PRIDE BEFORE A FALL | Closed.

[limier]

WHO: Lakshmi + Coupe, Kitty, Gwenaelle, Helena, Iorveth, Marcoulf, Merrill, Solas.
WHAT: Fade cannonball
WHEN: You can't make me date you
WHERE: The Free Marches
NOTES: OOC Post, Discussion plurk.

This is routine.

A rift, high above the ruins of the Hammer’s Edge Bridge. It cuts into the sky, green and pulsing as a wound to spit out spirits like misery. This is routine — but the position is precarious, so near to a cliff ledge. Watch your footing, a fall promises only sharp rocks and water below.

The task is straightforward: Close the tear, or provide a diversion for the Rifters doing so. Keep yourself alive, and keep your hand to the task, no matter how it aches. When respite comes, it’s a matter of seconds: The Rift stabilizes, and,

And Lakshmi breaks from the group. Moving fast (too considered for the pace, every demon dodged, never a misstep on the odd root or rock) as she sprints for the edge. Maybe you tried to grab her, stop her, stop someone else from grabbing her.

She launches herself legs out, flatly determined in her aim —

Maybe it’s only that like it or not, she’s going through that rift. Maybe it’s that there’s no good reason not to join her. Maybe it’s that everyone else is jumping too.

Routine, right?

 

Comments

helena / ota (cw ref to childhood abuse/brainwashing/self harm.)

[strangel]

the nursery — cw: ref to childhood abuse/brainwashing/self harm.
Helena trails her fingers along the walls as she walks. Where her fingers trail, there are brief glimpses of childish drawings scrawled onto the walls. Women's bodies in blocky stick figures and triangular dresses, the heads a rough circle. Very rarely, the head is the base of a red question mark, before the drawing disappears again.

This is like convent, and very different, in same moment. She sees the dark shapes of a nun's habit, and Helena seems to go rigid, motions stiff and jerky as she moves through the room like a feral cat, hyperaware and waiting to strike.

The toys on the floor are naked, plastic dolls. Anatomically strangely proportioned, faces in eternal smiles and hair and eyes in different colours. They have been burned, slashed with blades, spat on, their hair styled in rough, messy styles. The room smells acrid and harsh. Helena's breathing quickens, as she moves around the edges of the room, and the scrape of metal against stone pulls her attention down, and she moves her foot back, to reveal a razor blade beneath her boot.

This carries much from her childhood, but she knows it is wrong.


the field.
Some of the fighters, they are wearing cowboy hats and boots. An exaggeration of what she saw on the Johanssen men and their followers, certainly, a little more wild west than fit the Proletheans. Cowboys and scientists on the battle field, and Helena is drawn to it. Wildness simmers in her, the need to fight, to punish them for taking from her, for hurting her family, and she draws her bow to loose an arrow into the throat of one of the fighters.

the field;

[esquive]

Beyond that gate in the wall, the palace's stone yard gives to muddy fields and confused fighting. A banner hacks at the air. A horse screams. In the sickly morning light shields and plate armor and pike ends and sky and distant hills all become one synonymous color. In the fray, a mud streaked boy in leathers lifts his axe and means to swing it down again. An arrow catches him in the throat, blooming red as summer poppies.

Marcoulf's hand closes on Helena's sleeve. "Come away," he says, tugging at her like a child might even as transfixed by the battle beyond the gate. "Before they see us here."

[strangel]

She whirls to Marcoulf, baring her teeth like a feral cat, and twisting her hand so that she is grasping his wrist as she anchors herself against the ground.

"Are you a coward?"

[esquive]

She is all bright and snarling, animal sharp and here in the Fade it's easy to see her as twice as wild, a peeling and jagged woman with teeth all sharp and eyes huge in her pale face. Marcoulf's grip on her persists despite the vice of her fingers on his own wrist.

Is he a coward? Over this? Absolutely.

"We're not meant to be here." Every color on that battlefield is a familiar one. He's a little wild eyed too, all bowstring taut. He pulls on her again.

[strangel]

"Why not?"

She watches, intently, jerks forward with the pull, but not begin walking. "I remember you from tourney. We are both fighters."

This is a battlefield. Maybe they are not meant to be here, but this is where they are, in this sickly world.

[esquive]

"Because we don't belong here. Not in this way." In the flesh, he means, but the arrangements of those words doesn't come to him even as he tugs at her. This is all wrong - uneasy and revolting - and whatever shapes lie beyond that gate may be made for them but it doesn't mean it's true or right or that they ought to stick their hand into it.

"That's bait," he says, more certain of it than anything. "Let's be on our way and about our business." Engaging spirits and demons and whatever else lives in the Fade can only be ruinous. Never mind that there in the field, he recognizes the arrangement of certain plate armor. Or he knows that horse. Or he has heard that trumpet call both in life and in memory. It tugs at him, fish hook sharp, but let it.

[strangel]

"I do not belong in your world, but that is where I have been." People say she does not belong in her world, either. Monster. Demon woman.

Bait, though. That she understands easily enough, does not make her want to protest for the sake of it, for the purpose of finding bruises and pressing down on them to elicit a reaction. "Yes. We can keep wandering through demon lands. That is much better idea."

[esquive]

There are no doubt any number of people - here with them, even - who might take that as it's meant: a snipping challenge, all lip curls and the sharp edge of teeth. Marcoulf though: "I'm glad you're seeing sense."

He's no good at arguments, just feels certain there's no joy for going that way through this mess. He shoots her a fixed look and then, unhesitating, begins to move from the gate along the wall.

helena pt 2 | cw for self harm / blood / scarification / ref past abuse and murder

[strangel]

She found razors in the nursery, and the reminded her of when home was a dark room with a cage and refuse scattered around it. The location might change, but it had been a lesson in resilience. She could be strong wherever she was.

Helena sits on the floor, legs crossed, and turns one of the razors over in her hands. They reflect yellow green light of this place, which reminds her of poorly lit rooms and being shoved out into bright light. Tomas' voice, quiet and filled with false kindness, rings in her head. Go on, child. Destroy the demons.

At home, she was told demons crawled the earth. Filthy copies, corruptions of God's own creation. And now she is here, in the Fade, a home of demons and the place of first corruption, some are saying. Her sisters are not here, they are not here, they are not here and this is perhaps a shape of hell.

She peels off the cotton shirt she was wearing, stained with travel and battle, dirt and dust and demon ichor. On her bare skin are carved in marks, years of scars that spread in the shape of angelic wings. She failed Sarah and Cosima, and must repent. Had abandoned them. And for all the sestras that she has killed, beyond her knowing, for that she must repent as well. She shot the Queen Lady, horrified Kitty, and for that she must repent. (The girl, Grace, had called her a monster, and when she tried to suffocate Helena, had begged her to leave them alone.)

The razor digs in at her shoulder, and carves through her skin. A rasp of breath, relieved and agonising, before she reaches for the next cut, and blood rolls down her back.

Repent, and be cleansed. Repent, and the light will find you. (What was she now, if she was not the Light?)