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 )

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[miscreant]

[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.]

[wrackful]

[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.]

cw: suicide mentions

[miscreant]

[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.

[wrackful]

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.]