discord unshackled

11. biggest lie? that he doesn’t care if he lives or dies— turns out he wants above all else to live.

13. best accomplishment? not being his father. he managed to avert a significant part of a massive calamity once but that didn’t end up going so well for anyone

15. what’s his vice? while he’s leaned hard on wrath, greed, and envy lately, I think it’s still pride overall.

26. does he have a certain aesthetic or style? oilslick shadow chic. used to be less shadowy and more shifting transformation, but that was in better times.

“Enjoyment for the chase,” Will echoes. “That’s not good enough.”

Experimentally, he pushes Discord back again, just as slowly, and steps forward as he does it, to create a null sum of distance between them. He is pushing just to push, a wakening curiosity turning over at the root of his throat. His shoulders are still up, though, eyes still shining violent. Hackles trembling at half-mast - no naked show of tooth, yet, but the suggestion of it, in the angles of his body.

“Doesn’t do to leave your prey wasted and bleeding,” he says, voice harsh. “Do they deserve what they get, Discord? Do you deserve to have them?”

Will’s eyes are bright, now, but not with warmth. With something bitter. Something that wants to bite back, do harm.

“I don’t think I owe you that. Just change your articles, will you?” He leans over Discord’s shoulder, not to close the space between their faces but to position his mouth near Discord’s ear. When he speaks again, it comes in a near growl, barely there. “Just because you’ve cornered me doesn’t mean you get to keep me.”

Voskar laughs, for once very sincerely. “Very well. It seems you’re already very well kept,” he says, looking past the dreamer to the man still and smiling in the bed behind him. He allows himself to be pushed back. The fact that the dreamer does not push Voskar away is not lost on him.

There is more to it than that, but even shared godhood does not compel her to share her “feelings” with a stranger. How could she explain it, anyway, that she wonders more and more what it would be like to put down her crown for good? She has only dreams returned to her; all the rest she has is no real power, and her attempts to seize it have been for naught. Perhaps… but she won’t say any of this to him.

“I have a cousin here,” Adelaide says instead. “It was good to see him. And the beaches in the Sea of Nectar are… nice.” Not as good as those of Nacre, obviously.

“But both are better with a little champagne.”

Voskar laughs. “Many things are,” he says. “I mean to say, surely there is more to do than that. Along with the champagne, at least.”

Where he comes from, beaches are scarce— where land meets water it tends to do so with rocky bluffs and rivers’ mouths. The shores here in the Sea of Nectar look so soft in comparison. Unimpressive. Still, new to him.

“I’m not going to run from you,” Will says, quietly, “if that’s what you mean.”

He searches Discord’s face for a moment. “Learned my lesson about running from things in dreams already. At some point you have to make the decision to turn around and fight.” He tips his head just slightly, a frown creasing his brow. “You drag what ails you down with you, if necessary.”

Their faces are close, now, a breath apart. Will uncrosses his arms, spreads one hand flat on Discord’s chest and pushes him away, slowly, lightly, so that the gap between them is as Will had left it. Close enough for the space between their bodies to be uncomfortably tense, but not so close that Discord can taste him. The curl of a snarl flashes across Will’s mouth, barely a flicker of an expression, and then he’s stony-faced again.

“I don’t do it without a reason, for one,” he deadpans. “So tell me. What reasons do you have?” A beat. “And -” he shakes his head, and something wry twitches in his eyes, so slight as to be nearly imperceptible -

“I’m not yours.”

The dreamer bares his teeth like a cornered beast. Voskar is indeed getting the sense that he doesn’t run as much as he’d like. Too much rage. Too much fascination. Voskar knows that feeling well. Perhaps this is why this dreamer compels him so.

Will lets out a little huff, an ambivalent sound.

“I’m not sure what I’m being accused of,” he says, somewhat flatly, “but I’m sure I don’t like it.”

He takes a step forward, into the edge of Discord’s space, his arms still twisted across his chest like a breastplate. He’s all bristle. Chin defensively lowered, shoulders up, expression a dull, hostile stare. Generally speaking, Will prefers to avoid eye contact, but he makes it now. It’s easier, somehow, to watch the shadows roil in Discord’s black gaze than it is to know where to focus on an average person’s eyes.

“A good hunter respects the rules of the hunt,” he says. The sound rolls low in his throat. “Are you a hunter, Discord?”

That defiance, that is why Voskar came looking for this dreamer again. He smiles hood-eyed and lazily and watches the dreamer watch him. “Oh, yes,” he says, “when I can find something that will run from me.”

They so often do not. So many who want Discord’s favour instead, never understanding that discord favours no one for long. This is his nature. Some simply try to wait him out or ignore him, but fare no better— he will be felt. But those who try to cheat or outrun him...

Juno scowls at the intruder with some difficulty, and the light flickers briefly, goes out- and when it comes up again, they’re back in his room, his old room. Ben lays out on the bed, heels kicked up in the air, writing something in a notebook that is utter gibberish. Same Ben as always, frozen forever at half Juno’s age and unscarred and brighter-eyed but otherwise like a carbon copy. Juno’s familiar with this, at least- he moves to sit on the side of the bed, and Ben grins up at him, unapologetic, then looks over at the intruder too.

“So you get other visitors?” He asks, voice bright and full of laughter- and Juno grimaces and says, “Guess.” It’s hard to drag his eyes away from Ben, from the blood pooled on Juno’s bed underneath him, on the blood soaking his white tank-top the deep, deep red of arterial blood. Ben swats at him, like nothing’s wrong, and there’s more blood on Juno’s hands than there were before.

It earns him a concerned look from the phantom of his brother, before the screaming starts from a room outside, howling, sirens, fists on doors- and then it falls silent, and Juno shakes his head and wipes his hands off on the sheets. The blood stays as thick on his skin as ever. Not subtle, even he realizes.

Ben sighs and slides off the bed, then, eyes all for the intruder in this space. “Cards?” he asks, with deceptive cheer.

“Certainly,” Voskar says. Ordinarily he would produce them himself— this limitation is proving terribly inconvenient— but for now he simply waits. If they must sit on the floor it will be at Juno’s prompting, though Voskar certainly will not object. Reaching the floor is still a novelty that refuses to wear off. A certain spiteful satisfaction to it.

A deflection, hm. “Boring,” Adelaide says meditatively. “But it’s safer. I may drink champagne and eat cakes without interruption, for as long as they stay interesting.”

“Hieron is –” she hesitates. “Encroached. It’s strange to have room to forget that.”

“How disappointing,” Voskar says. Considers the streets, the ocean tang, the day’s warmth. “I knew such days, once. Boredom, I’ve found, leaves all too much room to remember them.”

“Like the Lunar Seas, probably,“ she says.  Jupiter can’t really think of what any of those are called off the top of her head, but they’re all Mare Something; she remembers that much from a short fascination with space as a child, when she’d thought it would be the best thing in the world to be a pilot, to brave the unknown with other pioneers.  Then she’d been told that she’d never be viable for it and the dream had died, just like that.  “But we’re not on a moon, so I don’t know why they’d call them that.  Maybe whoever made this place really likes moons.“

Voskar has met some moons in his time, all of them obsessed with order and consistency. Before anyone else, they had called him a necessary evil. It’s the greatest compliment he’s yet to be paid. He still wouldn’t name anything after them. “Hmph.”

Another considering look at the girl. “You’ve been very helpful,” Voskar says, and smiles. It is not a particularly kind or friendly smile. “I have one more question for you.”

It’s supposed to be Pereyra, Juno thinks as he slowly looks over at the person crouching next to him in those high, skinny stilettos. Those are Pereyra’s shoes- those are the Mayor’s clothes, even. Juno’s eyes narrow, and with his focus shifting away, the heart stops beating, fades. The blood on his hands remains. He shifts, leans away, and the illusion of the dream fades. The darkness leaks away, leaving a distant ambiance, diffuse lighting that lets him see the other, casts his own darker features in softer shadows.

“You,” he says, voice rough- “I don’t know you. You shouldn’t be here.” But he makes no move to remove the man, fingers still curling uselessly in his lap. He knows this place- this place where he’s seen the people his actions have destroyed, where he keeps his ghosts. As he thinks of them, they flicker into being on the edges of his awareness- here, Peter, there, Ben. Sarah. Annie. They disappear as quickly as they come, his focus still on the intruder.

“I didn’t kill you,” he says, “so what are you doing here?”

Voskar watches the phantoms as they shift into being and just as quickly into nothing. Stains on many souls, here. Many stains on this soul in particular. Something worth looking into.

cut for gore [link]

“‘For the sake of becoming’,” Voskar repeats. Laughter in his voice, though not his eyes. His younger self, simply Chaos those days, might have suited this dreamer better. “Yours? Or that which you brutalise? Here, I suppose, it’s the same.”

He considers leaning in again to chase that instinct the dreamer so quickly fulfilled. The taste of blood on his breath had been very appealing. But letting the dreamer keep reaching for him appeals more. Waiting to see what he becomes.

This image— it must be a memory, from the way it sits overlaying their snowy clearing, from the youth or at least innocence in this replica of the dreamer himself. In the other man’s face, intent. He watches the static dreamer in the projection in nearly the same way the dreamer in motion watches him. Perhaps he had been the brutality the dreamer cited. Perhaps there had been blood on his hands, too.

“…I’m not sure?“  Jupiter shrugs, thinks better of it after a second, and drops her shoulders back down to continue slouching.  “It’s… really hard to remember.  I was waiting for my dad to pick me up, he was supposed to be there in a few hours, and then I woke up in a bed here.“  She furrows her brow in thought and goes silent for a second.  It’s on the tip of her tongue – “Uhhh.  It’s called Aldebaran Ark?  And the different places are called Seas, Mare Whatever and stuff.“

Fathers. Voskar has no sympathy left in him but he’s unsurprised to hear of another’s negligence.

He casts away the topic of fathers. He has little enough interest in his own. “I smell no brine here,” he says. “There is some other meaning to the name, I take it.”

“Did you?” Adelaide folds her hands over the paper bag with a slant smile. “There are several of us. But you,” she hardly need guess, “are not of Hieron. Nor of the Void of the Outsider.”

She gives the slightest nod to him, and looks him over. She is still hardly able to discern her feelings toward the other gods she has met here. And this one jangles like the beginning of a migraine.

This god seems extremely put-together. Contained. No doubt she has knives under her elegant sleeves— even Aeolus had his sharpnesses— but she keeps them sheathed. Or, possibly, they’ve been taken from her by whatever forces took Voskar’s powers from him. Something else they might have in common.