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
no subject
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?
no subject
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."
no subject
(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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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 subject
"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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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..."