Clarisse La Rue (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laruetheday) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
faderift2022-07-20 08:18 pm
laruetheday) wrote in faderift2022-07-20 08:18 pm
Entry tags:
[open] and when i wake up you'll be here
WHO: Clarisse
WHAT: Arrival + some quarantine stuff
WHEN: Now, ig
WHERE: Ferelden somewhere + the Gallows
NOTES: n/a
WHAT: Arrival + some quarantine stuff
WHEN: Now, ig
WHERE: Ferelden somewhere + the Gallows
NOTES: n/a
Arrival
Weird dreams are a near nightly thing for demigods, so Clarisse doesn't bat an eye when she finds herself waiting for the elevator at the top of the Empire State Building in her basketball uniform, other than to wonder what kind of weird symbolism it is and hope that it's not going to interfere with her midterms. Even when the doors open and she steps in and lands on nothing but empty air, she manages not to scream. It all happens too fast, anyway.
Clarisse only has time to think, oh shit, and then she hits the dirt hard. The breath gets punched out of her chest and she wheezes pitifully, wondering since when her dreams are realistic enough to hurt. She rolls onto her back, wipes at the dirt on her chin, and finds herself staring up at something she can't comprehend, much less identify. The air looks... torn open, and through the jagged green split, she can see patches of concrete and red rocks.
The view is interrupted by something moving—something humanoid but elongated, with a grin that spreads too far in each direction. That's comprehendible. She's not sure what she's looking at, specifically, but she knows bad news when she sees it. Clarisse pushes off the ground at a run, angling herself away from the whatever-the-fuck-that-thing-is and trying to put some distance between her and it.
Quarantine - Dining Hall
At least the food here looks... pretty normal. She should be thankful for that.
Clarisse is in the dining hall, sitting straight backed and uncomfortable and pushing a piece of beef (probably?) around with a fork. She looks a little bit miserable, but what else is new? Push, push, push. The fork never seems to actually make it to her mouth.
Finally, she can't stand it anymore, and says to whoever's nearby: "Is there a place around here I can make an offering?"
Quarantine - Training Yard
Maybe she'd been slacking off on training a little bit, before she'd fallen out of the fucking sky, but that's over. If anything, the practice gives Clarisse a sense of familiarity, even while she's stuck in a place that's the complete opposite. She knows the moves. She's done them almost every day, for years. Doesn't matter where she is.
For anyone who happens to walk by and see her, it's clear that Clarisse is no beginner with the spear. She handles it with practiced ease, and it seems like she'd have no problem showing anybody else what it's like to be on the other end of Maimer's barbed tip. But when she does notice somebody watching, Clarisse only gives them a terse nod.
"You waiting for the space?"
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Her spear is still sticking half out of the demon, and she grabs for it, hands slipping once before she manages to get a good grip. She yanks; there's resistance, but that's good. Means she's ripping this thing open from the inside. The thing is screaming and bleeding and, she hopes, dying, but she's not going to just count on that.
Helps that the wolf just lacerated the thing's stomach open, though. Clarisse takes the opportunity and strikes. Again. Again. Practiced, fluid movements. The spear's barbed tip sparks red each time she drives it into the demon's body. Her own breathing is harsh and loud in her ears, and for a few moments she regrets that this is all just some weird dream, because this is what she's been missing while she's been at school.
The monster isn't screaming anymore. Is it dead? Faking? These things can die, right? Almost instinctively, she looks for the wolf. If it thinks this thing is done attacking them, she'll go with that.
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Jude rides the thing into the dirt and doesn't let go until it stops moving completely.
He's still rumbling a growl, jaws locked, and even with it dead, he tears the rest of its throat out for good measure. Blood pumps out in a sluggish wave across the grass, not fast enough for a heart to still be beating.
Jude stands up, a gore-splattered horror show with yellow eyes, and climbs the corpse to get to Clarisse. His enormous head is level with her chest. He sniffs her, the sound noisy up close, finds where the demon's claws raked her side.
He flicks out his tongue to lick, just once, light, like how he'd comfort a pup, then pushes his snout into her hand. Leans his body against hers to physically ease her away from the rip in reality.
It's bleeding, now. Flickering.
Jude takes the seam on one of the legs of Clarisse's sweatpants and tugs, gently, with his teeth.
Come.
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She follows Jude away from the rift, one hand loosely resting on his blood-wet back. She does look back, once, over her shoulder. The tear in the sky is flickering, and the sight of the Arizona dirt blinking out above her has her pausing for just a moment, mouth dry with sudden anxiety. That’s home, up there, disappearing.
She has no reason to suspect that home isn’t a place she’ll be able to find her way back to, though, and Clarisse hates looking like a coward more than almost anything. The moment passes, she turns back to face forward, and she keeps pace at the wolf’s side.
1/2
Forms flicker there, too. Shadows of ghosts, spirits, demons. Things that are too powerful and terrifying for the mortal world to fully control. Dreams are incredible things, and one brought her here.
With her hand on his back, Jude leads her to a more makeshift area with tents- it looks like the handful of agents that are circling and guarding the Rift have been camped here, like they had advance warning.
He finds a seat and wuffs at it softly.
And this is the tricky part. This is the part where he needs hands.
2/2
And then he changes.
It's horrible, for someone not expecting it. Not used to it from before the time they could walk and talk, surrounded by people who are wolf and human in equal measure, where toddlers play alongside pups and ride them, squealing, into riverbeds.
It seems unnatural, Jude's body shifting and changing, bones crunching and rearranging. It doesn't seem like it hurts, thankfully- there's no squirming and whining. That can happen, but only if it's sudden and violent. This is neither.
The transition finishes with a blood-streaked wolf becoming a blood-streaked man, tall and broad and with kind, settling eyes. He pulls the cloak into place, bare feet and a flash of bare leg making it clear that the shift doesn't include clothes.
"Hey there," Jude says softly. His voice is low, melodious, warm. He doesn't step into her space, but he does incline his head, his eyes soft on hers, unchallenging but unyielding. This isn't rehearsed- he's never been in this situation before. But welcoming someone scared and confused? He knows that part.
"I'm Jude."
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When Jude changes, it's not unexpected exactly, but she's expecting something instant and pretty, and what happens isn't like that at all. Actually, it's awful, and despite trying not to react she feels herself leaning back in the chair and staring upward, avoiding the sight of limbs stretching and the shifting of muscle and bone. She can still hear it, which is bad enough. Only when the transformation seems to be complete does she sit forward again and drop her gaze to meet his.
She doesn't recognize him; he's just some guy with a cloak wrapped around himself. Jude. Jude?
"Your name is Jude?" Somehow, she manages to sound pissed off, like he should have known better than to show up and introduce himself like that. "You're not... a god?" Well, shit.
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"Excuse me. That's a lot to put on a dude," he says, holding out a hand to waggle it at her, like she can fuck off with all that mess. He doesn't need that kind of trouble to deal with, not when he's busy just trying to function in a D&D nerd's paradise.
"Who were you expecting? Osiris?"
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"Um. Apollo, most likely." Wolves are one of his sacred animals. She props her chin in one hand, looking at him with tired eyes. This has all been A Lot, and she's only been in Thedas for like ten minutes.
"Okay, Jude, then what the fuck." The hand not propping her head up gestures to encompass... this. Everything.
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He takes a knee next to her, opening up one of the apothecary's kits, and taking out length of clean linen. Obviously, if he does anything she doesn't like, she can just skewer him with that spear of hers. He gently puts his fingers to her side, checking around the wound for signs of broken or cracked ribs, which thankfully she doesn't have. He doesn't have a healer's hands, mainly because his kind heals too fast to bother with much other than field medicine.
Gently, he folds the square of linen and presses it into place, gesturing for her hand.
"Pressure over that," he says gently, at least enough to make sure she's okay before he launches into any kind of explanation. He fishes out what looks like a small vial, hands it over. It smells faintly of herbs and ozone.
"Healing potion, if you want it. They shave off a lot of the worst."
Then, still kneeling, he does ease up and splay his fingers, so she can see the dull slice of faint green light on the palm of his hand. His own anchor shard.
Gestures at her hand, where he saw that flash of green, puts his own hand next to hers, to show her. The slash of green that matches the rip in reality bleeding several hundred feet behind him, ringed and guarded.
"You, me, and a lot of others came through the Rifts," he explains. "This place is called Thedas. Right now, there's no way to get you back. But there are a lot of people like us, and some people helping us, and they're called Riftwatch. I'll take you there, and we'll answer any questions you've got."
He keeps his eyes on her face. It's a lot. He remembers just how much it was.
"What's your name?"
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She's quiet through his explanation, but the progression from confusion to alarm is clear on her face. Her eyes widen, then narrow, and she presses a fingernail to the green slash in the palm of her other hand, hard, almost like she wants to dig through the skin and come out the other side. Doesn't hurt. That freaks her out more than the fact that the shard is there at all.
"It's Clarisse." Spoken almost robotically. She's still digging at the anchor shard. Who gives a shit what her name is? She's trying very hard not to lose it, but the words Right now, there's no way to get you back are circling in her head, and each time it gets harder not to stop fighting the panic.
"I don't have questions," she says finally, voice breaking the tiniest bit on that last word. Anger, or fear masking as it. "I just need to get out of here."
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Every time he looks at it, he wonders if he's looking at his own death.
He eases back from her, giving her space to instead seat himself on the floor, making sure the cloak drapes to fully cover him.
"I won't stop you," he says, dead serious. He will let her walk out of here. He will get between her and the others, if they try to go after her.
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The simple fact that he's telling her that she can go, that he won't try to stop her, confirms everything for Clarisse. She can't walk out there and find some other magic portal back to Arizona. If it were that easy, he would've done it himself. Right now, there's no way to get you back.
"Fuck," she says, almost snarls, and clenches her fists. "So I just—live here? What about my..." She trails off, not sure what she was even going to say. Her midterms? Her mom? Her life plans, or lack thereof?
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"There's a keep Riftwatch operates out of," he explains, tucking his hand around his ankle to hold it. Adult human men generally don't comfort young women by reaching for them, especially if they've just met, and he looks human enough to make it alarming, even if he isn't.
His wolf keens inside of him. He wants to be close, to bump up against her the way they did on the battlefield, to lean into her side and take some of that horrible pressure off.
Instead, he sits quietly on the ground, and witnesses her.
"There's a few dozen of us. You're welcome there, even if it's temporary."
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It had been the same way when she was stuck in the cyclop's cave and struggling against ropes that felt like iron, and again after the Labyrinth when she'd stayed up for three days straight trying to convince Chris to just be okay again, and again when Silena died and she'd dragged the drakon's corpse through the streets screaming for Kronos to come out and fight her.
Then it's a numb acceptance. Not the kind of acceptance she can make peace with, just the kind that makes fighting the situation seem like a joke. You're stuck, and you'll die. Your friend, he'll never get better. Silena will never smile at you again or hold your hand. So you just keep going. You lie in the cave and stare at the ceiling and wait. You leave the infirmary and go on patrol and try not to think about it. You go back to camp and you act like you're fine and you never let anybody see you cry, ever.
You don't like it. You just do it.
"Right." The look on Clarisse's face goes closed off, a door shutting. She's fine. It's fine. "Okay. I... guess I'll go there."
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He can't, and his heart aches for her.
"Okay," he says, heavily. He's not happy about this either. That he can't give her better news. That he can't help her to be angry.
"I'll stick with you," he promises, and gestures to her side.
"Still bleeding?"
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“Little bit. It’ll stop soon.” She’s had worse, and she figures if the demon’s claws were going to poison her or something, she’d be able to tell by now.
She looks at Jude for a few moments, watching him through narrowed eyes. It’s not personal. He helped her out, and Clarisse is, if nothing else, loyal to people who are good to her. And sometimes to people who aren’t. But she’s tired, and hurt, and Jude is the bearer of all the shitty news she’s gotten so far, so he gets the mad eyebrows.
Finally, “So if you’re not a god, how do you do… that.” You know. That thing.
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"Shifting?" Jude asks, glancing down at his body, at the cloak that covers him where it counts, and stretches one leg out, easing back on a hand.
"Was born to it. I'm a wolf shifter. We shift sometimes before we can walk. Not as early as the ravens- they sometimes shift at only a few weeks old. Cute. Fluffy. Hell to babysit."
He eases up again, stretching out his neck.
"Tell me about yourself, girl who knows the gods."
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"Never heard of that before. Or... wolves babysitting ravens." She believes him, though, obviously. There's lots of weird shit in the world she hasn't run into. Her own godson is a baby satyr, so she feels like she kind of... gets it.
A snarky part of her feels like saying something like 'I never said I knew the gods' just to be annoying. It's not really even a lie; she doesn't think anyone knows the gods, especially not their kids. That's pretty much their whole deal, being unknowable while also somehow being totally predictable in their horniness and need to cause problems on purpose.
But she just can't. Like, her spear is sitting right here. It'd be ridiculous coming out of her mouth.
"I'm a demigod. Like... Orion or Achilles. Uh," she adds, "I also go to college in Arizona." She gestures vaguely to her bloody UofA hoodie.
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He regards her with the mild surprise of someone who wasn't expecting that answer, but for whom it makes sense. Like her answer has settled and perfectly explained some question he had.
Clarisse practically bleeds baby alpha into the air around her. It's not a shifter or a metaphysical aura, it's just how she holds herself. He's seen enough of them for her to ring that bell of instinct inside him.
(It's the trouble bell, among other things.)
"Orion and Achilles probably didn't have to worry about student loans," he says, angling his chin toward her hoodie with a smile. "Can't say that the gods are anything more than myths in my world, but I'm open to being wrong."
He gestures at her spear.
"But it does explain that."
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Mostly, back home, people see her spear and think it's a lacrosse stick. Their brains skip over its actuality and settle on something that seems right, that makes sense. Her mother, too, must have done the same thing when she met Clarisse's father, seen him differently than what he is.
"It was a present from my dad. Ares." She reaches out and taps a fingernail against the spear. "I call it Maimer."
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His kind nearly didn't survive it. For long centuries, his people have been in hiding, and it's only within the last few generations that that's slowly beginning to change.
"Never understood the appeal of weapons," he says with a half-smile, looking over the spear with open admiration. "But I've never seen a magical spear before, either. Good thing it came with you."
A beat.
"Bad for the demons, though."
He gestures towards the Rift.
"Those things are going to keep coming out of it until we get it sealed up."
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Clarisse looks out at the Rift and takes a deep, steadying breath. Her fingers are still resting on the spear, not quite gripping it yet, but close, waiting. "We go back out there, then, right?"
Fight some more? She's eager to. Feelings are hard. Hurting things is easier.
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So he gives a single nod, getting to his feet, spreading his hands to show her the shard in his palm.
"Once the demons are dead, do what I do, and will it closed. It'll knit together."
Outside, the Rift is still sparking, bleeding, humming. The others are circling around the Shade that's pulled through, keeping it from getting too close to anyone.
Jude drops his cloak and shifts, taking a place as an enormous hulking guard at Clarisse's side. He'll let her take point on this one, thanks.
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And taking point on this is something she's all too happy to do.
Say whatever else you want to about Clarisse, but she's brave, and she's good at what she does. She wields the spear with expert level precision, charging the Shade again and again and then darting out of the way before it can hit her back. She leaves some good openings for Jude, and between the two of them they should manage to keep the thing busy.
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He stalks and snaps, the two of them harrying the creature back and forth between them until it doesn't know which way is up. It's hardly a fair match, and when he wrestles the terrible-tasting thing to the ground, giving her a prime target for her spear, he feels better.
Licking his chops, Jude sneezes to get the demon blood out of his nose, and comes close again to lean up against Clarisse's legs and hips, physically steading her.
He gently mouths at her hand, lifts a paw in a "shake" pose to point out the anchor.
Other Riftwatch agents are coming forward now, holding up their hands. There's a small handful of them, and each has an anchor shard that pulses in time with the tear.
It takes a moment, but Jude stands on all fours, pressing his paws into the earth, and reaches out with the sense and will that Mobius taught him. The anchor shard is in his palm, and apparently it works just as well when he's in his fur.
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