visetvires | six † i am a shadow dressed up in this skin & bones

Do you people always get this fucking philosophical when it gets cold? What is it about the drop in temperature and the birth of Jesus that makes people feel the need to tie up all their mental loose ends? Shit.

Someone let me into the pub.

spam } chapel & enclosure

[She prays. Fervently, her hands clasped so tightly that the dry skin of her knuckles breaks. Her prays are whispered, muttered against the clammy silence of this place, so free of significance, of the marks of the God she knows. If she's being honest, she feels closest to God in other places - in the Enclosure. Near Stephen, who has the quiet of God if not the quiet fury. When she is alone. In the bottom of a bottle. In some woman's mouth.]

[But it's here that she wants to find it. Here below the white walls, before the hard pews, she wants the severity of her God, His desire for her strength, His unrelenting expectation of her duty. She is failing. She whispers please and please and please.]

[When she gets up to leave, she's clearly been crying. Or maybe she's just red-eyed because she's drunk. Maybe it's both. Either way she runs, through the halls and to the Enclosure, slams on the door with a tight-closed fist, as tight as the vice around her heart.]

private } admiral

For Barbara, backups of her favorite type of ammunition.

For Marsh, a Bible, with metal in the ink - something he can read.

For Stephen - you know those virtual-reality simulators sci-fi always used to pretend would come into vogue someday? Some of those, with replicas of the outdoors. All kinds, all weather, a complete sensory experience. Something he doesn't have to ask a goddamn warden for, something that doesn't feel like a cage.

For Nick, slides of rare fossils. Or replicas of the real thing.

For Dean, mountain ash, twine, gunpowder, a better bed.

For Scott, a picture of the pack he made on the other Barge.

For Stiles, a comprehensive bestiary of all supernatural creatures from all Earth-based worlds.

For Philip, mountain ash, with usage instructions.

You're a son of a bitch and a godforsaken devil from Hell, and I hope to God someday I get to see you in person because I will find a way to kill you if it's the last thing I do. Merry Christmas.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Simon hadn't originally planned to spend much time in the chapel -- not when the altar in the bungalow suits him just fine when he's alone -- but things have changed, and now he kneels here just as often as he does by the cross next to his bed.

Clementine is already here when he enters the chapel this time. He doesn't know her, but where once he would have dismissed her for one of them he stops now at the back of the room and watches her, considering. Who is she? Is she a warden or inmate? Alive or dead?

It's a little unsettling, realizing that up till now he's relied on the physical differences between the undead and the living nearly as much as they do. Oh, there's the makeup, but only the most skilled actually make it look real, and even then there are a thousand other tells. When the dead are indistinguishable from the living... what else about them is different?

He sits and watches her for a while, thinking. When she stands, he does too, crossing himself as if he's been praying, which he has anyway: for the truth, for guidance. Aloud, he says:]

Amen.

[Clementine has never had the luxury of relying on physical tells to spot her enemy. She has had to put in work, do research, spend endless hours sitting and waiting, listening, tracking. All of the beasts she's put down have looked just like anybody else.]

[Simon does not look just like anybody else. Simon looks like Hell. She can't smell him, but when she turns and sees him she imagines all of a sudden and very vividly that she can. For once, her ordinarily-unflappable presence scatters to the wind. She's visibly scared, if only for a moment. This is the unknown, and she doesn't know whether to fight or flee or stand her ground, like she did the last time. Like she did when she died.]

[Her lips part, dry and desperate. She shakes her head.]

He never answers anymore.

[Like he wouldn't see the fear, even if it were only for a millisecond. He's as attuned to fear now in people who look like her as he is to the almost smug, righteous anger he feels when he sees it.

This time, though, he tries to do things differently. He pushes back the anger and makes himself soften, gentle, although he does nothing else to make himself seem more like the kind of human she knows. He can bend, but only so far for a stranger.]

Did He used to?

Edited 2014-12-24 12:52 (UTC)

He used to.

[A mostly automatic answer. It's so rare that she actually gets asked about the nature of her relationship with God. In the past, she's always been with the Order - who understood intrinsically, or claimed to - or on the hunt, which was not an appropriate place to converse about one's personal relationship with the Lord. So when asked, she is practically compelled to honesty.]

[That and she wants to tell someone now. Now that He isn't listening.]

We used to have an understanding.

[Now she doesn't understand anything anymore.]

[Simon's brows lift slightly. It has the ring of an honest answer, but it's certainly an unexpected one.]

An understanding.

An understanding.

[Her lips twist. She thinks, maybe she shouldn't say it, when she's already saying it. Too proud to keep anything in for the sake of decorum.]

I hunted for him. And he spoke to me.

[His eyes darken slightly at that, his lips thinning. He asks the question--]

Hunted what?

[--even though he's fairly sure, from the fear in her eyes, from the tone in her voice, that he knows the answer.]

[She tips her chin up, eyes blazing through the thin sheen of tears.]

Beasts.

[Not, in truth, him. Her purview was very narrow. But in another world, another time - this world, this time - it could have been things like him.]

[She eliminates no possibility, not anymore.]

Beasts.

[The word, on his lips, is an accusation, even a weapon in itself.]

Beasts. Monsters. Threats.

[Each word is a punctuation, a puncture wound; she wields her tongue like a weapon as much as she does. She's coming out of her own fear and horror at her own actions, now, recognizing that before her stands an enemy.]

[She has no plans to die again.]

six † i am a shadow dressed up in this skin & bones

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