kalmiya "worm off the string" longwillow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
longwillows) wrote2025-06-30 09:05 am
longwillows) wrote2025-06-30 09:05 amEntry tags:
✨ somnia inbox
reach out?
longwillows) wrote2025-06-30 09:05 am
no subject
Even without checking this way, though, he knows something's missing. Someone is missing—the rustle of a forest is silent, the sweet-floral scent he'd gotten used to is gone. Thinking back, he remembers the sear of pain, something that had felt like it burned off all his nerve endings at once. And then, nothing.
Pushing himself out of the chair he'd apparently fallen asleep in, he goes looking for Sharon, nearly running right into her in the adjoining hallway. ]
Kalmiya—I don't know if she's—[ Christ, get a grip. ]—I was gonna go check.
[ The invitation to come along is silent but there. He knows they're close. ]
no subject
Fear that only sharpens when she spots Arthur's expression. The moment her gaze lands on his, that fragile thread of hope she hadn't realized she was clinging to snaps. It's all over his face—he's reaching for the same tether, and he's coming up empty-handed. The realization guts her. Fuck, no. Please. Her voice fails her, but her wide, raw blue eyes speak for her, and then she's out the front door with bootlaces still trailing loose behind her. ]
no subject
He also knows telling her to take it easy isn't going to be appreciated. Hell, he wouldn't want anyone saying it to him, either. So instead of arguing about whether she's up for the travel or not, he follows her, only stopping to grab his shoulder holster and coat hanging from the peg near the door. Both get hastily swung on as he bolts out the front door after Sharon. ]
Sharon, just–just a sec. [ He'll catch up and reach out to her shoulder, slowing her momentarily. If she does, he'll kneel down to at least tuck her laces into her boots before standing again; he doubts either of them will enjoy it if she wiped out on the pavement. With a jerk of his head, he starts off in the direction of Kalmiya's plant-consumed apartment. ]
no subject
What if even this pause costs her? ]
If she's— [ the words catch in her throat, the rest swallowed by fear. She quickens her pace, ignoring the weight in her lungs, every step heavy with dread she can't shake, unwilling to slow until they reach her door. ]
no subject
[ A blade that cuts both ways. They don't know if she's still here, no idea if she's dead or if something else happened. But, she could also be mostly fine, sitting on that insane Lisa Frank looking bedspread she loves so much, stymied by the fact she can't just reach out to them either.
The thoughts are a terrible, dreadful loop, keeping him (and Sharon, he's certain) company the entire way to Kalmiya's familiar building. It's unsettling, how the time it takes to get there is both entirely too long and a complete blur. He feels like he finally snaps back into himself once they're racing up the last flight of stairs to the floor Kalmiya's apartment is on, coming to a dim and cramped hallway. It takes all his willpower not to kick the door in, knocking on it instead with a short and recognizable pattern.
Please be alive, please be okay, please be whole—I can't do that again, I can't— ]
no subject
Kalmiya does, though.
As soon as she wakes, it is with the gasp of the drowning, a sear in her lungs and a hollowness in her chest that feels like it still drips blood down into her twisting stomach. She flings the mask as far away from her person as the size of the apartment allows, barely registering as the plants rustle in the collision, nearly toppling herself with the weight of her own throw as she underestimates a body that has changed dramatically with her loss.
It's cacophonous in her foxlike ears as some guttural sound of sorrow and rage tears from her throat; in lifting her arms to cover them from the sound, she can see that one bears more fur than the other, an asymmetrical spread of dappled purple and white with claws not fully grown in. There are hot, itchy spots beneath her suit that can probably only mean further patches of fur growth; just a few more vectors of wrongness, a few more places she could rip her own skin open so that she can crawl out of it. Ears pressed flat to her head, she curls back up on the bed and finds herself wrapped in the too-warm fur of three massive tails. She sits in the stuffy pocket of natural insulation to cry, because it is a more bearable discomfort to keep at the front of her mind than the gaping wound in her soul where tethers used to be.
It feels like an eternity before it comes to her, and like a nightmare when it does. Footsteps. Ascending the dilapidated stairwell of the complex. Fear and rage seize her heart at either end and clamp shut around it like a vice. She goes frighteningly, horribly still. A sob clenches in her chest, arrested into silence by feral instinct, halfway between well-hidden predator and prey that knows they've been spotted. She waits—playing dead, the prayer of a caught quarry, the gambit of a crafty killer.
And then she smells it. Ozone and motor oil. Burning coal and a twinge of rust.
She doesn't move, convinced she must be imagining it, that her swimming vision and the whispers in her ears mean she's fallen back into the dream. But the scents thicken as the footsteps get closer, too loud even in flattened ears, too much to bear by a broken heart.
The footsteps keep approaching. The smell chokes her. But she can't feel them. It feels so unbearably wrong to be so empty when her senses tell her that they're so close; it can't be real, it can't, it can't—
A knock. Precise. Familiar.
She bolts out of her rumpled, gaudy bed like a startled animal. First to the wall opposite the door, wary of the sound and distrustful of its meaning. Then, on padded toes, towards the threshold, one uncertain step at a time. The human precision of the motion sits far outside her perception of her own body as she unhooks the chain and unlocks the bolt, nose pressed to what little gap is left between the door and its frame, searching desperately for any tell of deception in the odors beyond.
She finds none. Her entire body throbs with a loneliness that loosens her changed joints.
With palpable hesitation, she opens the door, just enough that she can see what awaits on the other side, as the other side can now see her with pale face and wild eyes.]
no subject
She doesn't need a tether to read her. The story is written plain in the streaks on Kalmiya's golden cheeks, in the wet sheen of tears not yet dry, in the wild pain still alive in her eyes, and in the flattening of her ears. Sharon's heart crumples at the sight, drops to the pit of her stomach, and then bursts out of her chest in a ragged, gasping exhale. ] Shit, Kal, [ she breathes, voice ragged and breaking as her hand flies to her sternum, pressing hard as if she could quiet the frantic thundering there. Relief slams into her like a tide, shaking her bones, though it only seems to highlight the gaping absence where Kalmiya's tether should be. ]
Shit, [ she repeats, no better words to offer in the emotional haze, more ineloquent than usual. All she wants is to shove through the doorway, to fold Kalmiya into her arms, to press her close until the emotions go quiet. But she forces herself still, rooted in place, trembling with restraint.
Instead, Sharon turns her wet-eyed gaze toward Arthur, silently trusting him to take the first step, to know how to reach through the fragile moment without shattering it. ]
no subject
It'd been spurred by sheer curiosity, by watching the other man take one step in a dream as himself and the next one as a blonde bombshell, lovely ankles encircled by strappy heels. He'd wanted to know—for the job, for the sheer pursuit of knowledge, and perhaps for an understanding of something he'd never been able to grasp. Eames had studied him in that unnerving manner of his that so many rarely saw, and told him it was both being someone else and not at all, like playing a role and watching it all at once, a jarring sense of dissonance, dissociation. Despite his abiding love for paradox, he hadn't really been able to wrap his head around it. Sympathetic, the forger had clapped him on the shoulder and said it was because he had a terrifying awareness of himself at all times. And don't worry about it, darling, that's a good thing.
Waiting here, in front of Kalmiya's door, he thinks he finally gets it. He's here and he isn't, as if he's experiencing some kind of double-vision. One part is calm, in control, as placid as an undisturbed lake. This is the piece that urges caution, keeps him from breaking the door in because it's only been a few seconds since he's knocked.
Offset, another version is squeezed by the same ratcheting unease and fear he had when Mal had patted his cheek and said she missed him, the real him, as though they were both stuck in some kind of limbo. That feeling grows, rising like he's caught in high tide, cemented in place, with no other recourse other than to let the ocean swallow him whole.
In the near silence, the deadbolt being disengaged is shockingly loud, enough to snap him back into focus. Kalmiya peers through the crack in the doorway, eyes wide with the same kind of agony he remembers cleaving through his system. Beside him, Sharon's relief is a wave, gladly welcomed to shore. Tension holds her frame still and he realizes she's looking at him, glassy eyed and expectant.
Swallowing the hundreds of words that sit on his tongue, the spill of them threatening incoherence, he tilts his head as if to get a better angle in the light, wanting confirmation of one thing before he can relax. ]
We're not dreaming anymore—are you?
no subject
Then her gaze follows to Arthur, as reserved and hard to read as ever, save for the signs that he ran right alongside Sharon in a rush to get here. A little rumpled, faster breath, a note of perspiration in the scent that indicates exertion. The flattened slope of her ears relaxes, becoming more droopy than tense, nearly as sad as her gleaming eyes. She should be relieved that they're here, but it feels so wrong, so lonely, so cold with only her own emotions to hang onto in the strangely empty air of this new daylight.
Are you? Is she? It hadn't even occurred to her to wonder, laying far beyond what needed immediate examination, but she suddenly finds herself terrified that she might be. That dream had felt so real; the joy within so vivid, the misery so heavy. And she has never known a pain like what Sleep did to her. Was that even a dream? Or did Sleep wake her then and there to ensure that every cut was felt to its fullest, and Kalmiya now drifts along the tide of that pain into a new nightmare?
The gap of the entryway widens slowly as she releases the door and it drifts on its ancient hinges without her to hold it still. Her reach is tentative and her fingers shake as she extends her arm out towards Sharon (not Arthur, because—she doesn't want to scare him again, and if he really ran all the way here then she's already scared him enough.) She doesn't go for the hand, her memory of being punished for taking One's still too fresh; instead she pinches the hem at the front of Sharon's coat, thumbing the fabric with enough pressure to part her fur and feel the texture of the garment on her skin.
It feels real, but still so far away. So cold. Kalmiya's lip trembles as she answers, her voice small, a little torn from her scream upon waking and fearful of the idea that another cruel punishment awaits her around the bend of this interaction.] I'd better not be.
no subject
Sharon steps forward, nothing hesitant in the motion, and pulls her into an embrace. Her touch is steady and careful—strong enough to anchor, but easy enough to escape. Beneath her surface, rage stirs and burns, black and molten, threatening to crack through her restraint.
Even gods can be torn from their heavens. ]
no subject
I'd better not be will have to do, for now. Neither her nor Sharon are experienced in dreamshare to know that answer isn't particularly solid.
Still, he blows out a quiet sigh, letting Sharon step through to encircle Kalmiya in a fervent hug. Over their tether, he can feel the blazing heat of her temper, his own coalescing into icy surety.
If this was the game Sleep wanted to play, he was going to flip every fucking rule on its head. ]
No, I don't think you are. [ He finally says, suppressing the sharp steel of fury. Setting a hand on Sharon's shoulder, he reaches out with his free hand, loosely cupping the nape of Kalmiya's neck. ] You're alright, we've got you.
no subject
At first, it's just a tremble in the breath and the arms as they respectively squeeze. But then she feels the warmth of Arthur's hand at the back of her neck; even chilled faintly by the autumn air, every whorl of his fingerprints feels burnt into her skin, as if her body has forgotten the intimacy of mortal touch after centuries in stasis. The splendor of it is thrown into staggering, agonizing relief by the size of the space it's trying to fill, a painful reminder of how strong their tether had been when it was cut, how deeply that connection had spread its roots into her being—I've got you, he kept saying, and says again now in solidarity with Sharon, even though they've both been ripped from her so violently. A sickening wave of grief slams into her as the extent of the loss is made even clearer.
Maybe Sleep was right. Maybe she will never be free of her blight, and she really will want for nothing less than this.
That's when the tremble becomes a quake, a horrible lurch that starts in her chest and jerks her shoulders with every catch of her breath. It's likely to be most obvious to Sharon, who can feel the distinct hitch in airflow to Kalmiya's lungs as she presses close and buries her face against Sharon's shoulder.
She's crying. For all the bright intensity of Kalmiya's presence otherwise, it is a disturbingly silent display, indicated only by her uneven breathing and the occasional muffled sniffle. Ears and tails are all tucked tightly against her body as she seems to fold herself ever smaller to fit more completely into the embrace she's been offered—aching to fit herself into a space where she can be surrounded by safety and love.]
no subject
When the older woman settles against her, tails fanned like a living barrier at her back, the trembling starts, soft at first, then building, until it rattles through them both. The tremor finds its echo in Sharon's own heart, stirring the quiet promise of violence that hums beneath her skin. There's not much she can stand less than watching someone she cares for suffer—she'd do unspeakable things to spare them.
And yet, under all that tension, something begins to knit itself back together. It's as if the threads once cruelly severed between them had never truly broken, only hung loose, waiting for this closeness, this magnetic pull, to draw them back into place. Relief comes like a physical exhale, a heaviness lifting from her shoulders she hadn't even realized she carried—a buried fear that their bond might never heal. ]
You're not alone. [ She murmurs, her voice barely more than a breath, forehead resting against Kalmiya's tangle of pale gold hair. ] If there's one thing she can't take from you, it's that.
[ Maybe one day, Sleep will try. Maybe one day they'll press too hard, too soon. But until then... They're here. ]
no subject
Kalmiya, he'd gathered, is made of a similar tempered steel. Her whimsy masked a kind of self-conviction that surprises people. Sleep had taken it and snapped it over her knee, left her to pick up the broken pieces. He's felt the empty ache of it; the utter silence where he'd heard the quiet rustle of her thoughts, before. As she collapses inwards, to cling to Sharon and allow herself to be held up by borrowed strength, he hears the inner howl of wind, the driving pound of rain. It's muted, as if he's underwater, but the deluge fills in the gaping abyss Sleep left behind. Relief pours over him and he gives Kalmiya a gentle, reassuring squeeze.
There are a lot of things he could say, yet none of them suit as well as the truth Sharon's voiced: she's not alone. ]
CW: religious trauma, cult shit
But the core of it has gone dark, the holy spark at the heart of her being snuffed by the oppressive nature of this city. The edges of the emptiness left behind, vacant its Celestial scourge, smolder. It intersects with the wound that Sleep has left within her, two voids meeting to yawn ever wider as one; so much to be angry about, and yet the burning edges never catch.
Her anger has never been without consequence. She has shaped her entire understanding and expression of it around that simple fact. She doesn't know what to do with it in its current form, gutted of the power she's had to control her entire life; managing her innate capability for destruction had always been the north of her compass. For better or worse, she has always been led by her Celestial blood.
It's just one more missing tether. One more piece that Sleep has taken. Acting without it has been freeing, in its own way, and yet—
You're not alone.
Still, there are consequences. Still, she has managed to wound herself and others by daring to feel.
It slips in a whisper from her mouth before she can stop it, another extension of the uncontrolled trembling of her body.] I'm sorry.
[I'm sorry, echoes a much younger voice over the thrashing winds of the storm; a prayer for forgiveness ridden with tears and shame, the sensation of a clammy forehead pressed prostrate to a cool stone floor, the lingering all-over burn of skin that's gotten too much sun. I didn't mean to hurt anyone.]
no subject
And Sleep tried to take that. Tried to grind it down—to grind Kal down.
All Sharon can manage is a faint shake of her head, rejecting the apology before it fully settles, pulling back just enough to look the older woman in her silver eyes. She can't say the words out loud, but the message hums through the tether binding them: you have nothing to be sorry for. Kalmiya didn't harm Sharon. She didn't harm Arthur. That blame rests upon a being convinced she can win by breaking them apart, by inflicting pain, by turning them into islands through fear and loneliness. ]
no subject
Somewhere, he feels the flinty anger over the people that left those scars on them both. But, he can't erase the past, none of them can. All they can do is continue to move forward, one foot in front of the other. So he shoves the roil of fury aside–it doesn't have a place in this scene–and despite their lacking connection, he follows the bits and pieces of Kalmiya he knows like a string through a maze. ]
No apologizing; I'd do this all over again, even knowing the outcome. [ What's a little psychic pain between friends? ] You took a mace to a deity and she decided she didn't like it. I think you might've shaken her a bit. Gods or whatever don't enjoy being reminded they can bruise.
no subject
She doesn't say it again, but still the Murmur cradles the distant sound of the young Savior of Sanctuary, praying to be free of a weight she couldn't entirely understand: I'm sorry.
Tightly she clutches to Sharon's coat, claw tips snagging the heavy winter fabric. Even tighter is her grasp on their tethers, a castaway seeking a lifeline in a maelstrom. Cords braided from their words—the insistence that she's not alone, and she won't be alone, made manifest in the weak tendrils of warmth that anchor her to each of them.
She holds, and holds, and holds. Ash and ozone mingle at the back of her nose. It takes a long moment to find her voice again, her throat squeezed shut as her body braces for a punishment that isn't coming. It's a thin sound, drawn by the tension she can't let go of as she weeps.] I wasn't...even aiming for her. I just wanted to help him...
[Spiteful as Kalmiya can be, her defiance of Sleep was nothing so petty. Something deep, something righteous brought her up onto that pedestal; she's no big damn hero, but she can't stand to see someone emptied of their very self like that.]
no subject
When Kalmiya cannot meet her gaze, Sharon glances to Arthur instead, searching, uncertain. All she wants is to make this better, and there's no way to do that. No magic words to fix it. No gesture that'll undo what's been done. All she can offer is her presence. To stay. To be here. To remind Kalmiya that she is not alone. And that feels so painfully useless.
Kalmiya's grip tightens on the tether, and Sharon gently gathers it, cradling it the same way she had wrapped her arms around Kalmiya moments before. She is careful with it, protective of the newly reforged thread between them. As futile as simply being here feels, it is clearly what Kalmiya needs. She needs them. She needs the connection. She needs to be reminded, over and over, that she is not alone. Sharon reaches up and brushes a tear from Kalmiya's cheek, never urging her to look up, offering instead a whisper along the tether that it's okay.
The tears, the shame. Even the pain. It's okay. ]
Sounds like it might be the same thing in her eyes. [ The realization settles quickly, turning into fresh purpose—an adjustment to a goal on her list. ] You didn't do anything wrong. It just means we'll have to be smarter about how we help him from here on out.