[ 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. ]
[ She shifts this time, and it's not the cloying grip, the need to hold onto something because she wasn't sure she could remember how to move herself under her own will. This was to hold, this was to be close, because Ilde was there, offering things most people couldn't understand the weight of.
Rather she feeds off that giddiness, lets it give her the courage to move closer. No more experienced than Ilde is about what it means. A short sharp inhalation as she presses them together again. Just as messy, but with more intent on being close. A twist of limbs, a mess of hair, the clumsy brush of her nose against Ilde's cheek, the press of her fingers against her hip. She has no learning on how to be intimiate, just a galaxy full of observation that she tries to apply to mixed effect. A second to get comfortable like that, another to find her stillness where she might giggle or cry again and to let her eyes close with it.
Sleeping again is still strange, she hasn't gotten used to the fitfullness of dreaming again. The drift into it no longer comes natural. But for once -- it's less so. For once she's lulled into the quiet, and yes in dreaming it's thing she never remembers the details of, ancient buildings and forgotten star systems and things hidden by time as much as space - but she doesn't care then. Rather it's a second where she has her eyes lowered, taking in rise and fall of Ilde's own breathing and then afterwards its an absence she finds not awful. To sift down like moving through water, not drowning this time, just wading into the comfortable warmth and depth before she sinks away. That oddness to sleeping -- alive without being aware, a laxness and and an evenness to her breath when finally she's asleep, resting against Ilde -- no more and no less than that. ]
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circumspector) wrote2016-03-14 03:55 pm
no subject
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. ]
no subject
Of course.
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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.
no subject
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. )
no subject
( 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. ]
no subject
( 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. ]
no subject
[ 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. ]
no subject
[ 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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
Rather she feeds off that giddiness, lets it give her the courage to move closer. No more experienced than Ilde is about what it means. A short sharp inhalation as she presses them together again. Just as messy, but with more intent on being close. A twist of limbs, a mess of hair, the clumsy brush of her nose against Ilde's cheek, the press of her fingers against her hip. She has no learning on how to be intimiate, just a galaxy full of observation that she tries to apply to mixed effect. A second to get comfortable like that, another to find her stillness where she might giggle or cry again and to let her eyes close with it.
Sleeping again is still strange, she hasn't gotten used to the fitfullness of dreaming again. The drift into it no longer comes natural. But for once -- it's less so. For once she's lulled into the quiet, and yes in dreaming it's thing she never remembers the details of, ancient buildings and forgotten star systems and things hidden by time as much as space - but she doesn't care then. Rather it's a second where she has her eyes lowered, taking in rise and fall of Ilde's own breathing and then afterwards its an absence she finds not awful. To sift down like moving through water, not drowning this time, just wading into the comfortable warmth and depth before she sinks away. That oddness to sleeping -- alive without being aware, a laxness and and an evenness to her breath when finally she's asleep, resting against Ilde -- no more and no less than that. ]