mental link

[erbier]

[ She is sitting on the floor of the Nesting Deck covered in blood. She slows her heart rate, and the wound in her neck slows to a dribble. But she is tired, and her thoughts fluctuate unevenly, ]

( I hope all of you are treated this well, when you lose someone, everyone, beloved. To have your pain thrown back in your faces and mocked, to be abandoned by your brood, to be assaulted in the very hall where you watch over your loved ones... )

[ Her disgust is bone deep. ]

( Do not look to me, when it is your turn. I will have nothing for you. )




may be choosey with who she really answers and to what extent, but post is open at large.

Comments

[unsea]

Stick around, [ he says, ] you might outlast me, yet.

[ The words are said kindly, but there is an edge to them. A refusal to perish under the weight of the symbiote or the looming threat of death itself.

She moves towards him, and he reaches his hands to touch where she should sport wounds. The dried blood on her throat is a memory of a savage bite, the ache he feels at the peripherals of his mind is difficult to place - hers? his? - an immaterial thing, at best. He passes his fingertips over the space where her future scars and stories were stolen from her, by someone who thought it a sweet kindness for a girl who just needed to be shown such a thing. ]

They believe you can be shown the error of your ways. Rehabilitated, if only you demure to your betters - [ there is sarcasm, thick and heedless, in his voice.

Lexa, he waxes and wanes over. Damon, he finds, is a new presence. One of the nebulous newborns, he assumes. The thought of teeth sinking into Ilde's throat brings to mind what he shares with Seviilia, to sate her hunger in exchange for her services. There is a willingness, between he and the huntress, though. Ilde's experience, which he feels in hindsight, was anything but. And that, in the end, is what sets a spark of fury within him once more. ]

He savaged you.

[ Oh, and there is something disgusted in his voice as well. ]

[erbier]

They are none of them my betters.

[ It is a piece of her anger. She feels put upon by their ignorance, by how little they realize all that she does for them in the shadows, while they pressure her to confess and to conform. Some of that pressure is in her own mind, whether she realizes that or not has no real impact on her anger; one shard of glass entwined in witch knot of thorny spines and poison stems.

If they would not oppress her with their plaintive moralizing, she could be even more effective to their cause... As it is, she has sworn to herself to do nothing more of use until someone recognizes her contributions. Ren never had. She had longed for even the smallest of pleasures for all that she had accomplished at his side. Of course not. Of course not. Another shard of glass, bloody-tipped. ]

Damon Salvatore least of all. He came to me here, unbidden, with all his visions of monstrous years. I could not tell if he wished to threaten or entice me, and accomplished neither. He left here with my knife through his hand.

[ She lifts her own hand to rub her throat, that bruise gone too: where he had wrapped his hand around her neck. She did not wish to be touched she did not wish to be-- She tilts her neck open to the ghost of Aleksander's fingertip. He is what is left. She almost wishes he too was gone, the way she wishes that her friends and broodmates would not lie in indeterminable sleep. She wishes it was clean, simple. Rope cut. Nothing about the Station is simple, it breathes around her, remembering all of them like ghosts in its veins.

But here he is, after choosing not to drown.

She turns towards him, her eyes stark in her pale, tired face. ]

What now?

[ Where do they go from here. ]

[unsea]

[ Ilde has become a unique thing of her own right; poisonous and dark, addictive enough to wish to keep her and dangerous enough to know he should cut her lose and turn away. One of them will go before the other, if they do not manage to kill one another - despite the symbiote's vested interest in preserving the safety of all hosts. Even those who would savage another, the way this - Damon Salvatore - had laid an ill hand upon Ilde.

He takes his hand from her skin, the moment she opens her throat to him. She is clean and pure, the way her former liege had always liked her to be - preserved now, by a single act of kindness. Knowing her world, in the way she had shared it with him, he chases the thought that she should be allowed her dirt and her scars now, as each would be a symbol of her new life. He wears his own, after all. Though he has cultivated them to suit his image (and his vanity -- ), and in his mind is a thought for the wound-thief. ]

You needn't disguise your savagery from me, Ilde.

[ His hands in his lap, his shoulder balanced cautiously against hers. ]

If you wish to set me upon those who wounded and stole from you, it only matters that you ask plainly.

[ But, it's already there - in his mind, the decision to confront Damon. The decision to meet with Sam, once more. ]

[erbier]

[ She studies him. Remembers when they had only just met and he was little more than a new host, and she was still... Surrounded with people she cared for, confused by the intensity of her love but alight with it, optimistic if uncertain. It hadn't lasted very long at all. Blossomed on Opia, and died there with the clutch of broken hosts they brought back here with them. But she remembers him, he had unsettled her, a darkness coming in to an otherwise lit world with a smile on his face. Poisonous and dark, addictive enough to wish to keep and dangerous enough that she should keep away. She had meant to, but then Anakin had died. But then her brood had failed to thrive. But then Ren receded from her. But then--

She'd fallen in for the comfort of it. Chafed at the comfort of it. Raged at the the comfort of it.

He seems tired to her now. Like she is. Just human, and tired. ]

What good will it do me.

[ She answers, tone flat from lack of emotion on the subject. They blame her. She may have managed to reconcile with Murphy on the spot, but he had articulated what the others must have been thinking -- he was rude and blunt in that way. That she had brought it all down on herself, when she knows for absolute certain that she told or asked every one of attackers to leave her be. She had warned Lexa more than once. She had asked Damon to go as well, before he grabbed her throat.

She can imagine it. People apologizing on her behalf because she was the unstable one. The one not to be trusted. The volatile piece left of Castor ruining sainted Steve Roger's name -- she knows now, thanks to Sam, who some of the hosts think her broodmate is. ]

I felt them reject you.

[ She says, in that train of thought. ]

I did not realize your brood was so petty, as to begrudge a drowning man.

[ But she shouldn't have been surprised. ]

You'd think they'd have known to blame me.

[unsea]

[ He had pressed Seviilia too harshly, it seemed. Stepped from his near-drowning by Ilde's hand to a brutal skirmish with the woman he had promised to feed with his old aches and pains. She had boiled him from the inside out, and when he had lashed out - out of spite, rather than defense, his symbiote had finally shown him that he, too, was subject to its whims and bonds.

What good does it do them, to resist? To push back, not only against the symbiote but against the other hosts - especially those of them who had already weighed and measured those among them who were prone to accepting their demons, and utilizing that wicked edge for the benefit of all. ]

No. They seem quite partial to you.

[ And balk at the wrongness of him, in turn. ]

They're wise enough to have come to recognize the danger in accepting me.

[ He is both disappointed and reassured, by this knowledge. Once more, the lessons taught throughout a long life have proven truthful. ]

[erbier]

[ She lays her head on his shoulder, eyes closing, tranquil. ]

I'm sorry.

[ A grand, but empty statement.

Was she sorry for pulling him under the water? Or was she sorry that he's lived a life of isolation, even when in a crowded room. Even in this crowded mind. Or, perhaps, was she sorry that she had lured in things which belonged to him.

She does not deign to clarify. Perhaps she's sorry for all of it. None of it. ]

[unsea]

[ A sigh, as she rests against him and he takes up her hand. A small, dangerous thing - capable of mercies and malices, whatever she chooses to bring. He presses his thumb into the palm of her hand, gently, tracing the length of the lines that cross her flesh.

The heart, the moon, the sun's reach, the veil, he remembers the old grandmothers that took up his hands and gazed at his palms. Discerning empty things, one after another. Duva's own, though - she had known him in silence. He tries now to see with the same eyes she did: the make of Ilde, and he cannot. ]

Don't be.

[ He would rather die than fall into that comatose state, and the tension in his jaw says as much. ]

It is the way of things - you and I are built to last.

[erbier]

Is that the way of it? [ She blinks slowly, gazing at nothing. ] I have never known what to think of it, that I lived in the wastes long enough for Dreus to find me, that he did not kill me himself for crimes imagined. Chance, maybe, although he always told me it was deserved.

[ A sigh, eyes closing again. ]

I was afraid I would not be the creature he saw in me, but... I think, if I remember to consider the hell in his eyes, I might still be.

[ How many times has her determination gone back and forth on this. What Dreus would think of her now. As if it matters, but it matters to her, the sense of her story. Where she comes from and where she's going. Aleksander tells her she is built for this, for carrying on into the inevitable dark. A traitor to all living things for skirting the edge of death over and over again, unforgivable. ]

[unsea]

It is the way I have decided to approach things.

[ A sentiment that he shares with her. He has seen many lives come, and go. She has survived a mad king, a burned world, a brood that has diminished little by little, inch by inch. Blood on her hands and a little knife in her boot. A pretty face and empty eyes, she is Ilde - without a doubt, and yet, she still reminds him, so very strikingly, of Genya. A pretty thing, hungering for the pound of flesh she was owed.

Finally, he offers his hand - upturned, palm empty. He doesn't presume to touch her again, not a hand to her throat. Not an arm around her shoulders. ]

You've been away from him, for some time. Testing the limits of your freedom without his presence, and the only thing holding you now - seems to be memory.

[erbier]

Dreus Fenn could turn a world to ash.

[ She answers, she feels his muscles shifting beneath his skin where her head is against his shoulder, opens her eyes to see his open hand. She considers it for a moment, but lifts her own and intertwines her fingers with his. Her thoughts are carefully articulated as her hand flexes, feeling out the shape of his beneath her palm. ]

Whatever else he was, he was mighty and he let nothing stand in his way. Whatever else I may be, I would like it to be something such a man would admire, even as he hated it.

[ Dreus had not tolerated rivals. She would be witch-kind to him now, but a witch he shaped with his own two hands, like clay.

She turns towards the Darkling then, letting her legs splay out long as she leans into his arm. Her unwound hand is at his cheek, luring, and her kiss has a demand: admire, even as you hate. ]