your childhood home is just powder white bone and you'll never find your way back

[apostatised]

Who: Martel & Anna Demirovna

What: A consultation and a binding.

Where: Hellsing Guild Hall.

When: Sukkardi night.

Warnings: Presently none, but that's subject to change.

'Relevant experience' is the phrase the Princess uses with both Martel and Anna in separate conversations; she says it so delicately that he smiles, faintly, aware of the edge. It isn't the sort of work he generally does for Hellsing, but he can't think of a good reason to refuse and the professional challenge is too much to resist. Innovation drives him, curiosity, and his own pride - of course he can do this, and so of course he will.

He keeps an office at the guild hall, and it's there that he arranges an appointment to meet with Ms Demirovna after nightfall, to suit her schedule. He'll need more details about what, precisely, she wants to achieve here, but he's made a few notes already about spells he's already familiar with and the likely useful elements of each. What he ultimately provides her with won't be half so patchwork as his scattered scrawl implies; this is merely a place to start, and the theory has him already absorbed before she arrives.

Comments

[indiscreet]

It's hard to know exactly what Nuala means by "relevant experience," but Anna trusts her judgment. In a way, she supposes, she has to. By now, she has well and truly cast her lot with the Princess and with Hellsing, and (she reasons) it is rather too late to be reconsidering who she will be trusting with her affairs.

To her relief, this time she does not get lost in the guild's hallways on the way to her destination. It is, at least, one less thing to be nervous about; as for the rest, it comes with the territory of what she plans to do (or, more accurately, have done to her) this evening. Precisely half of her may not want this binding to happen, but that is the half she is very determined to ignore.

Lightly, she knocks on the door of the office.

"Sir Martel?"

[apostatised]

'Sir' is a title he has no right to, but then- he has no more right to 'Lord' and he took it all the same, editing his history with both a scalpel and a mace. It makes sense to take back Damerel and leave aside the Pandions (if anyone ever cares to ask about the 'former' in his knighthood, 'crisis of faith' is the absolute truth with none of the incriminating details), and all the same...

He has never been Lord Margrave first; he was always sir before my lord. If Sir Hellsing chooses to refer to him this way, and the other employees follow suit, at least he doesn't have to remind himself to answer to it. The way it aches (the shame that burns through him) is something private, and remains that way as he answers, "Come," briefly, the office door unlocked.

She will find him at his desk, but not seated; leaning over his spread out notes, written in a language she won't recognize.

[indiscreet]

There is something about Martel, Anna is in the process of deciding, that makes everything he does seem so formal as to be intimidating. Part of it is, of course, the knowledge that he is a sorcerer of strong enough caliber to bind a Fae Title: she has learned a fearful respect of her own world's mages, an outlook that can only be described as healthy. But a great part of it is simply his demeanor. She supposes it is something like the effect she herself tries to cultivate; it's simply strange to find it turned upon her so effectively.

It means that she at first enters the office hesitantly, before quickly moving to close the distance between herself and the desk. Her internal nervousness aside, there is a vaguely predatory quality to her movements, almost but not quite out-of-place with her petite frame.

Lightly, she rests her fingers on the edge of the desk -- not claiming space on it, but rather subtly announcing her presence. (Her hands are very pale.)

"The Princess informed me that you might be able to help me with my...condition," she begins.

[apostatised]

Absorbed in what he's working on - some of this won't be suitable, but he'll preserve the concepts for later use - Martel doesn't look at her until she touches the desk, his eyes tracking her hand and up her arm to finally meet her gaze and smile, thinly. In person, he's approximately a foot taller than she is and physically imposing in a way that's all the more pronounced for his bearing (hinting at a not unjustified arrogance), and while he's far from threatening right now, he couldn't be mistaken for harmless. Or safe.

He seems appropriate, considering.

"You require a binding, I'm told. I believe I can provide." He steps back from the desk, then, tapping his papers and rolling them up. "Sit. We need to discuss what precisely you want, first."

[indiscreet]

Anna is accustomed to men taller than herself and accustomed in particular to a lack of both harmlessness and modesty. There is nothing quite like Kindred society to remind one of one's comparative youth, and weakness, and lack of knowledge, and she is constantly keeping all of these in mind even as she does her best to act as though there has never been any question that she belongs among the elite.

She sits, and continues to be publicly confident and privately intimidated.

"What I want is a complicated question," she says, quirking her lip, though her eyes remain serious.

A single deliberate breath, though she doesn't need it. "I am twenty four years old, and of that time I have been Damned for a mere half a decade. Yet I have memories of an identity that stretches back centuries," she begins, "and frankly I'm not certain whether that is a problem. Even to think of snuffing those memories out feels like the thought of ending my own life. But things cannot go on as they are. I am cruel, when I am not myself, and dangerous, and in so many ways the Huntress is stronger than Anna. What I want is for that to not be the case. I need to be safe from my...other self, so that I may tap into those thoughts and abilities only when I will it, not when...she does.
"Is that what you need to know?" she finishes, perhaps a bit tensely.

[apostatised]

Certainly it's a testament to something that her nature - apparent to him and detailed by her now - doesn't appear to give him so much as a moment's pause. It may not testify to anything particularly good, but for their purpose here it is useful and, perhaps, may have played a part in Nuala's recommendation of him to her. (If he were inclined to let it concern him, here and now she needs him a great deal more than he needs her, and that isn't an insignificant thing.)

"You want control." Somehow it's distantly like the punchline to some private joke, but his manner isn't mocking; it's precisely what he wanted to know, and he whittles it down to its finest point.

[indiscreet]

"Yes." His summary of her situation is tidier than hers, and there are nights when she might find that almost too-brief answer to be condescending. But right now it means that he understands. Understanding has been hard to come by. "Control."

It occurs to her, in a matter-of-fact sort of way, that the whiteness of his hair is very attractive.

"And you know how to get that control?"

[apostatised]

"Yes and no." He sits himself, finally, clasping his hands loosely between his knees; he takes a chair opposite hers, in front of the desk and not behind it. "Offhand, no," without so much as a hint of awkwardness or concern, "but I've a number of ideas that will coalesce, with work. Your situation is..." A dry smile. "Unique. What I intend to do is take the concepts of several spells I have experience with and redesign them into something more suitable, tailored to your requirements."

At no point does he give the slightest impression that he thinks there is any risk of it not working. He's Martel. Of course it'll work. (This is equal parts real ego and a conscious choice to be as reassuring as a man like him can generally be.)

[indiscreet]

Well, at least he acts as though she is intended to find that reassuring.

"How lucky for me, to be so unique." She keeps her voice soft, so that the tone stops just short of actually sarcastic. Indeed, the fact that her statement is simultaneously honest -- yes, she is lucky to have this; why would she ever think of giving it up? -- and resentful is, if anything, a suitably accurate representation of her feelings on the matter.

Then, a meaningful pause. She won't pretend to know the first thing about sorcery, much less this Elene brand of it. Presumably Martel understands her so-called requirements by now; if not, then it is quite clear that he won't be hesitating to ask. In the end, he's leading the dance, and she'll wait for her cue.

[apostatised]

Reassurance isn't something that comes naturally to him and there's little here to be hard; that it doesn't much work isn't anything that'd overly shock him. (Or at all.) Bothering at all is less out of sentiment than it is out of pragmatism - if she can trust him, this will be easier. On which note:

"What I'm going to do will be profoundly intimate. I'm to create something that will become a part of your mind, your spirit- something that will grow naturally into you and which I'll cede control of to you. In the process, I'll have to get rather acquainted with both mind and spirit."

[indiscreet]

Anna raises her eyebrows briefly at the use of the word "intimate" -- habit, really: she can't resist acknowledging his choice of words. Then a pause, and she nods once, deliberately. She isn't sure how to feel, yet, about the idea of something that will "become a part of her mind and spirit" -- she's got enough extra parts there already, thank you -- but the Princess recommended Martel, she reminds herself. And she will have control. Control is why she is here. It becomes something of a mantra in her head.

Perhaps she is successful at seeming confident, certain in the face of what she knows intuitively is going to feel like a loss; perhaps not. It's a reasonable attempt at it, at least.

"...Tell me what I need to do."

[apostatised]

The expression on his face suggests he's well aware of not only just how dubious this is going to seem to her but also just how ill-advised it'd be considered by anyone who knew him in (let's say) a past life. His tone is just a little bit wry, almost, oddly self-mocking-

"Trust me. You have a tug of war going on within you; I can give you dominance in your present self without snuffing out the other. The sorcery involved is invasive and intricate, and it'll be more difficult - and more dangerous - to the both of us if you're resistant. My own mind is the tool."

[indiscreet]

"If that's what it takes, then trust you I shall." A pause, and she adds wryly, "After all, I'm hardly spoiled for choice when it comes to magic-users of your...sort of power."

She sits up in her seat, leaning towards him. There's a sort of desperate humor just under the surface of her expression: this is a last resort -- she knows it, and knows that he must know it. If her choice weren't dubious, it almost wouldn't feel proper. Like winning a prize without running the race.

There is strangely deliberate way she has of taking a single breath and holding it and letting it go -- a rudimentary sort of meditation that if anything only further highlights how superfluous the act of breathing is to her.

"This is me trusting you now."