Dæmonverse AAU (9-10/16)
Apr. 3rd, 2008 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_luminaryTitle: Principles of Growth
Author:![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
dominus_trinus
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Chase, House/Wilson (established).
Genre: Alternate alternate universe, à la Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Summary: Secrets and stories shared among heretics.
Notes: My sincere thanks toruby_took for various R & D conversations and assuring me this story wasn't too bizarre to post, and to bluerosefairy for the truly excellent beta.
It takes a few months before Dad’s sure Mum won’t do any more magic, but after a while he resumes his old neglectful patterns. Time passes—six months, a year, two years. Mum smiles less often, almost never laughs; and month by month the brightness of her aura dims.
He tries to deny what he’s seeing, but it’s no good: he already knows.
It’s a little better during their lessons; she’s more animated, and the energy she takes in from the earth revitalizes her. When she can be herself, she’s all right. Mostly.
He goes into the living room with Kylie in her cat shape padding alongside, wondering what Mum has planned for tonight—she’d mentioned something about divination methods last week, which could be interesting if he could actually—
But the Circle isn’t up, and Mum’s in full regalia: black dress, bare feet, bow and arrows at her back and her hair loose, Zeru perched on one shoulder. In her hands is a branch, fairly thick and as long as she is tall.
Her eyes are sparkling, alive, and she’s smiling the widest he’s seen her do in weeks. “Mum? What—?”
“Change your clothes,” she says, taking in his t-shirt and shorts in a glance. “Jeans and a sweater at least; I’ll get your coat and shoes.”
For one moment he’s ecstatic, thinks she’s finally seen sense and they’re leaving Dad’s gilded cage never to return, but then he realizes that, if that were the case, she’d have told him to pack his things, too.
Don’t, Kylie says, stopping him before he can start to brood. His heart skips, and all at once she’s a kestrel like Zeru, rising to close sharp talons gently around his arm. She’s happy, and she’s taking us flying!
She’s never done that before, and he has to wonder why she is now, but Mum’s excitement is catching and he can’t dwell for long on the question. He changes his clothes in record time and returns to the living room, stuffing his feet into his shoes and shrugging on his coat. He’s too warm now, but he knows why she told him to change: it’ll be cold high up, and though she won’t feel it, he certainly would.
“Why the bow and arrows?” he asks.
“I just wanted them, that’s all,” she says, and rests the cloud-pine branch against her free shoulder, leading the way to the back door. Then she motions them out ahead of her and locks it behind them.
It’s a warm night, lit by a waxing gibbous moon, and the grass rustles softly with his footsteps. Kylie changes from kestrel to barn owl, shining white feathers touched with gold and gleaming where the moonlight hits, and when he looks through her eyes the darkness is lit up like day, and he can see the individual petals of every flower in Mum's garden from meters off.
Mum’s let the cloud-pine go, and it’s suspended in the air beside her at about waist-height; Zeru is already beating his wings, impatient for takeoff. Mum grasps the branch firmly with one hand and swings a leg over, graceful as anything, and although he’s never seen her do this, it’s clear she’s had long experience.
“Come on, love,” she says. Zeru leaves her, catching a cool breeze and flapping noisily upward—he’s not built for night flying, really, but there’s nothing to be done for that—and Robert grips the branch the way Mum did and tries for a graceful up-and-over motion, but he has neither the height nor the practice, so although he does manage to get on, he’s not going to flatter himself and say it was easy.
He’s in front of her, which he’s not sure is right—shouldn’t the person controlling the branch be in front?—but she just reaches forward and loops an arm around his torso, a strong grip like a seatbelt, which…
Suddenly it occurs to him that he’s sitting on a branch, no walls or floor or safety features or anything, but before he can get nervous Mum says a strange-sounding word in a commanding tone and they’re lifting up, Kylie’s wings filling with air as she falls silently into line beside him.
Higher, higher, and Mum’s hold is firm and safe and his heart’s full of Kylie’s joy at being a bird so high up—always before, she’d have hit the distance limit dozens of meters ago.
Mum cries out, a wild, joyous sound and Zeru echoes it with a hunting scream; he can feel her chest shaking with laughter and when colors flare across his vision, he can see a corona of silver at the edges of an aura that’s vibrantly bright.
Kylie wheels around so he can look through her eyes to see Mum’s face—she looks fierce and proud and her eyes shine with bliss, and his heart aches because she never looks like that on the ground except for those few moments every esbat when she draws the moon down and the Goddess lights her up from inside.
“What’s this like for you?” he asks. She’s told him about it, music and starlight and freedom, but he thinks he might understand better from up here, so high that when he looks down he can’t see the ground.
She’s quiet, then, “I can show you, I think, for a moment. Close your eyes.”
He does, and feels her hand come up to cover his heart—there’s the familiar tingling warmth of energy flowing through him, and then he feels something deep inside stretch backwards and—
And his eyes are still closed but somehow he’s seeing out into the night anyway, and he realizes that Mum’s pulled a little of his own perception into herself, because suddenly he feels the cold but there’s no bite in it, and the night is singing to him like every star has a voice, a chorus of indescribable tones that he's sure no church choir could copy in a billion years, and the moonlight is like a caress.
Then she presses him gently back and he opens his eyes with a gasp, heart beating fast because he’d never felt that alive before, that much a part of everything. “Mum…” He tries for words, but doesn’t know what to say. If this is what she was, strength and joy and music, how could she possibly have given it up?
Don’t ask her that, Kylie says. We can’t convince her not to go back, so let’s let her be happy as long as she can and not argue.
“That was brilliant,” he says at last. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” The arm around him tightens a little, sort of a hug.
“Why are we flying tonight?” he asks. “Is there a reason?”
“No,” she says. “Just that I wanted you to know this about me, and where you come from.”
He nods, looks into the infinite sky in front of him. “Could we stay up here forever?” He knows they can’t, that they’ll have to land sooner or later, but he still wishes…
Her laugh is tinged with a little sadness now, and she presses a kiss to the back of his head and guides the branch in an upward spiral, larger and larger circles. He watches Kylie and Zeru fly together, tries to hum a piece of the music he heard in the stars and realizes all at once that this is where Mum got his lullaby from, fragments of that music gathered together in a glittering mosaic.
He wants to go home. Not that horrible house but her home, where she belongs and he has a grandmother, aunts, cousins; where magic isn’t a shameful thing that has to be hidden and everyone can see and sense the same things he does. Where his father wouldn’t be anything more than a bad memory.
I wish…
But of course they go back to the house eventually, and Mum hides the cloud-pine branch away; and when she comes to tuck him in she’s dressed like the human she’s not.
And the silver in her aura is fading away.
Empathy
“I’m guessing that from here there aren’t any more happy moments,” House says at last.
He shakes his head. “The drinking started not long after that. My father divorced her and walked out when I was fifteen, not long before Kylie settled. I’d hoped she’d get better once the marriage wasn’t tying her down anymore, but…”
“Getting rid of the person responsible for the pain doesn’t always undo the damage causing it,” House says quietly, and Chase remembers listening to that diagnostics class Foreman once made him teach, piecing together the allegory of the leg.
He knows from experience.
“I never understood…Dad was out of the picture, there was no reason—” He breaks off, and Kylie presses herself close. “She stayed for me,” he says, “but she couldn’t live for me. No matter how much I begged her, she wouldn’t stop.”
“Not ‘wouldn’t,’” House corrects. “Couldn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about you or that she didn’t want to stay—but at a certain point, when pain is bad enough, when it won’t stop, you will do anything—anything—not to feel it. No matter who you’re hurting or how hard they’re trying to save you.”
He looks up to meet House’s gaze, remembers pained grimaces and the rattle of pills in an omnipresent bottle. Remembers Mum, staring with glassy eyes into the dregs of a gin and tonic.
It’s the same losing battle, even if the pain is different: House’s liver will fare no better against toxic amounts of acetaminophen than Mum’s did against the alcohol.
But we can help him, Kylie says. Stop the pain as much as we can, for as long as we can, so he’ll take fewer pills.
Only if he’ll let us, he says. And he’s not sure House will: he hates to be dependent on anything, and while dependency on medication is bad enough, trusting another person so fully would be anathema.
But…
But all their lives are tangled and woven together now, steel-strong microfilament secrets, and he’s let House see enough of his own pain that perhaps…perhaps House might be able to trust him. Perhaps enough vulnerability on both sides will strike a balance and cancel itself out.
Finally he nods slightly, acknowledging the truth of House’s words. He wants to speak, wants to say a million things (starting with promise me you won’t leave), but he knows he can’t. Knows House can’t make that promise any more than Mum could have.
“It’s been two hours,” House says, breaking the silence. “Still nothing.”
This is familiar, the ‘give me information’ tone, but he doesn’t have a handful of test results to go on. “It should last up to three. Beyond that…” He shrugs. “I don’t know much more than you do. Your leg was less draining than Mum’s hangovers.”
House frowns. “That makes no sense. The damage to my leg is worse than a hangover.”
“But you didn’t cause it,” he says. “I think it’s easier for me to work with damage that’s not self-inflicted.”
“But you’re guessing.”
“Between little training, less experience, and being half-and-half, I don’t really have a choice. Even Mum wasn’t sure which developmental pattern I was supposed to be following.”
“Which was her own fault for complicating the genetic crapshoot,” House says dryly. “Although you have to admire that kind of gall—most expectant mothers assume they’ll expose the fetus to teratogens if they so much as breathe wrong, and yours had no problem magically recoding a couple of genes.”
Wilson gives him a disapproving look. “I’m sure she knew what she was doing.”
“Not likely,” Kylie says. “Not without a recorded precedent. And witches have long, long memories.”
“How long?” Wilson asks.
“They can live a thousand years,” he says. “And maybe that was part of why it was all right to take the kind of chance she did with me: eighty or ninety years would hardly have amounted to anything. She’d probably hoped it would extend my lifespan.”
“How old was she?”
“In her two-hundred fifties, I think,” he says, meeting House’s gaze. “Young adulthood.”
“No other children?”
He shakes his head. “Not that she told me, and she would have if there’d been any. I know I have a grandmother, at least the one aunt and probably cousins, but…”
There’s that look again, unfamiliar sympathy. “But they don’t want anything to do with you. Daddy Dearest’s fault?”
He snorts. “Well, his packing me off to seminary didn’t exactly endear me to them—they can’t know whether I picked anything up there or not—but no. Odds are they blame me for Mum’s death, which is—”
“Wrong,” Wilson breaks in. “Blaming you is a petty solution. They can blame your father, the alcohol, her own pain—you didn’t cause any of it. And your mother’s family—”
“I can’t be upset at them, really,” he says, surprised to find he means it. “Witch clans aren’t like human families—there’re different standards of morality, love, forgiveness.” He shrugs, and Kylie says for them, “Even if they’d have us, we’re too human to fit in there.”
“And enough of a witch that you have to keep your head down to fit here,” House says sardonically. “Lucky for you: at least you can pass.”
“Learnt that in seminary more than anything,” he says, threading his fingers through Kylie’s fur. Even all these years later, he doesn’t like to think of it—sermon after sermon about the love of God the Father, and the hellish fates awaiting those who refused his grace.
It had been darkly amusing that no one else seemed to spot the logical fallacy of a loving God consigning most of the world to perpetual torment.
“And you wound up in seminary because…?” House asks.
“Because I lost control,” he says. “I forgot what I was, what I could do; I’d just—I couldn’t listen to Dad’s lies for one more second. Especially not during Mum’s funeral…”
Continue...
Author:
dominus_trinusRating: R
Characters/Pairings: Chase, House/Wilson (established).
Genre: Alternate alternate universe, à la Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Summary: Secrets and stories shared among heretics.
Notes: My sincere thanks to
ruby_took for various R & D conversations and assuring me this story wasn't too bizarre to post, and to bluerosefairy for the truly excellent beta.Lift Me Up
It takes a few months before Dad’s sure Mum won’t do any more magic, but after a while he resumes his old neglectful patterns. Time passes—six months, a year, two years. Mum smiles less often, almost never laughs; and month by month the brightness of her aura dims.
He tries to deny what he’s seeing, but it’s no good: he already knows.
It’s a little better during their lessons; she’s more animated, and the energy she takes in from the earth revitalizes her. When she can be herself, she’s all right. Mostly.
He goes into the living room with Kylie in her cat shape padding alongside, wondering what Mum has planned for tonight—she’d mentioned something about divination methods last week, which could be interesting if he could actually—
But the Circle isn’t up, and Mum’s in full regalia: black dress, bare feet, bow and arrows at her back and her hair loose, Zeru perched on one shoulder. In her hands is a branch, fairly thick and as long as she is tall.
Her eyes are sparkling, alive, and she’s smiling the widest he’s seen her do in weeks. “Mum? What—?”
“Change your clothes,” she says, taking in his t-shirt and shorts in a glance. “Jeans and a sweater at least; I’ll get your coat and shoes.”
For one moment he’s ecstatic, thinks she’s finally seen sense and they’re leaving Dad’s gilded cage never to return, but then he realizes that, if that were the case, she’d have told him to pack his things, too.
Don’t, Kylie says, stopping him before he can start to brood. His heart skips, and all at once she’s a kestrel like Zeru, rising to close sharp talons gently around his arm. She’s happy, and she’s taking us flying!
She’s never done that before, and he has to wonder why she is now, but Mum’s excitement is catching and he can’t dwell for long on the question. He changes his clothes in record time and returns to the living room, stuffing his feet into his shoes and shrugging on his coat. He’s too warm now, but he knows why she told him to change: it’ll be cold high up, and though she won’t feel it, he certainly would.
“Why the bow and arrows?” he asks.
“I just wanted them, that’s all,” she says, and rests the cloud-pine branch against her free shoulder, leading the way to the back door. Then she motions them out ahead of her and locks it behind them.
It’s a warm night, lit by a waxing gibbous moon, and the grass rustles softly with his footsteps. Kylie changes from kestrel to barn owl, shining white feathers touched with gold and gleaming where the moonlight hits, and when he looks through her eyes the darkness is lit up like day, and he can see the individual petals of every flower in Mum's garden from meters off.
Mum’s let the cloud-pine go, and it’s suspended in the air beside her at about waist-height; Zeru is already beating his wings, impatient for takeoff. Mum grasps the branch firmly with one hand and swings a leg over, graceful as anything, and although he’s never seen her do this, it’s clear she’s had long experience.
“Come on, love,” she says. Zeru leaves her, catching a cool breeze and flapping noisily upward—he’s not built for night flying, really, but there’s nothing to be done for that—and Robert grips the branch the way Mum did and tries for a graceful up-and-over motion, but he has neither the height nor the practice, so although he does manage to get on, he’s not going to flatter himself and say it was easy.
He’s in front of her, which he’s not sure is right—shouldn’t the person controlling the branch be in front?—but she just reaches forward and loops an arm around his torso, a strong grip like a seatbelt, which…
Suddenly it occurs to him that he’s sitting on a branch, no walls or floor or safety features or anything, but before he can get nervous Mum says a strange-sounding word in a commanding tone and they’re lifting up, Kylie’s wings filling with air as she falls silently into line beside him.
Higher, higher, and Mum’s hold is firm and safe and his heart’s full of Kylie’s joy at being a bird so high up—always before, she’d have hit the distance limit dozens of meters ago.
Mum cries out, a wild, joyous sound and Zeru echoes it with a hunting scream; he can feel her chest shaking with laughter and when colors flare across his vision, he can see a corona of silver at the edges of an aura that’s vibrantly bright.
Kylie wheels around so he can look through her eyes to see Mum’s face—she looks fierce and proud and her eyes shine with bliss, and his heart aches because she never looks like that on the ground except for those few moments every esbat when she draws the moon down and the Goddess lights her up from inside.
“What’s this like for you?” he asks. She’s told him about it, music and starlight and freedom, but he thinks he might understand better from up here, so high that when he looks down he can’t see the ground.
She’s quiet, then, “I can show you, I think, for a moment. Close your eyes.”
He does, and feels her hand come up to cover his heart—there’s the familiar tingling warmth of energy flowing through him, and then he feels something deep inside stretch backwards and—
And his eyes are still closed but somehow he’s seeing out into the night anyway, and he realizes that Mum’s pulled a little of his own perception into herself, because suddenly he feels the cold but there’s no bite in it, and the night is singing to him like every star has a voice, a chorus of indescribable tones that he's sure no church choir could copy in a billion years, and the moonlight is like a caress.
Then she presses him gently back and he opens his eyes with a gasp, heart beating fast because he’d never felt that alive before, that much a part of everything. “Mum…” He tries for words, but doesn’t know what to say. If this is what she was, strength and joy and music, how could she possibly have given it up?
Don’t ask her that, Kylie says. We can’t convince her not to go back, so let’s let her be happy as long as she can and not argue.
“That was brilliant,” he says at last. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” The arm around him tightens a little, sort of a hug.
“Why are we flying tonight?” he asks. “Is there a reason?”
“No,” she says. “Just that I wanted you to know this about me, and where you come from.”
He nods, looks into the infinite sky in front of him. “Could we stay up here forever?” He knows they can’t, that they’ll have to land sooner or later, but he still wishes…
Her laugh is tinged with a little sadness now, and she presses a kiss to the back of his head and guides the branch in an upward spiral, larger and larger circles. He watches Kylie and Zeru fly together, tries to hum a piece of the music he heard in the stars and realizes all at once that this is where Mum got his lullaby from, fragments of that music gathered together in a glittering mosaic.
He wants to go home. Not that horrible house but her home, where she belongs and he has a grandmother, aunts, cousins; where magic isn’t a shameful thing that has to be hidden and everyone can see and sense the same things he does. Where his father wouldn’t be anything more than a bad memory.
I wish…
But of course they go back to the house eventually, and Mum hides the cloud-pine branch away; and when she comes to tuck him in she’s dressed like the human she’s not.
And the silver in her aura is fading away.
Empathy
“I’m guessing that from here there aren’t any more happy moments,” House says at last.
He shakes his head. “The drinking started not long after that. My father divorced her and walked out when I was fifteen, not long before Kylie settled. I’d hoped she’d get better once the marriage wasn’t tying her down anymore, but…”
“Getting rid of the person responsible for the pain doesn’t always undo the damage causing it,” House says quietly, and Chase remembers listening to that diagnostics class Foreman once made him teach, piecing together the allegory of the leg.
He knows from experience.
“I never understood…Dad was out of the picture, there was no reason—” He breaks off, and Kylie presses herself close. “She stayed for me,” he says, “but she couldn’t live for me. No matter how much I begged her, she wouldn’t stop.”
“Not ‘wouldn’t,’” House corrects. “Couldn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about you or that she didn’t want to stay—but at a certain point, when pain is bad enough, when it won’t stop, you will do anything—anything—not to feel it. No matter who you’re hurting or how hard they’re trying to save you.”
He looks up to meet House’s gaze, remembers pained grimaces and the rattle of pills in an omnipresent bottle. Remembers Mum, staring with glassy eyes into the dregs of a gin and tonic.
It’s the same losing battle, even if the pain is different: House’s liver will fare no better against toxic amounts of acetaminophen than Mum’s did against the alcohol.
But we can help him, Kylie says. Stop the pain as much as we can, for as long as we can, so he’ll take fewer pills.
Only if he’ll let us, he says. And he’s not sure House will: he hates to be dependent on anything, and while dependency on medication is bad enough, trusting another person so fully would be anathema.
But…
But all their lives are tangled and woven together now, steel-strong microfilament secrets, and he’s let House see enough of his own pain that perhaps…perhaps House might be able to trust him. Perhaps enough vulnerability on both sides will strike a balance and cancel itself out.
Finally he nods slightly, acknowledging the truth of House’s words. He wants to speak, wants to say a million things (starting with promise me you won’t leave), but he knows he can’t. Knows House can’t make that promise any more than Mum could have.
“It’s been two hours,” House says, breaking the silence. “Still nothing.”
This is familiar, the ‘give me information’ tone, but he doesn’t have a handful of test results to go on. “It should last up to three. Beyond that…” He shrugs. “I don’t know much more than you do. Your leg was less draining than Mum’s hangovers.”
House frowns. “That makes no sense. The damage to my leg is worse than a hangover.”
“But you didn’t cause it,” he says. “I think it’s easier for me to work with damage that’s not self-inflicted.”
“But you’re guessing.”
“Between little training, less experience, and being half-and-half, I don’t really have a choice. Even Mum wasn’t sure which developmental pattern I was supposed to be following.”
“Which was her own fault for complicating the genetic crapshoot,” House says dryly. “Although you have to admire that kind of gall—most expectant mothers assume they’ll expose the fetus to teratogens if they so much as breathe wrong, and yours had no problem magically recoding a couple of genes.”
Wilson gives him a disapproving look. “I’m sure she knew what she was doing.”
“Not likely,” Kylie says. “Not without a recorded precedent. And witches have long, long memories.”
“How long?” Wilson asks.
“They can live a thousand years,” he says. “And maybe that was part of why it was all right to take the kind of chance she did with me: eighty or ninety years would hardly have amounted to anything. She’d probably hoped it would extend my lifespan.”
“How old was she?”
“In her two-hundred fifties, I think,” he says, meeting House’s gaze. “Young adulthood.”
“No other children?”
He shakes his head. “Not that she told me, and she would have if there’d been any. I know I have a grandmother, at least the one aunt and probably cousins, but…”
There’s that look again, unfamiliar sympathy. “But they don’t want anything to do with you. Daddy Dearest’s fault?”
He snorts. “Well, his packing me off to seminary didn’t exactly endear me to them—they can’t know whether I picked anything up there or not—but no. Odds are they blame me for Mum’s death, which is—”
“Wrong,” Wilson breaks in. “Blaming you is a petty solution. They can blame your father, the alcohol, her own pain—you didn’t cause any of it. And your mother’s family—”
“I can’t be upset at them, really,” he says, surprised to find he means it. “Witch clans aren’t like human families—there’re different standards of morality, love, forgiveness.” He shrugs, and Kylie says for them, “Even if they’d have us, we’re too human to fit in there.”
“And enough of a witch that you have to keep your head down to fit here,” House says sardonically. “Lucky for you: at least you can pass.”
“Learnt that in seminary more than anything,” he says, threading his fingers through Kylie’s fur. Even all these years later, he doesn’t like to think of it—sermon after sermon about the love of God the Father, and the hellish fates awaiting those who refused his grace.
It had been darkly amusing that no one else seemed to spot the logical fallacy of a loving God consigning most of the world to perpetual torment.
“And you wound up in seminary because…?” House asks.
“Because I lost control,” he says. “I forgot what I was, what I could do; I’d just—I couldn’t listen to Dad’s lies for one more second. Especially not during Mum’s funeral…”
Continue...
