Katou (katoustheshit) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-08-09 10:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, yue katou, zatanna zatara |
Who: Katou and Zatanna
What: Katou's dreams leave him injured again, Zatanna to the rescue.
When: Middle of the night/early early morning this morning.
Where: Katou's place.
Warnings/Status: Blood, severe dream injuries, addiction stuffs.
Status: Complete when posted
Setsuna, the rebels, and Katou were there, ready to strike at the White Mansion. They’d take down Heaven’s government, and capture Sevothtarte, the tyrant who had been ruling Heaven for millennia and helping turn it into the shithole it currently was. They had come up with a plan, mostly thought up by the rebels, though Katou helped close up any holes in it, and it seemed to be going well.
Katou had taken Setsuna’s face, and was using himself as a decoy for the boy while Setsuna went to penetrate the White Mansion. He was the only man alive who could play Setsuna, with their matching three wings. But the enemies attack wasn’t coordinated, and Katou immediately knew something was wrong. And then fucking Rociel’s army had shown up, and Katou had gotten his first sense of that terrifying aura that was in the White Mansion. It made the air feel heavy, his sword vibrate, and his head feel like it was splitting. He knew that aura. It was wrong, but it tugged at something within his heart. He made it just in time to push Setsuna out of the way of the man in the iron mask’s arm-sword, and get stabbed in the chest in Setsuna's place, run completely through.
But being skewered on the guy’s arm gave Katou and opening, and he used it to strike with Shiranui, slicing the iron mask neatly in half, but not harming the man underneath. And Katou felt his heart freeze as the mask fell from the man's face.
“That fiery glow can never hurt it’s owner,” said the man. The man with Kira’s face, though with a tattoo under his eye. While no one would call Kira’s brown eyes warm, they were as hot as a volcano compared to the grey eyes that looked at him now. Katou searched for recognition in those eyes, and… he found it. It was Kira in front of him, and he wasn’t brainwashed. He wasn’t under Rociel’s control. He knew exactly who Katou was, and exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t Kira anymore, but was Lucifer.
And then Kira brought his arm up, slicing Katou open front to back from his bottom ribs all the way up through his left shoulder, and then calmly told Katou that “Corpses should return to the ground where they belong.” Katou wasn’t sure what was worse - when he realized that Kira, no, Lucifer, had all his memories, or when he to explain that to Setsuna and Uriel, both of whom assumed Kira had no memories of them, when they got back onto the ship.
Katou woke and had to bite down on his lip, hard, to prevent himself from screaming out. Instead, he let out a painful gasp which he hoped wasn’t enough to wake Wendy or Jack, but was, apparently, enough to wake Nana, who immediately started barking.
“No no no no,” Katou murmured, trying to quiet her. “Shhh. Shhh. It’s okay.” Katou didn't need to stress Jack and Wendy out more than he needed to right now, and they'd already had to deal with more than enough of the weird bleed-over from his dreams. Besides, he wasn’t sure if he could handle seeing Wendy or Jack right now after seeing… that. After seeing Kira…
“False alarm!” Katou called out louder, over Nana’s barking. “I think Nana just heard something outside, I’ll take her with me to check it out.” He was mostly successful at keeping the grimace from his voice, but he hoped that they’d be half-asleep enough to not catch what leaked into it. Then, quieter to the dog, he murmured “If you don’t stop barking right now, I’m going to go outside on my own, and then you won’t be able to watch me until help gets here.” That seemed to work, and while Nana didn’t seem happy, she had at least quieted down.
All in all, there wasn’t nearly as much blood as Katou would have expected, he was still thinking relatively clearly (though holy shit did he have to concentrate on doing that. Everything hurt), and he managed to pull himself from his bed and out the back door, using Nana to lean on. He could only assume that meant that his body really wasn’t human anymore on this side of reality. Katou, the amazing vegetable man. Fucking perfect.
Once he made it outside, trying to keep his arm and the rest of the left side of his body attached to him, he laid down on the grass, pulled out his cigarettes, and lit one before pulling out his cellphone to call Zatanna.
She didn’t need much motivation to come, mostly just needed to hear that someone was hurt. The same boy she had healed before - and she’d given him her number for instances such as these, as a ‘just in case.’ It was funny how when the phone vibrated on her bedside table, she just knew it was him. As if she’d seen it in the cards, in the dregs of a long-forgotten coffee mug somewhere, stained with ground beans. This moment was inevitable.
Then, the Mistress of Magic appeared, a ripple and a shimmer of heat in the night air around them as she arrived in the backyard. A silent arrival, in fact, not unlike the way water rolled over the ground and seeped into places. “You have terrible dreams, for one so young,” she announced, her greeting. The weeks had passed and still fatigue sat in the corners of bright cobalt eyes, it reflected in the pallor of her skin, but she was getting better - her healing was going to work, that she was sure of.
“Where is the worst of it....thgil,” she murmured, and her hands began to glow - just so she could assess the state of the wounds on him. Nana whined, obviously distressed. “Stay still.”
"Tell me about it," Katou muttered, sparing her a glance and then taking a drag of his cigarette. "Do all these dreams just end up turning to shit?" he asked. His dreams hadn't really been Lisa Frank poster, but he'd at least been enjoying them for a while there. They'd actually been kind of fun. But things had just progressively gotten shittier and shittier since Kira had died.
When she told him to stay still he let out a bit of a laugh. "Lady, I don't think I could move even if I wanted to right now." He was actually kind of impressed with himself for making it outside.
Zatanna pressed her lips into a thin line, firm when she reached over and plucked the cigarette from Katou’s hand. “By stay still, I also don’t mean fill your lungs with tar.” A murmur of spoken words later, and the cancer stick disappeared into the ether - sucked up into a void of nothingness. Now step right up, folks - and for her next trick...
His one side seemed completely mangled, and she had no idea what happened but best not to ask right now. “Mih laeh,” she spoke, pulling on invisible strands of magic from the pool in the universe she had that infamous connection to. They bended to her will, weaved into a tapestry, the air around them beginning to ripple and blur just a little. But her hands were now hovering over the wounds, and they began to close as she worked.
Now she would ask what happened. “Here I thought your dreams could not get any worse but apparently I was wrong...?” Questioning.
"Hey!" Katou growled, a touch of warning in his voice when she stole his cigarette, but really, he couldn't muster up the energy needed to actually get mad. Not physically or emotionally at this point. Once she finished healing him, he sat up (with a surprising amount of trouble that he wasn't expecting). He went to reach for his smokes again with his left hand, and when that didn't work he attempted to wiggle his fingers. Nothing. Well. Instead, entirely with his right hand he grabbed his pack of smokes, put one between his lips, and lit it up. It wasn't until his first drag that he chose to answer, smoke spilling from his lips as he spoke.
"My dreams weren't so bad before, really." There wasn't the usual life to Katou's voice, just a flat monotone that Katou used when he was actively trying to kill whatever feelings he had. It was too much right now, and there really wasn't any other way he was going to be able to keep it together. "Minus the whole dying bit, they were kind of fun. We finally met Lucifer tonight, and I guess the Bible got one thing right. He's kind of a massive fucking asshole. Also, I think you fucked up."
“Lucifer is an asshole, I never would have guessed. Although I have dated my share of demons, in my time,” Zatanna deadpanned, eyeing the cigarette that dangled between the boy’s lips with no shortage of disdain - he really should quit, but she wasn’t rude enough to get into his head and scramble his mind so much that, from now on, smoking tasted like socks left in the rain and then put in a closet to fester for a month.
Though to her, that’s essentially what they tasted like anyway. She would not be picking up the habit, ever, and if she ever caught Raven smoking she’d throw a fit.
At the claim she ‘fucked up,’ slender black brows slipped into high arches. “I don’t think I did. But...” She examined Katou’s arm with a sigh. “Orange County metaphysics are hindering my magic, it seems. That should have worked.”
“It came as a shock to me too,” Katou said, and he was only half joking. The Lucifer being an ass not so much, but, well, the rest of the whole Lucifer situation in general was kind of surprising. “You’ve got a bunch of demons in your dreams too?” Dating demons didn’t seem like such a big deal. He’d never met any that he’d personally want to bone (well, except for Kira apparently), but most of them didn’t seem like a bad sort. Really, they got kind of a bad rap.
He raised his eyebrows in turn at her. “You obviously must’ve, I can’t fucking move it.” He’d have demonstrated, but, well, there wasn’t much to demonstrate other than have it lying motionless at his side. “I don’t know what any of that metaphysics mumbo-jumbo is, but I kind of need it. To do shit with, you know? So if you could just cut the crap and fix it, that would be swell.” Maybe getting angry at the woman who had saved his life (again) wasn’t the best call, but anger was better than anything else right now. If he was angry it meant he probably wasn’t going to cry.
Far too used to moody teenagers and their temper tantrums (though granted, Raven kept her emotions in check well - far too well, actually, but her friend Ed was another story), Zatanna simply favored Katou with a look comprised of blue steel and everything ‘no nonsense.’
“Gnils,” she spoke, a command, and the best she could do for the boy was conjure something sturdy for his arm, to support the weight of the supposedly dead limb. “I can’t. It is nothing I did, nothing you did - I would assume that it is an effect of your dreams, and if you have patience, it will sort itself out. You are not done dreaming yet, are you?”
She stayed calm, so as not to worry him. It seemed like he was already worked up enough as it was.
A sling. The best she could do was a fucking sling. “How the fuck am I supposed to-” he started, aggressively, and was going to finish that thought off with play guitar, but then what she said actually hit him. If he couldn’t use his fucking arm here, after getting healed magically, was he going to be able to use it in his dreams? The extent of the healing the rebels had were a couple of nurses, maybe with a bit of angelic magic to speed things along, but nothing like Zatanna. If they had Raphael with them, the archangel who had brought Setsuna back from the dead, that would be a different story, but they didn’t. Near as he could figure he and Setsuna were fighting over Sara.
“No, I’m not done dreaming,” he muttered, the heat from his voice gone. He was probably done being useful in his dreams though. Probably done being useful here for that matter. The fuck was he supposed to do with a bum arm? Was he supposed to keep it just… dangling there? Was he going to have to get it amputated? “I guess that’s that then.”
Her expression softened, and she reached out and squeezed his shoulder, adjusting the brand new sling so that it was as comfortable as it could be. “Give it some time, then,” Zatanna advised. Katou could either be healed, somehow, or perhaps he acquired a new arm - she didn’t know how technologically advanced his dream world was but it sounded quite fantastical. Most anything could happen. That meant that an arm to replace the flesh and blood limb might be far more functional than anything he’d find in this world - they would have to see.
“If it’s not sorted out within a couple of weeks, I’ll see what else I can do. In the meantime, while your dreams catch up, I’ll do more research on methods to try, to regain use of your arm.” She almost couldn’t believe the irony - in her dreams, she moved time and space and thwarted the end of the world, but here in Orange County, sometimes she was simply thwarted herself. It was frustrating.
“Yeah,” Katou said. “A couple weeks then.” A couple weeks of being a useless hunk of vegetable matter. When had everything managed to get so screwed up. Things had really been looking up for him. “I guess I’ll keep you posted on how the whole arm thing goes then.” And in the meantime, he had a pretty good idea on how to keep himself occupied and how to keep himself from hurting too much. If he was already useless, he might as well stop pretending that he could have become a productive member of society.
“Yes,” Zatanna nodded, and she was insistent about Katou keeping in touch to let her know what was happening. “I would prefer that.” He was so young, and from what she understood he hadn’t had an easy life - but the family he was with now, they cared about him. She hoped he would not forget that, no matter what happened.
Her eyes glowed slightly, magic dimming in the heat of the very early morning hours. “Don’t give up either. That’s the best piece of advice I have, even if you don’t want it.” She’d been there - after Lina disappeared, Zee had wanted to give up too. But she hadn’t - she’d come quite far, she’d built the Guild up and she couldn’t let it crumble. Not after all that hard work.
“Do you need anything else?”
“Don’t give up, huh,” Katou said. Nice words, really. Giving up is what Katou had been best at before the dreams started, and he had been working away from that but now… now it was really hard to not do exactly that. Still, he’d chew on the words for a while.
A working arm would be nice, he thought, but he already knew that ship had sailed. And drugs, but there was zero chance of him asking the chick who had disappeared one of his cigarettes. “No,” he said, another glance to his arm that was sitting uselessly in the sling. “I don’t think there’s anything I need that you can give me right now. But uh… tell me if you figure out the whole arm thing.”
Zatanna would do what she could. She promised him as much. “I will. There are many other magic users here, and I have a whole library’s worth of books at the Guild,” she pointed out. Miles and miles of ancient tomes - to set them down end to end meant they’d stretch seemingly forever. And she couldn’t read them all, but she’d look through as many as she possibly could for answers. They hadn’t let her down yet, her father’s collection. However, she had a gut feeling (without needing to consult the cards) that this situation with Katou would have to be resolved by the dream phenomena and nothing more. Regardless, that didn’t mean she would not try.
“If you need anything else, you have my number,” she winked, and gave Nana a pat on the head, scratching behind her ears around the frilly white cap (which of course sometimes had to be taken off to be washed, as much as the nurse didn’t enjoy being without her security blanket).
Nana rumbled contentedly, satisfied that Katou was alright for now. Then she moved closer to him, for protection and comfort, as Zatanna uttered a kcab em gnirb to cause her to disappear, and leave part of the family unit be.
Katou scratched Nana absently behind the ears as he finished the rest of his cigarette, and once he butted it out, he headed back inside with her. There was a small trail of blood headed to the back door which Katou wished he could clean up, though he was pretty sure maneuvering a mop was out of the question with one arm, and it would probably wake his roommates anyway. He definitely couldn't face either of them at the moment. At least there wasn't too much of it.
He did what he could to clean up his bed area, tossing his bloody sheets into a garbage bag. On his pillow he left a note for them, Gone fishin' with a crudely drawn monkey in a chef’s hat sitting on a pier fishing, a word bubble coming from his mouth that said don't wait up, so that Jack and Wendy wouldn't worry about him, and on the bag he left a note that said For Burnin' with the same monkey cheerfully roasting marshmallows in a giant bonfire. At least he hadn't lost the use of his right arm; then he'd be truly fucked.
He left his clothes and his guitar, but he took his sword, his CDs and his mp3 player, gave Nana a treat and a kiss on the forehead, and took off.