miscreant | Mental Link;

[There's no fight following Murphy, no threat. He'd been the fight, the threat, throwing words with a vicious violence at Bellamy, and this was his repayment. The result of the ricochet. He stops, an arm's length from Seviilia, tipping unsteady on his feet between the break in momentum and the urge, present and strong, to reach for physical contact.]

You need to... [He fumbles for the words, a way to articulate what she'd given him when Peter had fallen away. But his thoughts are scattered, the storm of his mind snatching at them, his throat thick, chest aching. He yanks his veils out of the way, unmindful of how it reveals the wet of tears on his face.] Freeze my head again. Whatever the hell it was you did.

[The need is almost enough to make him say please. It hurts too much, ripped open like this, all of the grief, the memories of Emori sparking like flames that gutter in the wind only seconds later.]

[When Murphy stops short of physical contact, Seviilia’s brittle tolerance to the symbiote makes up for it and she does it for him. Her hands move unspoken to the sides of his skull as he is in the middle of vocalizing his desire for it. There is the sensation that she might have been holding her breath, trying to stop herself from feeling quite so thoroughly. Tears were not a good look on a death knight, and she did not need any additional scars from this planet.

She invites herself close enough to embrace him, but restrains herself for more practical activity. Her gloves are discarded, blackened and runed fingertips finding the pressure points in his forehead. She does as bidded, slowing his thoughts and his grief with the ice of her touch, giving him a cool surface to rest against with hardly any distance between them.]

It’s alright, John.

[She remembers Lakshmi’s words about being a nurturing presence. It was easier to see now that her broodmate so clearly guided her mind to what he needed.]

[The relief is immediate. Seviilia's ice spreading through his mind, winding into the furious churn of his emotions, weighing it down in cold. He leans into her touch thoughtlessly, eyes closing, so exposed in this pain that any concerns of vulnerability, of taking comfort, they don't even occur.]

No. It isn't.

[The wounds of his shattered walls and the storm that had been contained beneath may be beginning to numb under the press and spread of her ice, but remains too close to the surface, present. He'd left Emori behind. He was never going to see her again, but worse, he'd left her alone. Already outcast from the grounders, her brother gone, she didn't have anyone left. The fear of no one even caring to bury Octavia was one he'd thrown at Bellamy, but in truth it was his own, and more tears spill, slow and sluggish as the cold curls deeper.]

[Her mind doesn’t quite translate his grief, but the context is there at the surface, and she takes a moment to digest it. Without it, the circumstance might have been impossible for such a selfish creature to comprehend — and even still, some of her obvious confusion bleeds between them.]

It must be.

[She understands only because it is forced upon her — that this girl he remembers, Emori, could not simply be forgotten about. That her wellbeing was important and of major concern. That they were responsible for abandoning her—

Her chest hurts, converts to anger, and she is left silent attempting to seperate Murphy’s emotion from her lack of it.]

[She doesn't understand. Murphy can feel that, even beyond the maelstrom in his head. The bombardment of feeling he's throwing at her even as she slows it, stills it. She wants to make it simple, and he wishes, viciously, that she could. Wishes he could hold everything back from her, but there's nowhere else for him to go.]

I love her.

[Quiet, a confession ragged with anguish in the slim space between them. This, the hole inside him, the wound at the centre, so wide and deep that even her ice can't seal it. The bleed of a dozen memories, touches, looks. The vice in his chest that had held him from destroying ALIE's power source when Emori pleaded that it would kill her. The drive that had sent him up the tower with Bellamy at the slim chance of saving her. The joy of seeing her free, the split second before the Enemy burst into the air above their heads.

But now there's only this pain and anger, turning and turning inside him.]

[The memories and sensations that come through cause her blood to chill and her calculated process to slow — it isn’t quite fear, but a familiar caution. Love, obsession, she has encountered these things before, in the form of a man who’s face she stubbornly pushes aside the moment it threatens to swim forth to memory.

His confession tastes of ash, but there is a sense of understanding beneath the undercurrent of everything else. Bereft of more complex emotion as she might have been, Seviilia would have been hard pressed to be ignorant to it. And slowly, like pulling off a band-aid, the logical thing in her pinches off the sensation of feeling raw to it, as she had clearly been forced to do once (or perhaps several times) before. It is a process, almost impossible with her shaking broodmate beneath her hands, but there is a determined steelness to her unbeating heart that she marches after with a single-mindedness that leaves her quiet for some time.

Love made people do things. Things she won’t allow herself near again, if she had any say over it. And so, while he thrashes against their shared mental space, she dutifully picks apart the worst of it and locks it somewhere heartless — somewhere love cannot reach.]

If you must carry her, carry her as your weapon. Not as your burden.

[Or do as I have done and shed her like a snake sheds skin is not vocalized, but it is there — an example more than a suggestion. She knows her broodmate too well to even bother presenting it as an option.]

[The sense of refusal at the example Seviilia offers is so strong as to almost be repulsion. But her words strike through him like a spear. Through and through. Hooking in, pulling back. Burden overlapping with the memory of Emori showing him her hand, uncovered, telling him how she'd been exiled, considered a stain. Weapon with Emori holding a knife to his throat, wiping blood from her face after she'd defended herself from ALIE's footsoldier, the ruthlessness she employed as they robbed traders on the road to Polis.

She would hate this. Him falling apart, useless and broken. A burden on Seviilia. A goddamn mess with Clarke, Lexa, Bellamy. Even if he'd left her behind, even if he never saw her again, she would expect him to survive, the same as he did for her. No matter what it took.

It crystallises as the cold finally seeps through to the core of him. Tipping into Seviilia's hands with closed eyes, physically exhausted, feeling as though the breath in his chest could curl like fog as he exhales. The resolve comes together slow in the ice, but solid. An obelisk piercing upwards through the centre of the silent, frozen storm. He couldn't be broken. He needed to keep going, to move forward. Even if that meant never going back.]

[She feels him relax, and some piece of her draws from — some nebulous instict. It isn’t her own experience, but it feels correct to widen her grip a little, to allow him to collapse into her strong arms rather than force him to lean into the points of her fingers. The affection is distinctly familial, the way a mother might hold their child.

She had never had a child. Nor a mother, as far as she could remember. But some part of her mind recognizes the sensation, even if she had not quite imagined her relationship with her broodmate in that manner.

Perhaps Asuka’s desperation for affection and approval was rubbing off on her, and carding its way through Murphy’s hair.]

“We press on”. That is—was one of the banner chants of my people.

[A calling she had nearly forgotten just a few weeks prior, when air filled lungs and terror found her heart again. When she had nearly taken the opportunity to put her life behind her. But she feels his ache keenly, and cannot find herself as devoid of sympathy as she usually is.

She simply isn’t capable of it anymore, when it comes to him.]

I am sorry, John.

Edited 2017-12-01 07:38 (UTC)

Everyone always is.

[It's quiet, and raw. He's raw, the skin of his mind and his self peeled back, everything underneath open and exposed. The only thing covering it is Seviilia's ice, soothing, numbing, giving him the space to breathe, to rest. He isn't ungrateful. He needs this, needs her, leant into her shoulder without any thought against it. This means more than he can think to understand, or has tried to understand for months now, a core part of him accepting the sympathy and the comfort of her arms purely as they're meant, without suspicion or cynicism.

But the thought still echoes, ripples back across all the things he's seen, all the things he's done, right up to the moment of the hurt on Bellamy's face only minutes before. There's always something to be sorry for. The world - universe - multiverse - never relented in that.

We press on. He can hold that, hear it inside Seviilia, feel the sound of it weave into the air of the monument newly built inside him, roots fed from a foundation of survival that was already there. He can press on.

But right now, with all the pain and the turmoil quieted and cold inside him, all he is is tired.]

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

Mental Link;

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cw: suicide mentions

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