kore_logs | Punishment

Entry tags:

Punishment

Who: Dilandau Albatou, the inhabitants of house 15 and Raphael's indirect influence.
Where: Dilandau's room in House 15
When: Night time of day 81
Warnings: Nightmares containing human experimentation.

When Raphael decides to administer his punishment it doesn't come in the form of a beating. It's more subtle, but far harder to bear. He strikes at Dilandau's weakest time, as he drifts into dreaming about his home.

In Dilandau’s dream he’s in flight, soaring above Gaia’s forest in his guymelef as the two moons shine down upon him. His men are in formation behind him and it’s glorious, the best soldiers in the best technology flying to bring destiny onto its proper pass. Dilandau banks and plummets sharply, hurtling towards a shining lake and whooping at the adrenaline rush.

An eagles plunges down, snatching a fish from the water, and suddenly he can’t stop his fall. The controls are frozen and no matter how much he tugs his limbs he can’t budge them. His men’s screams echo through his ears as he slams into the surface of the lake.

He doesn’t wake up, but now he’s upright in his cockpit again. He can see a sickeningly familiar battlefield through his eyepiece and the screams are getting louder. The Dragon is leaping across the battlefield, finding his men despite their invisibility cloaks and crushing them one after another. However, the screams don’t die out as each man dies, but stretch on, one over the other, so loud that he can’t even hear himself shrieking with them as he realises what a terrible mistake he made when he chose to lead them on this hunt. The chrima his body is immersed in ripples as the fish within it swim around him.

The Dragon finally turns to face him and all the screams peak and cut out. The Dragon steps forward and Dilandau leans back, as if pulling his eye away from the eyepiece will make his enemy disappear. The back of his cockpit is solid against his back until suddenly it’s not and there are hands grabbing him from behind and pulling him out of the equipment. He thrashes and screams, but he can’t break their grip. He’s pulled into the darkness and everything goes black.

He opens his eyes, but not to awakeness. He’s now lying on his back, looking up at the glass tubes of the Fate Alteration Engine as looming figures in black cloaks come nearer, talking indistinctly about particle densities and alteration trajectories. The words don’t make any sense, but the meaning behind them is obvious. They’re ominous, threatening and no matter how loud he screams he can’t drown them out. There’s a flash of fins as a fish swims through the liquid fate bubbling above and one of the cloaked figures plunges a needle into his arm.

He jerks, but doesn’t wake up. There’s a horrible pain in his chest, and now he realises it’s because they’ve decided to try a different tactic. He’s caught in a vice-like machine and Garufo himself is turning the handle, staring at him coldly as the fish swim through the pipes behind him. Dilandau tries to beg for mercy, but he can’t draw his breath because he’s being crushed, just like his boys were in their guymelefs when The Dragon decided to kill them all. This is his punishment for his arrogance and he doesn’t want to deserve it, but his men aren’t coming now matter how he whimpers for them to save him.

He finally manages to draw his breath and screams out their names, finally waking himself up. The pain in his chest doesn't subside, nor does the terror that's making his heart race. He curls up on his belly and tries to draw a large enough breath that he'd be able to stand up and get out of his room. Pride be damned, he can't stand to be alone like this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Fortescue doesn't sleep heavily. She keeps herself more or less on a hair trigger, in fact, as back home she had been through several attempts on her life in the middle of the night. When she hears Dilandau scream, she nearly jumps awake, heart racing, as she tries to figure out if it was a dream or reality. In the end, she decides it's best to check.

After all, if horrible monsters are attacking, it would be good for the rest of them to know. She pulls on her shirt and boots, taking her gun with her as a precautionary measure, and carefully navigates out of her room. Fortescue sticks to the shadows as she makes her way to Dilandau's door, knocking with her other hand on her gun. She knocks softly but firmly, every muscle tensed; ready for anything.

"Dilandau?"

Her voice is what finally snaps him out of his head far enough to be able to draw a stabbing breath and sit up. He stumbles out of his bed, crashes to his knees and then pushes himself up again towards the door. There's a moment of fumbling as he tries to unlock the door before he shoots his hand out of the gap and grabs hold of her to make sure she can't leave.

It's shameful, how little control he has over himself. He doesn't like the woman, nor would he ever want her to see him in this state, but whatever mockery or bribery she tries couldn't be worse than the thought of being alone.

He keeps his head bent to hide the sweat and tears under his hair as he opens the door further and tugs her in.

So that's a 'nay' on the slavering hellbeasts trying to devour him, Fortescue thinks, feeling large amounts of confusion and alarm as Dilandau tugs her in. She doesn't resist, though her other hand is still on her gun. Her gaze tracks anxiously around the room in certain spots she's been trained to case, looking for potential danger. But there's no one else in the room, and he doesn't seem to be injured. Or is he? In the dim light, it's hard to tell.

Fortescue frowns down at him. As much as they might clash, she doesn't actively wish any harm against him.

"Are you all right? Did something hurt you?"

He shakes his head, unable to speak at the moment while his breath is shuddering so rapidly. He doesn't want to speak either, for she'll hear how his voice would quiver. His silence doesn't do much good to hide his fear, however, as he's trembling all over. He's hunched from the pain and shame, with his free arm wrapped around his ribs.

She's not pulling away. That's good, because he's having enough trouble standing as it is and wouldn't be able to fight her to keep her there. He steps back towards his bed, keeping hold of her so that she'd follow him as he sat down.

"I'm not going anywhere," she assures him, now that she's less on red alert. She combs the other options: falling out of bed and aggravating his ribs, a nightmare (Gate knows she gets plenty of those), a combination of the two, or some other possibility that he's trying to hide. She banks more on the first parts of the list.

Am I really offering company when the only thing he does is belittle me? Fortescue thinks, tiredly, before discarding the thought. If this helps him go back to sleep, and if there are no more screams...

And if Fortescue is being really honest with herself, she finds it hard to turn away someone in need. Especially if she just has to sit here. Making a note of that shaking, she worries her lower lip between her teeth before reaching for one of the blankets on his bed, putting it around his shoulders.

"Good. You can't leave." Normally that would have been a demand, but his usual arrogance has completely gone. If anything, it's a plea.

He lets go of her wrist so he clutch the blanket; with the fear sweat drying he's freezing. He finally meets her eyes, though his gaze darts away often, as if that'll hide how haunted they look. It's necessary though, for he needs to make sure for absolute certain that she can't leave without him noticing and now that he's let go he can't just grab hold of her again. He doesn't yet trust himself not to cling like a child and get the stink of his cowardice all over her.

"How long... how long could you hear me?"

"Just the... last sound you made, I think." Fortescue spares his dignity by not calling it a scream, even though it's more than apt. She regards him with a little bemusement before, with a mental shrug, sitting down next to him on the bed. If it's company he wants then, in this case, it's company he'll get. "Bad dreams?"

It's an obvious question, but you have to start somewhere. And it's been a long time since she was dealing with Mirabelle waking up at early hours from nightmares. Her younger sister had always been the conversation-starter, back then.

It's so obvious it's pathetic. At least she's not smirking or making a joke of it.

"Bad memories." He takes a slow breath. "I'm trying to forget them."

If she ever teases him about this he's going to kill her. The thought is steadying. Yes, he'll slit her throat in the night if word of this ever gets out, and then everyone she'd have told would know not to mention it again.

Somehow, that decision makes it easier to trust her with this, because he knows what the limits are. He's decided just how much her life is worth to him.

"We talked by the fire about why we think we're here. I'm not one of you demons, but I'm... not a normal soldier. I was made."

"I see."

She keeps to a neutral tone, gaze mostly on her feet. If she'd known what he was thinking, she would have smacked him. But luckily, she isn't a telepath, and she's terrible at Seid magic — her world's rough equivalent. So Fortescue sits there and keeps going, because sometimes talking about it is the only way for it not to kill you. As much as she loathes therapists, she knows that much.

"With technology?"

He nods slowly.

"The Sorcerers found a way to distil out particles of Fate. They used them to Alter my destiny. I don't remember what I was like before." He's managed to piece together far too little about what he could have been. "I was weaker. Insufficient. I was chosen because my father betrayed the Emperor. I don't even remember the man's name."

Maybe it's best he doesn't know. He likes being the success, but the closeness of those mightmares remind him how closley he still walks to the edge of failure. He shivers, but resists drawings the blanket tighter.

"I was the only success, but it's enough that Emperor Dornkirk thinks he can use the technique to alter the fate of the world. That's why it makes sense to me that we've been taken. They'll find how to extract powers from people like you, work out why the alteration techniques worked on me and then they'll Alter themselves or their soldiers to make them stronger."

It does make a disturbing amount of sense, what he's saying, and Fortescue hopes that they're both wrong. But she's just simply too cynical to do more than vaguely hope. She absorbs the information he tells her, wondering what her own government would do with technology like that.

"We don't have anything quite like that. We can... change hair color, skin color, eye color. Heal birth defects in growing children, or children still in the womb."

If being chosen by a Guide was part of fate, then she was glad they didn't have that technology. They could mass-produce magic users in their population — and she knows, from how magic users were treated, that they would. Those who could use magic were always sought out, and never allowed to fade into the wood work like other people could. Magic users had to contribute, somehow.

"Why were you chosen because of your father?" she wonders. "To make an example of him?"

"Perhaps. They never told me much and I wasn't allowed to ask. I never heard anything about an Albatou who'd been executed."

His face twitches and he looks away. Even now, even here, the threat of the punishments for being too curious loomed over him.

He changes the subject, latching on to what seems to be a common thread between their worlds.

"So, how did your Sorcerers work out they could do that to babes in the womb?"

Fortescue considers. For her, it's information she learned in her history classes. When she was still in school, anyway. Back before... well, everything.

"Scientific progress, mostly. Technology from other worlds. Once we cracked genes and x-rays, things just went from there." She shrugs. "I'm sure they can do more invasive things than just change hair color. They'd never tell us. But they'll never be able to create magic users themselves."

He lets out a little puff of humourless laughter.

"How many things are there in your world that your ancestors would have called impossible? In the end it'll be those who accepted that it's impossible who'll be wiped out by those too stubborn to give up. If they're humans, they'll never stop trying to find a way, even if it takes generations of filling unmarked graves to succeed."

"Oh, I'm sure we'll see many more advancements."

But humankind didn't determine who was chosen to be a magic user. That was all Guides and, probably, Behemoths. But given their previous conversations about sorcerers and demons, Fortescue isn't sure how Dilandau would really take that information. Guides were neutral creatures, neither good or evil. She, and other Magi, knew that, but everyone else seemingly cowered in their wake.

Another time, perhaps, if she ever mentioned it at all. She shakes her head slowly.

"Where do you see the manipulation of Fate going, for your world?"

He reels off the explanation easily. Like all good soldiers, he's been well indoctrinated with their goals.

"We're fighting to bring an end to all fighting. Violence occurs when two people's destinies clash, so when the Fate Alteration Engine activates and replaces everyone's destinies we'll have perfect peace."

In his best times, he'd imagined great rewards for himself and his men, with riches and admiration to last them to the end of their days. During the worst, he assumed he'd be disposed of once the Engine was activated and he was of not further use.

"When I was taken... the last I remember was that we were days away from activation. I was stationed on our border, because our enemies were trying to invade to prevent our future coming to pass."

Edited 2013-06-23 15:54 (UTC)

Fortescue wonders if any of that is really true. Can humans stop fighting each other? It seems to be the only universal constant: strife. His explanation sounds perhaps a shade rehearsed. Or maybe it's peace in the way that the Nazis see peace. If you rule everywhere, there's no need for war.

"And what will become of you then? Will you have a peaceful destiny?"

"A glorious reward for ushering in a golden age." Another trained phrase. He shrugs.

"Who knows? No one's made me any specific promises. I can't see myself beating my sword into a plough and being happy raising goats."

"Mm." She bites her lower lip to prevent herself from smiling too much. As she does so, she looks him over — trying not to make it too obvious — to see if he's still shaking. "No, I can't say I see you raising goats, either."

The shaking has finally stilled, but he's still keeping the blanket around him. Nevertheless, his breathing is calmed and he's lost most of that haunted look. He meets her eyes through his hair.

"I'm not about to keel over, if that's what you're checking."

Fortescue finds herself relieved to see that he doesn't appear as panicked as he had earlier. Though, she examines that a moment later and feels vaguely annoyed. She should feel relieved that this means that she probably 'gets' to leave soon, shouldn't she? When had she begun to sort of care about a person who called her a whore just for giving him a nickname?

"Good. I'd have to lay you in some sort of embarrassing position when I put you back on the bed," she jokes, but her tone is still fairly gentle.

"It'd be your only chance to lay me in any sort of position." He answers back. There's even a ghost of a smirk to go with the innuendo. It's odd, this little atmosphere that's sprung between them, that means his soul-baring is letting him feel steadier instead of more intensely vulnerable. He never thought she'd have it in her to make him think she might be trustworthy.

He jerks his head over to his pillows.

"You can lie there if you're tired. I'm not going to sleep just yet." There's a tenseness to him as he makes the offer. He doesn't want to have to beg if he doesn't have to.

She snorts — it's an amusing quip — and glances back at the pillows, expression neutral. Part of her wants to make a quip about him getting her into bed, because it seems like just the right opportunity, but she holds herself back. They're being civil, for once, and there's no need to sabotage it. It isn't like anyone else is around to raise an eyebrow at them over suddenly not arguing back and forth.

Fortescue can relate to disconcerting nightmares, and not wanting to be alone.

"All ri'," she agrees, yawning, moving back to curl up on her side. "Don't draw any mustaches on me while I'm asleep," she jokes.

He scoots up so that he's sitting with his back against the headboard while she lies down. He's careful to make sure there's a gap between them. There's been enough touching for now.

"If I had a pen you'd have 'Property of Dilandau' on your forehead instead." He finally pulls off the blanket and drapes it over her shoulders and across his lap.

Eyes closed, Fortescue chuckles, sleepy now that all of the adrenaline has worn off. Being horizontal helps, as well. She's too tired to notice that it's one of the few genuine chuckles he's managed to stir out of her, but she's appreciative of the blanket.

"You wish." Then, more drowsily, "Sleep better."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Punishment

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject