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kristie-rp · 7 years ago

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Art, In Perspective

Original © by @cassandra-rp/ @coloredinsanity

“Welcome, everyone, to the annual Port Lyndon art exhibit! The work on display today is from talented artists, all local to our fair city. We’ll be announcing the winner of the art contest in a few hours, but in the mean time, please – enjoy yourselves!” The mayor, someone Pandora couldn’t have named for a thousand dollars (Steve? Stein? Stuart? Ugh. At least his wife was exotic enough to be interesting to paint), walked away from the microphone as his audience began to roam the exhibit.

Even in a room full to bursting with artists of all calibres, Pandora stood out. According to her sisters not boyfriend, this was because of her freshly dyed neon green hair (“It��s not neon, it’s radioactive,” he’d insisted while Oly had laughed, and Pandora had flicked neon green paint at him, mostly getting Oly to laugh harder instead of scowling at her textbook), and chances were high that her neon pink skinny jeans weren’t going to make her more subtle. She lingered awkwardly near the art she’d painted, the works on display that she’d spent hours perfecting.

As much as she wanted to share her work with others, she still didn’t know how to behave at exhibits. Should she be arrogant and obnoxious? Brag about how great her pictures were compared to that awful medieval almost-forgery across from her? Discuss technique? Well, she hadn’t studied the theory enough to discuss the technique, so that was out. Instead of fighting with herself over how to present herself, she settled in hiding near her display, watercolours and sketchbook on hand. At least if she was painting, maybe no one unfamiliar would try to talk to her – for all she recognized some of the members of the crowd, far too many more were the sorts of elite who could afford to hire her dad, and even more were tourists, desperate for a reprieve from the rain that plagued the city (or maybe they thought they were cultured or genuinely liked art? She wasn’t really a mind reader, who was to say?)

Within an hour, she couldn’t count the number of tourists who’d stopped to admire her work. They hadn’t said much – her ruse had worked! – but what they had gotten across was mostly positive. (Actually, the stand out had been the incredibly odd, albeit pretty in a delicate sort of way, woman who looked like she was on the verge of taking off, she’d been so jittery – “Not enough birds, no, not enough,” she’d said about six times. Pan had seriously considered Googling therapist phone numbers to pass on to her.)

The next stand-out was probably looking up into a familiar face: the librarian was there, with her – husband (were they married? Was anyone in Port Lyndon married? Or did they just cling to each other and never actually fall apart?), their magenta and vivid red hair enough to make them stand out even if she hadn’t known them, to some degree.

The librarian, it seemed, was most taken with the painting Pandora had completed that was completely different from her very abstract usual work. “Very interesting,” the librarian murmured, peering over her glasses at the piece. “What inspired that one?”

Pandora knew without looking which piece it was, but she turned anyway. It was larger than the others, completed over summer. A grand garden in thriving greens, dotted with flowers both common and rare, provided a pretty backdrop to a prettier subject. Long blonde hair and a historically appropriate large gown gave some identity to a woman who was, in a word, sad. The painting, so different from the abstract standards Pandora usually followed, almost leant the subject an aura of it, the sadness reaching anyone who looked on. In the background, a dark man hid in the treeline, a spot of shadow amongst the summery greens. To Intella, it made perfect sense. To Pandora, it was just something she had to finish. “O-oh? Well, um – one of my dads clients gave him a bunch of art stuff? I think it was as a thank you for this case. Um, a lot of it was really old, and when I saw it I just – I had this weird dream about this garden.” She gestured to it, as though it wasn’t obvious, and instantly kicked herself for it. “It just felt like it was meant to be. I – I know that’s not really a great explanation, but...”

The librarian – Intella, if Pandora remembered the name right – simply smiled and nodded. Pandora would probably try to get that across in watercolours in a little while, or at least the look on the maybe-husbands face; that sort of awestruck affection could almost outdo Travis’s. “It’s perfect,” Intella was saying, “And it does work quite well, doesn’t it?” She and her maybe-husband lingered for a moment more, gazes on the painting (or so Pandora chose to believe, not wanting to think about librarians and their maybe-husbands looking at her like she was the one on display) before they meandered off, talking quietly to each other. Pandora couldn’t hear much of it, but was absolutely sure she heard something about someone named ‘Paimon’, whatever kind of name that was. Perhaps they thought he’d like it? She didn’t dwell on it for long before shrugging and returning to her sketches, before the feeling of eyes on her forced her to look up again.

Something about the woman before her was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. It’d drive her nuts later, but as it was – well. She reeked of money, a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist – which Pandora noticed mostly because the woman gestured with that hand constantly, doing anything she could to draw attention to it. Long brown hair fell in dark, subtle waves down the womans back, probably to about mid-back (Oly had had hair like that back before Travis became a permanent part of her life and the ponytail became her default – Pandora had plenty of sketches and paintings of it), and there was no kindness in her sharp blue eyes.

Still, Pandora smiled, even if it didn’t quite reach her eyes, tucking her hair behind her ear as she leaned back, the better to see the womans face. “Can I help you at all? A – any questions, or such?”

The sharp laugh the woman bit out was condescending at best, and vaguely terrifying at worst; Pandora very nearly flinched. “I hardly wish to know what you’d have to say for yourself. Your paintings are just about as hideous as you are, I mean – honestly! That hair, those clothes are just – ick. You look like a crack whore, and you call this ‘art’? It’s garbage, and you – you aren’t any better.”

The attempt for casual faded as Pandora sat up a little straighter, offended and surprised by the slew of insults. They just kept coming, on and on, and it took a moment for her to register how they were disconnected, in a way. When it did, a feeling of sadness and anger pooled in her gut as it tightened; she opened her lips to speak, only to have it catch in her throat as she reached for some sort of composure, some sort of control. (Olympias would have a retort, Pandora knew, but she wasn’t her sister, however alike they appeared.)

“Nothing to say?” the woman was simpering. “I’m not surprised. Can you even comprehend what I’m saying? You don’t belong here, and you’re honestly just an eyesore. Do us all a favour and go home – assuming you even have one. I’d also suggest you try something you’re more adept to – perhaps stripping? You certainly look the part,” she trailed off, having been preparing to complete the insults with her name, as a sort of signing bonus of some kind. Once she’d picked up a business card and read the name, though, apparently something even worse than Pandora’s appearance hit her, because her expression morphed into one of angry disgust, and she gave up on any show of debonair whatever, and tossed the card to the ground for who-knew-what reasons.

Pandora didn’t actually care about the reasons, she just wanted to scream, to shout abuse and wreak havoc. But if she did that, she’d risk getting kicked out, and she couldn’t be kicked out. So she looked down at her sketchbook, refusing to dash away the tears that were starting to fall, because that would mean admitting this – this bitch had gotten to her, so she let her breath catch and focused on just breathing.

Luckily, the Cavalry had arrived at the perfect moment. The woman let out a quiet yelp – looking up, Pandora found that Vod was looming behind the woman, baseball bat resting on her shoulder. She didn’t look at all apologetic as she released a loud belch in the woman’s face, forcing the ‘dignified’ woman to choke and cover her mouth. Between Vod’s trademark intimidating stance and her generally disgusting nature, it wasn’t particularly surprising when the woman started to walk away, much more flustered than she had been as she ripped Pandora apart.

Cas snorted from Vod’s size, patting her shoulder for a moment before taking Vod’s bat, letting the girls meet each other. Vod leaned down to pat Pandora’s shoulder, as if she were passing on Cas’s gesture or had learned it from him in the first place. “She was a bitch,” she said immediately, unprompted. “What does she know about anything? That dress would’ve been too small for Tera, and you know what? At least Tera would still look hot in it. I bet that bitch’s tits are wrinkly as fuck.”

Pandora laughed, because she had too, snorting and rubbing at her eyes. “I don’t even know who the fuck she is – I just – was, you know –”

Vod’s smirk appeared, finally, and she slipped her hand from her pocket to reveal the fancy purse clasped between her fingers. “I groped her, you missed that. She missed the fact I snagged this at the same time.” She cackled quietly, flicking it open. “Oooh, credit cards – paypass, I can use this, and if I can’t, lookee here – this looks like $1500, all cash, shit.” Vod pocketed part of it and passed the rest to Cas, since they all knew he was a little more responsible and less likely to lose track of the cash in a fight of some sort. “Aha, here we go. Miren Morrigan. Even her name sounds bitchy, Christ.”

“Miren?” Pandora echoed faintly, looking away from Vod. “Oh.” She knew that name. She wasn’t supposed to, sort of, but she knew.

“She’s a shitty teacher,” came a familiar voice, one painted with disinterest that wasn’t going to fool anyone. Pandora swallowed and looked up at Olympias, her sister finally¸ finally, arrived, Travis in tow. “Little league ran late when some parents wanted to chat about ‘intermixing’,” Oly explained, coming around the desk to force a hug on her twin.

“She’s – what?”

“Morrigan. Miren. I had her for a sub once this year, in bio? She took the lesson plan as gospel and half of us ended up ignoring her and reading ahead in the text anyway.” On the other side of the table, Travis snorted, knowing as well as Pan did that Oly read ahead all the time anyway. “Shut up, okay, point taken. But. But. She’s still a shit teacher, and a bitch. If college does detention, she’d have stuck me in it until Christmas.”

Pan swallowed, remembering the last time Oly had been in detention. That had been caused by – well, it either involved paint or math, and either way, it’d obviously ended badly. All of them had gotten themselves detention at the same time, and how well had that gone? The teachers had been too afraid of the resulting well-behaved chaos to assign any of them more sessions. It was a good memory, good enough to pull a small smile to Pan’s lips as Oly released her from the hug. “You – you do know who she is, though? Who dad -?”

Oly shook her head, pressing a hand to Pan’s mouth to shut her up. “She’s just a massive bitch, Pan. Okay?”

Pandora considered that for a moment, considered Vod with her scowl and Cas with his soft concern and Travis with his not particularly convincing nonchalance, like she wasn’t sure he’d rip someone apart the second Oly suggested it might be a good idea, and considered Oly and her stubborn streak a mile wide. If Olympias didn’t want Miren to be the mother who’d abandoned them, then she wouldn’t be. She would be, as she said, just a massive bitch. Rather than nod, Pan licked the hand pressed against her lipstick, snickering as Oly snatched her hand back, exclaiming her disgust. “If you’re late, what’s their excuse?”

“It was Cas’s fault,” Vod declared immediately, ignoring the eye rolls that got her. “See, I just wanted to come look at the best art ever, but Cas there wanted to hit on the dude with the canvases.”

Cas didn’t disagree, Pan noticed, but she knew that didn’t mean anything. He’d let Vod pin a murder on him if she liked – and hey, look, she was thinking about something else. This is why she loved her friends, and her sister: they were good at what they did, and it was always, constantly, useful for her.

#kristie's writing #kwrites #kristie writes #kwriting #ft. pandora #ft. miren #ft. vod #ft. cas #ft. oly #ft. travis #ft. intella #ft. jonathan #ft. valentina

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lunaprism-rp · 3 years ago

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Axel + Intella + Jonathan

#Aesset #loveaesset #Jonathan Leperance #Jonathan #Leperance #Axel Leperance #Axel #Intella Migatori #Intella Leperance #Kristierp

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coloredinsanity · 6 years ago

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Everything had been up and down since the supernatural bubble burst. There was some good; Heron was practically torn apart by not only other supernaturals but the humans who fought for them once the news broke and various legal bodies involved themselves to help. Human and otherwise. People were educating themselves and the community as a whole were rather accepting once the initial panic subsided aside from select groups.

That was where the downside started; Religious groups and conspiracy nuts had lost there minds. The distain and fear mongering they attempted to spread was picking up all those who weren't happy about the supernaturals being allowed to roam loose.

---

Jonathan quietly sat in the library as he typically did on his laptop across from his wife and the librarian; Intella. Her mind elsewhere as she stared at the pages of her notebooks... She'd been busier than ever not only as a librarian and Demon hunter but simply because she knew so much. Although she wasn't one to stand in front of the camera like December Constantine but December was quick to enlist her on writing some more detailed explanations about different supernatural things to ease humans worries about them.

Axel was outed fairly quickly but it wasn't surprising. He just was in the wrong place when everything began. And it sadly dripped down to the library after a short period once people connected him. He'd decided to take a short 'vacation' just because his powers were highly controversial once they were displayed even briefly. Intella mostly agreed. Axel would cause most humans to have a mental breakdown once they thought about it for to long.

"Mgh." Jonathan mumbled ever so slightly as he reached up and his eyes slid under his glasses and rubbing his face a little. Intella spoke, "Eye strain..?" She asked a little as she tried to look away from her books. "No. It's not that." He provided in reply as he sighed. Intella's eyes finally did glance up for a moment as she desperately wanted to pry something made her decide for once to just let it go... After all. He didn't keep nearly as much from her as Axel typically did so if it was something he didn't feel like talking about right now. He probably would later...

It was the loud thud they heard that took there attention away from there respective media and it was quickly followed up by a smashing sound, the sound of glass shattering and scattering across the floor. Intella let out and angry gasp as she got to her feet and raced towards where it'd come from; The window busted to the library and a crowd outside; Flinching only slightly as another rock hit into the window; shattering the next one. Her eyes peering out with anger as she skimmed a couple of the signs; 'KILL ALL DEMONS' and 'HUMANS WHO LOVE DEMONS ARE AGAINST GOD' And various other garbage. Intella wanted to race outside and scream at them but her concern changed to the books as the port lyndon rain blew through the windows, grabbing everything she could to get them out of the way of the water.

Jonathan lingered nearby with a sour expression as he grabbed a couple himself before setting them down as he noted another person in the library coming to help Intella; Rachael Constantine. He didn't even know she was there but she didn't hesitate to pick up some of the books and move them inwards away from the broken windows.

Jonathan's fingers pressed to his forehead again. "I'm going outside, Intella."

Intella didn't pause but did speak sharply. "You're going out into and angry mob and what?!" Her irritation wasn't at him despite coming out at him. "I'm going to politely ask them to leave." He stated in a calm tone but there was something off that finally made Intella pause; she noted his hand was shaking and his fingers practically distorted as he tried to clench them. ---

Jonathan opened the door allowing the rock and the water thrown at him as a few people screamed; his face flat as he peered past his glasses. "Who's in charge..?" He asked softly. A few people screaming about him being a demon before a man stepped forward with a bit of hesitation. His salt and pepper hair was short and groomed and he wore a sweater and dress pants, a bible in his hand. Wrinkles lined the man's face so Jonathan figured he must be in his late 30's at the least. "Who are you and who are these people?" Jonathan asked as calmly as he could.

"Demon. My name is Ruben and these are the people who will rid your kind from this plane." He shouted, glaring.

"What is the name of your group, Ruben?"

Jonathan waited for a moment; not getting a reply. "I'm attempting to be polite. Please answer the question."

"Christ alone."

Someone said softly and he nodded, placing his hands in his pockets. "I'm going to ask you politely to leave and I shall be inquiring about you paying for these damages you and your group have caused or I will remove you myself."

Jonathan sighed a little as he heard the crowd scream a mixture of curse words and angry religious rambling. His rational attitude fading by the second and as Intella stepped into the doorway to see what was happening; When the crowd started screaming insults at her - something snapped.

"ENOUGH." Jonathan's voice was so distorted that even Intella jumped a little bit. His footsteps heavy as he walked from the doorway towards the crowd, grasping the man's sweater with a firm grip. "I have lived here for almost three hundred years; I have spent my existence trying to protect you humans from things that are far worse then me..." Despite his attempt to keep ahold; his glamor finally shifted away - Jonathan still looked quite human without his but his ears, teeth and hands certainly appeared more demonic.

Intella's eyes widened as Jonathan tossed the guy right across the street... He held back so often that this was rather extreme. The display was all it took for the entire crowd to start backing off as they stumbled backwards and began to fled in several different directions out of shock. As the crowd dispersed; Intella noted that Jonathan had aimed well as the man had ended up in a pile of trash bags; and aside from the fact he was shaking like a leaf he was relatively uninjured. Maybe a few bruises at best.

"Jonathan...?" Intella spoke softly. She just felt something completely off about him at the moment and after he let out a loud growling sound he turned back to the windows; His eyes glowing bright violet... His hand extended and twisted, the glass sliding off the floor inside of the library and floating back into place; time reversing and the rock finally coming back out as the window fixed it's self, his fingers grasping it and crushing it.

Within a second before Intella could even ask how he did that, Axel appeared; grasping Jonathan's arm and glaring at him. "Jonathan!"

It was as if as soon as Axel touched him that something changed; his eyes dulling back to blue and his glamor returning; Mostly. Two things that usually were hidden remained... His hair changed; it was half white and a symbol on the back of his hand was visible.

"Jonathan..." Axel's tone softened as he put his arms around him, concerned. "Don't do that...You know better."

Intella finally raced over; concerned. Her own fingers grasping Jonathan gently. "Jonathan...Axel. What - What was that about..?"

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kristie-rp · 5 years ago

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Mood: Intella Migratori X Jonathan Leperance

#jonathan #intella #intella and jonathan #jonathan and intella #mb #moodboard

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kristie-rp · 6 years ago

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read all about it

Who: Jonathan Leperance & Intella Migratori-Leperance What: Sitting next to someone, hands in one’s lap, leaning against them and kissing their shoulder. Injury mention TW, gunshot mention TW.

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Intella marks her place on the page with a finger, and uses her other hand to drag the stretched out collar of her sweater back to where it’s supposed to be. This is the fourth time she’s done this in the past half an hour, something Jonathan is acutely aware of. His hands are in his lap, nowhere near her, but he itches to run his hands over her, to smooth her frazzled magenta-tinted hair, and test the softness of the green cable-knit sweater and old blue jeans.

Last night, Intella woke him in the small hours of the morning, creeping into their shared bed long after she usually went to sleep. He’d asked how it went, meaning the hunt she’d been on; she’d huffed and told him to go back to sleep. He hadn’t remembered it until she found her way downstairs an hour later than usual. If it wasn’t odd enough that she had deviated from her schedule, the slow, cautious movements she pulled herself through would have given it away.

Still, Jonathan hadn’t asked, waiting for her to bring it up.

Of course she hadn’t yet, focusing on work and, when she decided to stop – he suspected this was due to the pain of moving the books on the shelves, but couldn’t yet prove it – turning to a book. Only she clearly wasn’t focusing; it was plain in the way her eyes kept staring at the same spot on the page for longer than usual, and in her eyes being squeezed shut, her brow furrowed in something, perhaps pain or frustration.

Jonathan sighs from his place beside her, half leaning into her side. He has been there the entire time, but this is the first time he moves, adjusting his position to lay a kiss on the skin exposed on her shoulder. The wool of her sweater is soft where it brushes his cheek, and he hums in quiet contentment as a noise emerges from her throat, a faint thing he has heard before.

“You are injured, aren’t you?” he pries. He does not mean to sound accusing.

Intella sets her book down with a glance at the page number, but only after a lengthy hesitation and attempts at protesting that Jonathan quells with a raised brow, borrowed from his older brother. She drags her sweater from her body in a movement that is jerky enough to bring an obvious concerned frown to his face.

If he weren’t already worried based on her behaviour, the sight before him is enough to cause it to jump to the forefront of his mind. He gasps aloud at the patchwork bruises on her dark skin, but it’s the bandage on her other shoulder that his gaze catches on. “Tell me that isn’t toxic,” he insists quietly, the colour draining from his face. She had been hunting something last night, something hellborne, and they are often poisonous in one way or another.

She hesitates, then catches his hand. “It’s not toxic. I don’t want to say it’s only a gunshot injury, but that’s what it is.”

“Your target had a gun!” Jonathan exclaims it a little too loud for a library setting, and he is treated to a glare from the aging man who has been browsing the shelves, and a shh from his wife.

“My targets hypnotised human pet slash guard had a gun, actually,” Intella corrects quietly. Her expression, which brooks no argument, is what keeps Jonathan from leaping to his feet, as if he can help her now, in hindsight. “The demon has been banished, and the human removed from polite society. He’ll be serving a sentence for possession with intent, for at least long enough for the control to slip. I think. Otherwise, at least long enough for his idiotic master to come up with a less cliched plan of attack. Honestly, you’d think they’ve never considered anything but violence.”

Jonathan reaches out and tugs her hair gently, exhaling slowly. He’s had to master deep breathing, because it’s that or hyperventilate whenever he is reminded of her mortality. While it is true she will be resurrected in time, the fact is that it still involves time. “Let me look at it.” It’s not a request.

“It’s fine, and I’m working, Jonathan.”

“It’s not fine, and you’re moving like something kicked your ass, Intella,” he corrects as sternly as he knows how. It wavers somewhat when she shoots him one of her patented looks, and he catches her hands before she can drag herself to her feet, back to shelving books and hiding somewhere he can’t keep track of her. He might be here as much as Intella is these days, but this will always be her home, and it shows in the way she moves among the stacks. “Intella. You know I worry whenever you go out on a hunt, especially alone. Would it really cost you to let me ease my concerns? Really? If I was injured, you know I’d let you prod all you liked. Besides,” he says, persisting in a quietly persuasive tone that captures the soft edges of his concern. “Besides, you must have dealt with the shot yourself. Don’t you trust me to double check it? To make sure it’s bandaged properly?”

Intella gives in before she has time to build a defense, and he knows that he should be grateful she loves him enough for it. Some part of her still caches on the idea of being seen as helpless, he knows that, and that she is willing to let him treat her injuries says volumes.

He leans down to kiss her properly before either of them move, warm and slow and loving. If there were a way to pour everything he feels for her into that one action, he’d do it. Jonathan believes nothing is more important than letting Intella know without a doubt that she is loved.

“Now let me help you,” he murmurs as he breaks the kiss, “please?”

Intella hums once, then nods. “Yes.”

#kwrites #kwriting #kristie writes #kristie's writing #ft. intella #ft. jonathan #kiss series

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kristie-rp · 6 years ago

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Axel & Leila: Hanahaki

“There are at least two dozen Inferno siblings in Port Lyndon at any given time; always have been. How have you been avoiding them?”

“Millenia of practice,” comes the soft response, deadpan. “My family is... avoidant, shall we say? We have always failed to make a habit of reliably checking in on one another. It is par for the course.”

“You’re a model, though. I don’t understand how you’re managing.”

“I suppose my many, many siblings are not interested in modelling.”

“And,” Intella says, impatient and curious and eager as ever: “how are you still a model? According to my notes, you have been for as long as it has been a concept.”

Axel peers up in time to catch the end of the shrug, short blonde hair shifting with the motion. Her name is Leila, and she is enchanting. She doesn’t talk much – she’s quiet, and private, and shy. Intella has been working to coax conversation from her in the past several weeks, ever since she was unsurfaced in the most recent raid on the cells of Herontesuto. “You humans are remarkably good at ignoring when the same person exists in the same role for too long,” he calls.

Intella opens her mouth, most likely to protest, because it is true that she’s never been caught out by that lie. Leila beats her to the punch, offering a consoling smile that softens her teasing enough that Axel almost misses it. “It’s okay, Intella. One day you’ll have to realise that you’re beyond human.”

Axel starts laughing, and it turns to coughing. He chokes on it, coughs that shake his shoulders. Intella and Leila are both blinking at him from the shelves they have been organising.

“Are you alright?” asks the librarian.

He shrugs, the coughs trailing off as he clears his throat. “Fine, fine. Just, you know, dying. Ignore me.”

Leila’s glance is one of concern, but Intella rolls her eyes. “Men, can’t even manage laughing right,” she says. He takes it for the joke it is, but shoots her a glare anyway. If it twitches in favour of amusement, well, that’s none of their business.

Jonathan sweeps Intella back to the library to collect one of the orders of rare European tomes she has ordered. The result is that Axel and Leila are alone at a four-person table in the Black Cat cafe run by a witch who is overly invested in relationship. It’s three weeks since he and Leila teased Intella for her humanity, and the conversation has been mostly forgotten by all involved. Besides – a witch Lucy might be, but her real talent is baking. Even Angeline has admitted her cakes being good, and Angeline resents Lucy with a passion.

Leila is eating something chocolatey, smaller than a regular serving. As he passed her murmured order onto the witch behind the counter, he’d felt a tickle in his throat, and clearing it hadn’t done much but alert him that something was lodged there. Axel has a more substantial lunch of some pastries he’d selected, and then charged to Jonathan’s bank card, stolen while his brother was distracted by the love of his existence.

“How long have you known her?” Leila is asking.

Axel raises a brow, a question in it. “Lucy? In this lifetime, around a decade. She crops up fairly regularly; I think she’s the witch who’s furthest from immortal.” He pauses to clear his throat again, annoyed that it won’t fade. “Well. Beyond the usual charms to avoid bodily harm, anyway.”

“Lucy - ? No. No, I meant Intella. The two of you seem close.”

“Um.” He doesn’t really get asked how he knows Intella. How he stands his brothers lovesick pining turned disturbing dependency, yes. But not how he knows his occasional sister-in-law. “She’s sort of always been around; she’s a Constant. If you believe in soulmates, then she’s Jonathan’s; things always go worse in his life if she isn’t around.” And sometimes when she is, but they both deal with it better when Intella is around, he thinks. Axel has someone else to lament his brothers quirks with, and Jonathan has someone to cling to when things go wrong, and Intella is a problem solver before anything else, or at least knows the people who will figure things out. If any human in Port Lyndon is responsible for the world not having burned down yet, it’s Intella. “In this lifetime? I met her when she moved here for her last couple years of high school; moved into the same building as her. She was living alone, something about family stuff, and no support network here? She was...”

Leila waits for him to continue for a long while, hands hidden beneath the table. He thinks she might be fidgeting. “Yes?”

Axel coughs into a napkin for a moment, in what is both an attempt to alleviate the tickle in his throat, and to buy himself time. The truth is that Intella was not a happy teenager, not in this lifetime. She hadn’t become confident in herself until her third year of college, not outside of her affinity for working with – fighting with – demons and the other things that go bump in the night. He thinks that she was picked on in school here, though she never confirmed it, and he never witnessed it. “She wasn’t in a good place when we met, I think,” he says at last, “but she’s better now. Happier. That’s what matters.”

“You love her?” she asks. It is somewhere between curious and pitying.

He laughs, and of course it turns into coughing once more; a glass of water appears, and he sips at it before he clears his throat again. “Not that way,” he says, “she and Jonathan are made for each other. But she’s one of my favourite people, probably, certainly one of my favourite humans. I’ve killed people for her, because she deserves to have someone in her corner, someone who isn’t as much of a lovesick idiot as my brother. I guess I love her as a friend, or a sister.”

Leila nods, and tucks her hair behind her ear; the two hoops in the top of her ear catch the light as Axel smiles at her. She smiles back shyly as she collects her bag and coat and gets to her feet, and says, “I’m glad. You deserve happiness, I think, and that road might be paved in heartbreak.”

She leaves and the door chime dings as he starts to cough for the third time in as many minutes, bad enough to have to cover his lips lest spittle fly across the uneaten cake and bagel still on the table.

He is not at all prepared for the petal resting in his palm when the coughing eases.

It’s called Hanahaki, and he knows that even without a book of mystical diseases. It is an older tome, kept behind glass in the library to protect it from the curious kids that wander through sometimes. Intella has allowed him to borrow it, along with the few gardening books he was willing to select. The librarian had raised her brows sceptically, and clearly hadn’t bought his claim that he was considering getting into a more outdoorsy hobby.

It’s a disease born of unrequited love, is the thing, and he doesn’t remember ever having it before, at least not in this timeline. He has known people who have had it before, remembers December’s husband carrying it for only a few days before the couple had begun courting, remembers Angeline dying of it twice or more. Tera has had it, once, before the first Inferno was born, before her cursed soul took hold; the woman hadn’t believed anyone capable of loving her, and even her then-lovers insistence hadn’t convinced her, and she’d died, too. No one in his family has had it before, that he knows of, and for that he is thankful.

Because his lungs are full of flowers, taking root and growing in the muscle there. His lungs are full of flowers, and they are going to grow and grow until he is coughing up entire flowers and things that Angeline could plant in her garden and coax into living. His lungs are full of flowers, and it is never long enough before blood begins to be coughed up too, alongside things that people call beautiful.

He’s coughing up daisy petals, or he was at the cafe; they are easy to identify even without the book. He vaguely recalls Garrett – December’s lover, before they were so close – muttering about how the heather in his palm indicated admiration, and that the white ivy twisting in his fingers was for a desperate desire to please the woman who had been queen. So the flowers have meaning, in the Victorian language of flowers, and Axel could google that, but he would rather find it in a book.

Angeline has one, inexplicably, buried in among her myriad CDs. (It’s easily explained, actually; she is a songwriter and a gardener and when the two overlap it can be so, so beautifully inspiring.) She digs it out and waves it in the air. “What d’you wanna know, my Padawan?”

“Daisies,” he answers, because he may as well be blunt about it. He debates for a moment before pulling up a photo on his less-than-new phone, showing her the petals of something else. “And whatever this is from?”

“Innocence and purity and loyal love,” she defines, almost before she finds the page. “And ‘I’ll never tell’. And that’s a gardenia petal. It’s – here, ‘you’re lovely’, and secret love. That’s cute. Did someone buy you flowers, or something?”

There is something lodged in his throat, and it isn’t petals this time. It fades when he clears it, but he thinks it might be a placebo effect, because dread has no physical manifestation, and throat clearing cannot cure the knot of tension buried there. “Something like that.”

He coughs up something yellow and white while Intella and Leila are laughing over a collection of old political cartoons Intella has dug out from somewhere and is figuring out where to shelf, before she got distracted. Jonathan catches them, because he’s coerced Axel into helping shelve the things neither of the women can reach without a stepladder or stool, and with Axel’s arms full of books he cannot catch the petals himself.

Axel is lamenting this inconvenience, because he would rather catch them and keep them to himself until he can dispose of them. How can it be bad enough that he coughs up pristine petals over the giggling three rows away from them, but not bad enough that he feels like dying? Sure, he’s been short of breath, but he can cut back on that, technically, it’s all unnecessary.

“Those are tulip petals,” Jonathan says into the quiet, confusion in his voice. Axel shoves the books in his arms back onto the trolley, and collects the handful of petals before anything else can be asked. Or tries to. “What the hell, Axel, why -?”

Axel is the older brother, and of course his head shaking goes unheeded. Jonathan’s slightly too loud voice drops, though, and that is, he suspects, as much as he can expect. Gods know that if he found out Jonathan was dying on something unrequited, he would be about as far from calm as it is possible to be. He fumbles the petals to press a finger to his lips. “Not here,” he hisses, figuring there is no chance of putting it off for long. He shoves petals into his pockets and Jonathan frowns at him, clearly annoyed at being put off, but Axel ignores him, and returns to shelving books.

When Axel leaves the library that day, he is consciously trying to avoid his little brother. It doesn’t work, and Jonathan barrels after him after he kisses Intella goodbye, nearly sending both of the men crashing to the ground in his haste to drag him away from the building. They stop at Black Cat, of course, and Axel very carefully hides the fact that he is smiling at a table by offering one of Lucy’s myriad familiars a scratch behind the ears at a table that isn’t the one he shared with the lot of them that one afternoon.

“Hanahaki, Axel? Really?”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Jonathan,” Axel retorts. His hands are clasped around the coffee Jonathan bought him, and there is a lump in his throat, and he thinks it is petals yet again. He does not think about her, and her smile, and her laugh, and her kindness – he does not think of anything but the worried pity on his brothers eyes.

“Who is it for? If you tell them, this goes away.” Axel is shaking his head, and Jonathan frowns at him; if his brows were thinner, they might have disappeared behind his glasses. “What do you mean, no?”

Axel has an answer, of course, the same answer people with Hanahaki always seem to have. He doesn’t want to put this on her, doesn’t want her to feel guilty when she cannot return the sentiment, cannot save him. And he won’t get any of the treatments, either, not when the side effects are what they are, or when he exists in so many continuities that it is impossible to say what damage he can cause. The cures, surgical or magical, strip the love and the ability to feel it for the cause. The surgical option that humans take – the one that might not even work on someone with his healing factor – has a high chance of stripping the ability to love at all, and a demon with his powers who is not tempered by attachment to others is more dangerous than many of the things they face. The ritual will transcend realities and dimensions and continuities, and if there is a version of reality where they are a couple, it will ruin them. The potion will remove the Hanahaki this time, but will make him more likely to get it again in the future, or the past, or at all; he cannot have that, not when the usual chance is less than one percent and the ‘cured’ variant is in the high twenties or more. All of them will have the consequence of forcing him to forget her entirely, and he cannot have that, either.

He has taken too long to think up an answer, and Jonathan has come to his own conclusions. “They’re in a relationship, aren’t they?”

It’s Axel’s turn to frown, then. “What? Why would you say that?”

“Why else wouldn’t you tell them? You flirt all the time, Axel; that never stops you!” He doesn’t think he flirts that much, actually, but Jonathan is still talking, and there’s not much point objecting. “It’s someone we know, isn’t it, someone who was at the library today, or someone who checked out the book you were – oh.”

Axel does not like the sound of that oh.

“You know you can tell me anything, right?”

“Uh, yes?” He really doesn’t like the sound of this. “But it’s just the Hanahaki. There’s nothing else.”

“Nothing else you want to tell me.”

“No. Nothing at all.”

Jonathan doesn’t look convinced, but he drops it. Sort of. “Tulips, huh? What do they mean?”

“How the hell would I know that?”

In his pocket, his phone vibrates with the text he’s been waiting for from Angeline, who must have finished her work. He doesn’t check it until Jonathan is leaving.

Yellow tulip = beautiful eyes. Whoever’s giving you this is a gigantic sap, dude.

Contrary to public opinion, the library is not open at all times. Intella closes it sometimes, when she can’t find Maddie to cover for her, and deals with her other responsibilities. Today she is taking care of a big deal demon who is after two Inferno siblings, the best Axel can tell. He’d missed most of the excuses the woman had made; he had been too busy coughing up daisy blooms (still innocence and loyal love and purity and never telling, says Angeline’s text) and blue violets (watchfulness and faithfulness and i’ll always be true, you fucking sap) over Leila sitting perfectly still as far from a window as she can get.

Oriel, the only brunette Inferno (so far as Axel is aware), is pacing and glaring at the phone in her hand. She is just as in danger as Leila is, something about a quirk of their powers, and she is offended that she is not being trusted to protect yourself.

“Pretty sure it’s about not letting mortals get caught up in the middle, actually,” Axel says around a mouthful of the daisies that are apparently all he can breathe.

“I wouldn’t let him get caught up in this,” she snaps, and then doubles over, her body convulsing with choking, familiar coughs.

A shower of ivy and primrose and heather in white and lavender falls to the floorboards, and all of it is speckled crimson. The white buds on the heather are dotted with it, and Axel stares at them for a long moment. He almost takes a photo to ask Angeline for a translation before thinking better of it, and decides that it is none of his business. So he offers her the tissues he keeps on him at all times, nowadays, just in case, and watches as she wipes blood from her lips with shaking hands.

There is a lengthy silence before anyone speaks. “You need to tell him, Ori.” Leila’s voice is gentle, but resigned; he gets the impression that this conversation has happened before, and he coughs blue violets into the crook of his elbow, crushing them underfoot as he retrieves a bin to collect Oriel’s flowers in.

“Or,” Oriel says. Her voice is ragged, and she sounds as resigned as Leila, as exhausted as Axel fears being. “Or, I could not.”

“What’s the worst that can happen? He says no and you have to get this thing removed, the way you should have to start with? He’s just another human, Oriel, he’s not worth this.” There is something horrendously bitter in her voice, and Axel thinks there is a story there, a story he wishes he felt confident enough to ask her about. Something bigger than a daisy or a violet wells in his throat, and he chokes it down, refuses to cough out something he cannot hide.

“You don’t know him, Leila,” Oriel says, and for all her voice is hoarse and cracked, she sounds so whimsical and far away that even if he hadn’t just seen her choke on flowers for her loved one, he’d know for sure that this was what was there. “If I tell him and he doesn’t love me, he’ll feel terrible and guilty and blame himself, even though it’s my own stupid fault.”

“But what if you tell him and he loves you, too?”

Oriel looks at her sister, and there is love and heartbreak in those dark eyes. Axel wonders absently what these two have in common, because they look so different and behave so unlike one another, and yet Oriel’s hand on Leila’s wrist leads to shoulders that droop instead of creeping closer to her ears. “But what if he just says it because he thinks it’s what I need to hear?” she murmurs, and Leila looks like she might cry. “And I’m not getting the treatment, Leila. It’s too dangerous for us.”

Axel is watching them both, and there is something welling in his throat. He does not know if it is pity or compassion for Oriel, or concern for Leila, or more blooms in his throat. “How long?” he asks around it, because the quiet is going to get to him if he does nothing else. He doesn’t know if he means how long has she had this, or how long until it ends.

“Not long,” is what Oriel says. He doesn’t know if she means not long until it kills her, or not long since it began. He supposes it is a death sentence either way.

He coughs purple hyacinths into his hand while Leila and Oriel quietly attempt to comfort themselves. I’m sorry you’re losing your sister, he thinks, and wishes he could say it around the mouthful of petals.

“I’ve got it,” Jonathan announces. He has been pacing for twenty three minutes exactly. Axel knows this because he is choking up azalea while he texts Leila and Intella in separate conversations, and the time has been staring at him this entire time. Leila is feeling under the weather and needs a distraction from the headache, and he has been sending her suggestions; Intella is asking for ideas for anniversary presents for her and Jonathan, and honestly, he does not remember ever signing up to be their advisor.

“I don’t know why it’s taking you this long to decide which book to get your girlfriend for your anniversary,” Axel says, spitting red petals into the bin beside the couch. He does not notice the darker red on the petals that are already on the spectrum, but Leila is asking him to choose between two different poets, and he vaguely remembers meeting one of them. He says so in a text, and then volunteers to bring her soup if his idiot brother ever leaves. (Aren’t you worried about getting sick? she asks, and he chokes on a snort. As if a cold is going to be worse than this. I’m a pureblood, unlike somebody here. I’ll be fine. – and then, from her, Okay, fine, bring me chicken soup, you dork.)

“You’re in love with Intella, aren’t you?” Jonathan asks.

Axel chokes for an entirely different reason, and has to push himself upright to stare at his brother. “What the fuck?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Jonathan says. “It gets worse when you’re at the library, and I know you’re texting her now, and look at you!” he exclaims, gesturing in a manner that Axel thinks he should perhaps be offended by. “You talk to her and you choke, you help her in the library and you cough, you go to that cafe and look at the table we always sit at and there are petals in your hand. And you haven’t been talking to her, not really, not since this started, have you? You’re avoiding her. But it’s still getting worse. And she’s got that smile like she knows everything, and her eyes are like that blue fluorite, and her skin is so soft, and kind despite everything she goes thrugh, and she’s literally the smartest person on the planet, maybe in the universe – and it’s okay. I can manage.”

It’s wrong on so many levels that Axel doesn’t have the words to address it – well, words beyond what the fuck is wrong with you and despite what you think, the entire world is not in love with your soulmate. “Manage what?”

“I can break up with her.”

Axel is gaping at Jonathan, because, he realises, he has never actually considered that his brother is this fucking stupid. “What the actual fuck, Jonathan, why on earth would you do that?”

“To give you a chance, obviously. Can you not question this? I – I don’t want to, but you deserve a chance to live, okay, and I know what being in love is like, especially with her, and just – you deserve that.”

It’s sweet, Axel thinks, but he really, really resents his brother for looking so incredibly crushed while offering such a ridiculous ‘solution’. He wants to laugh, but the absolute despondency on his little brothers’ face is making it difficult. “Jonathan.”

“I can talk to her, she’ll understand – what?”

“Two things.”

Jonathan breathes, exhaling slowly. “Two things.”

“One – don’t you think it’s a little arrogant of you to just assume she’d be fine with that? She loves you, you idiot. And she’s not the kind of person who welcomes decisions being made on her behalf, which you know.”

Jonathan is quiet, and Axel wonders which of the myriad times Intella has ripped into him for trying to prevent her from getting into something that might be over her head is passing through his mind. For him, it’s one of the more recent ones, a Heron raid in this lifetime, in which Jonathan tried to prevent Intella from finding out it was happening at all. It’s possible that hasn’t happened yet; time is weird. “She’d kill me.”

“Or close to it,” Axel agrees, nodding. “And two: Intella’s great, but it’s not her. Christ, it’s not her. She’s like a sister, okay,” this time, “and you need to get it into your head that the entire world is not in love with her.”

“Oh.” There is relief on Jonathan’s face, strong enough that Axel can almost feel it; that he’s sure any empaths in the city are picking it up out of nowhere. Axel lays back on the couch. “But, wait, if it’s not Intella, and all the signs are there –”

Axel tenses. He doesn’t have time to be nervous, not really, because Jonathan is back in his vision, staring.

“You’re in love with Leila!”

He says it like it’s a victory, and Axel opens his mouth to protest, to tell him he’s wrong. Only he pictures her, for a split second, the way she was when he saw her last – she was wearing this soft pink sweater, and his fingers had itched to straighten the crooked collar, to coax her fingers out of the sleeves. She’d looked – peaceful, sort of, but her brow had been furrowed, too, and he’d wanted to ask what was wrong; her nose had been pink from the cold and the damp and from her rubbing it raw, maybe sensing the illness coming on.

He chokes out daisies and miniature daffodils that he knows are called jonquil, enough to fill the two hands he uses to catch them. He notices the extra red this time, blood marring white and yellow in a manner even Jonathan can see, from abruptly closer than he was earlier.

The victory is gone and Jonathan’s breath catches, and Axel almost turns the flowers in his hands. Almost. Instead, he dumps them in the bin beside him, and refuses to meet his brothers’ gaze. He can feel the pity, anyway, and the fear.

Because he’s coughing up blood now, too, and that means they are tearing apart his insides more than they were when they began to grow.

“Jonquil means desire for affection returned,” Angeline says when he next sees her at Cafe 42. Her boss, either Lucas or Michael (Axel can never recall which one is actually the manager and which is the mysterious potential conman), seems resigned to let her hover near Axel’s table instead of collecting the coffee cups as she’s supposed to be. Axel doesn’t know how she still has a job, unless the jokes about Syrus bribing the owner are true. “It also means love me, and desire, and sympathy,” she goes on, folding her arms over her chest. “Now are you going to stop pretending I don’t know you’re not getting bouquets from a bloody florist, or are you gonna keep acting like you think I’m dumb?”

Axel wants to heave a sigh, and he does, he tries. Except he’s short of breath now, has been for ages, but it’s worse than it has been, and all he manages is a halfhearted huff. It sounds pathetic, and earns a raised brow. “I’m sick,” he says hollowly, giving up the pretence. It is offensive to Angeline to not tell her, at this point.

“No shit.” Angeline gives him a pointed once over, and he supposes he deserves that. Eating has been difficult, and if he were closer to human, he might be more skeletal. He is pale and haggard, and dark shadows have ingrained themselves into the space beneath his eyes, nights interrupted by hacking coughs and the daisies that started this whole thing, dyed red in the moonlight that slips through the gaps in his blinds.

He clears his throat and almost chokes on guilt, on his reluctance to say this. “It’s Hanahaki,” he says, quietly. The only other person in the coffee shop is Michael-or-Lucas, her boss, and he knows the man behind the counter pauses when he hears the word.

Angeline’s attempt at playing the disapproving mother collapses and she drops slowly into the chair beside him. Her hand is out of place when she rests it on his arm, and he does not need to look into her face to see that that is not what she expected. He looks up anyway, and his fools heart cracks at the brokenness he sees there. “Oh, Axel.”

She doesn’t try to talk him into telling or into treatment while she sits with him, and for that he is grateful. It is only a matter of time until Intella finds out and her and Jonathan start on about that, and he needs all the peace he can get.

It’s probably pathetic that hiding from Jonathan is driving him to spend more time with Leila, in a roundabout way. Jonathan is trying to talk him into confessing, or trying to, and has been ever since he found out, and Axel cannot handle it, because he isn’t the brother that people love. He has too many responsibilities and too many problems to risk endangering anyone with, let alone someone he loves as much as he apparently loves Leila.

(He is coughing up blood red daisies at a thought, now, and his throat is starting to be more and more blocked. He can barely eat, has been dependent on soup for two days now, because it is all that can fit past the vines he imagines in his oesophagus. He imagines a garden in his lungs and his heart and his throat, and it must be beautiful, but gods on high, it hurts not to breathe.)

Leila, he is learning, is quiet but insightful. Today, she is idly sketching out scenes from a history book, for whatever reason. Axel is watching her absently, and swallowing petals he cannot deal with right now, and trying very hard to contain his commentary, because he remembers that hanging. “The witch had dark brown hair,” he says at last, tripping on the words. Her fingers stop where she has been reaching for a pencil that can set the base for blonde, and she coughs, once. He frowns; he thought she would be healthy for now, since it has been two weeks since her last day stuck in bed.

She clears her throat, or tries to turn the cough into that; he isn’t certain which is more accurate. “Oh?”

“Janice. Janet. Dark brown hair. Daughter was dirty blonde.” He clears his throat, because these are fragments, not full sentences, and he isn’t certain what more he can do. “Neither were witches, either. Just – humans overreacting.”

Leila snorts, and then coughs again, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Humans always overreact. I suppose it is a consequence of their mortality?”

Axel shrugs, because really, how else is he supposed to respond to that? Of course humans overreact. They demand that everything makes sense, and everything requires answers, and insist there is only one universal truth. It took three lifetimes before Intella could accept his attempts at roundabout answers, and he knows he got lucky there, because anyone else would need reminding in the future. “You okay?”

“Sorry?”

“Your cough – you okay? Thought you were better.”

Inexplicably, Leila flushes, and although it’s quite pretty, Axel is still concerned. “No need to worry about it – I’m sure it’ll pass soon,” she says, going for reassuring and missing by a pitch. “It’s no bigger deal than your cough.”

He does snort then, and feels petals well up in his throat. He is in love with this woman, and it is killing him, and she has absolutely no idea.

(The daisies fill the trash later, because of course they do. They are accompanied by petunias and, once again, azalea and jonquil.)

“Are there any cures for Hanahaki that you haven’t mentioned to me?”

The question startles Axel enough that the chair he is rocking back on just about tips over. He flails and slams his feet down, and manages to save himself from embarrassment – or at least the embarrassment of hitting the ground on his back. He still expects a raised brow from Intella, but when he looks, she is only frowning at him from the side of the table he has settled himself at. “Why’d I know anything?” he asks, wondering if this is a roundabout way for her to reveal that she has noticed, or that Jonathan has given away the game, blabbering about how he doesn’t have to leave her to save his brothers’ broken heart.

Intella looks almost offended by the question, behind her worried frown. “You’re you. You’ve seen everything. And I refuse to believe you weren’t ever fascinated by a disease that has a reputation like this one.”

Okay, yes, those are fair points. He has known too many people with the disease not to have picked some things up, even without researching it himself – which he did, of course. There is a reason he and Intella get on so well so often. “Just the usual four. Reciprocation, surgery, potion, ritual.”

The librarian groans, and he looks on in some surprise as she pushes her palms into her eyes. She has to shove her glasses and their delicate wire frame upward to do so, and they catch on one of her earrings until she removes them entirely, the better to make contact. “I don’t know what to do!”

“Uh.” Axel is honestly, genuinely alarmed, now. “Intella, don’t tell me you’re...” infected, he wants to say, or ask. If Intella has fallen in love with someone else, Jonathan will be crushed. And, besides, in every one of her lifetimes, she has never had the disease, so far as he knows; he does not want to think of her being killed by this, too. Not when he himself is going to be dead before this life of hers ends this time, too.

“No! No, I love Jonathan, and I know he loves me. It’s not me,” she explains hastily, peeking from behind her hands despite the fact that there is no way she can see his relief clearly. “No, and no offense, but if it were me, I wouldn’t be coming to you without Jonathan.” Ah, yes, he thinks, because she is so sure of her love for Jonathan that she would have the roots cut from herself to spare her beloved the pain, no matter the influence on her own feelings for him. He wonders what it must be like, to be that certain of returned affection, and of course it sets him off.

He coughs for minutes, choked on flowers and petals, and even a couple of leaves; they fall to the desk he has hunched over, blood and spittle sprinkling them. The daisies are entirely red, and these are the ones that come with leaves and entire stems, whole flowers complete enough to insert into a bouquet; the jonquil is getting bigger. There are new petals, dark and unfamiliar, and those of something bell shaped.

Intella is horrified, and leaves for a long moment. Axel believes for a moment that she is disgusted with what he has done to her table, and begins to collect the blooms and the petals, having every intention of disposing of them and disappearing.

“What are you doing?”

He pauses at the question, frowns at Intella’s tone, somewhere between harried, disappointed and sad. There is no pity to be found, which he supposes might be a blessing; she must be the first person not to react that way. “Cleaning up,” he says, quietly. He cannot speak any louder, not with his throat as raw as it is now, both these days and after a fit.

“Honestly, you people. How am I supposed to identify anything if you hide it from me?” she demands, and it sounds rhetorical, so he lets the handful he has managed to collect fall. Intella does not shy from the blood and fluid on her table, and selects one of each to identify. “The daisies are for innocence and thinking of the person, questioning whether one is loved, and for simplicity and purity and loyalty in love,” she reads quickly. “The jonquil are for desire and sympathy and pleading for love, and wishing to be loved in return.”

Axel watches her chew on her lip as she flips to an illustrated index and, apparently, identifies what he has not recognised from a picture on a page. “Gladiolus is for strength of character and sincerity and being prepared and beautiful, for memory and admiration and wanting a reprieve. And anemone,” she says, flicking the page again, “anemone is for anticipation and truth and sincerity and,” she says, like there’s more, and then snaps her mouth shut as her frown returns, stronger than before.

It takes him a minute to work up the word. “What?”

“When it’s dark, it means forsaken. It means giving up hope.” Axel – he smiles at her, and it is unsteady and wavering and forced and small, and her lips part. She licks her lips, and places the book carefully on the table. “But you aren’t surprised by this.”

His hands are shaking where he has shoved them into his pockets. He has to swallow four times before he thinks he can manage a sentence, and he wonders what his oesophagus looks like now, if entire flowers are lodging in it. He wonders how long he really has. “It’s been a while.”

“I won’t ask why you didn’t tell me, because it isn’t my business, unless I’m your loved one, which I doubt, considering you haven’t treated it,” she says, matter of fact. She collects a bin from the desk a few feet away, and quietly goes about cleaning up the mess. “But you aren’t up to daffodils yet, are you?”

He’s not, so he shakes his head. The jonquil are something different, and they are getting bigger, and all they mean is wishing to be loved in return.

“Daffodil mean unrequited love, and ‘you are my only’,” she is saying, and though her tone is nothing but matter of fact, he wonders if she isn’t crushing pity to hide it from him. “And they will start healthy and whole, and then they will become bent, and it will mean misfortune. And then they will start to bloom wilted, and that’s – that’s when it’s too late for any treatment.”

It’s not good news, and he didn’t expect it. He didn’t expect a pattern; isn’t sure he wants to know for sure when the end will be here for him. But he tries for a smile, a tiny, little smile, one Intella does not return.

“Please tell me if you see bindweed?” she requests, voice quiet as someone opens the library doors. She flips to a different page in the book, away from the daffodil he doesn’t want to look at, and shows him a white thing that looks round from the top and like a bell from the side. She doesn’t say what it means, but he sees it on the edge of the page. Dead hope.

He spends more and more time with Leila. Intella seems to have decided to leave him alone, although he is avoiding being caught alone by her. She won’t tell anyone, not like he expected Jonathan to, and the presence of anyone else will keep her at bay.

Leila is coughing fairly often, too, so she doesn’t ask about his, about the handkerchief and tissues he keeps on his person, about the blood he is sure has been smeared on his lips more than once. He has never been gladder for a vaguely ruddy complexion. She’s pale and there are shadows beneath her eyes, and she looks more and more like the broken woman Intella withdrew from Herontesuto all those months ago. He’s taken to offering a brief enquiring “Okay?”, and she spares him the insult of lying, though she doesn’t do more than shake her head, and cover her mouth when her small frame is wracked yet again with a violent coughing fit.

He’s yet to succeed at comforting her when she’s like this, because the sight of it sets his own coughing off. It isn’t just the daisies that come out drenched in blood anymore, and the jonquil is getting bigger and closer to a full plant, and he is absolutely terrified that he will wake up choking on daffodils.

So he spends more and more time with Leila, and they do plenty together. He goes to a runway she walks on, something about living art, and watches as she becomes something else on stage, something ethereal. She is small and walks with shoulders hunched, but with her makeup on to paint her flawless, he could almost pretend she is no sicker than the skeletal models she works with, that she is a woman with more confidence than anything else. He goes with her to see Oriel, and pointedly doesn’t ask questions about the way the brunettes hands shake and the way the globs she chokes on are more blood than petal at this point. He meets her for lunch and for dinner and for breakfast some days, and they linger for dessert, chattering as much as they are able. She is coughing enough that he retrieves his half-charged phone to continue their conversation by text, and he chokes on something green and red and beautiful that he cannot keep down.

In the bathroom of Black Cat, he stares at three pristine daffodils and what might be an entire daisy plant, no longer the single flowers he has become accustomed to. He closes the lid of the toilet and sits down heavily, trying to calm racing thoughts: he has always known this was coming, in an abstract way. Tera and Angeline have died choking on daffodils in the past, and he knows that Tera, at least, died on a withered rose, red as the blood she had been forced to gargle, throat ripped raw by thorn after thorn, on choking on bouquets day after day for weeks.

He wonders absently what it means that he has never seen a rose in his own evidence, and flushes away what he has choked into the toilet. Intella would have theories, he supposes, but he does not want to ask. It is most likely because he doesn’t care much for the stereotypical assumptions that come with roses, about the single most clichéd flower of all time.

“Axel?” comes a familiar voice, and a despairing Axel looks up at the cubicle door. It’s Lucy, of course, and she sounds somewhere between amused and concerned, which he supposes is as much of a declaration of loyalty as she is likely to get from her in this lifetime. “Leila wants to know if you’re okay.”

He doesn’t try to swallow the blooms that come with her name, and daisies and daffodils fall into his hands. He closes his eyes and stands up, disposing of the flowers without another thought. He uses toilet paper to avoid getting blood on the stall door, and runs water in the sink. Lucy is in the bathroom by that point, and watches with an indecipherable expression as he washes the red off his hands. Eventually, there is no blood left and the water is too hot, and he turns it off and dries his hands on his jeans. Then he faces her, and the two stare at each other as though either of them have anything left to hide.

“I can brew the potion,” she offers. Her voice is soft, something wary in it.

Axel is shaking his head before she can voice the final syllable, though he does pause to consider, before shaking his head again. “You’d hate doing that,” he points out, and it’s true. Lucy is in love with the idea of love, and it is why she is so insistent on her potions. “And besides, it’s – not worth the cost.” The cost is his memory and his feelings for her, forever, and increased susceptibility in the future, and he doesn’t want to go through this again, even if he knows the memory of it will disappear along with his Hanahaki.

“I would,” Lucy agrees, and hugs herself absently. She is not a good friend, not when she is so invested in intoxicating people, often against their will – they might buy the dosed goods, but she is not always honest about which is which. But she can understand without being convinced the reasons he has made this choice. He doesn’t know for sure, but he suspects she has had Hanahaki more than once in so many lifetimes, and that part of her talent for brewing extends to dosing herself far too often with the cure; he has never seen her in love, and he thinks that this might be because she likes to pretend she doesn’t feel it, or doesn’t remember it at all. And the cost of the potion, after all, is more Hanahaki in the future.

“I think at this point, I want to wait as long as possible.” He does not meet her gaze as he blatantly lies, because he knows already that he is not going to wait. “It’s been this long, right? Might as well get what I can enjoy out of it.”

“What stage are you at?”

Daffodils, the thinks, and ducks his head instead of answering. “Thanks, Lucy,” he says instead, and brushes past her, back to the cafe where his now cold drink are being attended to by Leila. She fixes him with a worried stare, coughs into her hand, and offers him the phone he left with her.

He is watching her face and offering a tiny, awkward smile, as if it comes with convincing her that he is okay, even though he is so, so very far from it. He mouths an apology and hopes the spaces between his teeth aren’t bloody, and watches as she lowers her hand. For a moment, he thinks he sees soft purple petals.

No, he thinks, and refuses to dwell on it. It is bad enough that he is dying of this. He does not want to know of her dying too.

He should be suspicious when he finds Intella and Jonathan have both arrived at Black Cat before himself. Well, before Leila, at least; Leila who is always early, who has never run late in all the months he’s known her. The thought rises something sticky and too-big in his throat, but he swallows it down, and orders their usual through Lucy, who stares too hard at him.

“You’ve got a little something here,” she says, and leans across the counter to tap at his lower lip. He scrubs at it, and blood comes away, because what else would it be?

He mutters a thanks as the door finally closes, the bell having chimed what feels like too long ago. A glance tells him that Leila has arrived, and he offers her a warm smile, as warm as he can manage without showing bloody teeth. Her entire body is tense, and she relaxes in answer, offering something small of her own.

“I’ll bring your orders over in a few,” Lucy promises, and except for the lack of teasing that he has been enduring for as long as he’s known her, she seems almost normal. It’s as though she can simply switch off the knowledge that he is dying.

Anyway. With everyone there, Axel is the last to sit at the table, having to collect napkins to benefit the rest of them. Both himself and Leila only have drinks, while Intella and Jonathan eat lunch here. He has not even pulled the chair towards the table before Jonathan speaks:

“I was reading this opinion piece on the Hanahaki disease last night,” says his little brother, like it’s nothing at all. Axel chokes on air for once, and Leila turns white as a sheet. Jonathan goes on as though he is not crossing a line. “Intella and I got to talking.”

Intella clasps Jonathan’s hand for a brief moment, smiling fondly at him, and Axel figures it out. It’s a trap. Of course it’s a fucking trap. These two are never early, and he can’t even leave, because it will give the illness away to Leila, and he has come too far hiding it. “The article was about the ethics of each treatment, and whether there should be a government imperative to enforce treatment in later stages of the condition. The article was in favour of no, though information and funding for all surgical treatment should, of course, be offered to those who are suffering.”

Jonathan is nodding along. “And we got to thinking, well, forcing treatment is one thing, but they ethically can’t, right? What if someone is more susceptible to Hanahaki than others? What if they have self esteem low enough to doubt anyone is capable of being in love with them?” Axel regrets telling him about Tera in that one lifetime. “So we wondered if treatment shouldn’t be enforced until all possible alternative avenues have been explored and attempted. Alternative avenues including confessing to the object of the patients’ affections, of course.”

Axel dearly wishes he had cancelled on today, but he knows his brother and his sometime sister-in-law, and they would have cornered him sooner or later. He just wishes it’d been when Leila wasn’t here to suffer, too, because he can see her and she does not look comfortable at all. “It’d be inethical to force the matter, of course, and there isn’t likely to be any laws passed in this lifetime,” Intella picks up the chain of thought, “but we – I – thought that it wouldn’t be fair to not offer the opportunity to the object of their affection.

“Say one of you had Hanahaki,” she says, and oh, Axel wishes this was one of the lifetimes where she’d had to die. “One of you had Hanahaki, and it was on, I don’t know, the other one. Leila, what about you? If Axel had Hanahaki, wouldn’t you want him to tell you, so you’d have a chance to at least consider it? Instead of him either keeping quiet about it and dying, or getting the treatment and eliminating all chance of him ever loving you?”

Leila emits a tiny noise in the back of her throat, a keening that it takes Axel a moment to place as coming from her. She shoves her chair back and clambers to her feet, and bypasses Lucy to dart into the bathroom. The witch has a furrowed brow, and her mouth forms a tiny ‘o’, before she rounds on Intella and Jonathan, “You,” she hisses, and Axel has never actually seen Lucy this mad. Her familiars come to attention from around the cafe, and fixate on the couple. “You have no right.”

“All due respect, Lucy,” Jonathan says, and for all he’s the passive one, his voice is unquestionably firm here, “but it needed to be said.”

“Not like that,” the witch snaps, whip sharp, and it sounds like a curse and drips resentment. “Do you have any idea what Hanahaki is like to the person who has it? Do you? Have either of you – no, who am I asking, of course you haven’t. The two of you have a perfect love story, over and over again, don’t you just? One in love with the other, reciprocated, every single time.” She deposits the tray with their orders onto the table, and grips Axel’s shoulder tight. Her nails are sharp enough to dig in, and he expects blood to well, or indentations to form, if nothing else. “You do not have the right to press the matter with hypotheticals that are so exceedingly confronting, not when you have privileged information on anyone involved,” Lucy says at last. “And you most certainly do not do that on my property. If you insist on being insufferable, insensitive meddlers, do so in your own places. I will not be so restrained in the future.”

She pastes on a smile after that, and it is all teeth. Axel can see it reflected in the window, and even he is unnerved. Still – he swallows his uncertainty, and clears his throat of daisies and daffodils too big for his lungs. “Would you please check on Leila?” he asks, voice hoarse.

The look Lucy gives him is one he cannot interpret. “You don’t need to speak to check on your friend, Axel, and I have customers,” she says at last. It is such a deviation from her standing up to him that he blinks at it, and blinks at the key she gives him from around her wrist. Then she leaves the table without unloading the tray, and Intella and Jonathan exchange a look.

It’s immediately clear that neither of them are going to apologise, regardless of how apologetic they might look. Axel grips the chair tighter and gets to his feet to approach the bathroom, knocking hesitantly.

Leila’s voice is a croak, and she says “Occupied” as though it is one of the most painful things she has had to do. She sounds as though she has been crying, almost, throat ripped raw from something Axel does not know about and cannot help with.

He swallows around the heart that he has lodged in his throat, and has to try three times before he can manage an “It’s me” that seems to freeze her in place, judging by how silent it gets in that room. “Leila?” he whispers, and it cracks his voice. “Coming in.”

He says it as a warning, and the key turns smoothly in the lock. Leila is standing beside the sink, looking guilty and not making eye contact, and she is rubbing at something on her face. He realises it is blood in the same moment she gets it off, and it is smeared across her hand instead of her face. Her smile, when she attempts it, is pained, and the flowers in his throat are choking him, and all he can think is that she is sicker than she has pretended, that she is too sick, that she is dying.

Who will die first, he wonders – he with his daffodils, that are starting to bend? Or her with her – whatever?

He cannot ask if she is okay, cannot coax his mouth into forming the words, and she passes him on the way out with an awkward pat to his shoulder, over the place where Lucy has buried her claws. Axel himself is still, and listens to the glass paned door slam, the bell trilling. It is only then that he moves towards the sink, because he is choking, and he needs it out.

Only the sink is full, and there is wisteria there. Soft purple wisteria and yellow tulips and burgundy geraniums, and all of them are spatted with crimson blood.

Axel chokes on his own garden and spits it into the trash beside the sink. Daisies and daffodils with snapped stems and, oh, he thought he was done with anemone, and – and bindweed, the bindweed he has been warned of.

He is careful when he closes the bathroom door, and pauses at the counter to tell Lucy her sink is clogged with blossoms. Then he stops to tell Intella and Jonathan that he is not going to forgive them for their meddling, and leaves without another word, only a handful of bloody bindweed to mark his presence at the table.

Because Leila has Hanahaki, just like him, and someone out there is stupid enough not to love her back.

He doesn’t see Leila for six days, and it is both a reprieve and almost his death. He is choking on withered daffodils and anemone and bindweed, now, and he misses the daisies that started this. Angeline defines them as innocence and never telling, and they are still appropriate, he thinks. But there is no room in his lungs for anything but broken, withered proof that he is not loved, and that he does not even have hope to work with now.

When he does see her next, it is at his own apartment. She is at his door, bundled up against the cold and damp, a black and red and white umbrella clasped in her hand. She is the only person who carries an umbrella in Port Lyndon, he thinks, and she matches it meticulously with anything she wears.

“May I come in?” she asks in a croak, and he can do nothing but stand aside and nod like a poorly coordinated puppet on strings.

She doesn’t come to his place often – hasn’t since they pored over her sketch of the victim of the last legal witch burning in Scotland – and he is thrumming with the sight of her. There are daffodils in his throat, and they are dying, and so is he, and all he can think is that if this is the last thing he sees – her – he will be content in a death he’s put off for millennia.

He makes her tea because he doesn’t know what else to do and because talking around her is something close to impossible, and because he knows she doesn’t drink coffee. She hovers awkwardly nearby until he ushers her into the lounge, where he has nothing but an ancient sofa and a crooked coffee table. The two sit at opposite ends of the couch, bodies facing towards one another but not making eye contact. Axel has coffee, and she has tea, and they sip in silence for long, agonising moments – agonising because the flowers within him wants him to let them out, and he cannot. Not now.

“I have Hanahaki,” Leila says at last, and she is staring very intently at what remains of the tea in her cup, as though looking up will kill her. “Intella worked it out. She does that – but you know that.”

He does know that, so he nods, though she isn’t watching him. He would very much like to open his mouth and comfort her, because he can see her and she looks like a broken person, with shadowed eyes and clammy skin, and she’s still beautiful, but he would prefer she be well. He has had this disease for too long, after all, and he is weeks from death at most, from having flowers crowd the oxygen from his lungs and petals preventing anything else from getting in.

“I didn’t think she knew who it was for,” Leila murmurs, and then laughs bitterly. Apparently the wisteria in her lungs is dying, because it isn’t as vibrant as it has been, and there are yellow tulips and the anemone he is starting to find too familiar. It is not drenched in blood, not from her, but there are specks, and she is still failing to look at him. “Shows what I know. Intella knows everything.”

Axel kind of really wishes he were in a position that would somehow enable killing Intella, right now, because whatever she has done has upset Leila this much. He would appreciate it ending, thinks that an end to the librarians existence would do that. The world can probably survive a few decades without her until she gets back to standard, he thinks, and takes some vindication in the fact that there is no way he’d survive long enough to go to trial for it.

“I’m going to have it removed,” Leila says when it becomes apparent that Axel is still not speaking. “Surgically, I think. Vincent may have a chance of success.”

“What?” It tears from his throat before he can catch it, and he claps his hands over his mouth. Because if anyone is likely to deliberately twist the surgery to permanently prevent loving, it is Doctor Vincent Constantine, who likely cares only for the science of it. He is choking on dead daffodils, and the woman he is in love with is choking on anemone, and she has had enough.

His reaction startles her into looking up, and she meets his gaze. Both of them break into a coughing fit then, and Axel gags into the bin he keeps for this purpose. The bindweed is white and red with blood, and he thinks he could plant a garden with what his retching brings forth. (Angeline would know for sure, but he has not told her about the bindweed. If Intella says it means dead hope, then Angeline will say the same, and since she knows – well. He doesn’t want to tell Angeline that he is going to be dead sooner than she likely expects.)

Leila chokes on more flowers, and in the midst of it has to duck her head again. It seems to help her to figure out speaking again, though he can see her cheeks are damp. “I just want to tell the person who it’s for,” she murmurs, like it’s a crime she regrets committing.

Axel frowns, and shakes his head, and for all he tries he cannot form the words. The book of plants he’d taken from the library back when this first started is on the coffee table, and he could write on that, but –

“I know you aren’t removing it,” she is saying. “I know you’re – you’re willing to die for this, I suppose. Or else you think there’s a chance they’ll love you back. But I – don’t have that,” she croaks, and it’s so broken and wrong that he scrambles for a pen and the book. “

No one on this planet deserves you, because you are so much better than them, he scribbles, and shoves the book at her. He could stand to be more gentle, but the words bring her a faint smile and another round of coughing. Anemone falls from her lips as Axel watches, and she passes the book back. He does not think about how she is not surprised he is drowning in petals.

“You’re sweet,” she says, and doesn’t believe him.

Whoever it is for would be lucky to have you. Taking away love entirely for someone who is too stupid to see what they could have with you? That’s ridiculous. And he is coughing up bindweed all over again, of course, and he is too slow with the bin and it spills into the book, blood and all. Intella is going to kill him, but considering this is her fault and he is going to die anyway, he figures it is justified.

Leila looks up once she reads the page, and her gaze is so raw and heartbroken that he wants for a moment to take it back. He hasn’t tried travelling since he got himself into this mess, hasn’t figured out an approach, not yet. But he is instinctively calculating the likelihood of going back and preventing that himself from ever writing that message, anyway, even though he knows he does not have the health and capacity to make a return trip right now.

“I make no promises,” she manages around a mouthful of wisteria, and tears it free as best she can. There are petals lodged between her teeth, and she takes a long, slow, deep breath. “It’s you.”

Axel frowns, because he does not understand. Not at first. Me? He wants to ask, because the sequence of events doesn’t make sense. Leila seems to see that, and she clears her throat as best she can. Her voice is still a whisper when she parts her lips again:

“I have Hanahaki for you.” She pauses, and breathes, and seems to reconsider. “I love you.”

Axel wants to say something so, so badly, but he is suddenly consumed with greater, heaving, choking coughs than he has been in the past several months. He twists himself to lean over the couch and gasp into the bin, and there are so many petals in the mess that he cannot identify anything. He chokes on mouthfuls of blood and petals and leaves and entire plants that tear through his throat, and he doesn’t understand, for a long while, just what is going on. He is convinced that this is it, that somehow knowing that Leila has Hanahaki, too, is driving him over the edge, and that he is dying.

But the more he chokes the easier he can breathe, and for the first time in months, Axel can take deep, slow breaths, and hold air in his lungs without gasping for it. And still he gasps for it, because he has forgotten how it feels to breathe without a garden inside him.

The last thing he chokes up are daisies, and he supposes that makes sense; they are what started it, and they must have been at the bottom of it all, and this is it – this is the last of them. And once he’s done revelling, and once he realises the woman at the other end of the couch is gasping, too, choking on flowers and tears and her own thoughts, these things that have been tearing her apart in their own right.

Axel reaches for her and pauses, because she has Hanahaki for him, but he knows that touch makes it worse, and he doesn’t know if she has figured it out. If she knows that her confession cured him, then she must know what it means, and she should be cured, too.

He licks his lips and tastes blood, and then he coughs, clears a throat that stings something fierce. Axel hesitates a beat longer, before he sighs, and he starts talking, saying it over and over again even though his aching throat wants him to stop: “I’m in love with you. I love you.” Over and over and over again, like a mantra.

And she must hear him, or the message must get through, because wisteria is pouring from her lips and Axel’s touch, when he finally works up the nerve to rest a hand on her shoulder, doesn’t make it worse. Her breath comes gradually easier, and Axel has never before imagined he could feel so much relief from nothing so much as the sound of oxygen entering the body.

When Leila is done, when her body lets her pause, she stops, and gasps, and swallows a mouthful of blood. Her teeth are red when she seeks clarification: “You’re – you’re in love with me?”

“I’m in love with you,” he agrees, then pauses. “You’re not going to get the treatment?”

Leila hesitates, then places a hand on his cheek. Her touch is sticky with the blood they need to wash off, and petals cling to her fingertips. “No need, now,” she says, “considering you are my cure.”

#kwrites #kwriting #kristie writes #kristie's writing #hanahaki #ft. axel #ft. leila #ft. intella #ft. jonathan #ft. oriel #ft. lucy #ft. angeline #LONG POST #seriously this is over 11000 words #20 pages in word #i'm great #i'm also mean to oriel

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kristie-rp · 6 years ago

Text

TS: Cover Up

FIRST | I-1 | SECOND

“Why do you have a complete list of Infernos?” Axel asks her. Jonathan is in the little kitchen area of the office Intella barely uses, making a meal of instant noodles and the microwave. It has left Intella and Axel alone to go over whatever changes they can figure out.

“I’m a historian,” Intella says, although it explains next to nothing. She glances up to see he is giving her an incredibly unimpressed look, his brow raised. He doesn’t have to say the words no kidding aloud; she can see it written in his face. She sighs and closes her notebook. “Look at it this way – Paimon knows which children he has. Christabella is drawn to them. But neither of them track the bloodline: there are descendants born of traditional reproduction, and there’s the blood that’s been used by Herontesuto and variants over the years. Someone needs to keep an eye on where the bloodline is active, especially since trouble follows them everywhere. No one else is going to do it, so I took it upon myself.”

Axel hums, because that makes a particular kind of sense that is unique to Intella, as he well knows by now. She sees it as her responsibility to act as the keeper of information. It’s part of why he thinks it is worth it to spread traces of his power throughout her notebooks. He leans across the table to pull the book she’s been writing in all afternoon towards him. Intella rocks back in her chair to scrub her hands over her face, already starting to tire from the hours of intensive research they have put in, and uses the momentary reprieve to stretch, attempting to work kinks from her spine.

He flicks the book open. Inside, he finds a contents page, starting with the oldest Inferno – Gina and continuing on until it mentions Paiton, the child that Intella has been assured exists soon in the future. There is no mention of Paimon or Christabella in the contents, presumably because they are listed elsewhere, or because Intella hasn’t gotten around to copying out the information yet. Axel turns the page, scanning for what he should be looking out for.

Gina’s page lists the arranged marriage she refused, and her meeting Salem, followed by a list of years and events that related to her piracy and culminating in her recent return to the city. Nicolas’s is a long list of names , lovers and children and a note to cross-reference with another book for a complete record to the present day. The third page is about someone named Leila, who does not sound familiar to Axel except as a prisoner he’d shared a cell wall with last time Heron had caught him. He remembers a hushed voice and the sort of dialogue he associates with someone who has given up.

The first major note next to her name is that she meets Axel nearly 1800 years earlier, and that it was not long before they married. The second note lists a pregnancy – and it’s all ensconced with a curly bracket next to the label of ‘undone during unknown event’.

Axel has absolutely no memory of any of the things listed in the page.

“Intella,” he says quietly, before repeating himself slightly louder. Once he has her attention, he asks, “Leila Inferno?”

Intella pales, and he is immediately hit by the impression that whatever this is, she feels guilty about it. “What of her?”

“Married, pregnant, and undone?”

Intella winces. “If you’re about to ask why I’ve never mentioned this to you, consider – there are things you don’t tell me. I’m sure you have reasons, that I don’t need to know, or that if I do know I’ll be worse off, somehow. Whatever happened with Leila – I believe that’s similar.”

“You have no memory of this, though.”

“I have the notes,” she corrects, ignoring how clipped his tone is because she knows it does not bode well for any of them, “and that’s more than enough. There’s a detailed record of how you two interacted with one another, of how I couldn’t aid Leila in doing anything to alleviate her condition. And according to my hypotheses from when I first found the inconsistency, it seemed likely it was caused by a paradox or another event preventing the two of you from meeting when you were supposed to. There’s nothing you could’ve done to fix it, then – however much it might be necessary.”

Intella watches as Axel works his jaw, either considering his next words carefully or trying not to let his anger direct his choices. “You had no right to keep this from me,” he says at last, breaking the silence. “Your reasoning is terrible, and – you just had no right, alright?”

“What use would telling you have done, Axel? What could it possibly have enabled?”

“I would have known she exists, for one!” he snaps.

“You know countless people exist – this one person isn’t going to change anything. I’m sure Leila’s perfectly fine, but she clearly doesn’t need you in her life.”

She regrets saying it immediately as Axel slams his hands on the table, causing the books to shudder. “Doesn’t need me? Is she better off without me, Intella? Do you get to make that call, in all your genius?”

“I wouldn’t put it like – read the damn page, Axel!”

His lip twists as he seethes with frustration at her ordering him around, but he obeys nonetheless. Intella does not make uninformed decisions, generally speaking. He’s angry with her – he doesn’t like not knowing things, and dislikes the knowledge that she has made the decision to hide this from him across numerous lifetimes even more. The dishonesty leaves a sour taste in his mouth, and as he reads the list of things that Intella has identified as Leila’s contributions. They start with a note that makes Axel feel ill, that Intella cannot find a treatment or a cure for her condition, and a note to refer elsewhere for potential side effects, and to cross-reference with Oriel.

It doesn’t get better from there.

It seems that Leila has not gone out of her way to participate in things the way other Inferno’s have. Where most of them have some presence in human wars – even Gina had some involvement – Leila has none. There are no notes of career accomplishments, or attachments to others; indeed, her greatest involvement seems to involve surfacing after Oriel was born for a brief period. Intella’s notes suggest it was to share what she knows of their shared ability, and she disappears not long after. A list of years alongside it suggest appearing for Oriel again and again, but it is erratic and centuries apart, in places. It mentions her being caught and trapped by Heron for years at a time, and by organisations and groups that preceded it. At least, Axel assumes it features years at a time – the only sign that she ever leaves an extended period of confinement is the inclusion of later years, different years – he can’t tell how long she was held from 1918, but she is being held elsewhere in 1931. And it goes on and on and on.

“I’m not convinced that you meeting her any time than whenever you originally did would have done anything to help her. She’s clearly not in a good place.”

“Not in a good place? Intella, if she’d gotten out any sooner, someone would have to be breaking her out – that there’s nothing here, no dates, clearly no one bothered. She needs someone.”

Intella swallows. She can see Axel’s point – of course she can – but she cannot regret her decision. “And that someone should be you? When you already do everything you can to defend the time stream as a whole? When there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to be at the right time to help anyway?”

“I can travel through time,” he snaps.

“If you mess up an attempt to help, you can’t go back without causing a paradox. Which renders your entire argument null and void, doesn’t it? So far as I can tell, whatever undid you meeting in the first place was a paradox in itself. You want to continue off such an auspicious start? When you don’t even know what she’s like?”

Axel snorts at that. “Like you don’t know what it’s like to miss something you haven’t had yet,” he retorts. Intella twitches.

“That’s not fair,” she says quietly, reaching across the table to take her notes back. “You and Leila wouldn’t be the same as Jonathan and I.”

Whatever Axel is going to say in response is cut off as Jonathan emerges from the kitchen balancing three servings of noodles. “Did someone say my name?”

Intella and Axel stare at each other for a long moment before Axel grits his teeth and looks away, getting up to take a bowl from his brother and eat separately from the two of them. “Just your devoted wife,” he mutters as he leaves.

Jonathan blinks. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing we can deal with now,” Intella answers quietly, and opens her notebook to read through while she eats.

They’re up until the small hours of the morning reviewing everything Intella knows, and some things she’s forgotten.

“You need sleep,” Axel says at last, when Intella yawns for the third time in ten minutes. Intella opens her mouth to protest, and Axel glares at her. “No. You’re human, you need rest if you’re going to be at your best to help me fix this.”

Intella’s jaw closes with an audible click. Axel’s still mad at her, but this is also the first time she knows of that he’s actually been willing to let her, potentially, travel with him. She levels him with a disapproving stare, but pushes herself to her feet. “Fine.”

Jonathan looks between of them, fully aware they must have argued about something when he left. Something gives him pause. “Wait, Intella helping you?”

“I don’t have enough power to protect three people from the changes out there. But, if you stay in here, that’ll work. And it needs to be Intella. She knows more than you about everything that originally happened.”

“What? Axel –”

“I’ve made my decision, Jonathan. Don’t you start arguing with me, too.”

“What are you –“ Jonathan cuts off when Intella rests a hand on his arm. He looks at her, sees her shaking her head.

“You know my system, Jonathan. You can keep up with what changes in the texts, and you’re better at checking online for information, anyway. Anything that’s really useful will be on there as it is – for updated information. Until the books finish rewriting themselves.”

He wants to protest. Of course he wants to protest; he wants to protect her, protect his brother. If he’s stuck in the library, he can’t do that.

But Intella shakes her head at him, offers a small smile. “Axel will look after me just fine. C’mon, when has he ever let me get hurt?”

Jonathan looks for some sign that he should be worried, but Intella has a good poker face when she wants to. She’s smiling like she’s sure this’ll work out just fine, and in spite of himself, he caves quickly. He trusts Intella, he trusts Axel.

Even if he can see perfectly clearly that neither one of them is happy with the other right now.

#the sequence #kristie writes #kristie's writing #kwrites #kwriting #ft. intella #ft. axel #ft. jonathan

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kristie-rp · 6 years ago

Text

TS: Never Any Good News

FIRST | I-1 | SECOND

Original by @cassandra-rp / @coloredinsanity

Axel appears out of thin air in the library lobby on an otherwise perfectly normal Saturday afternoon.

As is standard in Port Lyndon, rain is falling in a drizzle, turning the view outside the window into a hazy experience at best. Jonathan and Intella are settled behind the main desk on their own chairs, Jonathan idly fiddling with the feet Intella has propped in his lap. She clutches a book, turning pages periodically, and he is researching antiques to verify sources on an aging tablet, copying out notes for his boss for work on Monday. It’s quiet, the library virtually abandoned. Valentina has visited earlier in the morning, claiming her usual backpack of books riddled with suggestions from Intella, and Angeline has come to browse poetry and taken off with two books. Aside from that, it’s been quiet, and Axel’s company is the first they’ve had since Angeline left muttering about coffee in the morning.

Intella sits up in surprise at Axel’s entrance, lowering her book to frown at him in confusion as she slips her feet from her husbands’ lap. It is an unspoken rule that all obviously non-human activity occurs as out of sight as possible, preferably in what was once an office before Intella made it into something of a relic storage room: that the time demon has manifested in the main room, right in front of the desk, is a violation and an oddity.

What is still more unusual is the immediacy with which he raises his hand, purple and black energy swirling around first them, then herself and Jonathan, and then, as she looks on, the building itself. It coats it like molasses, thick and dark and obvious, but does nothing to hamper her movements. Intella frowns as she attempts to describe the sensation to herself. Everything – stops, for a moment. She can feel her own heartbeat and her own breath on her lips, but she hears nothing, for a long, long period. it comes back to her as quickly as it left, the energy fading to something that she can see in a faint purple tint overlaying everything it touches, not unlike the one on the notebooks Axel has maintained a habit of gifting her with for countless lifetimes now. She can hear the world again, and she assumes this means it never stopped – not for most others, at least. Traffic hurries past outside the window, and Intella shakes her head, piecing together the evidence she has.

Axel, she deduces, has wedged them in the middle of a dimensional gap. She’s heard him talk about it before – has pried him with countless questions and taken still more notes over the years – and knows that it is the easiest way to prevent any changes to the current timeline from taking hold over them. He’s not immune, which doesn’t surprise her in the least despite never being told: she watches the colour leech from his face, the white stark against his dark red hair, and frowns still more as he collapses to the floor. Jonathan, much to her surprise – she hadn’t seen him move – is beside his brother in an instant, carefully taking him in his arms. He deposits Axel on the couch in the nearest meticulously maintained reading nook, and lingers to check on him.

“What on earth is going on?” Intella manages when she finally finds her voice again. She’s staring helplessly at Jonathan, as though he has answers that she doesn’t know about, as if he wouldn’t warn her if something major was on the horizon. She has theories – of course she does, at any given time in Port Lyndon there are at least four valid theories for everything that could possibly happen (demonic nonsense, Herontesuto nonsense, Constantine nonsense, Inferno nonsense), but even the usual selection don’t really cover this, especially with Axel’s bizarre urgency, knocking himself out with no hesitation whatsoever, and especially not precisely enough to offer any real answers.

“It’s a time barrier,” Jonathan says. Intella does not predict answers she couldn’t have guessed herself in her future. “So far as I know, Axel’s the only person who can create them. He’s protecting this spot and us from whatever is happening – whatever happened.”

Intella huffs, because she really doesn’t think that explains much of anything. Protected from time – so it’s probably time related, she figures; after all, that’s Axel’s whole deal. Her mind runs a mile a minute as she tries to come up with something useful to do, examining the library around her. She wants to question Axel, but there’s no way she can guess how long he’s going to be out. She resigns herself to being the least useful person in the room, what with Jonathan fussing over Axel, as her gaze passes over the desk.

She looks back quickly, staring intently at one of the many books open on her desk. It had been open to the record of the ritual that had sealed Dante away back when Port Lyndon began forming on this particular site. Had is the operative word. She reaches for it, flipping forward through several blank pages and then back a couple – nothing, no word on the team-up to take down Dante. Nothing about how she, Paimon, December, Rikku and Raven were forced to work together to trap a demon, nothing about how Raven sacrificed herself. More flicking reveals even more pages blank or half-missing: anything that had mentioned an Inferno is gone, blank as if it were never printed.

All of it.

She hurries to the history section, plucking familiar books off the shelf to quickly scan the pages. Contents and indexes with glaring white spaces where a reference should be, pages ominously blank – no mention of any Inferno at all, just some vague comments about Demon Kings, vague enough that she wonders if they’re deliberately incomplete, because no way are they this uninvolved in human existence. In her memory, they are there all the time, prodding and interfering and causing trouble. “Jonathan, why would previously complete books have blank pages now?” she asks, glancing over her shoulder.

Jonathan looks away from Axel to meet Intella’s gaze, and she assumes he’s confirmed that there’s nothing medically wrong with his brother, that he is merely exhausted from exerting so much power at once. “Changes to history, usually. If the history isn’t there to be written about, the book either vanishes or if it talks about multiple topics, well. Things vanish, sentences go missing until the timeline repairs itself – if there’s some person in the wrong place in this timeline, then it’ll fill in the gaps with something that works instead, something written by the same person. Axel’s barrier’s around us and the building, not the books. Probably did it on purpose. What’s missing?”

“Infernos,” she says, voice grim. “All of them. I can find some mentions of Paimon – but only in relation to his role as a Demon King.” Intella jabs at the page of the book she is currently holding, indicating a blank space. “An entire subsection that was in here about him falling for a human bride? It’s not here.”

Jonathan rubs at his forehead, and Intella braces herself for potentially bubbling frustration. He does this when he is trying to remain calm, usually for her sake. She knows it’s because he is under the (correct) impression that it helps her focus, and she finds it sweet that he cares enough to try – but it’s infuriating, the sense that she’s being catered to. What he never seems to figure out is that she knows him, knows his body language, how the straight lines of stiff shoulders and curves of folded arms over his chest speak volumes of his discomfort. “We’re safe in the library,” he says, “but I don’t know how far Axel’s powers will stretch, so we shouldn’t leave if we can avoid it – at least not until he’s awake. The books can probably tell us more anyway, or the internet – that should still be working.” He murmurs the last of it, frowning as he digs out his laptop, not willing to complete this brand of research on the struggling tablet he dropped earlier.

The most obvious thing to do is to look for Christabella online. Paimon, he knows, is indifferent to technology, and especially social media, using it only if Bella or one of his well-meaning children push him to. Even Intella, with her aversion to the digital age (convenience at a cost, she calls it), knows Bella has been on social media for as long as it has existed.

Jonathan finds her Intagram and Twitter quickly, and he doesn’t have to scroll through many posts to figure out she doesn’t have a clue who Paimon is. There are no pictures of him, not even of anyone who could pass for an altered human guise, no red hair in any of the pictures. Plenty of her posts feature her whining about being single or involved in bad relationships (she only seems to use nicknames, and he wonders absently if that’s a thing she has always done or if it is a learned habit). There’s even a comment about how at this point she should settle for Satan, with all the disasters she manages to hook up with (Jonathan knows that if Satan sees this, he’ll be offended; he also knows there is absolutely no reason for Satan to even know Bella exists, without the Paimon connection.)

It’s clear that Christabella and Paimon have never been together, and Jonathan and Intella’s minds are both churning. There are so many changes that result from this – so many things that will immediately explain why Axel, the immortal demon used to dealing with timeline shifts, looks like death warmed over.

Every Inferno child lived a life that effects others: if Gina never meets Salem, they have no way of knowing what happened to Salem and the lives his piracy touched. If Keith never kills, then there will be countless survivors and countless people suffering at the hands of those he targeted, or their descendants. If Shaun has never been trapped by Heron, then where does their information on demons come from, if they have it? And that’s without considering how much softer Paimon became under Bella’s influence, leading to him helping her and so many other humans – he trained Rikku because Christabella made him aware of how humans can suffer, gave her her byzantine-adamantium katana, and without that, what can the Japanese sociopath do? So many lives will have been lost at Paimon’s hands, and so many lives not saved because of a lack of his children and his protégé.

And so the research begins, with them having nothing else to do until Axel wakes anyway. Hours pass, but between the two of them they finally manage to find a hint of what has changed. She finds a legend online using the ancient library computer, the closest thing they’ve found to an explanation. Until history realigns, they can’t trust books, and Intella’s notebooks are useless for picking out new information, preserved by ingrained barriers to maintain details of the original timeline and lifetimes they were written in.

“‘The fairest human in the realm in beauty, spirit, and grace’,” Jonathan reads aloud when Intella brings it to his attention, “‘was sent to Hell as a consequence of a careless mistake of the ones responsible for such events. She caught the eye of the Demon King, Paimon, second only to Lucifer in the ranks of Hell. Absolutely charmed, the demon would have offered her everything, ensnared by her kindness and beauty as he was. Before anything could come of it, the human girl was found to be armed with a dull grey blade. Spoken of only in whispers, the Knife was said to have the power to rend a soul from a body and prevent it from ever being returned to the world. It became clear that her intentions were sinister, and her betrayal enraged the King, who barred her from his circle from then and evermore, casting her into the Pit until such time as her soul was due to be reborn, cursed forever to attract only the people who deserved a traitorous wench in their lives’.”

There’s a long pause as Intella unpacks it all, digging out her notebooks – she really must thank Axel more, when this is done, or when he wakes – to cross-check the facts she has half-memorised. “She never had a weapon, and that wasn’t how she ended up in Hell,” she confirms. “The demons – our version of the demons attacked the human realm, with Paimon on side. He took her out of boredom, essentially, held her captive out of spite, I suppose? He didn’t expect her to be so stubborn about the entire situation. Apparently, I was under the impression that that’s what made him so curious, since – well. You know.”

Jonathan nods his assent. “Yeah, I don’t really remember that time well myself – the whole dying thing, you know how it is. I think Axel was closer to the Kings back then, thanks to what he can do. I remember him laughing his ass off for an hour about how Paimon had pulled the big scary Demon King act on her and yelled at her with that booming voice he does, and she basically rolled her eyes and told him that she was still hungry.”

A faint snort and louder groan announced Axel’s return to the waking world, and Intella glanced at him to watch him pull himself up, using the arm of the couch as a pillow. “You had to be there.” Despite how serious the situation they’re in now is, Axel finds himself laughing. “Just – imagine this freakin’ five-two underweight little mortal girl in a cage, giving this gigantic, overmuscled Demon King nothing but sass in front of absolutely everyone. She didn’t give a fuck anymore, not since he’d killed her family – who she already thought were assholes, by the way, so she really couldn’t have cared less about the whole thing.” By now, he has managed to sit upright, twisting his body to get his feet on the floor. He lifts his hands to rest his head in them, taking a deep, steadying breath. Intella watches his smile fade, and frowns, aware he must be becoming more aware of the pain. “Why are you talking about the big two Infernos, anyway?”

“They’re gone,” Jonathan says without preamble, something like an apology in his voice. “Well, Paimon and Bella seem to exist, but there’s nothing else to it. No relationship – nothing.”

“That would explain the hangover,” Axel grumbles, forcing himself to his feet, however shaky he is. “Someone changed some timelines – which, obviously that resulted in so many more changes than just some. I couldn’t make sense of all the changes, not with them happening so fast. I just didn’t want to lose you two –” he pauses, clears his throat, the sound cutting through the dull thrum of the city outside in the harshest way possible. “Well, I mean. I didn’t want to lose the people who could help me.”

Intella rolls her eyes, because she is immune to Leperance bullshit at this point, and she is fully aware that the slip reveals the amount of sentiment that explains Axel’s urgency. She exhales slowly, reaching up to push her glasses back up her nose. “So more than the Infernos?”

“Yeah. More. I don’t know who else. So much has changed that it’s just noise right now, for me anyway. Looks like you already figured out the books, though,” he observes, nodding in approval at the blank pages on the desk. He glances at the bookshelves, and Intella wonders if he’s guessing how much fact is in those pages, how much can be trusted, how much will never be revealed – if he’s considering how much this cuts Intella, to see her precious collection rendered incomplete. He turns back to Intella and his brother, strides purposefully over to lean on the back of the chair and indicates the laptop, like they can’t see him shaking – can’t see how much this is eating at him. “The news might give us some leads,” he says, and Intella bites her tongue on the urge to insist he sit, because then it will become a point of pride not to, and that would be counterintuitive.

It’s easier to find things in the news than it should be, Intella thinks. There are allusions to disappearances of people, to beings stripped from their homes. She frowns at the news, because this isn’t the world becoming aware of the changes – no, it’s breaking and entering carried out in an almost rhythmic manner, one a month for the past three years, according to what she finds. “Abductions in the city,” she explains when Jonathan reaches for her hand, apparently picking up on the tense curve of her shoulders. “The police are clueless – and – I wish we had a hacker.”

She pauses, considers. She might have a hacker, actually. There are no Inferno’s – Brielle is out – but she has taken advantage of Virus’s services before, and she had to memorise the email, because he refused to let it be saved to contacts. It’s scrawled in the back of one of the notebooks Axel has charmed – “Thanks for these, Axel,” she tells him, pushing him into her now vacant seat as she digs out the right one. She drags over a third chair and pushes the rolling one out of the way, pressing the tablet into his hands as she turns to her computer.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: Work request

Hello V, I have a service request. Need to know current employment for police in Port Lyndon. No questions, the usual. Will forward usual fee upon information receipt. - I.M.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: Re. Work request

This is an automatically generated message to inform you that your email has been forward to [email protected].

Message: Hello V,... [click to view]

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: TEMP_FILE HOST: RE.-Work-Request-%120 Attachments: urgent.pdf

I don’t know where you got that address, but do not contact it again. It has been out of use for ages. V can’t take this right now, so I have. I’ve attached the relevant information. Usual code applies. Forward payment as indicated; fees as listed Have a nice day, SO

Intella pauses but takes the information, surprised at the lower rate than she is used to. She doesn’t know an S.O., at least not one who remains connected to Virus in any way. A thought itches at her mind and her brow furrows. “Police are understaffed – can – we need mentions of Heron,” she says aloud, thanking the fact that she is already in an incognito browser before searching with more urgency before.

Bing News lauds Herontesuto Laboratories for scientific discoveries she doesn’t have any memory of hearing about. She can’t find a single mention of any of the pryo-related technology they churned out in the past few years of the original – if that’s what it is – timeline, which makes sense without any Inferno’s to report on.

But there are also no mentions of the protests that took place five years ago, the ones that resulted in a death when Herontesuto ‘security’ got too reckless. Intella has never been able to prove that it was intentional, though she suspects, and Axel’s unwillingness to confirm or deny only makes her more certain.

“The witch is still alive,” she says aloud, catching Axel’s attention. She is frowning at her screen. “A – a few years back, normally – give me a minute.” She flicks back in her nearest notebook. “Heron protests got out of hand and three protestors were hospitalised. One died – a witch, tech witch; I knew her when she was younger, taking out spellbooks – anyway. I always thought it was suspicious that the witch died when the other two ended up recovering, Axel, but she lived this time. There weren’t any protests.” She pauses. “There are no Heron protests that I can find at all.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound right,” Jonathan mumbles. He pulls up his own search, more specific than Intella’s, because he’s just better at using the internet for research. Intella is better at finding the right book and pulling contacts out of thin air. He makes a noise of frustration. “People always protest Heron, though.”

Axel hums agreement. “Doesn’t matter the timeline, people take issue to violations of life and liberty. Or progress, in that one timeline. Animal rights extremists,” he explains without explaining anything, and chuckles to himself.

Intella shakes her head. “No protests of Heron? There can’t be no supernaturals around. There’d be no Heron at all, if that were the case.” There is a terrible sinking feeling in the air, and Intella clicks onto the tab with her email open as a new message comes through. It’s that S.O. person again, the message short and to the point.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: birdsofprey Attachments: urgent.xlsx

Think you could use this, if you’re looking for the authoritative list on who’s who in the city. glhf

The file is an excel spreadsheet, unedited and weirdly complete. It’s a list Intella doesn’t make sense off for a while, scrolling through names both familiar and alien. Her brow furrows, and she lines up her evidence in her head, staring at names. She’s only on A, by surname, staring at three familiar ones: Vladimier Andurgor, Ameila Andurgor, Angeline Andurgor.

Angeline.

Ameila’s name carries terminated in the notes, made bold and obvious. The listed reason is unsatisfactory work performance, and Intella cannot fathom a world where Ameila Andurgor does anything less than brilliantly at her work, taking far too much pride in her work for Heron.

For Heron.

Intella freezes as the pieces slide into place.

Terminated – as in fired. For unsatisfactory performance. Ameila always works for Herontesuto, nothing changes that, nothing; she hates the supernatural and pushes for humans above all else, manufactures monsters out of DNA stolen from beings she has no business messing with.

But she was fired, so someone is worse than her.

And Angeline is on the list.

“Angeline works for Heron,” Intella says.

It doesn’t make her feel better.

#the sequence #kristie writes #kristie's writing #kwrites #kwriting #ft. intella #ft. axel #ft. jonathan

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thelostpagesofportlyndon · 6 years ago

Text

Memory Thief

"You're quite the hero, aren't you?" The man spoke behind Angeline as she'd been catching her breath, twisting on her foot as she aimed her guns at the man behind her; bracing herself for a possible attack. She scanned the man, He was tall and thin with asymmetrical black hair, it was long in the front but fairly short in the back; a long strand hanging in front of his mismatched eyes, yellow on the left and blue on the right and a toothy grin.

Angeline stepped back as the man stepped forward, shifting and twisting, kicking him in the knee and knocking him down as her elbows smacked into his back harshly. Her guns pressing to the back of his head as he hit the ground, adrenaline still pumping through her from her encounter with the demons.

"No need to play so rough, beautiful." The man shifted quickly as his arm moved in and abnormal and inhuman way as he grabbed her wrist and before she could fire she felt a sudden shock in her skull; it felt like she'd been shot but she knew she hadn't; collapsing as the man adjusted himself, taking her other hand as his eyes glowed, the left one turning green and his pupil looking as if it turned; Angeline's eyes widening as she took in a sharp breath; her head hurting immensely as she screamed, loudly. Her legs kicking and thrashing; she felt like she was moving a lot but she barely was moving at all...

Hazama smiled as Angeline's eyes glazed over and as a tear ran down her cheek, it solidified and turned red... He grabbed it as it fell and sat up, holding it up to the light and looking through it at the memory of a conversation Angeline had with his client on the bus. It'd been bothering her since it happened... His eyes faded back to the 'normal' blue and yellow as his pupils twisted again and Angeline reached up instinctively to her head before she passed out; unable to fight it.

---

"Ange..." Syrus patted her leg a little to encourage her to wake up as she stirred, a faint smile on his lips as he reached up, messing up her hair. "You must've taken a hard hit... How do you feel?"

"My head hurts..." She mumbled, covering her eyes. Syrus picking up a pill bottle off the coffee table and taking out a couple, handing them to her before handing her a mug of fresh coffee. "How'd I get here..?" She asked as she took the medicine, downing half the coffee and peering at him. "Intella and Jonathan claim they heard you screaming from the library... What happened? It looked like the demon was already down."

"I...I don't remember." She admitted, rubbing her face. "I'm late for work..Aren't I?"

"That's really your concern?" He shook his head a little, sighing. "I'll take care of it... Rest, Tera might be back...Possibly with a body. Long story. "

"Right..."

#Memory thief #hazama #Angeline #Angeline Andurgor

1 note · View note

cassandra-rp · 6 years ago

Text

I can’t pick a narrator style. :U

Intella curiously peered out the window as she sat in the passenger seat; Jonathan had surprised her firstly with the fact he had a car and secondly that he knew how to drive it...He wanted to take her for a drive and she didn't mind, reading quietly most of the time but occasionally talking with him... The city had disappeared as the cement turned to dirt and the buildings to trees. The dirt path winded and soon they rolled up onto a older house; it was in disrepair... She recalled the description of the house as she looked at the sage paint that was chipped away and the stone path. "Our house..?" Intella asked; her notebooks described a place like this once.

"Yeah... I'd completely forgot about it." A sadness lingered in his eyes. Intella pursed her lips as she recalled the notebook's description of the lifetime; It was beautiful but ended in horrors. Axel had rewritten it after her death and despite her pushing he refused to tell her much aside from the fact it was to much for her heart to take again... "Why are we here..?" She asked after a moment and Jonathan softly smiled as he rolled up his sleeves. "I have somethings I think you'd like to have that I believe are in the attic here still...If the elements haven't gotten to them." He turned the key back and tucked it into his pocket before hopping out, Intella following along although some part of her hesitated.

Jonathan pulled another set of old key's out of his pocket as he hopped up the stairs; they warped and sagged with each step; Intella using more caution as she walked up behind him. The keys pushing into the rusty lock and a loud click as it unlocked; pushing it open. The inside had survived better; although dusty and extremely musky it was far better than the outside.

Jonathan navigated easily through the rooms until pulling down the ladder to the attic, dust sprinkling onto them as he tested it before climbing up, pushing open the top. "Well..It looks like they're still intact." He thought aloud as he lifted himself up inside the attic, Intella waiting at the bottom as her eyes scanned the walls, vague memories lingering in her mind until the ploom of dust and a box lowered into her vision, her hands taking it from Jonathan carefully; followed by two more. Jonathan slipping back down and easily landing on his feet as he dusted himself off, Intella curiously popping open the box on the top of the stack she'd made, a few binders full of paperwork and notebooks. They were clearly Jonathan's - less organized and he had a habit in a hurry of writing upside down in his notebooks. A diagram written out with notes beside it filling two pages caught her attention. "What's this?"

"Well. From what I recall I was documenting family histories during this period... Mostly because it was right about when we realized the Inferno clan was getting absurd." His arms slid around her as he pointed at the notebook she was looking at. "This one looks like Constantine's..." Intella raised a brow at that as she examined the names. "I've never heard of half of these people..."

"Mhm. I don't recall all of it but I'm sure we can trick Axel into revealing the rest of it..." He lifted one of the boxes as he spoke, smiling. "I also am thinking about renovating this place... Just for something to do." Intella smiled a bit and nodded. "I figured." She took the second box, lifting it and following Jonathan to take it back to the car. ---

"Zelda Constantine...?" Intella raised a brow as she read through Jonathan's notes and Axel glanced up with a pondering look on his face. "Zelda was the first Constantine as far as I know. She wasn't born into a family so she made her own. She was determined to never beg again... " Axel pursed his lips and Intella nodded, reading.

Zelda was homeless for as long as she could walk; she didn't remember a family or anything except the rainy streets of the run down town. She begged and worked and often getting abused in more ways then one for her efforts. It didn't breed hate or resentment but simply determination to never be in the situation she was in again.

And so she worked; There was a few note worthy moments that Intella catalogued. "Apparently she knew me..." She flicked back a page or two.

It was always just simply known as old money that the Constantine's had. No one knew where it all came from but now she did. Ironicly it was Byzantine. Zelda was turned in her late teens and discovered the metal that burned her. Unlike other vampire's she wasn't effected by sunlight or water. Upon investigation she and Intella had determined the weaknesses were essentially from the elder vampires inbreeding to keep the vampire genes 'pure' but it resulted in other issues... Zelda wasn't one to support the idea of harming one another but she knew it'd be profitable; and it was. She mined it and sold it to hunters and others and it didn't take long until she lived on the hill herself; As she grew she mined other materials... Diamonds and other jewels. But Byzantine was always one of her main interests.

It wasn't long until love came into the picture; A man named Theo Watson. He was from a similar background to her although a little different. His family disowned him and left him and his sister to the streets; he'd been working his way up the chain at a newspaper for the last few years and finally was CEO. His sister, Rose Watson. She was a drifter though as the two got married Rose also took Zelda's last name. The two wishing to disassociate from there past. It was considered very uncommon for a man to take his wife's name. Intella found it was a common trend with Zelda to break the norms of the time and she supposed that's why they'd been friends. Rose was interesting... The more she read the more she kept wondering if she was reading about Tera. And attractive dark haired woman with every curve in the right place and a list of men who disappeared within her presence. Hell; Red seemed to be her signature color.

And of course then there was children shortly after that for Zelda and Theo at least; A boy named Vincent who was incredibly gifted from a young age and also happened to be and incredibly resilient vampire. At least by today's standards. "Axel.. A lot of this sounds like it was early 1920's yet I know for sure that December has been around longer then that - I mean she was a queen." Intella's eyebrow quirked as it did whenever she knew Axel had a hand in something; His shoulders shifting a bit. "Keep reading." He simply added.

So, she did. It was fairly standard; Rose and Issac met, A criminal pair made in heaven and soon gave birth to a son named Julius. The four and there two children remaining quite tight knitted until the children were teenagers; Theo died in and accident on his way to work and although Zelda grieved she didn't allow it to stop her in any sense of the word; Vincent was put ahead in high school due to his intelligence and was already getting scholarships from universities desperate to have a rich and intelligent student such as himself.

Julius was far more average; Always a few steps behind his cousin. What he lacked in intelligence he made up for with his communication skills... His parents could talk there way out of anything and he was even better at it as he could even talk people into doing things. Business seemed to be a good calling for him and since mining wasn't as profitable as it once was he put himself into learning from his aunt Zelda everything he could about business.

Vincent was the first of the two to find love as he met a lovely intelligent woman named May Newton; A scientist with a fascination for all things abnormal and supernatural. She hardly flinched when he first bit her as she was more curious about how it all worked. And despite the dark things she spent her time reading and working on she was always a bright ball of sunshine.

The two of them finding and artifact that Intella was far to familiar with now a days; the amulet was broken roughly two months ago; The symbol was Axel's and the same one tattoo'd on his back, It allowed for temporary time travel but was a danger to Axel's well being..So she begrudgingly agreed to destroy it. And sure enough a few tabloids Jonathan had gathered talked about the disappearance of Vincent and May. Zelda splitting her will between Julius and vincent soon afterwards in case her son ever returned but trusting her nephew with her legacy.

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thelostpagesofportlyndon · 4 years ago

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"Where are we...?" Intella had to finally ask - Yes. She knew this was clearly Samael's domain as the warren barren land of sand and delapated structures. The hazy green sky was imposible in the way it moved and swirled with the random winds. She felt as if they'd been walking for ages yet getting nowhere...

December sighed as she rolled her shoulders with a visible sweat on her face and neck. She wasn't accustom to the humidity. "Almost there...It's not actually been that long." She added as Intella instinctivly looked to the gold antique watch that delicately ticked. Jonathan had gifted it to her - sure enough it had been only about ten minutes despite visually and physically feeling like an hour.

"Sarina with Samuel's blessing casted illusion spells in the most vulnerable places. Partially for her own safety. Mostly for Baal's temper tantrums if Drunken Inferno's are to be believed. "

Intella laughed as December reached out carefully and a purple aura became visible as she slowly walked through it. The desert fading to a more stoney area with large caverns and caves. A black door that seemed impossible in the side of the rocks. Intella raised a brow. Everyone claimed that Sarina lived in a cave yet she took it as a more ironic and sarcastic description rather then a fact.

The two stood on the doormat and a eyeball suddenly popped open in the center before the door swung open to reveal a hallway with black tiles on the floor and dark purple walls... December cringing a little. "It doesn't get any less creepy..." she added as she walked inside and as Intella crossed in the door slowly creeked closed. The inside having several locks that sealed instantly. A flash of magic barely caught by the human eye sealing the door as well...Intella would've been concerned but she knew Sarina's story...Honestly. It was justified. Paimon claimed that the fate of her parents was uncertain. Some said they were dead but others said her father cheated his death.

The house clearly was annormal. After all it barely looked like a cave or cavern but rather unique. The high glass ceilings that seemed to view a night sky despite the lack of actual stars outside. She could tell that the halls were shifting and bringing them the right direction until they reached what was somewhat like an alchemist lab, an observation tower and a library had been blended together. The walls lined with books and a table stacked with tomes. A shelf full of the most unique and rare spell ingredients and mirrors that displayed different places. Intella eyes widening like a kid in a candy store as she walked around the circular room. The mirrors displayed various things. One seemed to be Samuel's living space where he sat reading a book casually. The next was an overhead view of Port Lyndon... She felt a chill run down her spine as she glanced to the next that clearly was Dante locked away where he belonged. Her eyes fell to the books and many she was surprised she'd never seen. Some seemed to be demonic in broken or obscure languages. Enochian, Ijali and surprisingly... Ocali.

"You can read Ocali?" Intella blurted out in shock as her eyes finally met Sarina who floated in a sitting esque position. The makeup and corsets were traded in for a simple black turtleneck and pants. Without makeup her albino nature and delicate features were prominent. A flower on the bench being pulled apart with tweezers carefully and beakers bubbling with red liquid leeching out of the blue flower petals.

"I can speak it as well..." She offered with a timid smile as she placed the last leaves into the last beaker.

"Forgive me for being daft but what's Oc-ali?" December asked as she folded her arms with a quirked brow.

"Firstly. Why didn't you ever bring this up?!" Intella strained as she felt a mixture of frustration and excitement. "Secondly, December. It's the language that used to spoken by demons that has been lost for ages...Lucifer can barely read it."

"..How is that possible..?"

Sarina shifted back as she floated and crossed her legs. "That's the interesting part. Nobody knows...And the part that she'll most likely leave out is that the most likely suspected party is a certain pair of Leperances."

Intella sighed a little as she folded her arms. "It isn't that I don't believe it...I just don't understand any possible scenario that they would travel back for that purpose alone... Jonathan certainly wouldn't intentionally destroy history..." Intella knew she didn't sound convincing as her fingers held the knit of her sweater firm.

"...Besides the point. How in the world did you learn it?. I only have managed to decipher three vowels..." Intella asked sharply as Sarina rolled her shoulders.

"I ate the tongue of a mummified demon...?" Sarina meekly replied as the two looked slightly concerned. "I used a newer language spell combined with a double dose of very modern nausea medicine. I had Paimon's help in finding the tongue - he didn't ask why - surprisingly. I cut it out and ground it into powder and mixed it into my tea. It was disgusting but it worked...I can read and speak it now. "

"Do you realize how dangerous that is?!" Intella practically bursted a vein in shock as Sarina shrugged as she played dumb. She knew that it was an easy way to get possessed let alone other side effects. Enchanting and eating anyone could lead to unfortunate disasters. Side effects were endless.

#intella migatori #port lyndon #hell #sarina bludd #december constantine

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thelostpagesofportlyndon · 4 years ago

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Randos Paibells ideas

"?..." Paimon had come to visit Bella once again but something seemed to be bothering him since he got there. He looked - bothered. His brow knitted and his temperature radiating. He hardly seemed interested in anything they'd done all night as he was clearly elsewhere.

Christabella sighed as she plopped in the sand on the beach. Her blonde hair tousled and wavy as she wore a skimpy sheer crop top with a black bralette under it and worn denim short shorts.

Paimon standing distantly behind her as she finally huffed and flopped on her back as she stared at him. "Either fuckin' spit it out or I'm gonna go study."

Her snap did break his thoughts as he didn't expect her to be so blunt. His face falling before he did realize how distant he was being. "..Sorry." he apologized as he moved to sit beside her much to her delight as she playfully pushed him to lay back and look up at the stars. "Do you wanna talk about it..?"

"..I'm just concerned for your safety...It seems Heron has a new interest in you." He swallowed as clearly something more was there.

"..You said this wasn't new though. They've tried this before…? Soo...You always save me right?" She joked a little but could tell he wasn't finding it at all funny.

"...Yes. But - it doesn't leave you without scars…" he admitted as he closed his eyes. "Maybe I should just stay out of your life...It seems to always become a mess."

She sighed as she rolled over on top of him. He couldn't help but feel himself warm up as he looked up at her straddling him "The sentiment is sweet, Paimon...But you being miserable isn't the answer either. I'm human and I am your Achilles heel from what you've told me. You do the best you can...I still don't really remember or understand all this stuff but like…we can't control other people so why don't we try fixing the human thing? I know it failed before but it's been awhile...Also. like. You said that I destroyed that spell but isn't the dude with Intella able to time travel?"

Paimon paused as a bewildered look hit him like a freight train as he processed things. Axel's wording back in the past replaying. He never said he couldn't. He said to ask him later but Paimon, admittedly was blinded and assumed he was being dismissed yet Axel wasn't rude - he was being sympathetic in the moment until Paimon blew up at him.

In hindsight he realized Axel was being literal. He needed to do it at a later point in time for whatever reason…

His hands gripping Bella's hips as he suddenly rolled over on top of her and kissed her as if he needed the air in her lungs.

---

Intella jumped as Paimon walked into the library - he had no concept of silence. She heard Jonathan let out a slightly annoyed sound as he sank into his chair and his book even further. A slight smirk touching her lips at his reaction before she looked up dully at Paimon. "Can I help you..?" The sarcasm was bitter on her tongue as she tried to remain somewhat neutral… If only to protect her books from the match.

"Is Axel avaliable..?" Paimon barely had any patience to get the words out. Intella's shoulders shrugging as she leaned back. "He went out last night but haven't seen him yet...I can try calling him."

"Please."

Intella sighed as she retrieved her cellphone and called Axel. Three rings before he answered. "What's up, Beautiful?" He asked. Intella's face a small tint of pink. "Paimon's looking for you...You wouldn't happen to have a moment?"

Axel leaned on her chair as if he appeared out of thin air. intella noted the bloodied knuckles but decided to focus on whatever nonsense brought Paimon forward.

Axel gave a toothy grin as he leaned on the back of Intella's chair and looked at Paimon. "And how may I be of service m'lord~?" Intella hit his leg quietly to encourage him to stop his shit. Paimon's brow knitted but he managed to restrain himself. "...Firstly, I believe I owe you an apology."

Jonathan covered his mouth as he almost choked. Paimon folding his arms as he spat out words. "I - may have over reacted and misunderstood your point when I originally asked for your assistance in retrieving the spell for Bella."

Axel looked a bit too smug but rolled his shoulders. "...You can tell Bella I appreciate her suggesting you apologize first." Axel saw through it. "I'm still loyal even if your a prick sometimes." He patted Intella's arm. "Your going to have to assist me in this one, beautiful." He chimed as he straightened. "I'll be in touch as soon as Intella secures it. I would suggest paying Sarina a visit. She's most capable of actually performing the spell. "

----

"...So. why did you have to wait..?" Intella asked curiously as she and Axel walked through the old village. "It was selfish…" he admitted as he held her hand. "There was a distortion...I still haven't quite figured out what caused it but I knew coming to this point in time before it resolved would result in some damage to you. I forsaw all the outcomes and opted to wait until they were further in my favor. Admittedly...I could've done this sooner but Paimon beat the fuck out of me and I was a bit spiteful."

"It isn't unjustified but you could have stopped a whole lot of problems…"

"I know." Axel paused at the old cottage as he broke the lock and quietly stepped away as Intella slid inside and he leaned against the wall.

"Got it." Intella didn't take long to identify the infamous scroll as she slid it in her bag.

---

Sarina carefully unrolled the scroll as her fingers traced the parchment. Her eyes glancing back at Paimon and Bella after a moment. "This spell uses some hardcore magic. I have to ask - Are you sure…? This isn't like a vampire bite. This is permanently going to make her a demon...It directly will target her soul and her very being. She will have a demonic form and she could even develop powers. And to be honest...It will hurt."

Paimon clearly showed conflict on his face...Was this selfish? His eyes drifting down to Bella who seemed equally uneasy. Perhaps she'd be more willing if they'd known each other longer but...It was still new for her. Yet - this was the chance. What if it was taken away again..? He didn't want to force her but at the same time the thought crossed his mind…

"What should we do..?" Christabella ssked after a moment.

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kristie-rp · 5 years ago

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AU: Reboot - Memory

She is swept up with Axel in a flurry of clinging and uncertainty. Axel clings to her, takes her in his arms and won’t let go, and she is stiff and only minimally responsive. She is fairly certain that this is shock, that the whitewash that destroyed everything she knew and, she had thought, everything she loved took away her fraying sanity, at least temporarily. She has spent a significant portion of time with a being who calls herself Clementine, who seems excited and eager despite having just committed countless genocides: Axel is preferable, a balm to the numbness.

She clings to him, she thinks, but not as tightly as he clings to her. She is certainly shaking less than he is, theories and explanations churning in her mind at last, pushing the stillness of it all aside.

“You’re alive,” Axel is saying, over and over again. He has been for some time, longer than she’s been listening. She swallows, finally and pulls back slightly, the better to peer at him. She takes her hands to his cheeks, grasps his jaw in her hands to examine him carefully. He looks – haggard, she thinks, not crushed but something like it. She last saw a fraction of this when Leila left him and Ellen to fend for themselves.

Leila, she thinks, who is gone. Ellen, she thinks again, who is gone, along with Jona and Joshel and Rory, children she gave birth to and children she raised, and their friends and lovers and soulmates and –

Intella chews on her lips until the urge to burst into tears dissipates. Mourning, after all, is a luxury she does not feel she can afford right now. She has no plan, no concept of what’s going on, no understanding of the situation, not really. Her notebooks are dust, her records falling apart. She should, by rights, be dead. More than dead: non-existent.

Axel should be alone, but he isn’t. He is, inexplicably, with her. Or, more precisely, she is, inexplicably, alive and aware of him.

She twists in Axel’s arms, trying to look around, to get her bearings. The room is barely anything, unfurnished but for the chaise, sofa and armchair, a coffee table in the middle laden with the makings of high tea. Intella blinks at it, astounded by the picture it paints: in a white void, with everything ending, someone stopped to have tea. She suspects it may be a deity.

Her suspicions are confirmed when the star-skinned Zita and a golden, shifting amalgamation of Jonathan and Axel sweep into the room. It’s painful to look at Isao, to have that image brought to life, but she bites back despondency and refuses to slip. Aziz slopes after them, dragging his feet even as the other two seem to float. He is pale and sick looking, though as she makes eye contact with him, a minuscule smile graces his lips. She returns it, wondering if hers is anywhere near as wan as his, or if the forced nature of it merely makes her seem manic.

“What’s going on?”

The universe was due for a hard reset; these things happen naturally. This one, though, Zita and Isao assure her between tight-lipped grimaces and infuriated glances at each other, was triggered by the actions of a third deity, rarely acknowledged, named Clementine.

“She’s insane, but that’s not surprising. She’s been on the fringes of worship for too long, and that destroys us. If there are beings alive capable of acknowledging and worshipping, and we aren’t, it breaks us into fragments, tears us apart. You know about Isao’s corruption? It’s worse than that. He still had a variation of sanity, when that was at its’ worst. Clementine is – deranged. She brought herself time doing this, but she destroyed everything to do it. All on the hope that she can force whatever replaces humanity as the dominant species into loving her.” Zita’s expression twists in distaste behind the starscape she isn’t bothering to glamour away, and when she dusts off her hands, something like stardust scatters across the chaise.

“She doesn’t understand love,” Aziz says. Intella shoots him a look of concern; given the look that Zita and Isao give him, this might be the most he’s said since people came to an end. He looks like he’s fading away before her eyes; if the deities depend on worship of whatever is capable to provide it, then Aziz – Cupid – depends on love, eros and pragma and the other six recognised in the writings of the ancient Greeks. Even if he isn’t physically fading, he’s drawn in on himself, shoulders stiff and hair gone limp as he tries to make himself small.

“She doesn’t understand humans,” Isao says like it’s a correction, “which is barely relevant now, as there is a slim to non-existent chance whatever evolves next is humanity, repeated. I have no doubt she will make the same mistakes again.”

“Why didn’t either of you stop her, then?” Intella asks, figuring it’s the next pertinent question to break the silence, and only slightly driven by fury, and churning thoughts. How do you get vengeance on a being that can’t die? Zita and Isao look at each other, and she knows she’s not going to like this answer.

“They thought they were the only two left,” Axel says, and there is something accusing in the tone. Isao ripples away from the fusion of the two men Intella loves most, and Zita looks uncomfortable.

“You have to understand, we’re not subtle. Well – I’m capable of sneaking among humanity. But we aren’t subtle to each other. That we couldn’t sense her – by rights, she should have dissipated. She should be gone. The fact that she isn’t – wasn’t – hasn’t, that’s not something any other one of our kind has managed to achieve. I don’t know where she got the idea that a hard reset would solve things. I didn’t know we could trigger hard resets outside of collaboration. But then again, Clementine hasn’t been present among humanity for millenia, and the Earth has – had been our focus for ages. We have no way of guessing where she’s been or what she’s been doing. How she got the idea, we don’t know. I’m not sure we want to. But being able to go through with it…” Zita shakes her head. “That’s insane.”

“It is the equivalent,” Isao interrupts, noticing Zita drifting off topic, “the equivalent of you not noticing elephants stampeding a block away. It seems incredibly obvious, and indeed, it should be, but you aren’t looking and the streets are busy, and so it escapes your notice.”

It’s an odd metaphor, Intella thinks, and files this away for further contemplation when she has time. If she has time. She doesn’t know the terms of her being there, doesn’t know how human aging is going to survive the bubble the deities seem to have forged. Before she can lose her nerve, she asks: “Why am I here?”

Zita hesitates, but Isao has no such qualms. “Clementine saved you in order to manipulate Axel.”

Both she and Axel stiffen, though Intella suspected as much. Among an array of gods, what is the value of one mortal librarian, after all?

Zita is quick to add to that. “First, she had no way of knowing we’d choose to save Axel, considering the state of things; he’s powerful, but not powerful enough to create his own extradimensional pocket. True, that he inherited Crona’s power meant we made a decision to save him quickly – brought Aziz, too, with the knowledge that the humanising attributes he represents and embodies will be invaluable in the evolution to come. But Clementine hasn’t interacted with us in – time immemorial. At least four thousand years, since we created Satan, if I remember correctly. She can’t have known we’d save Axel; indeed, I don’t know why she’d think to save you.”

“She’s lying,” Isao says, a smirk on his lips.

Intella hushes him. “I could see she feels something for Axel when she woke me without your advice. Don’t change the subject. I didn’t ask why Axel is here: I asked why me. I’m just a human. I might know a fair bit, but books don’t exist anymore. My memory isn’t infallible. I’m going to run out of entertainment value for you sooner or later.”

Axel makes a noise of complaint half way through her protest; she is not just anything. Aziz looks put-out, too, but he has always valued humanity; she guesses he doesn’t think being only human is a flaw or fault. Zita, though, Zita smirks, looking something other than stressed for the first time since this conversation started. Intella suspects it may have been longer still since she smiled; after all, Intella is here with Axel, but for all Zita is an immortal being more powerful than a god, she was dating a mortal who no longer exists.

Intella might not have allowed herself time to mourn yet, but that doesn’t mean Zita hasn’t.

“I don’t know when Clementine made a decision to save you. Isao believes she did so to manipulate Axel – to prevent him from leading the uprising that could destroy her. Don’t say you wouldn’t, darling; you absolutely would. You’d kill to avenge your brother, and you’d kill to avenge Intella. Having her here to talk you out of it – that’s invaluable for Clementine. She’s dependent on Intella’s fragile mortality or ability to reason anyone out of any ridiculous choice to keep herself safe. However – however, Isao and I have a proposition for you.

“Aziz,” she says, turning her attention on the gray-washed Cupid, “you continue to exist because you promote the development of love and affection, things that nurture the best human qualities. Your involvement in the future will be invaluable, and your contributions vital.”

Isao inclines his head; for a moment, his glamour settles into something unfamiliar, something that might be his own face. The stillness of it is off-putting in place of the constant shifting Intella has adapted to. “Axel,” he says, “you have known for a long while that your role is, essentially, to be the Keeper of Time.” He does not explain what this entails; both Intella and Axel are aware of the constantly shifting timelines and how Axel has learned to keep them straight, except for now, with all of them dead in the water. Both of them know that it is overwhelming and all-consuming; they watched Ellen dissociate as she observed strains of reality where she was born of different unions, the only constant her connection to Axel. They watched Rory slip between existences and timelines, in and out of memory, recorded in Intella’s notebooks and forgotten in her absence. They watched Jona and Joshel wreck havoc, damaging timelines and piecing them back together for their own amusement, pushing the limits of what reality could survive. “It is easier to have someone familiar with the role continue it than it is to train a new being entirely.” Isao, Intella notes, seems to be avoiding mentioning the crux of the matter, here: he is avoiding confirming that Axel’s powers had been stolen, at one point, from a god or a deity itself, a theory she has long had, reiterated again and again in records from countless lifetimes. He is also avoiding mentioning that, with no one to carry the power, it is unlikely that one of the deities would be able to tame it after so long in a somewhat mortal host.

“Intella,” Zita says, and pauses. She smiles, and it is all teeth, in a manner Intella has never seen the generally quite genial deity demonstrate. “Intella Migratori. We would have you ascend – to become the Keeper of Memory.”

Axel tenses behind her, and Intella knows her eyes widen. She has never heard of any keeper of memory, and opens her mouth to ask questions.

Zita raises a hand to silence her, and grins that same feral grin. “You’re part of the way there already, technically speaking. Your notebooks – did you think we weren’t aware? Axel’s trick of protecting them from timestream fluctuations, that was clever, that made them especially useful. But this way – the information could be internalised. All in your mind, darling. Every memory, every piece of research you’ve glanced at; it’s an eidetic memory amped up to countless lifetimes.

“And we would do you the kindness of making it all-encompassing; in both your own and in others realities, these memories would be yours. Even an awareness of the timelines Axel has traversed, prior to Clementine’s actions? That could be yours. It would be as convincing as memories can be; you’d have unlimited, flawless recollection of everything, from voices and facts to faces and events.”

“Other changes would have to be made,” Isao adds. “Tera requested recollection of her own lives be a soul-linked quality on her recreation, but it was flawed; the more memory she had, the more her humanity and empathy would be crowded out. I’ve devised a theory, an approach to head that off at the pass.”

“You would be more than human,” Zita says, “but less than a god, technically. As immortal as Axel is, if not more so; you’d have none of those faith-based weaknesses that all demons experience – experienced. We would have to adjust your level of empathy a fraction, perhaps change how it is recollection triggers emotions? A way to mark them yourself to prevent being overwhelmed emotionally; after all, we don’t want this to be a challenge for you. Aziz can help with this, I expect. There would be abilities in concert with this, of course; the ability to gift and remove memories, and other applications I’m sure you can come up with without my input.”

Isao speaks, ostensibly to Intella, but when she glances up, he’s looking at Axel. “And immortality, of course,” he murmurs, “or agelessness, at least. What use is a decrepit keeper? Particularly when prone to neural decay.”

She can see what they’re doing, can see that they’re leaving things out and glossing over details. Intella knows she needs to rationalise it, to consider the pros and cons, to weigh her uncertainty about how this is going to work against her concern as to how her mortal body is coping with the situation. She looks at Axel, though, and he’s got a faraway look in his eyes. It’s yearning, she thinks; this is the look she imagines in stories where the man dying of thirst is offered a glass of water. It’s hope and relief and, yes, disbelief; it’s everything he wants, served on a silver platter, damn the catch.

It’s a chance that Axel won’t be alone again.

Intella knows her resolve is crumbling, and she closes her eyes in a bid to compose herself. There are questions she should ask, fine print she needs to read over. But she doesn’t have the time.

So she opens her mouth, meets the gazes of Zita and Isao, and nods. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

“It’ll be easiest if you allow Axel to be an anchor for you, darling,” Zita says what she claims is three days later. “It’ll be too much, otherwise; after all, the human body is not designed to cope with change on this scale. Do feel free to cling to him while the changes settle.”

Intella has had time to read the metaphorical fine print. She’s had conversations with Zita, pulled the logic she needs from Isao. She’s sidestepped Clementine, who she does not like one iota – no one that thoughtless should have such power – and has pried minimal commentary from Aziz, the previously sociable god monosyllabic and miserable unless in the presence of her and Axel hanging all over one another.

And she’s spoken to Axel, discussed the possibilities she can imagine with him, the good and the bad and everything in between. She’s never spent so much time with him one on one, not like this. Not in a way that feels like it means everything. No, in her memory it is Jonathan who is usually with her when she’s feeling dependent and interlinked, Jonathan who clings to her as things go south, Jonathan who holds her hand as she makes decisions that should, by all rights, lead to her own destruction. But Jonathan is gone, probably forever, and Axel remains, so she lets him cling to her, and talks to him, and breathes him in in a way she never has before.

“I’m ready,” Intella says, after taking the time to ensure she is comfortable. Zita assures her the process won’t be painful, but it can induce shock, she thinks. She isn’t sure. Isao confirmed it – it has been an unfathomably long time since they rewrote human genetics.

Isao and Zita sit either side, and she is, essentially, trapped in Axel’s lap. They each have a hand resting against her temple; her glasses have been removed, for the time being, in the way and far too liable to break in the process. Aziz holds them in his own lap, turning them over and over, listless and inattentive except to glance at her and Axel, and Zita and Isao, drinking in the minimal affection he can glean from them, and the love and sentiment that binds Intella and Axel, two thirds of a soul bond with the third made into nothing.

Intella closes her eyes, and tries to force her mind to go blank. She clutches Axel’s hand tightly, and though she can’t prove it after the fact, she can feel the start of the change, cool ice spreading from the fingertips of the deities who nurtured her world for untold millenia. It is a surface sensation at first, but by the time it crawls over her eyelids it is starting to seep deeper, reaching for nerves and neurons, recreating every part of her being.

Later, Intella will be able to recall the entire experience with impossible clarity. That does not mean she will ever be able to experience the not-pain of severed nerve endings, of everything changing.

When it is done, she does not feel quite right in her own skin. If someone had come into her library and shifted everything an inch to the left, she imagines she would feel like this: everything is right and looks perfectly as it is supposed to be at a glance, but she cannot shake the feeling that something is different.

She told herself when it began that looking at Isao was a mistake, but she does it now, as he helps her off of Axel to walk off the pins and needles that have settled into her bones. She sees his face, same as ever, shifting between Axel and Jonathan; more Axel than Jonathan, now.

But she catches her attention on Jonathan’s face on this golden god, and her memory fills it with colour, flashes jarringly with his smile, his laughter, his voice in her ear, I love you whispered over classic literature and scribbled in notebooks.

Her breath catches in her throat and she steps back from Isao a little too quickly, blinking the vision – the memory – away. She’s been refusing to mourn, but with the memory so stark, it startles tears into her eyes.

“Are you in pain?” Zita asks, curious.

Axel is next: “What can I do?”

But it’s Aziz who offers her a shaky, sad smile, and she remembers then what she’d been trying to recall a few days ago – the different types of love, and affection, and how all of it is a little bit what he needs, including the pain of loss. Her refusal to mourn hasn’t been helping him. She remembers this the same time she remembers a throwaway comment from the late 2010s, about how he could sense that Lucy wanted to love, that she felt it, but that it was locked away, where it wasn’t foremost in her mind.

Aziz senses love of all kinds, she thinks, and that is enough to bring her back to the present. She rubs at her eyes quickly, wipes away tears. “Excuse me,” she says, taking her glasses from Aziz and settling them back on her nose, where they belong. “It’s incredibly clear. The memory. Much clearer than my own memories of the same events were… before.”

Isao doesn’t look bothered, not knowing or not caring that he triggered her tears, technically. Aziz looks like he feels sorry for her, which isn’t something she wants to deal with right now. Zita is, of course, fascinated, always curious about the limits of her own power – Intella has to pull her focus away from a sharp recollection of the thrill of power in fingertips, of solar systems being created, and focus instead on Axel.

“I’m okay,” she says, to him and for him alone. “I’m okay, I promise,” she says, convincing him and herself, and leaning over him to kiss him as deeply and passionately as she knows how.

Leaning into him to do so is an onslaught of memory, but he is an anchor, holding her in place as everything storms around her. The kiss is grounding, and brings her to the moment, holds her tight and prevents her memory from spiralling.

I’m going to have to get that under control, she thinks, and grips Axel’s shirt to distract from the memories the word ‘control’ brings to mind.

#au: reboot #kwrites #kwriting #kristie writes #kristie's writing #ft. intella #ft. axel #ft. zita #ft. aziz #ft. isao

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