Mental Link;

[miscreant]

DEVOUR beg for mercy and i will deny you	ASSIMILATE the scourge will wash over this world
LEAD we do what the living cannot	WANDER your kind has no place in this realm

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[miscreant]

[There. She's done it, brought down her prey, and it was at her mercy, damn her blurring vision. She fights the symbiote's warnings through pure stubbornness alone, shrugs it off viciously like a horse tossing its rider--

But something else smothers her and keeps her from reaching for the Darkling to finish what she'd started, something that causes her to notice how she's cut her own lip with how hard she's clenched her teeth around it. The mindless state of existence bleeds away into the tar, replaced with the press of Murphy's irritation and fear.

And she comes out of it exhausted, dead limbs heavy like she was devoid of any strength at all, small as a newborn and weak as a bird. She's forced to catch her own weight as she comes back into herself, just short of blacking out herself with vision still swimming. And the hunger hurts deep in her stomach, bounces back across their connection until its eaten away by the Nesting Deck.

She wipes away blood with the back of her hand and clutches her side, slowly and sluggishly going through the memory of what had just occurred -- not quite a full descent, but close -- she had let the Darkling lure her, and he hadn't any interest in stopping her. Testing limits -- as he had before.

Irritation would come later. For the moment, her self presses back against the warning Murphy's offered -- a weak acknowledgement that almost doesn't seem to belong to her for how far away she feels, a mechanical pre-programmed response as she moves for the unconscious man across from her. She sees how he bleeds, remembered what she'd done to him.

There is a momentary struggle where she must stand and lift him to her shoulders. She should leave him there, a punishment for daring to break their pact, for risking Murphy -- but she is better than that now. Her part of the bargain will be upheld. She cleans the blood from his cheek and licks it away from her thumb before retracing her steps with a half-muddled memory, intent on returning him to a pod to heal the damage she'd done.]

( Fool. )

[unsea]

[ The vicious turmoil within him is silenced as well, the symbiote cutting his consciousness the way fate might cut the strings of a damned soul. At the very edges of whatever is left aware, he can feel Murphy's reach through Seviilia's proximity and his errant, weak thought is to swat them aside. Let them go, push them away. He's torn into Seviilia, though not as badly as she had gotten to him - and when he awakens, he will turn his face from regrets and attempt to mend this broken thing.

He's just

his brother is gone now

and the rush of unfathomable distress ( a feedback loop, from himself to Ilde and back -- ) had been unstoppable. Whatever barriers he had built over time are challenged by the connection to this hivemind, and weakened over time. Even he would bow under the weight of pain. And -- he's smaller than Seviilia, both in height and in mass and her jostling causes him to shiver and claw his way back towards some semblance of awareness. Gone, he breathes, more emotion than conscious thought. And he doesn't care if Murphy picks up on it, this deep well of grief -- similar to the state Seviilia had originally found him in, when he had bid his mother goodbye. ]

[miscreant]

[It hurts to move. She knows now that she went too far, in allowing herself to be goaded. She remembers cornering the Darkling in that room, open -- it should have been easy, if he kept up his end up the bargain. But he hadn't. He wanted her fury, pulling it from her and weaved it to his own devices. It bothers some part of her -- something distant, a feeling she can't summon again past the ache of her limbs as she carries his weight back.

Eventually, she makes it to the Nesting Deck, pausing only briefly when she feels the tug from Murphy's pod again, before she allows herself to be lead to the nearest unoccupied set. Shaking off her own headache is impossible, and the hunger in her stomach dares to summon tears to her eyes that she stubbornly blinks back even as it burns her vision.

Once she lays him to rest, hooking him up with fingers locked up in resistance, she sits back against the wall to try and regain herself. Were she living, she'd be wrought with fever, no doubt unable to catch her breath and on the verge of vomiting. Nothing felt worse than the hunger at its peak, so nearly impossible to resist. It had been years since she had been brought so close -- she'd always fed long before it had been allowed to be so unbearable.

Like a starving animal, she crawls to another pod to hook herself up before she loses her self control again. Even once she manages to hook herself in, even as the calm forces its way into her skull and her blood, her hands continue to shake for a time.

And there she will sit, until Darkling rises and she is able to scold him properly.]