[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

[erbier]

One. But I may as well be alone. He cares nothing for me.

[ This isn't exactly true, Steve has always been kind to her, but mostly because he was a sucker for her soft feminine veneer. She and Ren had once explicitly discussed how easy it was to manipulate him with it. ]

He has not spoken to me once since Ren fell away.

[wrackful]

[One. The same as him, then, with only Seviilia left. They hardly cared for each other, but they were stuck together, and compromise was necessary. Would he have felt worse, if she hadn't reached for him? Or would he have just reached for her?]

Did you try talking to him? Or did you go straight into raging murder bitch mode and then wonder why he wasn't around.

[Ilde's brood had lost one to a bomb, a pain that had to be worse than this. Maybe that was enough to wear down on something that felt like instinct to Murphy.]

[erbier]

[ Raging murder bitch. That is not the way to talk to her, regardless of her mood, and she lashes out with a slap without so much as a moment's hesitation. Her expression darkens.]

Do you have anything else to say.

[wrackful]

[The snap of the slap against his face is a bite he should have expected, maybe. He's certainly not fast enough to stop it. Doesn't seem to make any move in reaction at all, just the turn of his head from the impact, a brittle stillness stringing through the rest of his body.

When he turns his head to look her in the eye again, it's slow, a cold and bristling anger in his eyes. He smiles.]

Surprise. Turns out you're just about as human as it gets.

[erbier]

[ She doesn't know why his scorn hurts her the way it does. Sevilia had told her not to let the others injure her. His words are small and petty, his moods predictable. Well, at lease to her, who knew more than one alike to him, sour and independent, stubborn often for the sake of it. Disinclined to politeness, to closeness, but capable of it in little spurts that are in equal measure treasured, and unwanted. Distrustful, sharp tongued. She knows the shape of him, and when Mara had still been here she'd seen them in each other's eyes. As a pair they had been precious to her.

Now John does not have Mara, and Ilde does not have Ren. So here they are, she's slapped him and at his words she reflexively spits at his feet. She's never been so angry, in all of her life. She takes her gestures from the men of her caravan, and her wild ferocity from Dreus. She's a barbarous little woman under her pretty face, and there are times when all she wants is to be returned to the kind of barbarous world she knew. Where people do not threaten one another before they attack, where you can rest assured that you will be cut for any food or water in your possession. Simple. Short. Cruel. ]

Well then, vulture, you must be pleased with yourself for your predictions. The others must enjoy your dire squawking so thoroughly.

[wrackful]

[He looks down at where she's spat, expression both unimpressed and disgusted. That was gross, but it doesn't do anything to pierce his manner, the chill of his anger a smooth surface of ice. Her insults against him personally don't find purchase. He already knows them all.]

Yeah, [he nods,] we're all enjoying ourselves so much here. The bug makes you care, then it puts them to sleep, and now we all get to deal with you being a psychic nuclear meltdown like you're the only one it's happened to. [A beat.] You're not, by the way.

[erbier]

[ Her eyes widen slightly as he articulates that sentiment, and then her anger explodes. She begins screaming at him. ]

Is that it? I suffer too much for all of you? I won't suffer silently enough for all of you? And because your blessed presences don't soothe me I am worthy of your scorn in kind? Then get away from me. How many times have I inquired of each of you intruders into my grief to simply let me be, and yet you fling yourselves at me all the same to soothe your empathy for me?!

[ She points at him furiously. ]

You brought me your grief, John Murphy, and you were no kinder in it.

[ And then she shoves him. Slaps him again. Shoves him. ]

Get out of my sight. Get out, get out, get out.

[wrackful]

[Ilde's anger explodes forward and Murphy's rises with it, bursts upwards, shattering the skin of ice from the inside like the shell of an egg. He'd brought her his grief with no kindness, but he is still grieving, and the temporary calm the nesting pod had offered sheers away like paper curling to ash. His symbiote screams in time with Ilde's blows against his raised arms, the agony of his lost broodmates which had sent him to his knees on that first day now just fuel for the sick fury pouring through his veins, muscles, gut. Burning against the inside of his skin. Demanding violence, darkness, destruction.

It rises with her. Uncontrolled, pulled forth in reflection, and this is not the first time something in her has called on like in him. He doesn't hit back, doesn't raise hands beyond the poor shield of his forearms. It's his mind that surges forward, reaching to try and catch her as though she's tipping backwards over a precipice. Anger reaching for anger, pain for pain, the rest of him a ringing, inarticulate call for her to stop.]

[erbier]

[ Her breath leaves her, suffocated by the wave of arid wind. It takes her back to hot days on the cliffs, looking out over the wastes she had once trod -- step after step after step. The ephemeral edges of a desert through which one of them -- both of them -- had once waded, parched and grim in determination. Filled with a sullen nameless anger that simmered just below exhaustion and the hateful determination to keep going. She stares into Murphy with her hand wrapped, white-knuckled, around his wrist in the midst of yanking down his shield. But that isn't the shield that matters.

Her anger finds echo in him too easily, cold and sharp and always close to the surface.

It was always there, pulling, lurking. Inversions that dove-tailed. Mirror-images. A picture of understanding made from both color and its lack. Was that why it hurt? Not because Mara was gone and no longer a point of contact for them, but because John Murphy had been the first one to ask her: What do you want? And the question was always there beneath his words, whether she knew the answer or not. Liberating when she knew. Mocking when she didn't.

She does't know. She hasn't know for some time now, as the pillars that she had been building were all knocked down -- Sam Anders. Angel. Mara Jade. Kylo Ren. One by one by one until she was left pitching in the maelstrom, now wandering blindly off the cliffside.

Something in him responds instinctively, gripping back, offering an anchor, braced to help on the climb up.

She tugs his arm down, suddenly quiet, face stricken. ]

Oh, John.

[ As close to help me as she can get. ]

[wrackful]

[The list of people who would look to Murphy for help is short. It's understandable. His motives are self-serving, his manner dislikeable, his past blackened by fire and death. But his instincts have never matched the rest. He looks as lost as she sounds, his mind a ripped open wound, bleeding and burning, and Ilde who sings out the same, who's stopped hitting him, who's said his name like a plea. There's no thought in turning his wrist in her grip until her hand is in his. No thought in stepping in to wrap his other arm around her, pull her close.]

It's okay. You're okay.

[The words are meaningless. He can't give her optimism, dogged hope, or anything like peace. He can only hold on, his mind and his hands, offer resilience, the relentless ability to live through this pain and the next, the next, the next. Step after step in the sand, driving forward through the heat and the wind, choosing to keep moving, choosing to survive.]

[erbier]

[ She is not particularly okay. She is overwrought with pain that flows through her body like an acid, making all other little pains just as unbearable, stewing them all up into a storm of confused motivation. Sometimes this anger is for the others in her mind, and sometimes it is against them. She longs not to feel so alone, and yet the only cure to it seems to be so. She can't be calm with them looking at her. Either in distrust or in sympathy, both are infuriating.

Few things will be of comfort. The steady pad of feet in the sand from John Murphy, a single yellow flower from Misato. All other outreaches sting, burn, froth, fail.

She closes her eyes, buried into his shoulder.

Her thoughts at first are a cloud of fruitless wants. Her life back. Her friends back. Her broodmates back. Angel, Angel, Angel. But it quiets, first to a pitiful whisper, then down to maybe calm. Soothed into it by the slow back and forth sway of step after step in the sand. ]

( Where are we going... )

[ What is on the other side of the desert? ]

[wrackful]

[His anger doesn't dissipate. It never does, truly, and in this it becomes the desert, the hot, stinging sand, the dry wind raking what little moisture remained from exposed skin, from mouth and throat and lungs on every breath. But there's a calm in this, in having it ripped out of him, spread open vast to surround them, instead of festering tight and burning in his middle, his fists, his bared teeth.

Ilde settles, slowly, and him with her. Too long since he held someone like this, enough that his arms could almost feel alien for it, but he doesn't let go. They stay together, quiet, the pair of them like the stillness in the eye of a storm.]

( I don't know. )

[The City of Light is a vicious spark of memory, Thelonious Jaha's figure leading the way, his delusional faith, the deaths he'd caused and the three months he'd left Murphy trapped alone in a tiny underground bunker. All for a place that never existed.

It's a flashing burn in the sands, like a mirage that fades in heat and light. It isn't his memory Ilde wants. It isn't what he wants.]

( Somewhere new. )

[The best answer he can give. Not necessarily somewhere better, or safe. New. There was a light in that, dim in this storm, but true. A part of which him wants to drive towards it not just out of relentless determination to keep moving. Curiosity, the exhilaration of discovery, the feeling of feet on green earth after a life of nothing but metal and stars.]