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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He hadn't known the word 'Rhinemaiden' when she'd used it, but the term 'Fae' does ring familiar to him. Shrieky heard it in conversations had a long time ago, over tomes which he'd never learned to decipher for himself.

"You mean, like a Fairy?" He asks, a little stupidly, before shaking his head, "I definitely can't do anything like that. That's different."

His hand still lingers where she'd touched him for a moment, but he drops it down and finally manages to avert his gaze, breaking up the disturbing staring for a moment, "Are you from here?"

She shakes her head, folding her hair - long, black and blue-tinged like her wide eyes - over her shoulder and combing through it with her fingers, partly just for something comfortable to occupy her hands with. The staring, at least, doesn't bother her; she's more often in the position of unsettling other people with the precise same thing, and it's almost comforting. They might not be quite the same, but it's as close as she's ever come and she doesn't want him to leave before she understands.

"I'm from Italy." Sort of. Close enough; Florence was home, more than any other place. "I arrived here nearly a year ago." The first time; her expression is shadowed, a moment, but they've just met. It's not the kind of conversation you drop on a near-stranger, even Ilde understands that. "Are you new?"

Italy. The word searches for a foothold in his mind, but finds none. He's never heard of it before, but really, there are a lot of places he's never heard of before, and picking out every one to ask about it would serve only to distract from more important things. Like her. Like being here.

"Is it better here?" He asks, "Are you happier?" He's spent quite a good portion of this week finding out that people tend not to have been happy with having been kidnapped, and quietly gloating about it. For them, he wants to maintain the illusion that this place is a promised land, where the absence of humanity makes you better rather than worse. It's certainly held up in the encounters he's had so far, but she's been here long enough to confirm or deny it.

He nods his head, to her question, "Yes. I was brought here a little under a week ago."

The question he asks makes her hesitate -- yes, and no, and...maybe yes, again, but also no. It's too complicated for any of those answers and she wants to have one, for herself more than for him; she wants words and clarity and mostly, lately, she's just had but.

"It's better," she says, finally, because it's true. It is better than where she came from.

That makes him smile, and it's something between being conspiratorial and relieved. It's better here for them, and to his mind they are a them now, and the fact that this meeting is happening at all is just more confirmation to him that Baedel really is The Wondrous City which the brochure claimed it to be.

"I knew it would be!" The grin he's wearing now is embarrassingly large, and he's back to staring at her intently, "Do you live in the river here? Is there ever anything you need from land?"

"My territory is further north," she says, pointing, "where the waterfalls are. I have a villa there, with-- I live there, in Raven's Gate. On the land." With Sonja; she misses her, she wishes she were here, so she could tell her about this.

A small, deprecating smile; "It's a long story, sort of. But I teach music. And I like shoes."

By way of demonstrating, she curls toes she didn't have a moment ago, a smooth transition from one shape to the other. The odd black shadow that had sat high on her tail is a tattoo, evidently, a black ribbon tied around her thigh where a garter would sit; knotted, no bow, and it blends into her strangely smooth skin like an unusual natural marking.

He frowns as she reveals that she lives on land, then more deeply when she mentions liking shoes, because neither of those things even have any right to be possible for what they are. At the motion, he glances down, and feeling he experiences at the sight of her feet is... unmistakable.

He bites down on the inside of his cheek and just stares for a moment, trying to push the sudden writhing, boiling fit of jealousy that's just erupted in his chest him back down. He doesn't want to be angry and he doesn't want to be jealous and he wants everything about this encounter to be magical and special and it is but at the same time... Gods, why? Why did she get to have it both ways? Why didn't she have to choose? Why would any conscious deity create two kinds of Mermaid, and make one so much obviously better than the other? And why couldn't he have been the good kind?

After a long moment, he tries to force himself to smile again, but only succeeds in looking slightly sick, "That's... that's good."

This is the least enthusiastic lie he has ever told.

The tail is back moments later; people frown less at her for sitting around naked at the riverside if she's not got feet. (It's silly, she thinks, but it is what it is.) A little self-conscious in the face of that reaction - she can understand it, she thinks, because he shouldn't have to worry about drowning of all fucking things and it isn't fair - she tucks it back toward the water, resting her hands in her lap like some prim little thing.

"I didn't know what I was," she says, "for years-- because my bloodline was mixed with humans, and I couldn't do as many things as I was meant to, until the storm came and changed my world, and gave me everything I was meant to have. And I never had a river of my own until here, so I'm...not used to everything yet."

The storm had been a wrong thing, but she can't quite regret it happening for what it gave her; she's what she should be, now, what she could always feel the lack of before.

"Where did you come from? --I'm Ilde."

Jealous. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous.

He wants to sink his claws into her entire life and just take it. Except that he doesn't have claws, and that isn't an appropriate reaction for him to be having at all. Besides, if her bloodline was mixed with humans that meant that she was probably teeming with terrible disgusting human qualities and even if she spent her entire life living on land and walking around and being loved and recognized as an equal it clearly wasn't worth it. Humans were disgusting evil scum and he hated them, and if he wasn't so horrified by the idea that she might dislike him then he would certainly tell her all of these things.

"I thought I was human as well." He manages to keep his bitterness out of his tone, but it's a struggle and even to himself he sounds ill at ease, "I had everything I was supposed to have from the start, but no magic or legs or anything. Just gills and a tail." He pauses, then taps his fingers on one of his thighs lightly, "These are new."

He wants to ask her about her world. How it had changed, what the storm had done, and what her life had been like before it. He witheld himself though, instead sticking to controlling his fluctuating tempers, and answering her questions.

"I came from a moat around a castle, and..." And insisting upon being called Mermaid doesn't really feel like an option in these circumstances, "...and my name is Conway, but it's quite private. Please do not alert others of it."

"Conway," she repeats, and nods; Ilde is good at secrets, even if 'good at secrets' still means 'will tell Sonja if she asks'.

"This is my new thing," she says, in turn, lifting her fins for a moment and looking down. When her hair shifts, there are no ears beneath - slits in their place, made for water, which is why she's semi-deaf above it. It seems for a moment like she's going to say something, but she changes her mind almost visibly and rolls her lip in her teeth when she looks up (sharp teeth, like needles). "Humans did that? Put you in a moat." Took his gills away. His tail.

(The undercurrent in her voice-- that's anger, suspicion, an intimate knowledge of human danger and human judgement. Her bitterness isn't something she takes any pains to hide, because they can go fuck themselves for what was done to her.)

Somehow, hearing that undercurrent of anger in her voice calms him. It makes their differences less jarring, less significant somehow. Perhaps it's a terrible thought to have, but in hearing that tone he knows that she suffered, and he's suddenly acutely aware that he had desperately wanted this to be the case.

"It's beautiful." He tells her, as she lifts her tail, and there's a fondness in his voice that's sincere again, "Much better than being human."

He doesn't hesitate in answering her question, just nods quickly, "When I was very small. I don't really remember anything from before then."

"I was sixteen," she says, a little vaguely; when they took her away, confined her and never spoke to her because she wasn't a person any more, just a specimen. A wrong thing, tainting their precious humanity--

Ilde curls her nails against her palm and thinks about Sonja, instead.

"You have to be careful here," more abruptly, touching his wrist briefly. "It's different, because we're all together, but there are still more humans and they still tend to think they're more important than we are." They are wrong, she's sure of that. Their fucking species is not inherently more worthy than hers. "We're xenians, here, it means 'everyone that isn't human' and anti-xenian sentiment is stupidly common."

He stills almost entirely as she says that, because... he thinks he knows what she means. Maybe not a moat, maybe not the exact same life he'd lived, or the exact same wrongs suffered, but something. He wonders idly if it's worse for her, having been given a taste of a happy life only for it to have been taken away, while really, she was still only a child.

For some reason, his mind wanders to the first of two Princes, trying to unsheathe his sword while being shoved into the mud at the bottom of the moat. He dismisses it quickly and focuses back on the present. On her hand touching his wrist.

"I will be." His voice is low, and the revelation that this isn't all some perfect world where their kind never has to suffer or be treated as inferior doesn't anger him the way he expected it too. Because if no one here but him was angry and sick with hate against the humans, wouldn't that be even worse? Even more isolating? "I don't think they're different anywhere. Everything else changes, the differences between me and you, between different worlds, different people I've spoken too, I couldn't even have imagined. Humans are always wicked though. Everywhere. Why should being brought here have changed that about them?"

"Some of them are all right," she says, but it's grudging and speaks of exceptions to a rule; humans have to prove their trustworthiness to her in a way that other xenians just don't. In a way that he doesn't, now, because he's like her, almost, and Ilde has been starved for that in a way she hasn't really admitted to anyone. She likes Mafaton so much because, for all that it's mainly a vampire town, it's also mainly a not human place.

It's valuable to her, the ability to go somewhere they aren't.

"But just be careful." Her hand is still healing where the razors cut her in the arrival room, and she examines her palm for a moment before tucking it back against her lap; it's not so bad as it was, she doesn't need the bandage any more. It's just irritating, how the skin pulls and reminds her. "There are lots of us, not human, though. Not like us--" them, water creatures, "--but other xenians. And we've got ways." A shrug; Ilde doesn't put up with hardly anything any more, she tells herself.

He nods, because it's the all right that's integral there. He knows they can be all right, as individuals, just nothing more than that.

"I will be." He repeats, "There are some others who arrived recently, I'll pass on the warning to them." He's only really talking about telling Vanadi, really, because who else could possibly matter? Still, it's important to have your paranoia confirmed, and to have someone who knows more than you do to back you up when you're telling your friends why they should trust no one.

"Did they do that to you?" He nods toward her hand, noticing her looking down at is as they talk.

"Not that," curling her fingers over the marks. Other things, one could safely assume; but not that. "It was an accident."

In a manner of speaking. Some people in Baedal are almost blasé about the fact of their own deaths, but Ilde isn't quite one of them, not yet.

"They started the Mafaton riots, though. I was there when that happened."

He frowns, his obliviousness to this piece of Baedel's social history evident on his face. "Mafaton riots? That's one of the neighborhoods close to the Valhalla Inn, isn't it?" He's been there a few times, but it always struck him as being an especially quiet part of town. There'd never been too many people out and about, as far as he could see. "It doesn't seem like the kind of place where people would riot..."

"Don't go there at night," she says, reflexively; she goes there, because...well, she has her reasons, and she has her ways of being safe, but Conway strikes her as someone who probably shouldn't be in Mafaton too much. Or, like she says-- at night. "Mafaton is a cruorvore area -- vampires. Blood-drinkers. Some of them try to live the way anyone else does; there are ways, for them to be safe." For them to keep others safe, but it all works out to the same thing and she shrugs.

"It was politics. But they were starved and then poisoned and riots were incited. It wasn't nice."

Ivan would've killed her that night, if he'd made it back to the flat. If she'd still been there when he did. It's a strange thought, now, when she can still remember what it felt like to bleed out.

Shrieky doesn't doubt the veracity of the advice he's being given. It is almost certainly true that he shouldn't go to Mafaton at night, as would be true of any location filled with creatures that needed to eat something which he contained in order to survive. However... while it's true that he's heard of vampires, he's certainly never met any, and the idea of them congregating in a specific area is intriguing to him.

Maybe he'll just go there during the day.

What she tells him about the riots is... not surprising, exactly, but baffling, "Why would they do that?" He pauses for a moment, before adding, "I mean, I know that they are terrible and perhaps that they don't need any more of a reason than that, but... wouldn't starving, rioting vampires kill many humans?"

Despite the fact Ilde is quite fond of numerous vampires - or maybe because of - she isn't going to dispute the fact they're terrible. (At least one of those she's so fond of wouldn't lift a finger if she were about to die in his club, especially if it were somehow entertaining; they still get along, because they amuse each other.) She doesn't mind, mostly, that this is so. It's part of why the Mafaton incident irritated her so much, putting her in the position of being offended on behalf of the indefensible.

At least she could point out it had mostly targeted those trying to live quiet, goodly lives. Vampires like Deacon Frost didn't drink bagged shit in the first place.

"Yes," she says, succinctly, "and be killed by them for containment. Violent social sleight of hand. Look left, while I do this on the right--" with illustrative hand gestures. The frustrating part is that she still isn't sure exactly what was happening on the right while they were all looking left. "It was made to look like they were only concerned for human safety, but that wasn't it at all."

And then it ended, and the cruorvore population had dropped significantly, and most people just forgot. It still grates.

He props his elbows on his knees, and presses his fingertips across his lips for a moment. He could follow the logic of it, more or less. Make the vampires hungry and angry, and get them to attack humans, so that when the humans tried to wipe them out it would look as though they deserved it. What he didn't understand was why any humans would have agreed to be attacked in order to make this happen, and... what had happened to make them think that they required an excuse to kill and control other creatures?

He dragged the tip of his toe through the mud of the bank, frowning as he turned the thought over in his mind. Perhaps the humans who were to be attacked hadn't been told the plan? Which meant that when they were attacked, they would have believed that the vampires had no reason for doing so. Perhaps some of them had actually believed that killing the vampires was for their own protection.

Shrieky couldn't decide if this made humans more or less terrible. Probably more.

"Do you know why they did it?" He found himself asking, "Why they wanted to kill the vampires? Was it because they were afraid of them, or just because they hated them?"

"I think it was hatred, and fear, and something else more complicated," she says, slowly, resting her fins in the shallow water and fidgeting with her bracelet, picking at the gold apple. "A particular group did it-- they hide behind propaganda and other groups and..."

Ilde shakes her head, abruptly, because going too far into the Candlelighters right now leads her back to Prometheus and a hundred things she's trying not to think too hard about this week.

"Politics," she repeats, like it's a filthy word. "Maneuvering. Strategy."

He listens, quietly and intently, but this turn of the conversation leaves him feeling more out of his depth than anything he's had to contemplate since his arrival. He knows - has had to have known - that there are forces that move the world beyond his control or understanding, but as long as he was never really a part of the world, any concerns he had were only ever abstract ones.

"Strategy." He repeats, although it's evident from his expression that he's slightly lost in this part of the conversation, "Like... trying to control the city? Or going into war?"

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i am hung with graveyard flowers;

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