[se] understanding ashes

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

Leafchange’s looming presence signified another wake of seasonal rounds; either meant to haunt or cherish, and he was never quite sure which to pick. More apt for the former, for the wounds and grief to press in between shoulder blades, ribs, and the bones of his spine, to click and weave their way along the back of his mind in traces of loss. For now, he bowed his head through the doorframe of the Citadel, clamoring closer to a shrine he hadn’t spoken towards in quite some time.

Eventually he’d have to make amends again. Perhaps when everything was clearer. More certain, more sure.

His gloved hands placed a starry offering upon the mantle, before wandering further into the midst, and sitting upon the floor, casting off the gauntlets, opening the width of his bag. Within were several pieces already formed for lanterns – plain, unadorned, because he hadn’t picked the newest to add to the symbolic artifacts. He’d already hastened some for his mother, father, Huyana, Rexanna, Kiada (now since lingering with its own beacon of light), and several others over the years. Who or what had been lost in the past seasons?

Did he make one for those disappeared, gone, from his life, even if they weren’t perished? He had no intention of christening one for Morgan, and remained unaware of the wake of demises in the past weeks. So instead, he placed the already forged items on the cold stone, chin in his hands, studying and staring them over.

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

As she passes by, newly laden with her wonderful bag, Hotaru presses her fingertips to the shrine and sends a simple prayer to Frey. It hasn’t been long since they parted, but the Valkyrie is a woman of faith - surprising to some, perhaps - and the action brings peace to herself more than anything.

Deimos’ familiar bulk is impossible to miss, and the blonde diverts her path easily to join him. The artifacts and materials spread around on the cold stone make it clear what he is planning to work on. Why he chose here of all places is something Ru can’t even pretend to understand, but even his unfortunate choice in places to sit won’t dissuade her from forcing her companionship upon him.

“I lost Ru’in’s lantern in the fire that took the house in Torchline,” she admits softly, from where she stands just behind his shoulder. Of course Sunjata had thrown Lusea’s lantern in her face after they’d burned the guild, but that was par for the course. Only his hurts and losses mattered. “I don’t even know if making one would help. Kiada said she was unsuccessful in freeing his soul.” Hotaru thinks of it from time to time, wondering if her niece will never seek to finish her quest now that she is Ascended. Why would she see that fate as a curse now that she has chosen it for herself?

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

Ru’s voice broke him out of the silent reverie, twisting his head back over his shoulder to glance, and then falling back into the solemnity. Something in his jaw flexed and twitched, a muscle probably used to being overworked, pondering if he should even say the words forming on his tongue. “I asked Ludo a few years back,” when Kiada was dead and Amalia was gone and Hotaru had disappeared and he hadn’t had much else to go on but fringes, memories, and the need to fix all the broken shards in his life. It hadn’t solved anything. “If I could complete Kiada’s quest for her.” His fingers went to trace over one of the lantern bases, flickering away pieces of dust. “It said I needed the lantern Jigano had.” And since he’d vanished into the ether, there hadn’t been a possibility. “And then the Ascended tried to eradicate the monsters.”

So therein – maybe it couldn’t be done.

He sat straighter, moving over and giving her a piece of space if she was inclined. “I have made some for my parents and Huyana, even if I will not be able to see them.” He shrugged his shoulders, because sometimes it was just enough to represent pieces, memories, despite their souls and existences in another world entirely. He had been too, once. “If it makes you feel better, why not.”

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

She stands solemnly behind him as he speaks, and finds she couldn’t move if she desired. Awash with a painful love for him that makes her knees weak. When she does move, she doesn’t actively register it, but her hand finds his shoulder. Less a mountain now that he is sitting and she is standing. “Thank you, Deimos. For trying.” Her hand squeezes at his shoulder, holding there for a moment to collect herself and knowing no further words are needed. He will understand the gravity she feels, the depths of her appreciation.

Taking in a slow breath, her hand falls away and she folds gracefully to sit beside him, their knees knocking slightly. “I agree. Will you help me make one? I’ve yet to make one for Romina, and Ru’in’s needs remade.” He had known them in their youth, even if only briefly before his demise, and she trusts he will make a beautiful symbol regardless of how well he’d known them.

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

Half a smile curled into the corners of his mouth, mostly to keep away the melancholy, begrudging and accepting of the squeeze on his shoulder. Perhaps that was one of his many flaws – always trying, even when the impossibility stared him right in the face. That it took a long time for the rest of the void to sink in, collecting over bones and fragments.

“Sure,” he accepted, moving over one of the lantern bases already started towards her. “I did not know who to make one for this year anyway.” The death spiral from beyond hadn’t melded its way to his ears yet – otherwise there probably would’ve been one for Bastien, to match with Rexanna’s. Instead, he had a horde back home, hanging with care until the season’s end.

Presuming he could start on Ru’in’s, he began to craft a darker slate of wood between his hands – remembering a boy fond of engineering, with a larger than life personality – ensuring the carving along the sides had a mammoth tusk.

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

Neither is keen on prolonged emotional moments, and Hotaru is grateful for the lantern base that is pushed her way. It's a nigh flawless construction, though she's not surprised given its creator. His easy acceptance was expected but appreciated in the moment as it always is. Perhaps appreciated even more now after she has seen how quickly things - and people - can change.

Silence seems the better choice. Taking up her own lantern with hands that are steady (for now) the Valkyrie begins to paint instead. Opalescent colors of pink and blue, white and green. Thinned enough to be nearly transparent over the glass. It would look beautiful with a flame inside.

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

He watched intermittently, eyes coming up every once in a while from examining his lantern, into surveying hers. Iridescent and lustrous structures, pigments, flickers of paint coming across the base riddled some manifestations of a daughter lost. Then he’d return carefully to Ru’in’s representation, permitting a ghost, a hint, of dark sienna to be embedded into the metal lacquering, so that when it turned it highlighted the figments and hues. Though usually easily coaxed into silence, sometimes a preference, his low rumble started again, quiet enough so there were no echoing murmurs from the otherwise empty expanse. “You can tell me more about them, if you want. I did not know them well enough.” Before he faded into death.

And if she didn’t want to – if it was too painful, then he’d let it be. No push. No shove. No prying.

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

The offer has her brush stroke slowing, bristles spreading over glass with unnoticed increased pressure. Ru slowly retracts it from the surface, considering. When was the last time she spoke of her lost children? To someone who knew them at that, even just briefly? It is a double edged sword, this grief. To remember the good times is a balm, but it inevitably leads to the reminder of their loss.

“Kiada and Romina were nearly as inseparable as the twins themselves,” she starts, voice soft. The brush strokes return shortly thereafter, if only to provide something else to focus on. “They were quite a collective, those four. Kiada and Ru’in had a spark for each other nobody could overlook, even young as they were. Romina, I think, was torn daily between wanting to beat Kiada off with a stick and wanting to be sisters - just not in a way that meant giving up Ru’in.” Ru laughs slightly, recalling the war in her daughter’s eyes every time the Harpy came around for reasons unrelated to the Banshee’s existence. Namely, Ru’in. “And the twins themselves…they were so close to one another. Like dolls that shared a limb. So unlike how Raeden and I were.” And oh how she had been grateful for that. That her children were spared that fate, of competitiveness and broken communication. It may have repaired itself later in life, but Hotaru would never get those lost years back. Gone due to her own foolishness.

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

Family lost was a given in their lives; tenderness and devotion and love so easily granted and taken away. Fleeting little moments were sometimes all they had, and he listened to some of Ru’s as she described the differences, the qualities, of fragments long gone, but only in the tangible. He’d half expected her to refuse, because he understood the weight, the pain, and the nuances of all those proportions perished and lamented, but still so alive in the heart and mind and soul.

So he smiled as he worked, listening all the while – remembering the children as he’d seen them last – not when Kiada tried to reach a lost soul and ultimately failing, not when she wore devastation plainly on her sleeves, not when Ru etched another fallen star into her chest. “Were you and Raeden not close then?”

Carving another vague outline into Ru’in’s lantern, he considered another fault and flaw in his own way of life – damned and doomed to lose once more. The grin faded and diminished, gaze askance on the floor somewhere. “Kiada came to see me. She is going to the Grounds.”

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

It is an ache that she is familiar with, but a pleasant one, like a sore limb being gently and tentatively stretched out. It will always hurt. Until the day she meets them again in Mort’s arms it will hurt. But she can only lead by example, living in spite of all that loss, because it’s what she would’ve taught her children to do if they had had the chance to grow old enough to learn it.

Her laugh is more amused the second time around. “Oh, certainly not. At least not at first. She was quite like our mother - elegant, beautiful, domineering. I was not, at that age.” Ironic, considering how their roles had reversed as they’d become older. “I was the shy and awkward shadow she endured but couldn’t wait to rid herself of. She loved me, but hadn’t found the middle ground of barbed comments and expressions of love.” Setting down her brush, Hotaru holds the lantern up to the grey of the sky beyond, squinting critically at it. “Only after I left the Hills and we had a few years apart did we become close.”

The divergence from the topic stills her hands, and a slow frown overtakes her face. A maelstrom of emotion in her breast she can’t begin to pick apart. “It is her choice, just as her Ascension was. Though I wish she did not try to inspire guilt in us for our own choices, but she is still young.” Young and alone, pushing away the only family she has left because of their differences in faith and fealty. As if Rexanna had been much of a mother, it’s true, but Kiada had yet to approach Ru at all. In fact the woman had only seen Kiada again after her death as a face in the crown of her coronation. It is a wound she can’t ignore. But also a choice she cannot force the young woman to make.

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

Deimos fought off an eye roll at the inclusion and subtle comments about her own beauty, opting to snort under his breath instead. More manifestations of other years pressed against Ru’in’s lantern – an opulent sky flanked by mountain ridges, summits not crestfallen, but rising, rising, rising along the sanctions, as if the boy and the man had become a part of them too. Only thereafter did he place smaller images of them assembled on the valleys, intermingled in between tundra lines and evergreen sanctities. “At least you had that time together,” after the hazardous years – when one didn’t know what to do with the other.

The Sword hadn’t meant to veer the conversation into the languishing depths, but by habit and his guilt-laden brow, Ru must have sensed where it was heading. She’d done well to stop it in its tracks too, because he parted his lips to cast some other rancorous shame, before his jaws and teeth clicked back together. There were a few barbs he swallowed down on the forefront, because it had been Kiada’s choice, and he’d never been one to push or cajole or force anyone into those ranges. “Still hurt just the same,” the monolith added quietly, having offered years upon years of support, strength, dominion, and protection, all coming to a point where she couldn’t even be bothered to look at him.

But he placed her lithe figure beside Ru’in’s on the landscape of the lacquer, staring it over until he could move onto the others.

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

A wry, sad smile paints itself upon her lips. Raeden’s loss is merely another monument of grief built in the wasteland of her memories. The loss of her children may be a crack in the tectonic plates of her foundation, but Raeden’s is no less affecting. “Yes, and there is always the hope she is well, wherever she is. Her and her children made it through the portal last I saw.” Nieces and nephews she would never know. The hard part of having a large family was losing them.

The purse of his lips when she finally lifts her gaze makes her own twitch in amusement, or as much as she can feel given the topic at hand. With how close they sit, his words award her the opportunity to reach out and squeeze his knee, offering physical comfort when she can. “I know,” she whispers, a voice only for him, aware of how much it means for him to have said the words so plainly. How great the pain must be for him to speak of it at all. “She still has not spoken to me since…since her death. I’m glad she at least still feels she can talk to you, if nothing else.” If nothing more. Part of Ru resents the young girl for her childishness, for hurting the Valkyrie and the Sword so willfully when both would do nearly anything for her. But she has been hurt so much by others that her own prickliness is nearly inevitable. Still she knows if Kiada sought her out this very moment, Hotaru would bend like a sapling in the wind to accommodate her feelings. Such was the way of family in the Valkyrie’s eyes. Adorning the lantern with small white stones in lieu of something more precious like pearls, the woman languishes in the quiet of the street, letting the grief and memories ebb and flow naturally instead of fighting them down as she does nearly every other day.

DEIMOS

ache first, but then let the cuts close
spit out the blood

They could always build testaments and columns of their grief, but it was the way they forged onward that cast him askew. Too many times he’d been told not to be bogged down by memories, to not root himself so precariously in the dark that there was no longer any light to see, to not be mired in the past and have no future – and the notions instilled of those beacons never yearning, never wanting, to be the reason he dimmed. So he tried and tried and tried, and then would do so for Ru too. “Then, if she is anything like yourself, she and her own have found a way to prevail.” A sincere smile to follow, even if it was aimed at the ground.

Mulling over the foundations of pains wasn’t going to get him anywhere either, though her support was appreciated in the slightest alteration of his gaze, in the Attuned measures of their bond. Sometimes its weight, the aches, the numbing, binding wakes, were the most familiar in his chest; so accustomed to their thresholds that the exposure was often harsher. He sighed as she relented her own semblances with Kiada – which was none at all – and all that could possibly mean. “Have you reached out?”

Thereafter, he turned the lantern around, seeking out her approval for the depictions and images granted, or if he was to scrap the whole thing and start anew.

watch your body pull itself back together
then let your soul do the same

you are such a soft and messy thing, nobody knows how to take care of you

Dwelling may become a rot clinging to their insides when performed too frequently, but perhaps that is the point of the festival only being once a year. To let the sorrow be cathartic in its ephemerality. It’s easier for her lips to twitch in an amused smile at his words, now, with the freshly risen memories of better days to buffer the sorrow. His own smile may be directed towards the ground, but the corner curl still warms her, and the warm noise in her throat is not quite a laugh but it pairs well with the gentle brush of her shoulder against his. “Gods pray she never ends up here or we’re all doomed,” she remarks, mirthful. Raeden would take Caido by storm.

Sighing as the mood shifts with the currents of their conversation, Ru sets her paintbrush down and rolls the ache from her shoulders and neck. Perhaps she should visit her spa before she returns to the Greatwood. “No…I don’t know what to say. Somehow you’re better than me at that, though Gods only know how.” She tries for levity, but not with much effort; Deimos can read her as plainly as ink upon a page, there is no hiding her feelings. The failure and guilt she still feels for Kiada’s death mulled together with her own conflicting feelings about The Voice and her ilk.

Taking in the lantern he has made, the Valkyrie’s proud face softens into something tender and vulnerable. One hand, free of paint due to her steady hands, rises to gently touch the metal edge of the lantern as if it were the face of the child it’s made for. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” He will hear her, subdued though her vocals might be. That’s what matters.