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IC INBOX ( KENOS ).
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█ To Commune with Set is to stand barefoot in an endless, scorching desert. The sun illuminates all, scalding the shadows themselves out from underneath whomever enters his dominion; the arch of gentle, distant, waves of sand mask the precarious chasms, towering dunes akin to mountains. The sense of vastness, timelessness, is of particular notice, lending itself to the alien, eldritch quality of his mind. There is a dark storm in the distance, and you know intimately that this divine being is far from benign. You cannot bargain with a force of nature. You can only survive it. |
mid-Iqnu (cw: torture, eye things)
With no warning, no build, the equivalent of a sudden desperate, panicked pounding at the door, an attempt at Communion comes slamming into Set's psyche. There are no words, no plea for help in anything but a jumbled, inarticulate, weak longing for it, but stronger is the vicious shame, the fear, the rage, rage brighter than a blazing sun ready to flare.
There's a scalpel glinting in the light, a pain deep in the skull spreading, spreading, something that should never be touched flayed raw and pulled out, on fire at every ending. An eye, sickly green, dangles between gloved fingers, but then it is a stormy grey eye, dangling by the slick and severed optic nerve between bloody fingers in the rubble of a city under siege. Running, she's running alongside him, a jinba and a war god to whom shape meant nothing, wind streaming through ebon and crimson manes, water splashing, laughter, fingers gently brushing through wet hair. There are sharp teeth smiling sadistically, the shadowy silhouette blurred by something hot and wet and a backing of bright lighting. Ropes, straps, no matter how much she struggles she can't move, she can't fight, no, no, no, she doesn't want it, she doesn't want it and it doesn't matter, it hurts, it hurts෴
And then there's nothing.]
HERE WE GO, cw a little victim blaming, violence against women
i warned you / i told you you were too brittle, too quick, too unprepared / i told you not to pursue it until you were prepared) — no. No, he does not think of the things he has told himself in the dark of night, he simply acts.Across the boundary of their minds, he leaps. Bare feet in the snows of her mountain range of a mind, fingers slipping across dark stone as he bounds higher. Higher into the peaks and crevasses of how she presents herself, a lightless and barren place, frost killing the ground where things could grow. Even in the wake of him, pulling the warmth of Ra's sun and the arid heat of the desert, he knows he will not find purchase beyond what she can allow. Still, he mounts the peaks. He searches for the dark caverns she had mentioned before, the places she had warned him not to go wandering in search of, without her ( guidance ) approval.
He knows the smile that bears down upon her ( ah, sebastian ), and that Hayame's life is not endangered. Her sanity, however, is. And he rushes into the dark of the cavern with naught but the ends of his hair and tips of his limbs alight with inner light, ten and a thousand points of white-hot brilliance that illuminate his path as he searches for her. For the dark place inside of her, combing through the cavern, combing through to the hidden place where —
a trickster god was a trickster, not because they were solely capricious and untamed, but because they brought something that was forbidden. He brings forbidden light to Hayame, the warmth of the sun across her underbelly, the crisp clarity of the blue-tinged sands at night — life, that still exists in barren places. He drapes it into her cold mind, into the pain. He brings the memory of laughter to the broken memory that pours into her own. The sensation of running on four limbs, hair and tail streaming like a flag. The rush of please, yes and how very, very in love he had been with her form. With wearing it.
He slips alongside her mind, where he can. Fits his fingers into the grooves she has laid out for him, wavering and untrusting as she is — and he sinks his hands into the cold rock of her darkest parts. I'm here, I see your pain. I wear it with you. ( Screaming, broken women bare their teeth and rend their clothes as they're slaughtered, abused. Decrying him as he opens himself to their pain, to what he's caused them. ) Darkness builds across his skin, crackling fever that snaps bone and seizes his throat as he tries, oh he tries, to tug part of Hayame's soul back to him. Some pained part he can tear free of her struggle and shelter, using his curse as a lifeline to bring SOME part of her back to him. Something he can wrap in his arms, something he can protect. ]
buckles up!!!!
To her eyes. "Sebastian Michaelis", "Gabrial Lactance", whatever his true fucking name was... He got exactly what he wanted.
But it isn't actually three hours, or three days, or three weeks. Set begins to search... but when Hayame loses her desperate battle over her next foe, the poison (drug) the demon stabs into her body with a last little smirk and a mockingly sweet sweet dreams, the entire mountain goes dark. The sky is starless, moonless. The snow storm dies without even a whimper of a howl. Everything is silent. Everything is still. There is no resistance to Set's search, because there is no one there. No one except for the humiliated, violated fragment of her soul that he managed to claw free with a curse bestowed by a goddess of peace to help a husband understand the damage he has wrought.
As Hayame('s body) is dragged mindfully through Kowloon, through Springstar in the dead of night in a careful way that will leave no evidence at all that she had viciously fought against her restraints and what had been done to her... that fragment quivers in Set's arms. Without conscience, without true existence apart from the whole it can do little else, born from pain and and pain alone, but it is there with him in the dark of the caves, filled with the sting of the needle, the burn of the scalpel, the indignity of her capture, the panic of helplessness beneath the bindings, and the sadistic reminder at the end that she will never be allowed to die. She will only lose everything.
... The caves stay dark for a long time.
But then the fragment that had been a part of her pain begins to struggle to be free, to heed the call to rejoin the whole that it had come from. Even if it may be comforted, being not-alone among the cries of other woman suffering, women who were allowed to cry... It yearns to drag itself sickly and weak through the tunnels, deeper, deeper, and deeper still...
And if Set takes it where it wishes to go... then he has his "guide", one that will take him through the confusing paths and rocky terrain into the deepest recesses of the mountain where Hayame curls in a silent, shame-filled heap, her face hidden in the clutch of her hands and the rest of the world shut away. ... But the god of war hasn't been "the rest of the world" since the dryad had bound them.
Perhaps, in her despair, she has forgotten.
Or perhaps, in the wake of a demon's manipulative, exposing whispers, she has come to doubt every bond that she has ever made, filled with bitterness and new distrust for those who could not or would not rescue her from ambush and pain. ... Perhaps it hadn't taken much encouragement at all for her to start to think that Set would hear who her "opponent" had been...
And then Set wouldn't come.]
no subject
It's almost too much for him to bear, almost causes him to spin around and leave her. He has never pretended to be anything but selfish, driven by his own unknowable design. A set of parameters given to him by reality, between which he bounces and acts. Instead, he carries her fragment to her self, and dips his hand low — that piece of her she'd allowed to hide with him tipped like a palmful of water against the space where her shard would be. His hand warm and firm and unyielding as he rests it against her upper heart and folds to his knees alongside her. ]
He is not a liar. [ She must know that. ] Precise are his words, and they are always born out of some type of truth. The thing about the truth he speaks is that it is not absolute. You will always have the freedom to change, and force him to follow.
[ Hayame is not powerless, in the face of a demon. But it is not physical strength that will save her, it is resolve within her heart. What he knows about Sebastian Michaelis is, perhaps, more than most; he keeps secrets about the creature, because theirs is an immortal's game. A grudge between them would be biblical, catastrophic. But, as a friend to Hayame and a god to her warrior and a Meridian companion, he hopes he can help her come back from this. He bites his lip, because he is not good at these things. He knows he can speak logically to her, explain to her how such a thing came to be and what it means, but.
That might not be what she needs. ]
I found you.
[ He says that instead, reaching out to fold her shoulders in his arms and hold her. ]
I have you.
no subject
She curls tighter in on herself, half-trapping Set’s hand against her instead of lashing out or throwing his touch away, shoulders and back legs quaking as the part of her soul wailing over pain and injustice returns. It suddenly smells like the harsh chemicals and Kowloon filth of her makeshift surgery suite, strong enough for someone with a sensitive nose like hers or his to want to retch. Just as suddenly it’s gone, and it smells like salt instead as Hayame’s blood-smeared lips twist beneath the blind of her hands over her eyes, pursing and parting around the lingering feel of a bit and the stinging splits it has left in the corners of her mouth where the skin was stretched wide.
He’s not a liar? Set had come to her, and he comes with that? With things that now, when it’s all so fresh, only sound like blame or confirmation in her ears. So the demon was telling the truth, when he smiled and asked who would bother to come rescue her? So he was telling the truth when he mocked her with how no matter how foul he was inside he would always be more beloved and more believed amongst their shard-bearing fellows?
Again, it falls to her to change, to somehow twist herself into knots or snap her own steel will over her knee in order to win or keep what little she had that mattered to her? Change, change, it feels like every other time they speak now he mentions how she needs to change and in this instance, consumed with bitterness and pain and the added betrayal of all but being told the demon was right…
Hayame curses the world. The one that gave her scraps and then once she’d finally found the courage to value them… told her to change to keep them or fall back to watch them smile and embrace the enemy who trampled on her pride and left her like this in the dark.
No one was supposed to see her like this. In the real world, the physical one, there wasn’t a single mark on her body where she lay exhausted on the floor of her home, only able to collapse once the door had been shut and locked. The demon had seen to it, making his lackey use magic to heal every wound to make it even more difficult for her to try and claim to anyone that she hadn’t wanted what happened to her, that she had fought it with all her strength. But here, where the body was shaped by the mind…
Here, her arms are covered in bruises from the straps that had held her down tightly to the table no matter how much she bucked and thrashed, the complex back muscles where upper and lower body met torn from their moorings by how she’d twisted a large frame already strained into place. Here, her fetlocks have all been rubbed in bloody, raw hide rings from the rope hobbles she’d jerked and kicked and struggled to pull from their anchors, because if she could just get free enough to lash out-
The worst is on the left side of her face. But she’s still hiding it, clutching her hands over it as if she could deny it existed, but she can’t and-
Set gathers her into his arms. He says I have you, like he had that night at the masquerade when he had held her and granted her the blessed, cursed knowledge of what pleasure might do for a woman who had never let herself feel good or wanted or loved, like she… that’s where it had come from. In the dark of a hotel room in Xanadu, when she had finally found the trust and vulnerability required to take a proper lover, to touch him, to feel him feel good because of what she’d done… she had whispered into his hair something that felt like deja vu, not quite remembering in the haze of heat the exact words but they’d been-
I have you.
And the shame of it, of all of it, of it being made public, of being so helpless, of knowing the demon might be right, of not being able to kill herself, of now bearing the shame of the demon’s touch for potentially anyone to see, it all- It just bursts, and Hayame is weeping in Set’s arms, her words barely intelligible between the sobs.]
What are you doing here-
[She wants to push him off of her, she doesn’t want him to touch her with hands that might have touched that demon, doesn’t want him to speak with her using a mouth that had laughed and invited him-]
Go, just go, and let that demon regale you with the tale of his latest amusement!
[The image of them smiling, laughing, of Sebastian’s lips curling into coy, playful description and Set idly sighing and shrugging and going on about how he’d warned her, how this is what happened to those who didn’t adapt, as if she was just some toy of the demon’s he barely knew, not someone he called a friend… it’s so possible and real in her head, and she hates it, she hates it more than anything because-]
Go laugh at what he has done to me!
[Because she’s lashing out in wet, garbled words, but her hand… one still covers the left side of her face, but the other has clutched on to Set so desperately hard he might not be able to pull away if he tried, breaking in his arms and unable to push away anyone who might hold her in that moment.
Even if at first… it just hurt even more.]
no subject
Folding his arms around her strong shoulders, ensuring that within the press of their minds he is larger than her. That he can fit his thighs around the full length of her spine — the fullness of her body, as he forms around her back and draws her back against him. As he grows larger and more engulfing, holding her like a small animal against his legs and belly as he strokes her dark hair and presses his mouth to the crown of her hair. A god is titanic, boundless in their wholeness, and this is as close as he gets to the pure fluidity of his form — the place within their minds, where reality cannot touch them. ]
I do not talk with him about you. I do not let him talk about you, either.
[ He does not willingly ask about Hayame, not with Sebastian. From her, he would. To her, he has brought information that is useful tactically. For her and Meridian, he continues to align himself with the demon and tease out information they can have, if they know how to ask. ]
And I have never, and will never laugh at you.
[ That much is true. In his heart, he wishes they had been quicker to bolster Hayame's inner strength. To preserve her fragile mind and keep her from shattering, but they could not; she is stubborn and affixed to her beliefs, and difficult to work with and speak with. But, he still sits with her. Holds her to his chest and murmurs into his hair, fingers following the painful bruises where she was bound and fought against her captor. The marks of her shame and terror, her attempts to fight — ]
You did not deserve this. And I will not let him push you into isolation, or away from me. I understand, how this feels. What you are trying to do, what things you are thinking and how badly you cannot trust — it happened to me, too.
cw eye stuff
It’s sometimes too much to bear, like just another reflection of another world that seemed designed for her to fail or suffer.
But as he envelops her, somehow the Set she has always known while simultaneously also being somehow greater, larger, she somehow feels like she might almost be safe, even though everything is hurting, her pride and body both, shown just how easily she could be incapacitated with the single prick of a needle, made into a plaything, an object for someone else’s sick fun or idle amusement cloaked in the guise of “making things right”. As if that demon cared what was right between them? She curls tighter in his hold even though a part of her still wants to rail at him, demand to know what self-respecting person would be mollified with the consolation he offers of simply not discussing her or laughing at her, oh, that made it all fine and normal and acceptable—
… Except Hayame had not been bred and raised to have self respect. Just enough to feel she was superior to the Armless, yes… but not much more was tolerated. Her whimpers echo in the hollow cave deep in the mountain and echo back her, shame, shame, as she curls tighter in Set’s embrace no matter the pain, the whisper of his touch over bruise and bite and burn and puncture marks that don’t exist in the real world anymore.]
Then why—
[He says that she did not deserve what had been done to her, and she… needed, to hear that. Wanted to hear that. But he says he understands, too, understands, and though Hayame doesn’t doubt his experiences themselves, having seen enough flickers of shared vision and cursed memories to put together a vague sense of certain darker things in their time together…]
Why do you not rage for me, Set?
[Her voice is accusatory and vulnerable and passionate and despairing all at once, unsure herself of which feeling was more dominant when she twists in his hold to finally look at him-
Revealing a sickly green eye in her left socket where he’d once only seen a dark, scarred emptiness surrounded by perfectly preserved lids and thick black lashes. A sickly green Hag’s Eye, implanted into her head against her will, with needles and paralytics and no anesthesia for the cutting, the peeling, the seizing and pulling of a shriveled severed nerve, the invasion of shadowy tendrils, the burn of forced reconnection-]
Why do you not rage beside me?
[He was the god of war, who’s strength and violence and aptitude on the battlefield had convinced a jinba who had long abandoned the gods who abandoned her kind to instead reclaim hope and pledge herself to his worship.
Together… they could be so glorious. Couldn’t they?]
no subject
[ A god cannot simply become wrath, become grudge and fury. Set's true rage is biblical, and he has none of the power at his fingertips; he can only build foundations upon which future strikes can be carried out. One such foundation has been laid, and now the weapon begins to take form. The white-hot fixation of a god of war, being prepared against Highstorm and Zenith.
He strokes her hair, and his voice is quiet. Patient, in a way that seems to be evoked by her extreme vulnerability and pain. As long as she does not rise in animosity and demand against him, he does not have to dig his heels in — for he has his pride and methods, even if they do not align with the shape and mode of her own. Gently, he presses her down, to lay her temple against the warmth of his lap and cradle her in his arms. To nose into her dark hair and stroke a broad palm over the length of her body. ]
When I strike, I will make but a single demand for submission. Should our rivals fail to accept my gift to them, the subsequent blow will shatter more than just the demon who hurt you. I terrorize Highstorm and Zenith and leave a deep scar. The act will scream your name. It will burn with your pain and power.
[ For a tempestuous man, he also knows patience. ]
You will be with me, and see the way I break those who thought they could break you.
no subject
There was a certain freedom in being allowed to rage that she relished in, simply because she had never been allowed to have it. But there were times, since those chains had been released... that she felt as if it were consuming her, rotting away her hearts and leaving only the burning anger behind. Yet, how is she supposed to rechain herself, when she had not been the one to understand the method to unlock them in the first place? It was the happenstance that had done it, her chaotic fate, not anything she had achieved herself, so-
Set presses, and Hayame flinches and half thrashes on instinct, because not hours before she had been held down, strapped down, straddled, and cut into, unable to free herself no matter how much she struggled. She cannot help but instinctively recall it, feel the fear again, the fury, the nausea, the shame. But even though those hands of his feel tainted by the very thing that had inflicted that pain on her... the touch is gentle and firm, not mocking as even the demon's "soft" touches had been. Those hands had fought with her... but they had also held her as she'd held him in the despair of curse and hauntings, they had taken her hand in whatever their friendship was, they had taught a woman who feared intimacy what pleasure was, and-
Hayame's arms wrap around Set and tighten, accidentally almost crushing if he were not a god, back legs kicking slightly along the stone floor to remind herself she was free to move, she wasn't helpless, she wasn't... and it would be a lie to pretend that it was not partly to keep him there, as if, should she let go for even an instant, he would return to her enemy's side or abandon her like those hellish whispers had made so easy to believe. Over his shoulder... her now "healed" (maimed) and mismatched eyes blaze with hatred, half blinded by tears. Set promises that he will take her cause into his attack, that she will see it, but... Her fingers tighten until her knuckles blanche, her jaw tightens until her back teeth threaten to crack, and her voice is dark and furious when it reverberates in the dark cave her humiliated soul had hidden in.]
I cannot let that be enough-
[Not if she wanted to rip back the pride the demon had stolen. She had practically begged Set to prove his "friendship" by feeling anger on her behalf, but she had not, could not, plead with someone to take revenge on her behalf. Even if it would be better for Meridian, even if she would be happy to see him gone... She did not relish the thing calling itself "Sebastian Michaelis" dying because of something else, at the hands of someone else. Even though Set will feel sick gratitude twisting in her guts over his offer, mollified in one way to imagine a strike at Zenith that would catch the demon up in the sweep of it...]
I want him to know it was me, Set.
[She doesn't want to just watch, with the sickly green eye that had been forced into her skull by taunting shadows. She wants to leave her mark, to do the work, to act, to strike.
... To have something to do, so that she does not collapse in on herself like a dying star, dimming the furiously bright glow of the asset named Hayame hanging in Set's war room.]
no subject
[ Her drive is delicious, splendid in its fire. That Hayame will not be satisfied with wanton destruction and desires something direct, something tangible that will be as much a confrontation between the two as her explicit vengeance. Set will still involve her in his plans, for Meridian, but on a personal level, he can offer her nearly whatever she desires to ensure her mark is laid upon the existence of the demon who had so thoroughly debased her.
He cannot swear off of Sebastian, not without collapsing his own extension into Zenith. Not without costing Meridian more than a single individual is intrinsically worth in the grand scheme of war, but he can offer her information and assist her in other ways. ]
You may have it, still. And the ruination you will directly bring upon him.
[ He strokes through her hair, down the line of her spine to the hook of her equine half, smoothing a massive palm over her dun pelt and leaving warmth where he trails. She cannot be defeated, if Sebastian's words are forced to become lies. While the truth of them is that Hayame is exceptionally good at isolating herself, it need not be the truth forever; by holding onto her, by accepting her as she is — aggressive and difficult, honor-bound and trying, she can never be taken far. ]
I will share what I have learned about him, his abilities, his connections, his words — I cannot strike with you so directly, but my weapon will be a blow against all Zenites and those who adhere to their beliefs. Shard-bearers and citizens alike, as I carve through the heart of their Lady's throne and aim for her heart. And Sebastian, as always, is yours. Yours to do with as you desire. Should you claim his life, it will be a testament to your power. And I support your goal.
🎀
But the war within her, always within her when dealing with Set, who had first been the deity she swore to but now was some confusing mix of bonds... is that she is not supposed to be ashamed of being seen like this by a friend. She tries to tell herself that she needn't, on top of all the rest. He had come when she was injured in the Hall of Mirrors, she had come when he was raging and haunted by that shade in the fields of Alenroux. She had come when he was bloody and exhausted in the roots of the tree during the Iconoclast Oracle, now he comes to her here in this dark, deep cavern, in the secret place deep inside her communion-mind few have ever attempted to find.
They were... even. They always balanced back out. (Hah... She remembers now, as her fingers cling to Set beneath the fall of his crimson hair. Beneath those roots, when she had brushed Sebastian Michaelis's eye as offering into his mane... She had thought to herself now we are even. Apparently the demon had not agreed.)
Set's touch is warm, where she had been cold in the aftermath, gentle without the mockery that had been in the demon's hands. Here, the wounds inflicted on her body in her desperate struggles to fight back are still present on her soul's vision of her body. Ankles bloody and hairless from rope burn twitch and quiver as his palm travels over bruises, over the thick, spasming knots where her thrashing in the twisted position on the surgery table had ripped the muscles where human-like back moved into equine withers. But under his touch, with the promise of ruination, of knowledge, of support... even if it was not the type she truly longed for, or felt she deserved...
In the physical world, she is curled weak in Claude's lap and her unmade bed, pretending to try and sleep but only just coming down from the hysteria of having to explain to a hidden lover why she had missed their rendezvous and appeared back with two eyes. In communion, she is curled weak in Set's arms, on cold stone, hurt but latching in anguish at anything she can grab. Between their efforts... The injuries are easing from her soul, the pain now only mental, remembered, chased away by warmth. Her tears are hot on Claude's thigh, on Set's shoulder. She can't stop yet, but-
He wanted her to ask him directly for what she needed from him? He wanted people to ask him for the knowledge he stored in his vast, secret war room festooned with stars?]
Give it to me, Set. All of it...
[The burn of tears has made the sickly green of her implanted eye glow with an almost unnatural brightness, the rage crackling in the stormy grey of her natural iris almost eerily absent from the Hag's Eye that did not belong to her body, no matter how it had been forcibly connected to the optic nerve. But she cannot stomach it any longer, she cannot... she does not want to...
Hayame's grip on Set tightens, as if by strength alone she could somehow make him choose her fully, even though she knows she cannot. The eye she despises and is far too tempted to just rip out of her skull herself is hidden when she buries her face in his chest. And the shame... the immediate shame, she has to let drain out of her in his (their) arms, until she is emptied. Only then... then, she can fill it with attacks on Highstorm and her personal revenge.]