her as well, and shares it with her. The dark, guileless offering of knowledge born of spite.

The two of them had always been so cordial to one another, so polite. Hiding knives in their smiles and disguising contempt with pleasantries. She has grown in leaps and bounds, but he is a sinister thing of time and experience. She thinks to drown him, and he stays in her grasp. She won't need to breathe before he does, no. But, he'll remain there, hand wound around her throat and the other tight around her wrist - to make this a point. He doesn't want to feel the whisper of pain, old hurts and wounds, either - he blames her, for this vulnerability. Because the source is out of reach now, and she is the next in line that he may recognize as "loss".

Best to excise that now, to rid himself of her gore-slick fingers and pervasive madness. ]

( You don't know what freedom is. You've traded his fetters for these ones. )

[ He'll stay in her hold, for now. His brood, still numerous ( and oh, he despises them, in this moment. ), will feel this within moments. ]

[erbier]

[ She's screaming, it pierces the water like the cracks in a slate of ice. She knows what she's done. She knows what she's done and she knows whose chains she wears. She knows how he thinks he's cast his away. She hates him for it, for his cavalier self-sufficiency, for his ages of cold and dark. For his mother and mentor who had shown him the paths up the mountain.

And here she is, alone as she ever was. Screaming beneath the surface.

Wishing she had any control in what manner she suffered, and always always staring into the abyss with blood on her hands. She pulls her feet up closer to her body, centralizing their density and taking them deeper into the water. They could both drown here now and be done with it. Perhaps their broods will forget how to breathe with them; Castor and Gacrux can be done, in the blink of an eye. ]

( I hear your sadness every time I reach inside of you, don't play to be a brave man now. )

[ He only wishes he could forget the cold winter and the dead girl. ]

( Tell me. Give it to me, and I will release you. )

[ The name. Give it to her or, perhaps, she will take it as the oxygen leaves his thoughts and he will have no wherewithal to stop her. Perhaps she will drown him either way, fish his corpse from the water and flay him open to make new fetters with; power and bone. A resplendence of misery. ]

[unsea]

[ Her fury washes over him, like the waters she's dragged him under. It hurts now, enough to cause him discomfort. His lungs have begun to twinge, and his grip falters around her throat. Ilde has practiced, and she'll drown him with her feral might and dredge him up from the waters and crown herself with what she rends from his physical body. It's a threat that is real to him, as it has been real throughout his entire lifetime. He could be a prize to her, as well, and he has tempted her with that idea. Set a new flame in a corner of her burning world, to call her to it.

He releases her wrist, to lay hand to the bottom of the pool. As she clutches him to her, he holds her too. Nevermind that he'll have to breathe before her.

For the first time, in his existence among the nest, he extends himself among his brood. Their minds full of resentment and water. Let them know him, for what he is. Keep them at bay, now that he and Ilde are meeting without hiding themselves for what they are. She commands of him his name, and thinks to grant him his reprieve once she has it, and his inner world vibrates with the force of his laugh. A terrible, horrible sound. ]

( The Darkling. The Black Heretic, ) [ there, in his world: a black wound in reality, born of him.

Iosef, Anton, Stasik, Kirill, Vasily, Alexei, Eryk. A hundred names, and with them, a hundred lifetimes. He tips them all into her bloodied hands. Personas, memories, false faces, disguises. A face similar to his, changed by the touch of one Tailor or another. Rebirth, reinvention. Is this the name she's looking for? Or is it this one? What use is a name! ]

( -- Aleksander. ) [ A sigh, and again: ] ( Aleksander Morozova. )

[ Very well. She can have the damned thing. ]

[erbier]

[ She takes the useless thing that he gives her. Something to make a demand for, just another little something that ties her to that boy that once was, but perhaps like the Ilde who lived in the godking's palace: is no more.

Bubbles burst from her mouth, but whatever it is she is saying, or screaming, or crying, is lost to the water.

She shoves him back from her. She does not want him, he is no substitute -- though she was plenty glad to play as such when in a spat with his brother, now was she not. She pushes him towards the shallows where he can recover himself, or not. She kicks back, sending herself out into the deepest end of the pool where he won't follow her if he has any sense.

She is up and out of the water in a smooth motion, pulling herself up onto the tile without any struggle. She doesn't even look to see if he makes it back to the air. She just leaves, barely even a trail of water out into the hallway to show she was there.

The sense of her within the Station lingers, thunderous, but catching sight of her again will take luck.

Better not to see her. ]