faderift | [open] and when i wake up you'll be here

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[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

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 side stings as Jude feels for broken ribs, and again when she takes the offered linen and presses it against the claw marks. She can tell nothing's broken, and part of her wants to shrink away and snap at him to back off, she'll be fine. Except she doesn't have any ambrosia or nectar with her, and in lieu of that the square of linen's going to have to do. The healing potion she takes and sniffs suspiciously, then doesn't drink.

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."

Jude notices she doesn't use the potion with a slight nod of his head, because he saw that coming, but gives her a second to scratch at the shard. It still feels sick to look at, some shade of wrong that it doesn't connect to anything.

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.

It's not supposed to be that easy.

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?

Jude nods, slowly. The smile's disappeared from his eyes, his face. The grief and anger are still here, still real, even for him. She's had ten minutes. She deserves the space.

"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."

The feelings that hit are all too familiar, as is their order. Anger is first, of course. Anger that has her clenching her fists so hard she feels like her bones might break. Then comes regret and sadness so deep she could drown in it.

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."

Anger is fair. Anger is to be sung. Jude can't feel it as he should, he should be able to feel it scorching along his veins, screaming catharsis. He should be able to join her and help her bleed it off.

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?"

The question pulls her out of her own head a little. Clarisse pulls away the fabric, looks at the cuts, shrugs and presses the linen back onto them.

“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.

Jude observes the mad eyebrows with even more maddening patience, accepting it as if it's his due. He's had plenty of baby alphas use him as a chew toy, thanks, he's used to a little spirited frowning.

"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."

Luckily for Jude, he's come across someone who's almost totally unfazed by the concept of somebody turning into an animal.

"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.

Jude nods, with the grace of someone who knows that everything is more than a little wild right now. But she isn't put off by shifters. She doesn't immediately liken him to a werewolf. It's hit and miss.

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."

"Most people think they're myths in mine, too," Clarisse says, looking at him with a raised eyebrow. "Most people don't notice a lot of what's going on around them. Like gods or monsters or, y'know, people who can turn into wolves."

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."

"Smart," he says quietly. "Considering what people do to what they don't understand."

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."

"Maybe," she says, only half agreeing. Some of the time, having such a big secret is nice—makes her feel special, like she's part of a club very few ever get to join. The rest of the time, it's lonely. But she's never felt worried for her own safety, should somebody figure out what she is.

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.

Jude doesn't question whether she wants to go. Whether she's ready. He can sense it, see it in her eyes, that barely-holding-on need to move, to do anything that makes sense. He understands that compulsion.

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.

"On it."

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.

Jude takes a wing like he was made for it, and he was. Pack hunting is second nature to him, and hunting and fighting alongside a human isn't as alien as it might seem.

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.

Taking down monsters is something Clarisse knows. Doesn't matter which universe she's in, apparently, shit dies the same way. Point being, it's comfortable for her, familiar, years of muscle memory and practice making it so she doesn't need to think, just act.

Once the thing goes down, she's on her own. Well, sort of. Jude is there, and there are other people around, with their own palms glowing and cut open. Clarisse copies them, holding her hand out, wishing this could be over. It doesn't feel good. Her palm pulsing like a heartbeat, in time with the hole in the sky.

Her other hand curls in the fur along Jude's back, not even thinking about what she's doing, too preoccupied with closing the Rift.

It's an unpleasant tug that goes all through her hand, like it really wants to pull her in with it, but it's not enough to drag her, especially not with Jude there to anchor to the earth with him.

The sides of the tear in the Veil meet, then seal, before there's a flash of light and a crackling boom, and one last little part of reality, bleeding on the grass. It leaves the air crackling and smelling like ozone, enough to make Jude huff. He licks his muzzle, then sits down at Clarisse's side, satisfied.

A relieved cheer goes up from the others around them, and the other agents start moving to break camp.

It's subtle, but the others do give them some space. Especially Jude- but then, a gigantic fucking wolf would probably make anyone uneasy. He leans his shoulder against her hip, and waits for her to be ready.

He'll stick by her side.

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