01. crowned eagle (open)

[thetatters]

Who: John and you!
What: Local octopus acts suspicious, becomes a bird, hides from rain, and touches corpses.
When: Throughout March.
Where: The grasslands.
Warnings: Event standard warnings. Minor self-inflicted injury (feather plucking) in one prompt if requested.

[ Feel free to claim one of John's note options when tagging any prompt! ]

1. theft

When John draws down the first crumpled balloon, he freezes at the sight of its burden. That creased sheet of notebook paper is familiar, and when he unfolds it, so too are the words:

song of my soul my voice is dead
die thou unsung as tears unshed

In his mind, dark stars wheel over the city. He can smell damp island caverns and the streets of Carcosa.

John crumples the note in his fist, and pretends that his hand does not shake.

For the rest of the month, he is alert as a hunting dog. Each time he spots one of those pages, whether sitting on a convoy table or peeking out of someone's bag, he waits for an opening. For any distraction. Then he tries to palm the note and slip away, intent on destroying the evidence at first opportunity.

But these sleights of hand were more Arthur's domain than his own. He is less subtle than he thinks.

2. feathers

The storm builds. John can feel it in limbs he does not possess, in the urge to twist and coil. It is like the moonlight madness, so he suspects this is a cycle, reliable as the movement of alien suns across the sky. There is some comfort in that: a cycle need not be measured in Earth-hours to be comprehensible to him. Like the blue dawn in the Dreamlands, it will come when it comes.

Nor does the prospect of sprouting teeth and tentacles frighten him. Privately, it's the opposite. When madness takes the Convoy, he would like to wear a more powerful form, so long as Arthur's body emerges unharmed by moonset.

But he resents the half-steps, the lingering corruption. He resents the glossy black feathers that speckle Arthur's skin, the grand eagle wings edged in iridescent gold. He often stops to glare at his own black-scaled hands, the curved talons which adorn each finger.

He is not clumsy with these. The wings, the talons, he moves more gracefully than Arthur's human legs. But the changes have forced him to go shirtless, and thus put too much on display: Arthur's skinny ribs, the slash and toothy bite mark at his belly, the gunshot scars over his stomach and chest. John has scavenged lengths of yellow fabric in half a dozen shades, and wears these as cloak and cowl, always hooded over his face.

Some days, these threadbare robes are clean. Others, they are speckled with blood from where he's plucked at feathers and picked at scales, furious at such corruption of Arthur's body. Only his left arm is always glossy-feathered and untouched.

3. corpse lore

John has learned what happens when he gets caught in the rain. So he waits nervously for the gaps between squalls, hunched in the safety of his truck or taking shelter in a crumbling ruin. Anything to stay dry.

Each time the rain stops, he picks his way through the field of Husks. He crouches, grim and harried as a graverobber, to lay his left hand upon a silver corpse. Always he hisses a gasp as though burned, recoils, and stalks away again.

Should he spot anyone else scavenging nearby, he tries to act casual. He waits out the rain in an abandoned building, stalling for privacy, acting as though nothing has happened at all.

Comments

[serialmurderbot]

SecUnit keeps a hand by Levi's shoulder, steadying him with faint contact even as it keeps most of its focus on John. Around them the plains fill with the howl of wind and the distant thudding roar of water hammering down, but despite the oncoming sound it doesn't waver.

The last thing it wants right now is to get the three of them into a building during a storm where it might have to get in between them again. It starts a background search of its media, the techniques it's seen the colony solicitor use on two disagreeing parties.

... While it's at it, there's footage of Doctor Mensah settling an argument between two of her kids, and it pulls that too, doing its best to mimic her 'I'm not fucking around' planetary leader tone.

"Right. You," it says, gesturing with its still-extended arm towards John, "Explain. You," this for Levi, "One tap if you think it's accurate, two if it's not. I don't have a lot of fucking patience right now."

[solitarysoul]

Levi glares daggers at John, low growl rumbling in the back of his throat. He hasn't figured out how to control the growling yet, but right now he doesn't care.

He gives SecUnit a nod.

[thetatters]

God damn it. He will have to walk a thin line, if Levi is being asked to confirm or deny.

"I don't fucking know! I just— I stepped into the storm, and..." He was a masterful liar, once. And he remembers the look on Blake's face when she awoke to what she'd done, the look on Jack's face when he'd turned back to himself. John curls further in on himself to hide his weeping eyes, his voice gone genuinely brittle with pain and— and whatever else. Christ, what would Jack think of him now?

"I felt myself changing. The power, the anger. I, I grabbed him. I'm not going to fucking do it again, can we all put our goddamn guns away!" He coils tighter, growls a thin miserable rumble of sound, and peers out at them with ichor still streaming from the gaps in his pale mask. His eyes are a vivid too-bright gold that leave sunspots in their wake. "He got something in my eyes, I can't fucking see!"

[serialmurderbot]

Then how'd you see the gun feels like the obvious shitty retort, but now that SecUnit has had more time to evaluate John's behavior, and more importantly, his physical status, it can put together that black ichor on his shoulder with the gun Levi's holding, and recognize it for the mirror of blood on his face. Levi's not the only one who came out of this hurt. Does that make this better or worse? It spends .25 seconds weighing this before it decides it doesn't care.

It keeps its posture tense, the only sign of the shifting probabilities of its calculation of the situation here being the lack of increased pitch from the gun in its arm. "Great. If either of you try this again I'm snapping whatever you used to do it into little pieces. Even if it's still attached to your body." Not the best threat it's ever heard, but it's working under pressure here, okay.

"You're saying you just stepped into the rain and got so mad you attacked someone for no reason." It sounds... skeptical. "Not just for a stupid reason, but for no reason."

It doesn't look directly towards Levi, but the angle of its helmet indicates it's waiting for him to give his input as best he can, at the moment.

[solitarysoul]

"It w--" Levi attempts to protest and defend himself at the threat but that's all he manages to get out. He acted in self defense, he shouldn't be under the same threat as the tentacle monster!

Glowering, he removes one hand from his gun so he can tap SecUnit's arm twice.

[thetatters]

John curls in upon himself, tendrils roiling around him like the thunderclouds overhead. He grits a sigh through unseen teeth.

"... I have problems with my memory." There is something genuinely brittle, defensive, to his tone. That is real, and it's the sort of weakness he doesn't care to put on display. He has spent so much of his existence not knowing who he is or what he's done. "There are parts of my mind I prefer not to examine. Violence... comes as a reflex. It is not something I'm proud of."

He wipes the ichor from his eyes with one coiling tendril, and though one continues streaming, the other peers out at Levi. Hunched over himself, his head hung low before the seething mass of his body, John makes eye contact.

"I... I am trying not to be that way anymore."

Shame. That's what tightens his voice alongside pain. Add this to the long tally of things he would rather Arthur never know, things unworthy of their time together.

"Levi was only defending himself against a monster," he says to SecUnit, voice steadier now, "and you need not hold him accountable."

[serialmurderbot]

Levi's protest earns a very pointed, "I mean it." No more attempted murder on its watch.

The helmet is turned directly towards John, now. It's not a comfortable situation, with the shifting of John's form when he moves. It's the opposite effect from what it's experienced before, where its scanning capabilities were trying to tell it that there was nothing in the space its organic eyes could percieve - this time its data processing insists there must be something there, but its organics are determined to percieve it as a visual mess of shadows-feathers-something else that makes its organic neural tissue start screaming.

Maybe that's why it feels the need to be just as imposing as it can manage, at the moment, but something about that isn't adding up, for SecUnit. Maybe it's just that in its experience, people fight about something. Even when it's something stupid like who left the cracker wrapper in the sink, it's something, even if that something is a stand-in for something else more impossible to fight.

"A reflex to what," it asks, impatiently.

[solitarysoul]

Levi snorts but doesn't try to speak. He wants to see how John will respond right now.

[thetatters]

John growls like a beast, low and resonant beneath the rain. He curls further in on himself, then snaps outwards like fabric caught in the wind.

"Fucking— fine! To being seen as a fucking monster!" He splays his clawed hands, flares those broad black wings. Worse, the tendrils lick up around him like flame or like curling silk, dizzying to watch. "I have kept this hidden. This nightmare that I am. I—" His voice goes ragged and deep with frustration. "I've been trying so fucking hard to... to stay human."

The best he can pretend to be, in this world, is like Jack: someone who has always been corrupted, and now only fights against the draw to let it show.

"Now can we get out of this goddamn storm?"

[serialmurderbot]

"You don't give orders here."

Said as a point of order - it says that because it's both true and because it needs time to process that, unexpectedly more time than usual, because it has to deal with a sudden performance reliability wobble as both organic and technological components throw out errors at whatever John's doing, and it has to focus past that in case this turns into John trying a last-ditch attempt at getting out of being cornered. Or at fleeing. Still, the howling of the wind and the oncoming rain are making its risk assessment spike, and the pattern of scales that have grown in along its arms are itching in a sharply uncomfortable way.

'Staying human', what the fuck. Gross.

It doesn't tilt its head, but it can hear Levi's still-rasping breathing, and he isn't talking still - that definitely requires medical attention, which can't be administered out here.

"I don't care who you are, but if you threaten or kill anyone in this Convoy, I will turn you inside out." Not great, as far as threats go, but - the important part is the deadly serious tone it uses for it, not so much the content of the threat itself. To Levi, it says, "Keep the gun."

cw: kids sent to war

[solitarysoul]

Being seen as a monster? Not exactly, since the thing he called Jack was still human...or appeared human, at least. Was the Kaiser a monster? Probably. There were weird stories about him and he definitely used some sort of magic when the fought. Not to mention just shrugging off the gunshot from Pav.

Levi hadn't trusted John before (really, he didn't trust much of anyone here) and now he definitely wouldn't. Though he's not sure if the association with the Kaiser or the attack was acting stronger on that. Probably the Kaiser, if that asshole hadn't tried to take over he'd never have to go to war. He, and so many others, would still have childhoods. That was on the Eastern Union more than the Kaiser, but he was the one who started it all.

He doesn't give two shits about the tentacles or the weird face (even if looking at John was giving him a headache). It was different than he'd seen here before, but he really stopped caring if people looked weird. During Termina some of the moonscorched had remained...well, not sane but not hostile. And here? Here it seemed like almost everyone was going through changes. At least John still had thumbs.

He grunts. Of course he's going to keep the gun.

cw: gore mention

[thetatters]

It's a perfectly good threat. It's the sort John has used on people— it's something John has done to people, when he wasn't calling himself John. He can clearly picture what Arthur's skin would look like if it were peeled away.

So he glares balefully back, silent, still streaming ichorous tears. And grits, "I understand."

Arthur gave him so much shit, their final day together, about giving orders. John's not giving fucking orders. No one here knows the goddamn meaning of giving orders. But he— he was hasty, yes. Reckless.

Cruel. And it didn't even solve his problem.

"It won't happen again." He levels one last parting look at Levi, shoulders bowed, tendrils still seething at his feet. "I'm going back to the Convoy." And unless anyone puts a gun back in his face, he pulls himself forward through the rain like an octopus across the sea floor, and slinks away.