Marsh || Steel Inquisitor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myironeyes) wrote2014-10-06 06:11 pm
myironeyes) wrote2014-10-06 06:11 pm
Entry tags:
- acupuncture of the damned,
- brighteyes bros,
- brood brood cluck cluck,
- dolorous von shishkabob,
- friendly neighborhood angel of death,
- full of psychic fishhooks,
- hemalurgy is a bad life choice,
- king of the sadpandas,
- no one expects the steel inquisition,
- no that's a lie it is expected,
- people live in terror,
- this is not his baby,
- water torture on the brain,
- where is his lizard baby
(no subject)
[Public Video]
The kitchen is, as usual, understaffed. We were understaffed before this latest shake-up and now we are more understaffed. We require at least one temporary warden supervisor for the lunch shift and four or five new inmates.
Those interested should speak to Riddick or myself.
[Open spam, backdated throughout the last few days]
[Marsh can be found in odd times at odd places - late and night on the deck or early morning in the greenhouse, hunched over, making soft, choking noises, his little cockatiel crooning worriedly and attempting to preen his short hair. Folded in a corner of the ice-damaged stairwell, a hand splayed over his spikes, breathing hitched, shoulders shaking, looking like nothing so much as a man desperately trying to sob and unable to manage it.
The crying from Iris's room - it's psychic, he doesn't just hear it. It gets in when he is too tired to fend it off from ripped-open places, and then it becomes him, the loneliness and fear and grief, the confusion of the very young. He remembers himself - it is not overwhelming, not like Ruin at its worst, nothing like that - but he cannot stop feeling it. And the feeling is not entirely unfamiliar.]
[Private spam for Bianca]
[He decides, eventually, that it cannot be a trick, that something is real, must be suffering. Or perhaps he doesn't care anymore, as long as it stops. He arrives at her door with his jaw clenched from the effort of holding the lost, abandoned feeling back, and it still drips through his cracks, stings like salt in his punctures. He knocks.]
[Private spam forC'Rizz the Dalek Emperor, backdated to shortly after the arena]
[It's not a pleasant return, but he falls to the necessary housekeeping with a grim sort of gratitude. He asks the admiral for a resurrection, then swallows a truly foul amount of powdered pewter and a small sliver of feruchemy-laced gold. Then cooks until he stops seeing Iris on every blank nonmetallic surface, and brings the egg soup to C'Rizz's room. He knocks, then lets himself in.]
It's me.
The kitchen is, as usual, understaffed. We were understaffed before this latest shake-up and now we are more understaffed. We require at least one temporary warden supervisor for the lunch shift and four or five new inmates.
Those interested should speak to Riddick or myself.
[Open spam, backdated throughout the last few days]
[Marsh can be found in odd times at odd places - late and night on the deck or early morning in the greenhouse, hunched over, making soft, choking noises, his little cockatiel crooning worriedly and attempting to preen his short hair. Folded in a corner of the ice-damaged stairwell, a hand splayed over his spikes, breathing hitched, shoulders shaking, looking like nothing so much as a man desperately trying to sob and unable to manage it.
The crying from Iris's room - it's psychic, he doesn't just hear it. It gets in when he is too tired to fend it off from ripped-open places, and then it becomes him, the loneliness and fear and grief, the confusion of the very young. He remembers himself - it is not overwhelming, not like Ruin at its worst, nothing like that - but he cannot stop feeling it. And the feeling is not entirely unfamiliar.]
[Private spam for Bianca]
[He decides, eventually, that it cannot be a trick, that something is real, must be suffering. Or perhaps he doesn't care anymore, as long as it stops. He arrives at her door with his jaw clenched from the effort of holding the lost, abandoned feeling back, and it still drips through his cracks, stings like salt in his punctures. He knocks.]
[Private spam for
[It's not a pleasant return, but he falls to the necessary housekeeping with a grim sort of gratitude. He asks the admiral for a resurrection, then swallows a truly foul amount of powdered pewter and a small sliver of feruchemy-laced gold. Then cooks until he stops seeing Iris on every blank nonmetallic surface, and brings the egg soup to C'Rizz's room. He knocks, then lets himself in.]
It's me.
[spam]
He puts a hand on the side of the bus. It's hard for him to really pinpoint the source, this close, because it feels like the crying is echoing all around him as well as through him, but he supposes it doesn't matter. He burns brass, low at first and then stronger, wanting to soothe that terrible familiar ache away. He thinks of Kelsier, hands still tiny bit chubby, the devastation still fresh, balanced on Marsh's knees and curled resentfully against his chest. He'd been angrier than this child - ship or not, it's a child to him - but underneath it was the same.]
Shhh. Shhh.
[He doesn't really realize he's saying it out loud, lost in the muddle of memory and compassion, wanting to comfort what he knows so well can never really be comforted. But it can be bourne, can be made bearable. Shhh, we're still not alone.]
[spam]
Marsh is not its person, and at first it feels as though he might only be about to make it worse: there's a rise in pitch, a sort of escalation of the tantrum now it can recognise that someone hears it, is reaching.
And then it quiets: not completely, the jagged absence of the person its life entwines with is too big and terrible, but it holds onto Marsh, breathing in his brass, and the volume and sharpness of its grief seem to decrease.
Bianca is still on the floor, still clutching tightly to Iris' dogs, and when she raises her eyes to him again there are tears running down her cheeks.]
I need a drink.
[spam]
Shhh, I know. We'll set it to rights. Shhh, there there.
[He loves the little incomprehensible thing already; he loves easily, and it is a child in pain. He is not enough, he is not who it wants, but he's used to that, too, and nothing in him resents it, not like this. He sends is all care and reassurance and ragged aching affection, leaning against the invisible wall as he soothes and soothes.]
I don't want to leave it.
[Without even meaning to, he makes it sound curt, logistical, as though it's about having finally gotten the thing quiet, nothing like the formless and sincere sentimentality of his bleeding mind, stubborn without plan or recourse. He will have to, eventually, of course. He has dinner shift and C'Rizz to look after and more brass to acquire, eventually. But he doesn't want to. He is, perhaps, obliquely, asking for help, hoping she knows better than he does whether it will understand a promise to return.]
[spam]
[Iris would have been hugging him, offering backup, and Bianca knows it, can recall clearly the self whose first impulse that would have been.
She rises shakily to her feet, wipes her eyes impatiently and starts to pace the room, arms folded around herself as though she were only physically cold.]
My bus will help it keep the contact, if need be.
[spam]
Maybe it means something to me.
[This is true, but also not at all what he was considering when he first raised the objection.]