madara: the (other) unlover. (possessedly) wrote in camulus, @ 2011-07-24 07:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, madara ievins, slamet smith, viktorus petraitis |
WHO: Madara Ieviņš [CONDUIT] and Viktorus Petraitis [PRINCE OF THE FLIES] with brief appearances by Slamet Smith [SIHIR] & Lilith
WHAT: Grounding.
WHERE: On campus somewhere and in Madara's headspace. The usual.
WHEN: Slightly backdated to sometime this afternoon before Tori did other things and after Madara left Slam asleep. I am so specific today.
STATUS: Complete log.
Asleep, Slam looked oddly peaceful. All the mercurial flicker-shifts of face and aura that half-defined him had fallen away along with the concentrated, precise flares of brightness that have wreathed his hands and mouth for days, the tell-tale signs of magic in motionthat has been boiled down to a precise matter of words and gestures. There was little of the demon-summoning healer about him now, just a body and spirit simultaneously at rest cast in sharp relief against the drabness of the rest of the world. He must be dreamless, Madara thought obscurely, to lie so uncharacteristically still. Must be so tired that the dream-demons couldn’t yet make their way through the heavy press of wholesale exhaustion. She should feel like that too, she was almost certain that she should, that the dragging temptation to curl up next to him and close her eyes was the correct sensation, the one that she should give in to, but there was a far-off roar in her ears like high tide coming in and if she had lain down surely, surely she would have drowned when the waves rolled in. Lilith said something and from the tone she could tell it was biting, probably intended to be bracing, but the words did not make it through the white noise.
Slam stirred slightly in his sleep, as if he too could hear the conduit encroaching. Perhaps he could: she had half-forgotten until just that moment that she had opened a metaphysical vein and sutured him into her own energy stores. Had it been anyone else, Madara would not have been able to forget, would have felt the unfamiliar presence like a constant tic in the back of her mind, but it was always this easy to share energy with him, more like reestablishing an equilibrium than anything else, and after a week it was difficult to pare the bond down to nothingness, painful in an odd backwards way. Like saying good-bye to a twin without saying good-bye or having a twin, like letting go of an anchor accidentally and then suddenly swinging free when to be groundless was unwanted. She kissed him on the forehead, whispered something (or tried to: her lips moved, but she couldn’t hear herself), and wandered outside, back to where she would be able to feel the earth hum against the soles of her feet.
The Obelisks had healed her body. Painlessness made its motion nearly unnoticeable, the function of a half-forgotten afterthought. She had felt her injuries as if they were an amputated limb’s phantom pains, but what is there to remind one of what is whole and unhurt and simply further away than it should be? Precious little, as Madara stepped back out into the sunlight and felt it sing against the energy that was coiled around her skin, as her heel and then her toes landed on the ground that welcomed her as it ever does. That day much of her hummed back at it in just the same pitch and timber, for much of what she was at that moment was nothing more than energy borrowed, on temporary loan from this world and that nebulous otherwhere both. And in the matter of honest debtors, she began to pay her lenders back in kind as soon as she was able. One steady breath in and out, then two, and the rock-steady tight-coiled energy that was wrapped around her bones and muscle holding their all too human frailty at bay (for earth is many things, bedrock and soil and desert and grave and ground, but earth is far from frail. Earth endures) began to uncoil, slow and steady. And as it uncoiled, it slid smooth and steady down toward where it properly belonged, from her feet to the ground.
She didn’t notice, as she walked and paused and then continued to wander, that she left behind her a trail of greenery reviving. Nothing so trite as flowers blooming in her footsteps, no, but she gave the wounded ground an injection of nothing more or less than what it was supposed to be, as she made her way silently through the crowd of students and officials and medics. Madara is no healer. But this, this she could uselessly begin to fix all unknowing as she drifted. She saw friends (alive, all of them alive and vibrant-bright to her Sight) and she saw classmates she didn’t know and at no point did it occur to her that she might reach out and touch a friend or a stranger. There was relief at the sight of certain faces, yes. Even a minor explosion of something that might be called joy for a select few. But even that was muted as a bell wrapped in cloth. She felt almost as if she was watching an old home movie, or something that might have happened to someone else. Lilith was making a horrible sound, like teeth grinding against slate. It was the only thing Madara could hear other than the conduit. It was not loud enough. Lilith was curling their hands into white-knuckled things so that nails bit at palms. If someone is walking through a crowd unnoticed, the girl said offhandedly to the demon, her low voice barely hinting at curiosity, is that any different from how it would be if they were not there at all?
Yes, growled the demon-thing in that odd place between real and unreal where she and the girl could face each other. Outside, the body still walked. Inside, Lilith snarled wordlessly, fingers curled into claws as she tried and failed and tried again to strike the girl she couldn’t quite touch. Outside, a broken-branched bush improbably began to repair itself. Inside, Madara looked around as if utterly unsurprised to see that the water was surging higher (or was the island sinking?). Inside, Lilith’s hands passed through Madara with little resistance, as if the woman-child was no more than water held in the shape of a person by some strange trick. Inside, Madara looked down (through) her translucent self. Her perpetual smile flickered, but then the scene shifted and she was Outside again, where Lilith could do little other than shriek high-pitched nothings that the waves effortlessly overpowered.
The conduit was going to keep rising. That much was clear, as it grew loud and louder still, a soundless torrent of promising, hungry noise. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it, how she was bleeding away the solid ground that had never been hers to keep and taking on ravenous grasping water. Funny, she had thought she would mind more when it happened. She had thought she would fight the drowning, battle to keep her head above the surf in a viscerally immediate reflection of the fight she had waged her whole short life. But why? What was there to save, when it was she and she was it and this was what they were? What was she without this stuff like liquid mercury curling into her like it was finally reclaiming its fated home, welcoming back the prodigal daughter who had finally seen the light? She was barely anything at all on her own, she already knew that. Just this throwaway thing of bone and marrow and breath, giving ground at last as she should have been since the beginning. There was a familiar aura to her left. Tori. Alive. Whole. Her mouth curled slightly. That was good, that was grand. She kept smiling over that, the slightest genuine quirk of the mouth, as she kept on moving, winding down on her steady way to nowhere at all like a clock without hands.
Tori saw her walking towards him,then away, something else that spoke to his fears that she was not quite there, that Madara had not quite noticed him. She had smiled, so maybe she seen him. But the acknowledgement was not quite there behind her eyes, and it hadn’t been since the first time he saw her two days ago. She was scaring him. It would be so very easy for her, he knew it, to float out somehow from within herself. Madara was something special that he’d always known that would one day leave. Everything in his life was ethereal, Madara even more so. If it was good, it would leave him. The fact was easy to accept once one had experienced it just once, and so it was not something Tori held as anything more than a necessary evil, a hard truth. But it was too soon for it to happen now. He had to bring her back, but he had no idea of how. So he just swiftstepped through her newly blossoming greenery and touched her on the shoulder. He wasn’t one for physical affection, at all, but touching seemed to help her remember she was on earth. “Hey.” He called, sounding vaguely offended, but more worried than anything else. “What are you doing?”
Usually she had the typical human reaction to a person suddenly appearing right next to her unannounced. It was startling, no matter how much time she spent with half-angels and half-demons who swiftstepped as thoughtlessly as she walked. She would jump slightly, probably swat at whoever had surprised her. But this was not a usual day. She was not surprised to see Tori appear. She was nothing in particular about it, blinked benignly at him and then followed the line of his arm to his hand on her own shoulder, brow furrowed slightly. That looked like. She should feel that, probably. “I’m.” Her face smoothed out, her head tipping slightly to look down at the ground, where green was rippling slowly outward. “Finishing up.” Small hint at the usual smile, small further dip of the head to take him out of her field of view. “That’s all.”
Tori was not at all reassured when she seemed to not notice him, nor did the fact that her skin seemed to be burning under his hand escape his notice. He frowned, trying to look at her in the eyes, but not quite able to make contact. This was not right, there was no way she was safe now. She was floating out to some sea and Tori couldn’t quite grab her. She was just out of reach. And that sensation scared him more than the entire week had, more than anything had in quite some time. He couldn’t lose her yet. It wasn’t time to. She couldn’t go because of this. Exhausted and impulsive, Tori pulled her closer, holding on to the only part of her he could touch right now in the hopes that maybe this would sink in. This very uncharacteristic fucking hug thing seemed to work for everyone else in every other situation, why not now? He kept her close, staring her down to make sure she couldn’t lose his words. “I don’t know what the fuck that means.” He said sternly, “But you need to come back now.”
His aura was doing odd things. It had been relief and glee and suchlike things but there were darker urgent threads slinking through it now. She couldn’t look away from it, standing doll-like in his arms, because he was too close and it was right up against her and no matter where she looked she was staring through the haze of Tori manifesting on the astral plane. And Madara was slightly more than half-gone, drifting lazily and hazily towards letting go of all the things she held to tightly with two clenched fists when she was in her right mind (or in her mind at all), but even mostly divorced from everything she held dear she couldn’t see Tori like that and not react. The conduit could care less, didn’t differentiate between Viktorus Petraitis and any other soul-carrying irrelevant thing that it could break over like a wave once it was both the woman-thing and itself, two become one and the one become torrential.
There was no malevolence to the thought. It was no more or less than the half-coherent mumblings of a semi-sentient unnatural force. But there was no warmth in it, and something deep down in Madara’s core that had been held semi-consensually paralyzed snarled at that, at the wrongness of it. Her head dipped and tucked itself against him, the only outward sign that anything had changed, and somewhere inside Madara eyed the tide she stood ankle-deep in like it was the enemy, something to be forced back (and Lilith laughed). “Shit shit shit shit shit.” It was will that would win her this, the ability to keep standing here and making a fool of herself. It was always just will in the end, how had she forgotten? Well. Will and. “Don’t let go.” Will and want and something worth being held down by and for, something (someone) worth staying alongside for as long as she was able. Somewhere inside, Madara stood her ground and was the ground and without motion or obvious action forced back the creeping sea. Outside, she shook with the effort, her hands twisted into fists that held his shirt prisoner. And she felt the cloth abrade her hands and she felt her bones clatter and she felt the sunlight beating warmth against her bowed head and she felt Tori. She felt him not letting go, and so she held on.