It's a good idea. The vault hunters - [ stops, Ilde will have no idea what those are. ] - warriors I used to handle were always picking up new weapons in the field.
[ She looks over the weapons on the display and takes her time picking one up. Needs adapt her range, she can't rely on the rest of her siren abilities when they were still settling. Needed to learn more mundane ways of fighting in their absence. After this she'd go to her training room, trying channelling it down again. Maybe this time she'd not turn all her hair static this time or burn skin.
Picks what she saw the other siren's use most often. It helps make the SMG feel right in her hands. ] You'll never really know what you end up fighting with when it truly starts.
[ A nod, quiet and observing the way Angel handles the weapon, what she picks and how well it suits her. Something compact and rapid, Ilde can see that working well for her. Ilde chooses a set of daggers now familiar to her, medium in their size, of an average shape. Something she will not have to put all her concentration towards, keep some of her attention with Angel. ]
[ She grips it steady, fingers laced along the grip. How long before she had callouses of her own. The little burn marks where bullets flung and seared her - her own marks of living.
They might hurt, but she'd find it worth it. ]
They say it changes you, killing.
[ But then again, Ilde didn't seem to have much of a problem with it -- but she wasn't going to dwell. It was done. ]
[ Ah. In a ways he doesn't entirely want to talk about this, but she also knows something about Angel's lack of experiences. And perhaps if she shared her own... ]
It does. [ Silent for a moment to gather her thoughts, flicking the daggers in a sharp repetitive motion. ] Steven told me he had never killed anyone before. The idea hurt him, the loss of something precious. I am not hurt by death.
[ Life is not precious, it is an agony of chaos and brutality. ]
[ she falls quiet, as Ilde speaks taking the time to think on it, the quite talking in contrast to the roar of gunfire. The remembrance of the people she relates so fondly to the sound. Fine, to keep listening, to in turn weigh her own thoughts against it. She doesn't expect Ilde to be more or less than she is, even if they don't always agree --
'Death is freedom.' Something closes high around her throat. The sharp click of metal choking out the breath, the stretch of skin around newly implanted metal, and she shuts her eyes tight against the bright, bright purple ( her cage is stone like amethyst is stone, the air burns with smell of lavender, the sun is ultraviolet out from behind her eyes and it's all she can taste, smell, hear, feel - ) that fills up her mind with a far too jarring memory, one she does her best to keep away from. Death is freedom. Freedom is her veins searing open, burning out with that light, she can feel every organ shutting down, she can feel her lungs giving out, she can feel it like an inevitability. Pain that is beautiful in it's absolute, it has no beginning, she can't remember what it was before
The gun clatters onto the bench and she catches herself on its edge. It's alright, she can walk now, she can move now. Recoils away from the memory she doesn't know an end off except the dark and black and - she shouldn't have come out of her room, she should have waited until this misery had abated, like the sick needed to eat plain foods. Should have, should have, should have - ] Ilde.
[ spits it out with a need, like the word didn't want to come out of her mouth. Then she's reaching for her hand, seeking with purpose not just for contact but she needs something press hard back into, to know flat and here and safe and - ] Please, I just need - [ she should call for the Cathaway, she doesn't want to let this slip, needs her collar, needs that hard line of herself that she can't manage, angling to Ilde's fingers around her throat instead, be solid, be here, keep her two feet on the floor. Because there's an awareness of Ilde that's not right, that prickling feeling that happens when she phase shifts, that way she slips in and out of here and there that isn't physical. Reality was never so solid, and dying felt like the last echoes of something that happened long ago, like radiation still transmuting through different forms until it reaches it's own end. ]
[ Ilde knows what is happening to Angel all too well. It has happened to her a number of times since she has come to this new world, this new life. One could call it some kind of panic attack, or a flashback, but with the many oddities of the symbiote involved, it became something so much worse, something soul deep that paralyzed in a flash. That was not the reaction was attempting to inspire in Angel, but she is hardly surprised. Such fits came like a strike of lightning, with little warning of their severity before it was much too late.
For all her understanding, she is not experienced with comforting others, she is not entirely sure what to do. No offerings from anyone else have ever really helped her, it is something she has always resolved herself. All she can do is react to what Angel feels like she needs, even if she can't fully understand its meaning. She lets Angel put her hand at her neck, and with the other Ilde loops her arm loosely around the other girl's waist, to keep control of the situation should Angel's weight sag once more.
There is a deep frown of concern on her face, severe, almost angry. Although if she is angry with anyone, it is with herself. She is beginning to feel as though she can do nothing but cause harm, the weight of the guilt the Prince wishes her to feel beginning to gather, but not to the effect he hoped. She lowers her forehead to Angel's shoulder and pushes those emotions out of range, there is no need for them when she is already suffering.
This is the most intimate situation she has ever been in, the most physically close, but she hardly notices that, instead listening to Angel's breathing and heartbeat to be sure she will not suddenly faint. ]
...It's alright.
[ Not the sort of thing she usually says, but she does not mean that everything will be alright. She means that she too knows such pain and panic, that it will pass, that there is no shame in being overcome. ]
[ It has all the grace of fingers holding together an open wound, a slit throat and her palm holds Ilde's fingers around her throat. Thumb under her jaw, her palm set against the delicate bones where she could feel them press when she swallowed. She feels stricken and empty, she is already pale, but her lips are numb and her body is feverishly cold to her. Leeching needfully from the other girl instead, pressing in them just there so that her breathing goes almost too shallow but has to take deep breaths to get the air she needs. Holds her almost too tight, sagging into her. There are no real things, there is just Ilde and empty corners of her mind and the faint noise of dust and rumble slipping in ancient places, tumbling to the ground.
She knows how those stone feels -- it is so wearing, so exhausting, to hold it all up. The want there, to crawl into Ilde instead of herself, to that beautiful garden, banish everything she couldn't handle away, and it felt like she could handle so very little. ]
It hurt, I don't remember anything else but -- [ Mad babble for things there is no explaining really. It is all she manages, where Ilde wraps around her, she, in turn, burrows like a root system into the earth, like sunlight to open upturned leaves. Searching for a way out from the rot that birthed them. Or find meaning to it. Hooking herself into the other girl's warmth, the set of her fingers, stitch herself back up with vines and weeds and things she doesn't know but to look at. ]
[ This is really just no good, trying to hold the girl up in the shooting range. She almost contemplates calling someone to help her, but she's not really sure more stimulus will help Angel in this moment. ]
Hush.
[ Not exactly the most comforting, but Angel didn't need to explain herself. ]
Come, let's get you back to your bed.
[ She'll carry her there herself, if she needs to. ]
[ She nods, accepting it with a simplicity, falling quiet and clutching her still. She'll go so easily sometimes, for all she is trying to get in the habit of dragging her feet about what matters. But somewhere safe sounds better. It's so hard remembering how to walk, easier when someone can do it for her.
Rather she focuses on the one thing she cares about so much then: ]
Will you stay?
[ Don't leave her alone, comes so suddenly and viciously a thought, she almost doesn't care who, just that she's so tired of being alone. The quiet where there is nothing but herself to fill it. ]
[ That pricks something in the depths of Ilde's own memories... The mad king's head in her lap in his few and brief moments of lucidity and regret. It almost chokes her with its suddenness, the briefest ember of resentment. It catches her off guard, but she manages to grab hold of the foul feathered thought by its tail and smothering it until it is broken and silent. ]
[ She nods, and falls quiet. Easier to do when her heart is still beating fast-fast-fast in the high of her throat. When her hands are shaking from the force of something that has long since left her, but she understand is never going to truly leave her, just like Parker's death, an emptiness that will never be whole.
She lets herself be guided the rest of the way without complaint, pushed and pulled like feathers in a breeze. The thank-you there in the clutch of her fingers against Ilde's, the steady breath she feels not in her mouth but against the press of Ilde's palm. No resistance to her at all, just a gentle bend to whatever she's asked from there out. ]
[ When they make it back to the room, it is impossible to untangle herself from this sorrowful little clinging vine. She could forcefully shove her into her own bed, but that does not seem conducive here, she will have to coax this trailing plant into standing tall with patience. Ilde knows that. So she lies down in the bed with Angel cradled into her side, just like she lies down in the gardens with her ear pressed to the earth, to listen, to offer her love and her warmth. It is difficult for her to do the same with another human being. They are so different, so full of complication, resentment, disappointment. Madness. Human beings were all full of madness and cruelty, and for all of Angel's sweetness on the exterior, she knows something about her lies, many and vast.
She has refused to love anything she could not control for all of her life, and now she is here with a weak girl in her arms whose heart she may or may not have broken. ]
The thought of losing any member of my brood is terrifying.
[ She is here, this is happening, the only way to relieve the tension in her lungs is to let the ideas out. ]
[ She turns herself into her, and it takes -- more than it should be to learn how to be close to another when she has catalogues of her spied upon moments of others doing this to draw reference from. Just no one prepared her for the soft warmth of another human being, willingly being near her. Not the cold observation of a fearful team of scientists, not the ghosts of cold metal being joined to her spine, her skull.
For awhile she can't do much else but lay against her and breathe, scared of how much space she's taking up, of how much this truly was to her. Of Jack's memory conjured up somehow and destroying it all. She leans into the echo of Ilde's thoughts -- how short she'd known her, but how easy it was to let Ilde into her mind, to let her lay in turn against the bed of her thoughts as Ilde let Angel lay against her.
Perhaps that is alone why she tries to put it into words. ]
It is. [ she shifts against her side, her arm settling low across Ilde's hips, her eyelashes blinking against her shoulder. The warm trickle of breath as she tries to ease the words flat. ] Keep them close, don't let them out of your sight. They don't know how fragile they are.
[ People never knew, they never knew how easily they could be shattered. Did Parker? Did it matter anyway? It had happened as it had, regardless of it all. ]
[ A sigh of breath that ruffles Angel's dark hair. Ilde stares off at nothing as she contemplates those words. They are true, even in the ways they are not... Castor is a brood of very fragile people, deeply injured and yet still struggling onwards. It is something that binds them all, the familiarity of their pain underneath even if they do not know everything about one another. Not yet. Ilde understands all this about her brood, that there is no coincidence to them, that they are all a little bit toxic. ]
They understand. [ Not precisely rejection of the sentiment, ] They understand our influence on one another.. Now. Now that I demonstrated how it can go wrong.
[ Complicated. She's not pleased with the results, but she also cannot apologize for reacting as she saw appropriate. The Prince continues to speak as though she did it simply to flout his law, and that rankles. ]
[ She has yet to work out what she feels for her own -- other than to be defined now by this loss. Aoba was kind, strange though, Ares didn't like her much, though soon, after this for all she does not know it yet, she will lose Romy too, and they will be down again in numbers and she'll force herself to find Petre. For now, this feels like whittling enough, they get to be the honour of being the ones held up as lessons to the others. Forever crippled. What a good lesson they must be now, to the others. She looked miserable enough for anyone. ]
It could go wrong for anyone. [ It's not quite forgiveness, but it's understanding. She was in control of her own actions. But she hadn't been the one to pull the trigger on Parker, either. ] Parker hadn't wanted to be near us. He told me, the first time we ever spoke. He said he didn't want to be here.
[ The image of the cripple is all too real for Ilde. She has seen so many ugly wounds in her time. The caravan of her childhood would have no choice but the leave them behind in the wastes, where if they would wait for nightfall to come and for the shadows to finish what they had started. There were many more in Dreus's palace, sad examples of flesh who could survive nowhere else and so the mad king took a kind of pity on them, let them lie in the shade of his alcazar and be fed, and where at least it was a question as to whether or not he might kill them that day.
Even more than that, however, is the misery that Cathaway had pushed at her, that had filled Ilde with so much anger:
A heavy knife falling, weight and edge driving through a pale finger laid flat against the cutting block. It splits through skin and muscle and nerve. Hacks through bone. Blood paints the blade, then the block. A squeal like pain.
They reinforce it, the Prince and the Pilot. This idea that Adara is now irreparable. Rather than offer the benefit of their own losses, they merely push guilt and pity. Infuriating. Ilde's arms tighten around Angel, burying her face in her hair. ]
Don't think that.
[ Not at all responding to the words that she has said, instead the picture in her mind. ]
[ They are a tumble of old things or abandoned things, like the huge ordered structures of Dahl, overgrown with weeds, growing in between the wires. The way they could always find the cracks in the concrete, how those heavy blocks would shelter saplings from the elements. No matter what they were, they knotted together well, wrapping deeply around. Twists a leg through Idle's and her arm moves around her waist and she can feel the other girl's face pressed into her and in return, she tucks her own into the little corner between neck and chest. Every breath in her body feels painfully tight -- in that way, the violence is fitting and matching. The gush of blood that she thinks if she shuts her eyes and leans further into the give of Ilde, she might feel the blood, might taste that coppery tang, somehow.
Doesn't speak, rather, that would mean moving something more than just the soft exhale that brushes her lips against her shoulders as she goes to wet them. ]
(I want to be. ) [ scrunches up something knotted inside herself, because she's well and truly past being at a point in her life where she threw insults her hurt, it had turned cold as Jack wanted her to be long ago. Just never like he intended. ] (I'm supposed to be. )
[ a pause, all crackle white noise, and then: ] (I'm so scared of failing, Ilde. )
[ A breath, the briefest consideration of whether or not she should just lie and soothe her, but that isn't really Ilde's way. Instead she is honest, and she lets her thoughts touch with Angel's, close and comfortable just like their skin. Familiar now that they have done this several times. ]
(I am too.)
[ They can hide from it here, for a little while, but the fear will always be waiting on the other side of the doorway. Ilde knows that all too well. Death, fear, and pain. A diseased pack of hound that stalks her every moment, sickness frothing at their mouths, waiting to catch her, catch those around her, and bite deep. ]
(You cannot let fear paralyze you, when you stand still... you assure your fate.)
[ She had called Angel a witch, but perhaps that was the power they needed to survive. That determination to reach even where it is ugly and dark. Prince would not approve. (Her King would not forgive.) She doesn't know if that matters. If his means have failed all who came before... what would he do for them now.
Determination wells inside of her. She won't relent. She won't let her brood be taken from her, nor Angel. She will die first. ]
[ In a tangle of thoughts and limbs she takes her cues from Ilde's breathing. There's sense to the words, they are the only words they can probably afford to have. ]
(Where I come from... there are others like me.)
[ starts, then stops, because it's hard, she makes a point not to talk about her home in detail. Paints in broad strokes of information that she keeps herself removed from. Says, Pandora is misery and sand, doesn't say she'd do anything to feel even that, says her father is a monster, but that the kills others.
If anything, what begun this is why she doesn't often talk about it, it's a pit of misery, but this was the first solid thought she'd had in years, watching like she did. ]
(But they're warriors, leaders, respected as much as feared. I wanted... so much to have their strength. They never stopped moving, no matter what happened. )
[ There they are, all three them, clear in her mind. The blue of their markings out from their ripped clothes, their too pale skin and their too bright eyes as they did such impossible things. She knows what they would do to Ilde's hounds ( skags is what she thinks of, with bile dripping from their jowls and the long drag of their tongue as their jaws snapped shut ), they'd melt them down to nothing, they'd bath them in every toxic element that they were given natural control over. ]
[ There is a dichotomy to the way that Ilde thinks about this. She believes in individuality, in strength of self. And yet she allowed herself to be poisoned by Dreus. And yet she believes in the idea of the Hive, of working together for the greater good. She sees none of it as contradictory, and that is the warped hypocrisy of her thinking. ]
(You cannot compare yourself. You can only be you, you must live with your choices.)
[ She believes it. She made her choices and she was not sorry. She was not sorry to have loved Dreus. She was not sorry to have killed that man on Avera. If the Hive takes something of her nature... she will not be sorry for that either. ]
[ For a second, there's only one answer, to explain everything, but she doesn't have the energy for it when she just clawed her way out of that memory. That's enough rolling in her own death for one day.
Rather she curls in, tilting her head and down into the curve of Ilde's shoulder, her shoulders hunching up as she sighed in the effort of her calm and recovery. The shift of muscles and skin, bones and tendons that are is sluggish. The draw into Ilde's warmth she can't seem to help but wants much more than she can admit. An exhausted breath she lets out of herself.
Then she forces herself back, putting her head flat on the pillow so she could look across and take Ilde in like this, their hair tangled up on the pillow. Still close, not that far apart -- but more, so she can see her face. Remember her just like this. The softness of her, staying her with her when she's nothing but wretched. ]
(Was it hard? Defining yourself? I only knew what... I didn't want to be.)
[ She's easily moulded in some ways, a newness, and a tenderness for living that no doubt time will ruin. Otherwise, she's stiffly unmoving. She knows what she will not do. It's a starting point, but she's keenly aware that's all it is. She has yet to do anything else herself. ]
[ The question, really, is if Ilde has defined herself. She doesn't feel as though she has. Her understanding of herself is... entirely too much like Angel's. Treated like something precious, something Holy, fed on false ideas and false promises. The only reason she fares better in that nebulous place is because she sees no other choice, but that does not make her any more solid. Any more knowledgeable on the matter. She thinks about Anika and Ahsoka. The apprentice had spoken high praise about how her master had taught her to believe in herself, to define herself. And to Anakin Skywalker the answer was so very simple: it was a matter of necessity, how could one live their own life without it, it would come naturally with time.
Ilde had a jealousy for what Anakin and Ahsoka had, and in this moment especially. She can't offer Angel any advice on this. They are both lost. Given no guidance except for the false religious dogma that they are special, something rather lost without the two madmen who propped up their wings for their own pleasure.
The chasm of that emptiness echoes inside of Ilde and she has to somehow keep it in silence. Angel has just begun to uncurl and she does not what to put all the weight and darkness back on her. Not now, maybe they would talk of this another time. Not now. She strokes a strand of dark hair away from Angel's face, a physical gesture of warmth to hide how cold she feels inside, ]
(Don't worry, it will come with time. )
[ She hopes. A platitude, not Ilde's way, but she cannot bear to make Angel cry any more today. ]
Edited (I wasn't...d one....) 2016-05-21 17:26 (UTC)
[ It's perhaps not great words of wisdom, but the truth of that is that Angel would have a hard time accepting half of what she was told. Her choice was self-destruction, her choice was dark oblivion, why this is at any length difficult to understand how others spoke when they didn't know what it was to only have nightmares being interchangeable with comfort.
Ilde does, for all she might not say it, and it might not come up so directly, but she suspects it's why she can lay here in her own nothingness with Ilde so comfortably. With everyone else, there's a need to make it up, but with her -- there is just them. Other people's delusion and the imprint it's left on them in return -- and to that end, when Ilde brushes her fingers against her cheek, Angel's eyes close and her free hand reaches up, to still it there against her face. Turning into it ever so slightly, the flutter of eyelashes and the brush from the corner of her mouth against the edge of her palm, her fingers laced over and across with no pressure other than the softness of what she had asked to start with, for her to stay.
If Ilde is a gardener, then Angel suspects this must be how it feel to be one of her flowers. ]
(... Alright.)
[ Trust, she realises, has many forms, and even if it is not -- some speech Roland might give, it's what she needs, the confirmation that they have time now. She can be more now, she can with it, find things to fill up this space. With seconds, moments, like this. Her appreciation, gratefulness, is open. ]
[ Her pulse quickens, an unfamiliar burn of heat across her collarbones. She does not understand this vulnerability, this tenderness. The only experience she has of such things is her Godking, and even at his most tender he scorched everyone around him, she has little burn marks on her skin from where he had been gentle.
The sensation, skin prickling, is almost like fear. Almost like that fevered sickness when her symbiote ability activates itself... but ever so subtly different. Giddy, half-hysterical. It makes her a little dizzy, uncertain whether to pull her hand away or to leave it in place where at least the physical contact was grounding in the swirl of terror and delight.
She blinks, forcing herself to shake it off enough to think although the prickling under her ribs remains. ]
Try to rest. I will be here when you wake up.
[ She manages to speak it, despite the subtle breathlessness. ]
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circumspector) wrote2016-03-14 03:55 pm
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[ She felt to practice her precision was relevant, no matter what the medium. ]
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[ She looks over the weapons on the display and takes her time picking one up. Needs adapt her range, she can't rely on the rest of her siren abilities when they were still settling. Needed to learn more mundane ways of fighting in their absence. After this she'd go to her training room, trying channelling it down again. Maybe this time she'd not turn all her hair static this time or burn skin.
Picks what she saw the other siren's use most often. It helps make the SMG feel right in her hands. ] You'll never really know what you end up fighting with when it truly starts.
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Perhaps until it ends.
[ Why you gotta be so grim Ilde... ]
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They might hurt, but she'd find it worth it. ]
They say it changes you, killing.
[ But then again, Ilde didn't seem to have much of a problem with it -- but she wasn't going to dwell. It was done. ]
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It does. [ Silent for a moment to gather her thoughts, flicking the daggers in a sharp repetitive motion. ] Steven told me he had never killed anyone before. The idea hurt him, the loss of something precious. I am not hurt by death.
[ Life is not precious, it is an agony of chaos and brutality. ]
Death is freedom.
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'Death is freedom.' Something closes high around her throat. The sharp click of metal choking out the breath, the stretch of skin around newly implanted metal, and she shuts her eyes tight against the bright, bright purple ( her cage is stone like amethyst is stone, the air burns with smell of lavender, the sun is ultraviolet out from behind her eyes and it's all she can taste, smell, hear, feel - ) that fills up her mind with a far too jarring memory, one she does her best to keep away from. Death is freedom. Freedom is her veins searing open, burning out with that light, she can feel every organ shutting down, she can feel her lungs giving out, she can feel it like an inevitability. Pain that is beautiful in it's absolute, it has no beginning, she can't remember what it was before
The gun clatters onto the bench and she catches herself on its edge. It's alright, she can walk now, she can move now. Recoils away from the memory she doesn't know an end off except the dark and black and - she shouldn't have come out of her room, she should have waited until this misery had abated, like the sick needed to eat plain foods. Should have, should have, should have - ] Ilde.
[ spits it out with a need, like the word didn't want to come out of her mouth. Then she's reaching for her hand, seeking with purpose not just for contact but she needs something press hard back into, to know flat and here and safe and - ] Please, I just need - [ she should call for the Cathaway, she doesn't want to let this slip, needs her collar, needs that hard line of herself that she can't manage, angling to Ilde's fingers around her throat instead, be solid, be here, keep her two feet on the floor. Because there's an awareness of Ilde that's not right, that prickling feeling that happens when she phase shifts, that way she slips in and out of here and there that isn't physical. Reality was never so solid, and dying felt like the last echoes of something that happened long ago, like radiation still transmuting through different forms until it reaches it's own end. ]
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For all her understanding, she is not experienced with comforting others, she is not entirely sure what to do. No offerings from anyone else have ever really helped her, it is something she has always resolved herself. All she can do is react to what Angel feels like she needs, even if she can't fully understand its meaning. She lets Angel put her hand at her neck, and with the other Ilde loops her arm loosely around the other girl's waist, to keep control of the situation should Angel's weight sag once more.
There is a deep frown of concern on her face, severe, almost angry. Although if she is angry with anyone, it is with herself. She is beginning to feel as though she can do nothing but cause harm, the weight of the guilt the Prince wishes her to feel beginning to gather, but not to the effect he hoped. She lowers her forehead to Angel's shoulder and pushes those emotions out of range, there is no need for them when she is already suffering.
This is the most intimate situation she has ever been in, the most physically close, but she hardly notices that, instead listening to Angel's breathing and heartbeat to be sure she will not suddenly faint. ]
...It's alright.
[ Not the sort of thing she usually says, but she does not mean that everything will be alright. She means that she too knows such pain and panic, that it will pass, that there is no shame in being overcome. ]
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She knows how those stone feels -- it is so wearing, so exhausting, to hold it all up. The want there, to crawl into Ilde instead of herself, to that beautiful garden, banish everything she couldn't handle away, and it felt like she could handle so very little. ]
It hurt, I don't remember anything else but -- [ Mad babble for things there is no explaining really. It is all she manages, where Ilde wraps around her, she, in turn, burrows like a root system into the earth, like sunlight to open upturned leaves. Searching for a way out from the rot that birthed them. Or find meaning to it. Hooking herself into the other girl's warmth, the set of her fingers, stitch herself back up with vines and weeds and things she doesn't know but to look at. ]
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Hush.
[ Not exactly the most comforting, but Angel didn't need to explain herself. ]
Come, let's get you back to your bed.
[ She'll carry her there herself, if she needs to. ]
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Rather she focuses on the one thing she cares about so much then: ]
Will you stay?
[ Don't leave her alone, comes so suddenly and viciously a thought, she almost doesn't care who, just that she's so tired of being alone. The quiet where there is nothing but herself to fill it. ]
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Of course.
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She lets herself be guided the rest of the way without complaint, pushed and pulled like feathers in a breeze. The thank-you there in the clutch of her fingers against Ilde's, the steady breath she feels not in her mouth but against the press of Ilde's palm. No resistance to her at all, just a gentle bend to whatever she's asked from there out. ]
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She has refused to love anything she could not control for all of her life, and now she is here with a weak girl in her arms whose heart she may or may not have broken. ]
The thought of losing any member of my brood is terrifying.
[ She is here, this is happening, the only way to relieve the tension in her lungs is to let the ideas out. ]
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For awhile she can't do much else but lay against her and breathe, scared of how much space she's taking up, of how much this truly was to her. Of Jack's memory conjured up somehow and destroying it all. She leans into the echo of Ilde's thoughts -- how short she'd known her, but how easy it was to let Ilde into her mind, to let her lay in turn against the bed of her thoughts as Ilde let Angel lay against her.
Perhaps that is alone why she tries to put it into words. ]
It is. [ she shifts against her side, her arm settling low across Ilde's hips, her eyelashes blinking against her shoulder. The warm trickle of breath as she tries to ease the words flat. ] Keep them close, don't let them out of your sight. They don't know how fragile they are.
[ People never knew, they never knew how easily they could be shattered. Did Parker? Did it matter anyway? It had happened as it had, regardless of it all. ]
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They understand. [ Not precisely rejection of the sentiment, ] They understand our influence on one another.. Now. Now that I demonstrated how it can go wrong.
[ Complicated. She's not pleased with the results, but she also cannot apologize for reacting as she saw appropriate. The Prince continues to speak as though she did it simply to flout his law, and that rankles. ]
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It could go wrong for anyone. [ It's not quite forgiveness, but it's understanding. She was in control of her own actions. But she hadn't been the one to pull the trigger on Parker, either. ] Parker hadn't wanted to be near us. He told me, the first time we ever spoke. He said he didn't want to be here.
cw: gross
Even more than that, however, is the misery that Cathaway had pushed at her, that had filled Ilde with so much anger:
A heavy knife falling, weight and edge driving through a pale finger laid flat against the cutting block.
It splits through skin and muscle and nerve.
Hacks through bone.
Blood paints the blade, then the block.
A squeal like pain.
They reinforce it, the Prince and the Pilot. This idea that Adara is now irreparable. Rather than offer the benefit of their own losses, they merely push guilt and pity. Infuriating. Ilde's arms tighten around Angel, burying her face in her hair. ]
Don't think that.
[ Not at all responding to the words that she has said, instead the picture in her mind. ]
You can be stronger for this.
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Doesn't speak, rather, that would mean moving something more than just the soft exhale that brushes her lips against her shoulders as she goes to wet them. ]
( I want to be. ) [ scrunches up something knotted inside herself, because she's well and truly past being at a point in her life where she threw insults her hurt, it had turned cold as Jack wanted her to be long ago. Just never like he intended. ] ( I'm supposed to be. )
[ a pause, all crackle white noise, and then: ] ( I'm so scared of failing, Ilde. )
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( I am too. )
[ They can hide from it here, for a little while, but the fear will always be waiting on the other side of the doorway. Ilde knows that all too well. Death, fear, and pain. A diseased pack of hound that stalks her every moment, sickness frothing at their mouths, waiting to catch her, catch those around her, and bite deep. ]
( You cannot let fear paralyze you, when you stand still... you assure your fate. )
[ She had called Angel a witch, but perhaps that was the power they needed to survive. That determination to reach even where it is ugly and dark. Prince would not approve. (Her King would not forgive.) She doesn't know if that matters. If his means have failed all who came before... what would he do for them now.
Determination wells inside of her. She won't relent. She won't let her brood be taken from her, nor Angel. She will die first. ]
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( Where I come from... there are others like me. )
[ starts, then stops, because it's hard, she makes a point not to talk about her home in detail. Paints in broad strokes of information that she keeps herself removed from. Says, Pandora is misery and sand, doesn't say she'd do anything to feel even that, says her father is a monster, but that the kills others.
If anything, what begun this is why she doesn't often talk about it, it's a pit of misery, but this was the first solid thought she'd had in years, watching like she did. ]
( But they're warriors, leaders, respected as much as feared. I wanted... so much to have their strength. They never stopped moving, no matter what happened. )
[ There they are, all three them, clear in her mind. The blue of their markings out from their ripped clothes, their too pale skin and their too bright eyes as they did such impossible things. She knows what they would do to Ilde's hounds ( skags is what she thinks of, with bile dripping from their jowls and the long drag of their tongue as their jaws snapped shut ), they'd melt them down to nothing, they'd bath them in every toxic element that they were given natural control over. ]
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[ There is a dichotomy to the way that Ilde thinks about this. She believes in individuality, in strength of self. And yet she allowed herself to be poisoned by Dreus. And yet she believes in the idea of the Hive, of working together for the greater good. She sees none of it as contradictory, and that is the warped hypocrisy of her thinking. ]
( You cannot compare yourself. You can only be you, you must live with your choices. )
[ She believes it. She made her choices and she was not sorry. She was not sorry to have loved Dreus. She was not sorry to have killed that man on Avera. If the Hive takes something of her nature... she will not be sorry for that either. ]
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[ For a second, there's only one answer, to explain everything, but she doesn't have the energy for it when she just clawed her way out of that memory. That's enough rolling in her own death for one day.
Rather she curls in, tilting her head and down into the curve of Ilde's shoulder, her shoulders hunching up as she sighed in the effort of her calm and recovery. The shift of muscles and skin, bones and tendons that are is sluggish. The draw into Ilde's warmth she can't seem to help but wants much more than she can admit. An exhausted breath she lets out of herself.
Then she forces herself back, putting her head flat on the pillow so she could look across and take Ilde in like this, their hair tangled up on the pillow. Still close, not that far apart -- but more, so she can see her face. Remember her just like this. The softness of her, staying her with her when she's nothing but wretched. ]
( Was it hard? Defining yourself? I only knew what... I didn't want to be. )
[ She's easily moulded in some ways, a newness, and a tenderness for living that no doubt time will ruin. Otherwise, she's stiffly unmoving. She knows what she will not do. It's a starting point, but she's keenly aware that's all it is. She has yet to do anything else herself. ]
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Ilde had a jealousy for what Anakin and Ahsoka had, and in this moment especially. She can't offer Angel any advice on this. They are both lost. Given no guidance except for the false religious dogma that they are special, something rather lost without the two madmen who propped up their wings for their own pleasure.
The chasm of that emptiness echoes inside of Ilde and she has to somehow keep it in silence. Angel has just begun to uncurl and she does not what to put all the weight and darkness back on her. Not now, maybe they would talk of this another time. Not now. She strokes a strand of dark hair away from Angel's face, a physical gesture of warmth to hide how cold she feels inside, ]
( Don't worry, it will come with time. )
[ She hopes. A platitude, not Ilde's way, but she cannot bear to make Angel cry any more today. ]
no one look at me
Ilde does, for all she might not say it, and it might not come up so directly, but she suspects it's why she can lay here in her own nothingness with Ilde so comfortably. With everyone else, there's a need to make it up, but with her -- there is just them. Other people's delusion and the imprint it's left on them in return -- and to that end, when Ilde brushes her fingers against her cheek, Angel's eyes close and her free hand reaches up, to still it there against her face. Turning into it ever so slightly, the flutter of eyelashes and the brush from the corner of her mouth against the edge of her palm, her fingers laced over and across with no pressure other than the softness of what she had asked to start with, for her to stay.
If Ilde is a gardener, then Angel suspects this must be how it feel to be one of her flowers. ]
( ... Alright. )
[ Trust, she realises, has many forms, and even if it is not -- some speech Roland might give, it's what she needs, the confirmation that they have time now. She can be more now, she can with it, find things to fill up this space. With seconds, moments, like this. Her appreciation, gratefulness, is open. ]
looking into your eyes so deeply
The sensation, skin prickling, is almost like fear. Almost like that fevered sickness when her symbiote ability activates itself... but ever so subtly different. Giddy, half-hysterical. It makes her a little dizzy, uncertain whether to pull her hand away or to leave it in place where at least the physical contact was grounding in the swirl of terror and delight.
She blinks, forcing herself to shake it off enough to think although the prickling under her ribs remains. ]
Try to rest. I will be here when you wake up.
[ She manages to speak it, despite the subtle breathlessness. ]
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