multiversallogs | i am hung with graveyard flowers;

Entry tags:

i am hung with graveyard flowers;

Who: Ilde Decima and Hasi; OPEN
What: The water helps her.
Where: The Gross Tar; initially near her waterfall territory in Raven's Gate, after that various areas.
When: Givdi with Hasi; open after that through Shundi.
Notes: Specify time/place (if not Raven's Gate) if you tag in, please!
Warnings: Descriptions of LM:A-related horrors to follow in the thread with Hasi; discussion of rape & related fall out in thread with Jae.

When she finally goes down to the water, it feels so good that she hates herself for a moment sliding in, her clothes on the bank under an illusion. It soaks into her skin like she belongs there and she's glad that she got there first, that Hasi isn't there yet, because sinking into it hurts a little and it's-- not anybody's business what internal conflicts she's having. She just died. She's allowed to feel...whatever this is that she's feeling, and whatever it is she's going to feel it at the bottom of the river for a while, her tail catching light as it flicks up before she dives.

She'll surface, eventually.

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"Do you want to talk about it?" Or, and this is more what Ilde intends to ask, does he not want to talk about it? She's not very good at the former (she's willing to try, but she's really inept with anyone's emotional drama, including her own), but she's excellent at respecting someone else's lack of interest in discussing what's upsetting them. 'Not asking' is a knack of hers.

Hilmi. Jesus. The next response is delayed--

He was a guest and now he's not.

And a delay from Jae's end - he finishes the cocktail he was drinking (rapidly), pays his tab, and leaves, finding that he suddenly needs the air. Being in Creekside, he ends up on a bench facing the river, with its quaint little park-esque banks.

I'm sure it's not my business but shit's been weird lately and saying he rubs me the wrong way is an understatement. Did something happen?

Ilde weighs how much she wants to say here-- but she's seen him and Megan talk on the network, they seemed friendly, and she's more than willing to take out a full page ad in one of the newspapers listing in detail why no one in Baedal should fuck Hilmi. That this happened at all, this shouldn't have happened, it's sick and it's irresponsible and it makes her ill.

Hilmi's fae. Not like me.

(Very important to be clear on that point.)

He has addictive properties, sexually. I don't trust him with his own dick and I was right, and the only person with the fucking antidote isn't in the city right now and I wish she'd come home because I need her

Which is slightly more than she meant to say.

It takes Shrieky some time to notice her there. He's trying to feel down the side of the bank with his one submerged foot, trying to see if he just stretches in a little deeper, if he'll be able to touch the bottom. It should be shallow at the sides, shouldn't it? Shallow enough, maybe that if he stayed near to the edge, he could slip into the water without any immediate risk of drowning?

From the position he's in though, there's no way of telling, so after a moment he withdraws his leg, and shifts around to lean forward over the water, trying to make out it's depth by sight. That is when he sees her watching him, and his heart almost stops.

His stomach twists with something that Shrieky can't identify, and without even thinking about it he's leaning too far forward. His face is breaking through the water's surface, and he's able to stare back at her properly, without the irritants of refraction and air interfering.

...that's new, and immediately Ilde is fascinated; her distant expression softens, slightly, and she lifts her hands like she'd help him if she were sure he needed it or how, exactly.

"Hello," she says, experimentally; maybe he can hear underwater the way she can. Maybe? Someone like her, that would be wonderful and maybe this shitty week could feel a little bit better. (Or maybe he's about to accidentally drown and she'll have to push him back for his own safety, like she's ready to, but it'd be so nice--)

Startled, Jay jumps back, hissing at the figure coming toward him. He's still close enough that she could probably pull him in if she really wanted, but he hoped his hissing might dissuade her. If not, he would change, because while he didn't want everyone knowing what he was he had the feeling that if she found her hands full of a writhing, venomous snake, she'd change her mind about whatever she had in mind.

For a long time, Jae doesn't respond. He has no idea how to. If anyone walks by, they'll be treated to the sight of a young man with silver hair, hunched over, elbows on his knees, staring intently at his CiD (clutched between his hands), unmoving. For some time.

There's a specific reason Ilde is telling him this. It's not just a PSA. That much he can tell. This horrible thing - he imagines being born with that kind of power and it makes him sick, sicker than thinking about vampires - that exists in someone that mean-spirited (he can tell, and maybe that's unkind and uncharitable of Jae but he doesn't care). But that last part of her message - how the hell is he supposed to proceed with it? He can't. Just sit here while she's hurting. She went back home. She went home. Not back to London or playing her cello, she went back - there.

Finally:

Did he do something to you?

Well. The hostility is enough to make her rethink bothering with him; if he falls in, he's going to have to find his own way out. At least he jerked back far enough she doubts it's going to be a problem, because after that she examines him for a moment with a doubtful look before diving deeper down, out of sight and back on her way.

She's speaking to him! She's like him! After a lifetime of being alone, and watching humans live in communities and forge bonds with others of their own kind, he's finally encountering what has to be another Mermaid.

He takes a breath to reply, and suddenly his chest aches, bubbles swirl out into his vision as his lungs empty and his gills... stay defiantly flat against his neck, facilitating his sudden attempt at drowning.

Wrenching himself back away from the water, Shrieky falls sideways onto the bank, retching and regurgitating the liquid which he just inhaled.

Ilde's next response comes in two parts; the first is quicker than the second, much quicker.

Not me.

Then;

Did you see Megan's response on his post? The one he ignored.

And then he went back to leaning over and looking in. He didn't know what that was coming up at him, but he was far less worried now that she swam away, because she clearly was not higher on the mythological creature food chain than he was if that was her reaction. His heart was still pounding, startled that she'd been a person, but seeing that she seemed to be gone now, he went back to looking for fish.

Realizing what's happening - gills, that's different, she doesn't have those but it makes sense - Ilde surfaces moments after he wrenches away, pushing herself closer to the bank and holding herself there with her hands, trying to see if there's anything she can do for him.

"I can-- the water, I can get the water out--"

His heart sinks.

I did. She's been acting like a pod person for a week.

It's confirmation that she didn't need, and Ilde swears.

Sonja has an antidote but I don't know if she's coming back she has to

He's coughing and retching and vomiting up the Gross Tar and she's there and still talking to him and Shrieky suddenly feels very very angry with himself for making this vitally important first meeting so incredibly terrible.

"Do-- do that for me."

Somehow through the choking coughs, that sounds like an order rather than the request he intended it to be.. He sounds cross, which is really not his intention at all.

Poor thing, she thinks, abstractly; she's wondering what was done to his gills and she has some unpleasantly familiar theories. The anger registers but she doesn't flinch from it, doesn't think it's for her - she'd be angry, too, and even if she's unfamiliar with what drowning actually feels like she's seen it often enough to have gathered it's not nice.

(She still feels a little bad about what she did to Ivan, even if she didn't mean to. At least he wasn't using his lungs for anything important.)

She can do this, though. It's just the reverse of what she did once before, and she pulls herself up out of the water to do it, pushing at him enough to move him back so she can get at his chest and pressing her hands there, cool and unnaturally smooth, like fine pearl in texture and the way she gleams in the light.

All she has to do is decide. She decides she wants the river water back--

--and it comes to her.

An antidote. Megan needs an antidote. Megan, the nicest person here and he thought - maybe he just thought she was having a shit time with being here; it's not his business and he's not her boyfriend or her brother and a million other excuses that seem hollow and really full of shit, right now. He puts the timeline together with an effectiveness he wishes he didn't have, and he feels sick. A week. This guy - Hilmi. A fucking week.

Jae had been wasted at Megan's party, and his lass semi-clear memory of her was that she wasn't any better than he was. He knew Hilmi was there - he remembers, earlier in the night, making a mental note to keep an eye on him, but four hours and god only knows how many red party cups later wrecked that plan. And it's not Jae's responsibility to be the hook-up police - Megan can sleep with whomever she wants, whenever she wants, she doesn't need some guy hauling dudes out of her bedroom if they seem weird. But Jae was too fucking drunk to hook up, and if Megan was a drunk as he was - Megan who is nineteen and five feet all and this guy is Jae's age or older and has this compulsion and he -

- the middle-aged couple walking down the riverbank path near Jae immediately veer around him, suddenly experiencing intense, overpowering rage towards injustice in the world. They'll never know why. Maybe they'll get some use out of their evening or fury.

It's a long time before Jae responds.

Sonja will come back.

But he can't wait for her. Megan can't. What the hell is he going to do?

Ilde switches her message transmission to video without even considering whether or not Jae will recognize her this way-- it's her number, her face is still...close, it doesn't matter, she has to tell him this properly. From the river, yes, her tail partly visible behind her and her skin gleaming as she leans over the rock to send her message--

"Someone has to keep an eye on Megan. Take care of her. Find somebody who can help in case Sonja--" a breath, "--takes too long. He's used for..." She closes her eyes for a moment, then tries again, "She could die, Jae. That's what he does."

That's why she's never quite seemed friendly, why she doesn't trust him, why she holds Hilmi at such a forcible arm's reach - because this is proof that she can't trust him, and it's not just whether or not he behaves around her. This is how he behaves with other people, and there are certain things that even Ilde's fucked up approach to morality can't tolerate.

"I know somebody-- he might be able to help, I'll try to get a hold of him."

It's startling, but it's somehow the best possible time for her to have revealed herself. Nothing is going to interrupt how awful he feels for Megan, especially not his own internalized discomfort about non-humans. Instead of looking frightened or repulsed, he just looks at her, and thinks about the magic that makes her, and the courage it's taken her to be her in the midst of everything that's gone on.

"Please see if you can." His voice is hushed, expression drawn. He's not going to cry, or sound desperate - it's just not something he does (anymore) - but the gravity of this is as weighted as anything he's ever been confronted with, after Korea.

"Will he come to your house?"

Her hands are cold against his skin, he's still coughing as he lets her push her palms flat against his chest, and then a moment later? He's not. He gasps, and leans forward, curving in on himself slightly at he stares at her, eyes wide and fixated. On closer inspection, there are clearly differences between them. Even between what she is now and what he once was. He can't see any gills on her throat, and with her too, too dark eyes and smooth skin, she looks less human than he ever has.

But the tail.

That much at least, is unmistakably like him.

He touches his throat lightly, still gazing at her, mesmerized by her existence, "You're a mermaid."

"Not if he has any self-preservation instinct," she says, savagely; she's going to try and contact Severus, soon, and then she doesn't know what. This isn't something that it's ever been on her to try to navigate, Hilmi isn't her responsibility and she's deliberately made sure to keep a distance from this aspect of him, and it's a sick and angry feeling that she has to because he won't. Sonja isn't here, and so Ilde has to try, and she just wants to be ill.

The way he looked at her, the way he said her name; he knew. He knows. It's another unpleasant awareness that she doesn't know what to do with.

"Rhinemaiden," she says, letting her hands fall away and tilting her head as she watches him for a few moments, trying to decide if he's all right. "We're like mermaids, but we live in freshwater." She debates for a moment, then adds, "There isn't much of a 'we', though, I've never met anyone like me."

Just her father, and she hasn't seen him since they both still thought they were human. She misses him, now, acutely-- all the more for knowing she will never see him again.

"If he bothers you-"

It's out of his mouth before he really thinks it through, and so when he stops short he smiles; humorless, a little apologetic. What the hell is he going to do? Kick Hilmi's ass? He is, presumably, some kind of soldier, a fighter, someone from that apocalyptic world who's used to kill people. Like Ilde? - Who certainly doesn't need his protection (what little of it he could even offer), but she doesn't need to be dealing with this, either.

"...If you call around, about the antidote. I'll deal with it."

Somehow.

"Neither have I." He replies quickly. His voice is still hoarse, and he's still staring at her with an intensity which will probably cross over from being understandable to being rude quite soon, but he couldn't bring himself to care even if he wanted too, "I lived in a moat, in salt water. I had a tail, and my gills used to open."

He drops his hand down from his neck to his chest, and he presses down where the cold of her palm was, the sensation still feeling imprinted upon his chest.

"I couldn't do anything like that though. What you did with the water, I mean. Was that magic?"

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