Daisy makes sure not to make herself hard to find. She could, if she wanted; she knows how to mask a silhouette, how to make herself unseen if she wants to ambush, but there's no use for that here. She's there, in plain sight, leaning against a tree, coat bunched around her crossed arms.
She finds an adjacent tree to lean against in mirror, looking back to Daisy. It's awkward - but it was never going to be easy to manage. Never was going to feel less like tearing herself out of an awkward cocoon of flesh. Even now, she wants to run away from it, feeling the tension build up in her spine.
"...I suppose I should clarify something first, to make the rest make any sense. Most of my memories were lost to me. Over time, some of them have come back, but not everything."
If there are parts she can't explain, then at least Daisy will know why.
She knows the feeling. Laying yourself bare is... difficult. Even when she wanted to talk to Jon about it, deep down in Forever Deep Below Creation, she had to let him compel it out of her. Sometimes, in the months after, she almost considered asking him to do it again, but she never did. She muddled through any other difficult talks on her own.
Daisy's head tilts, just a touch, then she shrugs. "Amnesia, huh. Alright."
"There are gaps. But none of them change the broad strokes. Mainly just to clarify there are whys and hows that I'm not going to be able to answer. I manage on the day to day, and the rest is just...something I have to live with."
She's stalling, she knows. Taking the longer route to what she needs to say. Finally, she just shakes her head.
"...Gods, this is awkward. You barely know me, but...I'm going to take a risk and ask, when you say you hear the blood, does it call to you to spill it? Does it fill you with the need to do it? Like you'll tear apart if you don't?"
Daisy takes and releases a long, deep breath, that ends in a breathy, "...yeah. Yeah, it does."
Her jaw works, iron touches at her tastebuds, and she stares out into the wilderness with a thoughtful expression. "Been like that almost as long as I can really remember. I could always hear it, feel it. Telling me who to chase. Pushing me to hurt them. Even when I was a kid I was a bully. Then... things happened, and as I got older it got louder. Harder to ignore. Even now— me attacking all those people, last year?" She looks over at Fever and shrugs. "I couldn't ignore it anymore."
Too starved, too weak to keep resisting the call pounding in her skull.
Most people probably start getting nervous now. But something in Fever relaxes, the way that a sailor spots land and has new strength to keep rowing. It's so loud. It's always loud in her head, a discordant and dissonant chorus underlined with war drums and drenched in red. She just has days where it's easier to fill her head with anything else, in whatever scant few inches are not the slithering, sticky, metallic scented sludge that makes up her own mind. Rotting from the inside out, a blood taint embedded in the structure of her bones.
Sometimes there's nothing in there but screaming.
She just nods.
"I...always want to hurt people. Even when I woke up with only my name and a vague idea of what to do, I just wanted to kill someone, something. The pieces that come back, there's just death and more death. Carnage in levels you wouldn't believe." But Daisy would, wouldn't she? That's why they're here in the first place. "Enough to say I've been like this for a long time. Or I've always been a monster and just don't remember it."
Her eyes close for a second, before they reopen.
"And it's not - I can't stop it. Just hold it off for a while. I can be talking to a dear friend, and it still just..." Every beat of her heart. Every tick of the clock. The clawing need. "At some point, redirection isn't going to be enough. When the urge takes hold, all anyone can do is run away, until it has run its course."
Tie her up. Kill her in a thousand ways. Don't assume there's any reason to it.
There's a noise, low in Daisy's throat. She remembers the names of almost every victim she's ever hurt, physically or otherwise; she remembers the locations of every body she's ever buried out in Epping Forest; she remembers the smell of Jon's blood in the air and how even with Basira stood right there talking her down, she almost slit his throat anyway.
For all the control she may have developed, over the years, no one is ever truly safe. She has a list in her head, ranked from easiest prey to the most satisfying of challenges. She knows the best ways to kill each and every one of her loved ones. She knows they trust her so much they'd never see it coming.
"It never goes away."
The shape of her life is that of a blood stain on the fabric of the universe. There's no scrubbing it clean, when her hands are drenched in red just as thick.
She scrubs at her face with a hand and sighs. "Yeah. At least, that's what a lot of people call 'em. Can't say it's wrong. They're... gods of Fear. Eldritch beings that sit somewhere outside our universe and feed on it. People like me... we're connected to them. The real dedicated types come up with these— rituals. To bring their god down to change the world. Most just... feed it. Stop feeding it, it'll feed on you."
"We have a word for it. Chosen. Means a god's singled you out, for one reason or another. Decided to favor you, and everything that ends up meaning when you get tethered. Changing you with their power."
Not that all of them were malevolent, or fear related in her world. Some gods had leagues fight for that glory and honor, to be blessed. Set apart from the rest, wielding the divine and executing their will upon the land. But that's hardly a point to be making right now.
"Not like you can go and tell them no, when they make that choice."
She's. Working up to the most tangled part of it. The question Daisy asked and did not ask. What are you?
Daisy huffs a humourless little laugh. "We call them Avatars. And we all get a choice. Supposedly. But sometimes you don't even know you're making it. And other times it's barely a choice at all."
Jon's choice, as she understood it, was to live on as a monster, or die with what humanity he had left—and what kind of choice is that, really? Her own... she chose to take the life of someone who was, or who had at least started out, human; it's a choice that rests on her head, a decision she made, but she hadn't known what it would mean.
A point of no return. No going back. Every Avatar dies in one way or another, once they step over that threshold. You become something different. Something that lives on only because your patron allows it.
"Our one advantage. You can lose the status, if they decide they don't want you anymore."
Because it happened to her. Only one was allowed that particular throne of corpses. No sense keeping the favor on someone who at that point was merely a bloodbag to feed the parasite.
"I brought up gods because they're involved. A god, singular."
It is a struggle. Even here and now, she could hide behind the veil of the Chosen. Let that be the answer, mine the sympathy out of it, let Daisy think the kinship is on that level. Make it something inflicted upon her. But that would be hiding from her actions, and she again and again has had to make the choice to not do so. Alfira's blood on her hands, and she had held herself up as her murderer. Confessing to every companion she had about what lurked in her thoughts, so they knew - but none of them were willing to take it seriously enough to avert it. Or they were too desperate to have a solution to throw her out, to leave.
Thorm's knowing face, grey with ennui, looking down on her. Gortash's voice slinking into her ears, eyes black as the abyss, recounting what they'd all done. Orin clad in the skin of how many innocent, with teeth and claw and blade at Fever's dream throat. Monsters, all of them. Clawing at their fellow, scenting her weakness, poised to tear and finish the job that had already been started.
She's gone paler than when they started, wrestling with the truth that exists within every drop of her blood. I know what I am.
Her voice is so soft. She can't make it louder, or she'll choke.
"...Bhaal. The Dread Lord, the god of murder, violence, and destruction. One of death and bloodlust and hatred, the one that deeds of cruelty and ruin are done in the name of, whose faithful are feared, reviled for every understandable reason, the one who would ravage the world."
Say it. Say it. Confess, and let judgement come.
"He is my father."
What that makes her, now, she doesn't know. She waits now, for Daisy to leave - to decide this is too much, to look at her with the scorn and disgust she's earned with such an admission. Something, anything. But silence hurts too much to bear.
It explains a lot, in truth. How overpowering the sense of violence and danger and wanton Slaughter that radiates from Fever's very presence is. The adeptness for violence that Daisy saw first-hand, on that trip through Hell. All the questions, the recognition in them.
"...fuck."
She doesn't have to know Fever's world to know that being the child of a god like that is a curse. To be shaped in the image of a monster is trial enough, let alone to be born in it. (Even in her world, that much is true; the story exists for Daisy in only snippets caught by accident, statements about a woman called Agnes, birthed from the flames of the Desolation and snuffed out just the same.) She doesn't have to know any more to imagine that such a legacy marks you as a threat to all who may know.
Daisy drags a hand over her face. It settles over her mouth, where her own teeth catch her knuckles as she turns it over in her head.
"...you're not faithful to him, though. Are you." Less a question than a statement, an observation. "Wouldn't be looking so pale. Wouldn't be standing there like I'm gonna bite you, or worse."
She shakes her head. If Daisy did bite her, if she walked away, if she came in with threats to ensure that she and her own would be safeguarded, it would all be warranted. It would all be deserved. No one knows better how dangerous she is than herself.
"I used to be. But whatever faith I had was lost to the same place that my memories went."
And every memory of being faithful is a joy she cannot connect to anything else. Every death she inflicts brings that same wild ecstasy that it does in recollections, that same frenzy setting in, but it isn't her sole purpose for being. The world cannot be offered up as a sacrifice when there is so much in it. The dissonance strikes her, frightens her. That both who she is now, standing before Daisy, and the woman who was poised to answer the bloodiest call are the same. She's the same. She's still capable of everything she remembers. Everything she fantasizes about. Only the circumstances have changed.
"That part isn't coming back."
Even if she remembers everything, one day. Which seems less and less likely the more time slips by.
Daisy nods—that's what she thought. The violence may still be there, may always be there, but when stepping beyond her biases she can no more condemn Fever for that than she can shake her own vicious tendencies. They are monsters. They are changing. It's only in the last couple of years that Daisy has accepted that those statements are not mutually exclusive.
"...I used to be so much worse than I am now," she says, after a moment. "Hunters are— we're the monsters that even the other monsters are scared of. We can kill anything. Even the most powerful Avatars of other Fears. Some get smart. Hold something over us to get us to do their dirty work. Or make us an offer too good to ignore. But others— they just end up prey. A. Lot. Of Avatars end up Prey."
The Hunt makes monsters that hunt monsters. The vampires, lacking any real spark of life or any history of humanity, are just the beginning. In the end, you always end up with the blood of other people like you drying between your teeth.
"And I was good at what I did. Still am. But back then—" She shakes her head. She didn't hold back. She didn't care about collateral damage. She Hunted, and she killed, and she kept running. "Took me being buried alive for eight. Months. Down where my god couldn't reach me. For me to start realising— I. Was a monster too. And maybe I always would be. But I didn't want to be— what the Hunt wanted, anymore. I wanted to be— me. Whoever that even was."
The breath she takes is slow, like she's inhaling Daisy's confession in return and letting it sit in the space where she'd held her own. Secrets for secrets. And knowing that the gamble paid off in the way that she'd hoped against experience that it would. Daisy takes every word with the weight it has inherently, because she knows that all of hers will be treated the same way. They are something unknown, wearing mortal skin, not infected or cursed or possessed - it is them, and the self cannot be cured save by death. And they are trying, every hour of the day, to not fall back into the waiting maws of what birthed them.
Eight months. It must have felt like eight eternities. Yet there will be no whispers from her of condolences, of being so sorry that it happened. Sometimes, everything must collapse, until your back hits the ground in the darkness. Only then can you start to climb up.
"...terrifying, isn't it? To realize you want to say no."
Looking at the god that owns you down to the last scrap of your marrow, and refusing them. Knowing they will never be removed, that they're too tightly wound in, but still saying I will not. It causes more fear than any near-death ever could.
But if a self is to be salvaged from the wreckage, if the chrysalis is to be broken open and the butterfly not to die trapped inside, if it is to emerge with each struggling step and to let the sunlight unfurl its wings-
Daisy breathes a tight, humourless laugh laced through with the fear that is, and has always been, a part of her. "Yeah. Fucking terrifying."
You don't say no to a god. They don't take kindly to it. The Fears don't care about their Avatars, they never have; they're nothing but tools, extensions of their will on Earth. Feed them, and you'll know power unlike anything you've ever had before. Resist, and you'll know weaknesses unlike anything you've ever felt before.
But her time in the Buried let her make a new choice. For all that those long months fill her dreams with grime and dirt and the feeling of the life being choked out of you, there is life in her now that there never was before.
It wasn't easy. It will never be easy. There will always be a fight to hold onto the version of yourself that you are trying to become. It may be the hardest fight you'll ever face. It is also the most important, the most worthwhile, fight that you'll ever struggle through in your life.
"I don't think there's a single moment of my life. Where I haven't been scared out of my mind." A reality she rarely admits. Let alone in so many words. "When I accepted that I— had to die, back home, it was the most at peace I'd ever felt. But now— it's different. You have to keep going."
Fever leans more of her weight against the tree, the rough texture blunted by her clothes, her hair. Slowly, her eyes close, and stay there.
(Under all that joy, in those fragments of memory, there has always been fear. Look at me. Love me. Don't hurt me, I'm doing what you want.)
It is intentional. Trusting Daisy so obviously, essentially turning her back to her. It's probably not smart. But she's not a smart person. She's just someone who's figuring out the way to arrange all the remnants of whoever Fever was in a shape that they'll actually take. It's constructing a skeleton with nearly every bone missing, and trying to draw a new face for it.
How do you control it, she wants to ask, the question that drives her to do so much. What way does she need to stretch herself, what influence does she need to put herself under, what does she need to do to herself to manage this. She can only throw everything she can at it. Everything that comes her way. Everything that might hold it off for one more moment, one more moment, before it breaks through her skin wearing the blood of countless other souls.
"How do you keep going?"
Maybe Daisy's got something she hasn't tried yet. They made it this far, after all.
What a question. Daisy releases a long, slow breath through her nose and thunks her head back against the tree. She wishes she had some neat, compact, simple answer, but life has taught her that there's really no such thing. Not for anything.
"Everyday. I make the same choice. Every single day. Got this—" she laughs dryly at her own expense, "this mantra. Don't listen to the blood, listen to the quiet. Doesn't work when the worst hits. But it... helps. Helps remind me."
Helps with the panic attacks. Helps bury the urges that are still weak enough to bury. Helps keep herself sane when she feels like she's losing grip.
"And uh... people help." She almost sounds embarrassed, as she says it. Has to clear her throat before she continues on. "Erin, Max... they don't. Get it. Not completely. But I owe them. A lot. And— at home. There was another Avatar. Tried to keep each other reigned in. Best we could."
In the end, neither she nor Jon could stay out of their entity's grasp forever. Maybe they had never truly been out of them in the first place. Maybe it was always futile. But Daisy made a choice, at the end; let the Hunt take her, so she could save the few people in the world she cared about. And Jon... she's not sure what really happened to Jon, except that it ended with him at the centre of the Eye's new world.
But they tried. Against all odds, they tried. And Daisy's always been grateful for it. For how Jon wasn't Basira, didn't argue with her when she said she was done.
"...plus uh," she snorts, "helps that I've got two people who'll take me out. If I snap."
She nods, though her eyes are still shut. Breathes in, breathes out. Making a choice. Like every time she feels it roiling under her skin and has to say no. She won't do that. She won't pick up something and make it hurt. She won't spill blood, even as her hands want to tighten into claws and ask for death, death, death. It would feel so good. It would be so easy. It would be so relieving. Even now, if she found something soft and vulnerable and good and crushed it into oblivion, it would fill her veins with warmth and joy.
But. People. Names and faces flood to mind, hands to hold, the feeling of being embraced in different ways. The shield of wings, the hold of slightly shaking arms, the tug on her sleeve to rouse her from nightmares. The taste of orange in her mouth to stave off weakness. The steady feel of a plastic controller in her hand, playing games and avoiding the reality that was crushing in. Lines cast out, crossed over, interweaving until a true net began to form.
"...I'm going to need to make a contingency plan. The person who knew about all this - he's not here." She'd know, she's certain of it. She had trusted him with that most sacred of tasks - kill me, if needed. If she doesn't have warning enough to beg someone to bind her, sedate her, do anything to keep her trapped in place. "And I don't...stop. Until I'm done."
It's what makes her so useful in fights. It's what makes her the worst person to face. She doesn't stop. She can't stop. She can never stop. Only until they yield, or die.
"I could do it. Putting me down... it's not easy." It's not bragging, it's just a fact. Hunters are resilient. Back home, a normal human can't take one out even with the entire magazine of a gun. Even now she can die at mortal hands, it has to take her down instantly. Or it's just not going to take. "The damage I took, back with the hellhounds? Usually that heals up instantly."
Fever saw a touch of that particular trick, with the burning alcohol. But it's not just small wounds. She'd had her side opened and leg torn up, back in Hell. And she still kept going even then, when it wasn't healing.
And Daisy had seen her fight - the intentional brutality, the precision that speaks to skill in the slaughter, the drive onward to go and go and go and pile the mountain of bodies higher. Everything might die. Everyone might die, if she doesn't wear herself out or be stopped.
"If I sense it early enough, there's time to just tie me up, put a guard on me, see if it can't be fought through. But if not..." An exhale, and she finally opens her eyes again. "I'd owe you greatly for it."
It's a lot to ask of someone. But there would be no grudge borne, nothing but unending gratitude that she was allowed her own mind again.
"No skin off my back." It's really the least she can do. She's asked the same of Valdis, and of Erin, and... well, maybe some of Erin's thing about monsters needing to stick together has been getting through to her. "Contingencies... help. Makes the ticking time bomb feel less like it's going to take out everything in a ten mile radius."
A far too real risk, with people like them. There's a reason Daisy made it through so many victims before someone who could actually stop her came along.
She wants to laugh, but instead what comes out is just an exhale, mirthless and tired. She's so tired, to have said all that, the weight of it shared a touch and the absence throwing the rest into relief.
"Do you want a third? Three chances always seem to be just enough."
Three wishes, three brothers, three people who will come in for the kill if it's warranted.
"Least I can offer, after putting all that on your shoulders."
"Sure won't say no to one. This place is. Bigger." More ground to cover, if something goes wrong. The more people prepared to deal with the threat, the better. "Don't get any easier to take out when I lose it. But I'm sure you can figure it out."
She hesitates to hand over the shortcuts immediately, not out of distrust but out of caution; if Fever snaps first, the last thing they need is her knowing exactly what to do to take Daisy out before she can be stopped. Fever already has an edge for having magic.
"Valdis is a good call, if you ever need another. She stopped me the first time. Don't think she'll even ask questions."
Which is close enough to being in her head that Fever instinctively wants to cloak her thoughts, hide herself away so that she's not so fully exposed. But that's quibbling over minor details when the real threat is multiple people ending up like Alfira, like her victims in the Green Dome. Because the thing is, if you don't worry about the aesthetics, if you make efficiency your target, you can kill a lot of people in a short time span. That they'll come back the next day doesn't make any of it fine.
Maybe in a worse time, it would have been fine, and she could have twisted it into something acceptable. Maybe when she first arrived at the ship and wouldn't have even wanted to admit something was wrong. Even right now, she can feel it under her skin, pressing outwards. Death doesn't even matter, why can't you indulge yourself, it would feel so exquisite, it misses you like your oldest lover, you were born for this-
Breathe. Don't go immediately cashing in on that pact.
"But, thanks. I'll figure out how to talk to her."
After she's had time to recover from vomiting up all of this.
"And...thank you for listening."
It matters more than she can phrase in words, someone hearing and knowing on that true level. Someone who knows how deep this runs, that it's not a matter of redirection or pushing through or ignoring it. Every morning, checking the hourglass of one's own will and strength, waiting for when you wake up and find it on its last dregs. Waiting for what will come, because you're not foolish enough to think you'll be able to always beat it.
Daisy nods her head to the side as if to say touché or fair point. The empathy either complicates things, or makes them easier, and it's hard to know which until you're sat there talking to the woman wielding it.
"Don't mention it. Not a lot of people like us. Easier when you're not doing it totally alone." Daisy snorts. "Not that I've always taken that advice..."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hadnoright) wrote2022-11-01 01:56 am
proceed at your own risk
Daisy makes sure not to make herself hard to find. She could, if she wanted; she knows how to mask a silhouette, how to make herself unseen if she wants to ambush, but there's no use for that here. She's there, in plain sight, leaning against a tree, coat bunched around her crossed arms.
"Hey."
no subject
She finds an adjacent tree to lean against in mirror, looking back to Daisy. It's awkward - but it was never going to be easy to manage. Never was going to feel less like tearing herself out of an awkward cocoon of flesh. Even now, she wants to run away from it, feeling the tension build up in her spine.
"...I suppose I should clarify something first, to make the rest make any sense. Most of my memories were lost to me. Over time, some of them have come back, but not everything."
If there are parts she can't explain, then at least Daisy will know why.
no subject
She knows the feeling. Laying yourself bare is... difficult. Even when she wanted to talk to Jon about it, deep down in Forever Deep Below Creation, she had to let him compel it out of her. Sometimes, in the months after, she almost considered asking him to do it again, but she never did. She muddled through any other difficult talks on her own.
Daisy's head tilts, just a touch, then she shrugs. "Amnesia, huh. Alright."
no subject
She's stalling, she knows. Taking the longer route to what she needs to say. Finally, she just shakes her head.
"...Gods, this is awkward. You barely know me, but...I'm going to take a risk and ask, when you say you hear the blood, does it call to you to spill it? Does it fill you with the need to do it? Like you'll tear apart if you don't?"
no subject
Daisy takes and releases a long, deep breath, that ends in a breathy, "...yeah. Yeah, it does."
Her jaw works, iron touches at her tastebuds, and she stares out into the wilderness with a thoughtful expression. "Been like that almost as long as I can really remember. I could always hear it, feel it. Telling me who to chase. Pushing me to hurt them. Even when I was a kid I was a bully. Then... things happened, and as I got older it got louder. Harder to ignore. Even now— me attacking all those people, last year?" She looks over at Fever and shrugs. "I couldn't ignore it anymore."
Too starved, too weak to keep resisting the call pounding in her skull.
no subject
Sometimes there's nothing in there but screaming.
She just nods.
"I...always want to hurt people. Even when I woke up with only my name and a vague idea of what to do, I just wanted to kill someone, something. The pieces that come back, there's just death and more death. Carnage in levels you wouldn't believe." But Daisy would, wouldn't she? That's why they're here in the first place. "Enough to say I've been like this for a long time. Or I've always been a monster and just don't remember it."
Her eyes close for a second, before they reopen.
"And it's not - I can't stop it. Just hold it off for a while. I can be talking to a dear friend, and it still just..." Every beat of her heart. Every tick of the clock. The clawing need. "At some point, redirection isn't going to be enough. When the urge takes hold, all anyone can do is run away, until it has run its course."
Tie her up. Kill her in a thousand ways. Don't assume there's any reason to it.
"...you said there was a god involved, in yours?"
no subject
There's a noise, low in Daisy's throat. She remembers the names of almost every victim she's ever hurt, physically or otherwise; she remembers the locations of every body she's ever buried out in Epping Forest; she remembers the smell of Jon's blood in the air and how even with Basira stood right there talking her down, she almost slit his throat anyway.
For all the control she may have developed, over the years, no one is ever truly safe. She has a list in her head, ranked from easiest prey to the most satisfying of challenges. She knows the best ways to kill each and every one of her loved ones. She knows they trust her so much they'd never see it coming.
"It never goes away."
The shape of her life is that of a blood stain on the fabric of the universe. There's no scrubbing it clean, when her hands are drenched in red just as thick.
She scrubs at her face with a hand and sighs. "Yeah. At least, that's what a lot of people call 'em. Can't say it's wrong. They're... gods of Fear. Eldritch beings that sit somewhere outside our universe and feed on it. People like me... we're connected to them. The real dedicated types come up with these— rituals. To bring their god down to change the world. Most just... feed it. Stop feeding it, it'll feed on you."
no subject
Not that all of them were malevolent, or fear related in her world. Some gods had leagues fight for that glory and honor, to be blessed. Set apart from the rest, wielding the divine and executing their will upon the land. But that's hardly a point to be making right now.
"Not like you can go and tell them no, when they make that choice."
She's. Working up to the most tangled part of it. The question Daisy asked and did not ask. What are you?
no subject
Daisy huffs a humourless little laugh. "We call them Avatars. And we all get a choice. Supposedly. But sometimes you don't even know you're making it. And other times it's barely a choice at all."
Jon's choice, as she understood it, was to live on as a monster, or die with what humanity he had left—and what kind of choice is that, really? Her own... she chose to take the life of someone who was, or who had at least started out, human; it's a choice that rests on her head, a decision she made, but she hadn't known what it would mean.
A point of no return. No going back. Every Avatar dies in one way or another, once they step over that threshold. You become something different. Something that lives on only because your patron allows it.
"No turning back, after that."
major spoilers for the dark urge storyline.
Because it happened to her. Only one was allowed that particular throne of corpses. No sense keeping the favor on someone who at that point was merely a bloodbag to feed the parasite.
"I brought up gods because they're involved. A god, singular."
It is a struggle. Even here and now, she could hide behind the veil of the Chosen. Let that be the answer, mine the sympathy out of it, let Daisy think the kinship is on that level. Make it something inflicted upon her. But that would be hiding from her actions, and she again and again has had to make the choice to not do so. Alfira's blood on her hands, and she had held herself up as her murderer. Confessing to every companion she had about what lurked in her thoughts, so they knew - but none of them were willing to take it seriously enough to avert it. Or they were too desperate to have a solution to throw her out, to leave.
Thorm's knowing face, grey with ennui, looking down on her. Gortash's voice slinking into her ears, eyes black as the abyss, recounting what they'd all done. Orin clad in the skin of how many innocent, with teeth and claw and blade at Fever's dream throat. Monsters, all of them. Clawing at their fellow, scenting her weakness, poised to tear and finish the job that had already been started.
She's gone paler than when they started, wrestling with the truth that exists within every drop of her blood. I know what I am.
(And in answer, the so recently familiar voice, the comforting presence in her skull. Knowing is power, love. Knowing is madness.)
Her voice is so soft. She can't make it louder, or she'll choke.
"...Bhaal. The Dread Lord, the god of murder, violence, and destruction. One of death and bloodlust and hatred, the one that deeds of cruelty and ruin are done in the name of, whose faithful are feared, reviled for every understandable reason, the one who would ravage the world."
Say it. Say it. Confess, and let judgement come.
"He is my father."
What that makes her, now, she doesn't know. She waits now, for Daisy to leave - to decide this is too much, to look at her with the scorn and disgust she's earned with such an admission. Something, anything. But silence hurts too much to bear.
no subject
It explains a lot, in truth. How overpowering the sense of violence and danger and wanton Slaughter that radiates from Fever's very presence is. The adeptness for violence that Daisy saw first-hand, on that trip through Hell. All the questions, the recognition in them.
"...fuck."
She doesn't have to know Fever's world to know that being the child of a god like that is a curse. To be shaped in the image of a monster is trial enough, let alone to be born in it. (Even in her world, that much is true; the story exists for Daisy in only snippets caught by accident, statements about a woman called Agnes, birthed from the flames of the Desolation and snuffed out just the same.) She doesn't have to know any more to imagine that such a legacy marks you as a threat to all who may know.
Daisy drags a hand over her face. It settles over her mouth, where her own teeth catch her knuckles as she turns it over in her head.
"...you're not faithful to him, though. Are you." Less a question than a statement, an observation. "Wouldn't be looking so pale. Wouldn't be standing there like I'm gonna bite you, or worse."
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She shakes her head. If Daisy did bite her, if she walked away, if she came in with threats to ensure that she and her own would be safeguarded, it would all be warranted. It would all be deserved. No one knows better how dangerous she is than herself.
"I used to be. But whatever faith I had was lost to the same place that my memories went."
And every memory of being faithful is a joy she cannot connect to anything else. Every death she inflicts brings that same wild ecstasy that it does in recollections, that same frenzy setting in, but it isn't her sole purpose for being. The world cannot be offered up as a sacrifice when there is so much in it. The dissonance strikes her, frightens her. That both who she is now, standing before Daisy, and the woman who was poised to answer the bloodiest call are the same. She's the same. She's still capable of everything she remembers. Everything she fantasizes about. Only the circumstances have changed.
"That part isn't coming back."
Even if she remembers everything, one day. Which seems less and less likely the more time slips by.
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Daisy nods—that's what she thought. The violence may still be there, may always be there, but when stepping beyond her biases she can no more condemn Fever for that than she can shake her own vicious tendencies. They are monsters. They are changing. It's only in the last couple of years that Daisy has accepted that those statements are not mutually exclusive.
"...I used to be so much worse than I am now," she says, after a moment. "Hunters are— we're the monsters that even the other monsters are scared of. We can kill anything. Even the most powerful Avatars of other Fears. Some get smart. Hold something over us to get us to do their dirty work. Or make us an offer too good to ignore. But others— they just end up prey. A. Lot. Of Avatars end up Prey."
The Hunt makes monsters that hunt monsters. The vampires, lacking any real spark of life or any history of humanity, are just the beginning. In the end, you always end up with the blood of other people like you drying between your teeth.
"And I was good at what I did. Still am. But back then—" She shakes her head. She didn't hold back. She didn't care about collateral damage. She Hunted, and she killed, and she kept running. "Took me being buried alive for eight. Months. Down where my god couldn't reach me. For me to start realising— I. Was a monster too. And maybe I always would be. But I didn't want to be— what the Hunt wanted, anymore. I wanted to be— me. Whoever that even was."
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Eight months. It must have felt like eight eternities. Yet there will be no whispers from her of condolences, of being so sorry that it happened. Sometimes, everything must collapse, until your back hits the ground in the darkness. Only then can you start to climb up.
"...terrifying, isn't it? To realize you want to say no."
Looking at the god that owns you down to the last scrap of your marrow, and refusing them. Knowing they will never be removed, that they're too tightly wound in, but still saying I will not. It causes more fear than any near-death ever could.
But if a self is to be salvaged from the wreckage, if the chrysalis is to be broken open and the butterfly not to die trapped inside, if it is to emerge with each struggling step and to let the sunlight unfurl its wings-
What choice really is there?
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Daisy breathes a tight, humourless laugh laced through with the fear that is, and has always been, a part of her. "Yeah. Fucking terrifying."
You don't say no to a god. They don't take kindly to it. The Fears don't care about their Avatars, they never have; they're nothing but tools, extensions of their will on Earth. Feed them, and you'll know power unlike anything you've ever had before. Resist, and you'll know weaknesses unlike anything you've ever felt before.
But her time in the Buried let her make a new choice. For all that those long months fill her dreams with grime and dirt and the feeling of the life being choked out of you, there is life in her now that there never was before.
It wasn't easy. It will never be easy. There will always be a fight to hold onto the version of yourself that you are trying to become. It may be the hardest fight you'll ever face. It is also the most important, the most worthwhile, fight that you'll ever struggle through in your life.
"I don't think there's a single moment of my life. Where I haven't been scared out of my mind." A reality she rarely admits. Let alone in so many words. "When I accepted that I— had to die, back home, it was the most at peace I'd ever felt. But now— it's different. You have to keep going."
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(Under all that joy, in those fragments of memory, there has always been fear. Look at me. Love me. Don't hurt me, I'm doing what you want.)
It is intentional. Trusting Daisy so obviously, essentially turning her back to her. It's probably not smart. But she's not a smart person. She's just someone who's figuring out the way to arrange all the remnants of whoever Fever was in a shape that they'll actually take. It's constructing a skeleton with nearly every bone missing, and trying to draw a new face for it.
How do you control it, she wants to ask, the question that drives her to do so much. What way does she need to stretch herself, what influence does she need to put herself under, what does she need to do to herself to manage this. She can only throw everything she can at it. Everything that comes her way. Everything that might hold it off for one more moment, one more moment, before it breaks through her skin wearing the blood of countless other souls.
"How do you keep going?"
Maybe Daisy's got something she hasn't tried yet. They made it this far, after all.
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What a question. Daisy releases a long, slow breath through her nose and thunks her head back against the tree. She wishes she had some neat, compact, simple answer, but life has taught her that there's really no such thing. Not for anything.
"Everyday. I make the same choice. Every single day. Got this—" she laughs dryly at her own expense, "this mantra. Don't listen to the blood, listen to the quiet. Doesn't work when the worst hits. But it... helps. Helps remind me."
Helps with the panic attacks. Helps bury the urges that are still weak enough to bury. Helps keep herself sane when she feels like she's losing grip.
"And uh... people help." She almost sounds embarrassed, as she says it. Has to clear her throat before she continues on. "Erin, Max... they don't. Get it. Not completely. But I owe them. A lot. And— at home. There was another Avatar. Tried to keep each other reigned in. Best we could."
In the end, neither she nor Jon could stay out of their entity's grasp forever. Maybe they had never truly been out of them in the first place. Maybe it was always futile. But Daisy made a choice, at the end; let the Hunt take her, so she could save the few people in the world she cared about. And Jon... she's not sure what really happened to Jon, except that it ended with him at the centre of the Eye's new world.
But they tried. Against all odds, they tried. And Daisy's always been grateful for it. For how Jon wasn't Basira, didn't argue with her when she said she was done.
"...plus uh," she snorts, "helps that I've got two people who'll take me out. If I snap."
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But. People. Names and faces flood to mind, hands to hold, the feeling of being embraced in different ways. The shield of wings, the hold of slightly shaking arms, the tug on her sleeve to rouse her from nightmares. The taste of orange in her mouth to stave off weakness. The steady feel of a plastic controller in her hand, playing games and avoiding the reality that was crushing in. Lines cast out, crossed over, interweaving until a true net began to form.
"...I'm going to need to make a contingency plan. The person who knew about all this - he's not here." She'd know, she's certain of it. She had trusted him with that most sacred of tasks - kill me, if needed. If she doesn't have warning enough to beg someone to bind her, sedate her, do anything to keep her trapped in place. "And I don't...stop. Until I'm done."
It's what makes her so useful in fights. It's what makes her the worst person to face. She doesn't stop. She can't stop. She can never stop. Only until they yield, or die.
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"I could do it. Putting me down... it's not easy." It's not bragging, it's just a fact. Hunters are resilient. Back home, a normal human can't take one out even with the entire magazine of a gun. Even now she can die at mortal hands, it has to take her down instantly. Or it's just not going to take. "The damage I took, back with the hellhounds? Usually that heals up instantly."
Fever saw a touch of that particular trick, with the burning alcohol. But it's not just small wounds. She'd had her side opened and leg torn up, back in Hell. And she still kept going even then, when it wasn't healing.
Hunters. Not even once.
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"If I sense it early enough, there's time to just tie me up, put a guard on me, see if it can't be fought through. But if not..." An exhale, and she finally opens her eyes again. "I'd owe you greatly for it."
It's a lot to ask of someone. But there would be no grudge borne, nothing but unending gratitude that she was allowed her own mind again.
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"No skin off my back." It's really the least she can do. She's asked the same of Valdis, and of Erin, and... well, maybe some of Erin's thing about monsters needing to stick together has been getting through to her. "Contingencies... help. Makes the ticking time bomb feel less like it's going to take out everything in a ten mile radius."
A far too real risk, with people like them. There's a reason Daisy made it through so many victims before someone who could actually stop her came along.
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"Do you want a third? Three chances always seem to be just enough."
Three wishes, three brothers, three people who will come in for the kill if it's warranted.
"Least I can offer, after putting all that on your shoulders."
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"Sure won't say no to one. This place is. Bigger." More ground to cover, if something goes wrong. The more people prepared to deal with the threat, the better. "Don't get any easier to take out when I lose it. But I'm sure you can figure it out."
She hesitates to hand over the shortcuts immediately, not out of distrust but out of caution; if Fever snaps first, the last thing they need is her knowing exactly what to do to take Daisy out before she can be stopped. Fever already has an edge for having magic.
"Valdis is a good call, if you ever need another. She stopped me the first time. Don't think she'll even ask questions."
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Which is close enough to being in her head that Fever instinctively wants to cloak her thoughts, hide herself away so that she's not so fully exposed. But that's quibbling over minor details when the real threat is multiple people ending up like Alfira, like her victims in the Green Dome. Because the thing is, if you don't worry about the aesthetics, if you make efficiency your target, you can kill a lot of people in a short time span. That they'll come back the next day doesn't make any of it fine.
Maybe in a worse time, it would have been fine, and she could have twisted it into something acceptable. Maybe when she first arrived at the ship and wouldn't have even wanted to admit something was wrong. Even right now, she can feel it under her skin, pressing outwards. Death doesn't even matter, why can't you indulge yourself, it would feel so exquisite, it misses you like your oldest lover, you were born for this-
Breathe. Don't go immediately cashing in on that pact.
"But, thanks. I'll figure out how to talk to her."
After she's had time to recover from vomiting up all of this.
"And...thank you for listening."
It matters more than she can phrase in words, someone hearing and knowing on that true level. Someone who knows how deep this runs, that it's not a matter of redirection or pushing through or ignoring it. Every morning, checking the hourglass of one's own will and strength, waiting for when you wake up and find it on its last dregs. Waiting for what will come, because you're not foolish enough to think you'll be able to always beat it.
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Daisy nods her head to the side as if to say touché or fair point. The empathy either complicates things, or makes them easier, and it's hard to know which until you're sat there talking to the woman wielding it.
"Don't mention it. Not a lot of people like us. Easier when you're not doing it totally alone." Daisy snorts. "Not that I've always taken that advice..."