peripheries | IC Contact

My name's Ezra. I don't think we've met.

Paul said you had an idea to try to reach out to the Leviathan some of us have been having visions about. I had a similar thought. Seemed like we should compare notes.

Paul did?

[An emotion along the lines of "senpai noticed me!!"]

So far I've been sensing it, moving beneath the waters, out in the distance. What have you learned?

Mostly just that, and only really in dreams.

I've got an affinity for making connections to just about any sort of living mind, but usually I do it pretty up close and personal.

And now you can't be. So what are you going to do this time?

I can't be right now, and that's not ideal, no, because I'd prefer to see what I could do before it gets close enough for an actual fight.

But I should be able to do something when it close enough to fight.

Once that happens, we'll share information. We still have time to prepare before it arrives. You also sense this, yes?

It's not going to be here for a while longer. Yes. That feels right.

[Some fine evening early in the month, Iskierka drifts in through the closed window of the room Paul and Kaworu share. She is a creature on a singular mission; fixing eyes on Kaworu's notebook, no matter where it might be, she goes straightway to retrieve it and drag it to the nearest flat surface.

It is only after she's flopped it open to a blank page that she notes there are two Significant Personages here. That stalls her for several seconds as she looks between Kaworu and Paul, Paul and Kaworu, in apparent indecision.]

[There's a fact about the Trench. If someone is gone, really gone, their Omni signal dies. All messages are returned. The ~~Old Man's~~ Omni is still lit up, a glimmer of hope that something lost can be found again. And now here was the bird. Hope was painful and so often false and he knew if he found any he'd dig his fingers into it like claws and never let go until there was nothing left of him.

He digs his nails into arms and only the long sleeved shirt he's wearing saves him from drawing blood. It's like there's not enough air in the room or in the house or in entire world and he has to take all his breaths a little deeper.]

What do you want, Bird?

[It's not the real question he wants to ask, but he's not ready to ask the other.]

[When Merlinus' Omen drifts into the room, it's unexpected. That's why Paul's wrist-knife flickered into his hand as his eyes flared into seething light, coming to his feet in one swift flowing movement.

But it's her. Paul hadn't thought to look. Hadn't imagined it could be possible, doesn't understand what it could mean. He's partway between her and Kaworu, half-shielding, half-lost. It's Kaworu's question that brings him back into motion, reversing his hold on the knife so it points up his forearm when he lowers his hand back to his side.

He lets the question stand for both of them, looking at the winged harbinger expressionlessly.]

[Iskierka stares back with an equal lack of expression--at Kaworu, at Paul. At Paul, at Kaworu, her faceted crimson gaze settling there as he's the last one to have spoken. Whatever menace Paul might've presented to her is apparently less important than that.

What did she want? She clacks her beak, curling a forefoot into a fist with one claw extended. With it she mimes scratching letters on the page at her feet.

She needs something to write with.]

Edited 2022-03-05 04:24 (UTC)

[Kaworu sees the gesture and gets what she means. He emits a strange sound, something between a bitter laugh and a huff.]

You're always less prepared than you think. It's so annoying.

[It's not directed at Bird. Not really. He walks on legs that feel shaking but hit the floor hard with a frustrated gait. There's pens on the other desk. They always have pens right there. Why didn't she just look...?

He grabs one and turns around, for a split second, he considers throwing it across the room towards the bird. His hand almost moves to do it, but then he crosses the room and slaps the pen down beside her before standing next to Paul, arms crossed, looking expectantly at her.]

[If Kaworu still sees her, the chances of her being real are much higher. Paul cycles through his tests of consciousness and reality as Kaworu gathers a writing utensil and scolds the Omen. He notes the boundaries between her and the things she touches, the way shadows fall across her; he bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes thin blood; he reaches out his empty hand to curl over Kaworu's shoulder.

He still doesn't wake up. She doesn't vanish or change.]

Are you all right?

[He asks Kaworu, not her, his eyes finally subsiding to only a faint sheen of blue. His voice is only a handful of different registers, but too many of them tremble under the suppressive calm of the others.

(Are you there? Do you see us? Are you all right?)]

[The first crack in the Omen's usual featureless calm comes when Kaworu slaps the pen down: She starts. The feathers on her neck and shoulders raise; her antennae and pseudocoremata flatten.

The pose lasts a second, maybe two, until Paul speaks. She turns her eyes toward him even as she's groping for the pen to drag it to her.

There's nothing in that gaze to give away whether someone else watches from behind it. Yet, almost in answer, she rears up to take the pen in foreclaw and foreclaw and hindclaw, balanced on three feet and her tail, and begins to write:]

Paul, Duke Atreides,

[She stops, drops the pen and drops off the desk to flit to the other. Selecting a pen of another color, she carries it back with her and resumes her writing pose to add,]

Little bird,

[He can’t look at it. Those words, spoken in his mind’s eye hurt. Like someone took a knife and drove it in between his ribs.

He makes a noise in response to Paul’s question, something pained and denying. But he leans into the hand on his shoulder and reaches up to take it with a clammy grip as he watches the omen work.]

[Between Kaworu's clutching grip on one hand and the hilt of the knife in the other, Paul binds himself down to the moment. He breathes steady and slow, stepping closer to Kaworu as he taps the backs of his knuckles in simple four beat time.

Atreides, heavy as the ring on his left hand. He awaits his instructions with steady-set shoulders.]

I'm here.

[A murmur as much for his own ears as Kaworu's.]

[Iskierka writes with monomaniacal focus, now with one pen, now with the other. What emerges is braided, confused, the Omen's best attempt to process two never-sent letters into a single text for the two young men who weigh heavy on her Sleeper's mind.]

Tabris, Kaworu, welcomed and well-loved, friend, commander, fellow-Disciple of Pthumerians and Old Ones and gods beyond,

Or, to the Paul I imagine I would write this to, if I had a hope of a letter escaping Hell. (Not Navia, but the hell of endless torment desperate monolaters imagine us damned to, rather than the one we got,)

Hail and well met, o thou construct of memory and conjecture. I am sorry I am sorry I'm not there when you return from the ocean. I am sorry, I must (imagine I can) write you this letter proclaiming my own demise, at least so far as the Waking World is concerned. How are you? I imagine, also, I wasn't more watchful in the month before Leviathan arrived. I fear I asked you to be careful without giving an example of what careful meant as a balm to my own grief--being corrupted enough to grieve--that you and Trench survived the beast and it is dead. I imagine it's returned the souls of those it devoured, and the last of them have flopped their way back onto the beach by now. I imagine that Kaworu (Tabris, little bird,) was with them. It's a father's duty to teach his children when to run and how to hide from what hunts them; I failed you in that. If I get back from where I've found myself, I will give you those lessons. They're better demonstrated than explained.

To imagine otherwise, imagine Better explained than demonstrated is Sleepers aren't imperishable after all, is to give myself that many fewer reasons to want to return. If that's possible; [Iskierka starts to write a name and then scribbles over it violently] did escape. It's the return I question--I don't doubt her determination to rescue me but I doubt the possibility. (Don't tell her that. Or I can imagine you not telling her. Easy enough.)

Something I quaver even now to explain to even knowing this is an all an exercise to keep myself sane and won't go beyond my own skull

It comes down to the coin. I must suppose, should I never return to the Waking World, the coin will not make a reappearance. It is a terrible thing to have been part of a god (a Monarch), and to no longer be one. If I do, perhaps it will be waiting there for me, somewhere I put it down and misplaced it, and will never slip my fingers again. It is a lonely thing and an isolating thing. If you are the first to find it, it deserves a better resting place than a pocket or coin purse. It is terrible to see your god die and know all avenues of return are choked off. In hindsight, it did its job well. Not its fault it was sent to warn a blind man. Not its choice to be another victim of the inevitable. And my god did not even want me except as a tool, and I don't want to return (except when I do). (Did you call it? Did you call it? Was it lying? What would it say to survive? What could it?)

Nor yours. I didn't (won't) release you from your promise then even if there was no keeping it and you would break yourself over that. Whatever you feel now: It is natural. It is expected. I say: Don't break yourself over that. How much we are responsible for those feelings or what we should do with them I still don't know. The situation was impossible by the time you got to it, let alone when I arrived. Every world contains as many impossibilities as possibilities--the Waking World, yours, mine--and you will meet many more than this in the future. Two final words of caution:

(What is a pillar of the world but impossibility piled on impossibility? What am I stuck in but an impossibility, a didn't-happen, where St. Sacrifice wasn't as we knew them or never lived to give up the Throne?) There is a black-eyed man who is much larger on the inside than he appears on the outside. He is another black god (like Leviathan). If you have not met him: Good. If you have: Avoid him if you can. If you can't, if he is kind to you, don't refuse his help (you can't refuse a Throne-gift anyway, anymore than you can reject gravity), but think in the back of your mind about the men who raised you. The mercy of Trench, whatever its horrors, is we can make up for every impossibility given enough time.

Besides, you wouldn't have left him even if I had let you go, would you? Don't leave Paul alone with himself. If I know him at all, he may try to be alone in the way the responsible always make ourselves alone, in a crowd but apart from it. (The same thing you're always chastising humans for.)

Look after him. He needs you. Look after him. He needs you.

With love, In faith,
Merlinus Old Man

[She draws a shaky rendition of Illarion's sigil at the bottom to close the letter(s). Laying the pens aside, she turns her eyes back on her audience and warbles softly.

Message received?]

[[ the letters can be read separately here. ]]

Edited (slight continuity correction) 2022-03-05 05:49 (UTC)

[Kaworu returns the soft beats before his hand goes still as he continues to read. His entire body goes so rigid that one could snap him in half with little force. The knife between his ribs pushes harder, deeper, tearing through soft flesh until suddenly it feels like his chest is collapsing, tearing, twisting around that pain wedged so deeply.

He's barely even read more than a few sentences.

There's not enough air in the room. He tries to inhale and the pain constricts his lungs. He desperately tries to breathe in but there's nothing there. Just emptiness and that twisting pain. Or maybe there's too air. The air is too heavy, it clogs his throat and burns when he tries to inhale like smog. He can't breathe this. He can't breathe at all.

The room closes in around him, like there's nothing there but him and those letters on the page. The word "love" haunting like a specter as blackness blurs the edges of his visions. He even forgets Paul is there beside him. The weight of everything the letter stirs is impossible for him to hold. He feels like he's crumbling inwards or maybe just spilling out everywhere until there's nothing left of him at all.

Kaworu drops to his knees like a sinner praying before god, then onto his hands, the wood floor cold where his skin makes contact. He curls up, his forehead resting on his hands balled up together into a single fist.

("I didn't know you could pass out from breathing too hard." He'd once made that off hand remark to Shinji Ikari, as he walked out of the infirmary, put-out by the affair and little else.)]

[Paul couldn't keep his promise once. An impossibility, the letter calls it (it's too much, and you're not enough), absorbed, processed, and decoded in instants, his mind too well-trained to give him the grace of incomprehension. He can't keep it now, as Kaworu crumples to the ground, Paul following him to his knees a fraction of a second later, slower, more controlled.

He can't protect him from this. All he can do is reach for Kaworu across that awful gulf of grief and curl over him, pressing his forehead against a slender shoulderblade as one hand flattens over Kaworu's back, the other bracing against the floor.]

Take a deep breath through your nose. Let it out through your mouth slowly. Like this.

[Words that echo in more than one way; with shuddering ghosts, and the gentle wisdom of another lost friend. Paul demonstrates, close enough to Kaworu that his expanding lungs brush his ribs against the other boy's. He is a rock, he is an anchor, he is a steady, fixed point.

(Stark light arcs under his skin, flitting along the delicate networks of capillaries around his eyes, in the tips of his fingers.)]

[Iskierka cocks her head to one side, watching this reaction to what she's written. She is (too small, not enough) not quick to process without her Sleeper present; she is part of a soul that has been ripped to pieces and gutted of its sensibility of itself.

There is a feeling that should be here. The Omen struggles to wrap herself around it, to fit it inside a chest too narrow for it.

She takes mincing steps to the edge of the desk. She drops off it in a flicker of feather and scale, landing beside the two stricken boys.

Careful, considering, she stretches up, reaching to rest a hand on one pale head and one dark. She is not very much but she is, also, here.]

[While Paul glows brighter, for a few moments Kaworu seems to be fading. It's as though his already pale skin has become translucent and revealed that within him is nothing but glowing and swirling light. Pure light trapped inside a tiny human form and it's all fading into nothing.

Paul's hand on his back and forehead on his shoulder steadies him. Reminds him that he is here, anchors him back to the edge of the land and the sea, not letting him be lost to either one. He twists his fingers in the other boy's shirt as he tries to mimic the breathing instructions like he's never done it before. He can feel the percussion of a heart beat against his ribs when his has almost gone entirely still. Vaguely, he thinks if can anchor himself, he'll hold on tight to Paul, then he can't be pulled away either. If neither lets go, neither can be lost.

A soft featherlight touch on his head nearly sends him back spiraling, drowning, but he keeps breathing along with Paul. Shaky, weak, miserable breathes.]

Is this what love is? Is it supposed to hurt like this? Why do humans seek it out if it turns into this?

Edited 2022-03-05 15:09 (UTC)

[As Kaworu breathes, Paul rubs his back in slow concentric circles, firm containing pressure. The brush of feathers on his hair is a distant sensation, more than nothing and less than enough. Cold fractures in his chest, sends bitter splinters into his blood.]

We can't help ourselves.

[Most of the time, the choir that has stolen Paul's voice is harmonized to imperfectly imitate what it consumed. It's not so now. These are older voices, deeper and rasping, their long-dead languages flowing over his tongue like the frigid, mournful waters of the River of the dead.]

We seek out what we know will destroy us. We know it hurts, it will hurt, and we bare our throats to our conqueror. To be human is an awful thing. I'm sorry that we made you one. I'm sorry we didn't know better.

[The braided current of Paul's words flows over Iskierka as water over a mute and uncomprehending stone. Kaworu's anguish is easier to comprehend but not easy and if the Omen were capable of despair over her own deficits, she would.

She pats them both, light as the beating of a moth's wing. She whistles a note that echoes but doesn't mimic how Kaworu intones hurt and another for Paul's hurts. A sliding three-note trill captures the beat of I'm sorry, and then she withdraws in a flutter to perch on the desk again.

Insofar as she means anything, she didn't mean to hurt anyone.]

[The notes are like alcohol on a wound. They sting, a burning sensation at the core of him that makes him flinch and twist. Then it soothes slightly. The very beginnings of a scab starting to form.

Kaworu realizes his face is wet. Tears. The first time he cried, his sorrow wasn't his own. It was something alien and invasive. Now it all belongs to him. He has to carry it now. Paul has to carry it too. They can't discard it or hide the scars that form. It's the nature of being human.

He exhales shakily into Paul's chest, feeling the heat of his own breath and warmth of Paul's gentle weight. There's something satisfying about Paul's apology for humanity, like someone understands Kaworu's misery for the first time. But also something fundamentally wrong about it coming from the boy who once said he was fine with barriers between hearts because it allowed him to ruffle the hair of an unexpecting victim. He doesn't know what to make of it, a conflict between the part of him that wants to be understood and the parts of him that cares for the essence of what makes another themselves.

He pulls closer.]

Do humans have tears so that others share in their sorrow?

[Paul adjusts himself to curve close around Kaworu, gathering him up in an embrace (not thinking of a blood-slick sea and empty eyes) that settles the shorter boy's head against Paul's shoulder in a ever-more familiar pattern. He draws both of them up from the floor as he does so, sitting back on his heels and resting Kaworu's slight weight against himself.

He looks over Kaworu's head at the alien bird, forlorn and lost as the angel-turned-human whose back he begins to stroke in long, soothing passes. He gives her a slight nod, as solemn as the one he gave Merlinus when he first swore to care for Kaworu. The vow stands.]

Yes.

[Paul says, gently, his own eyes still only shining with light, not moisture. He can smell Kaworu's tears, this close, their faint mimicry of sun-warmed tide pools.]

So that we can see each other's hurts. And they're good for you, too. Like draining infection from a wound.

[Stress-secreted hormones leeched out through the lacrimal glands, the physiological release of heaving lungs and wrung out sorrow. Crying is a vulnerability, but it's also a gift, a blessing to be shared only with those you most trust.

(The rain still doesn't come.)]

IC Contact

text; un: Lothrat

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

a Visitation; early March

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: panic attack

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject