sixthiterationlogs | [OTA] every single night's a fight

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[OTA] every single night's a fight

WHO: Jude Sullivan
WHERE: 6I Village; Various
WHEN: Mid October and onward
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Epilepsy symptoms, including hallucinations

Each season seems to come with its triggers, like crazy can relate to allergies. Winter was easiest, like the cold took too deep a root in the world to let it affect him. He was calm and collected at the end of the year; his spine kept to its purpose and he didn't blink away so many insects and shadows that weren't there. Spring was always long rains, trapping him indoors, storms breaking pressure behind his eyes and making them pop with color, making shapes crawl in the shadows of the water running over windows. Spring stranded the truck in churning mud and clipped the line that told him to care, so that he'd sit twenty minutes with a foot on the gas, snapping out of it when tires found earth and shoved him forward. Summer was the worst, most dangerous. Late humid heat boiled his head in his skull, and those were the months he could really snap: fall over in a pile of elbows, sob uncontrollably, disappear into a white hot rage and come out not knowing why he'd felt any of it.

He doesn't know if it's leaf mold or just the haunted atmosphere of Autumn, but it's when the shadows crawl the longest, when he has to decide if the thing in the corner is real based on a twitch in his pinky or a smell no one else seems bothered by.

Looking at the leaves, his birthday must have passed. The anniversary too, and it's better not to know. Better to just keep making paper while the weather allows him to use the wood and take the work outside. He's started experimenting with the fallen leaves, and they don't add the color he thought they might--but new batches of paper hold their fragile skeletons on the surface. He doesn't know how much to stockpile for the winter, but--it's the last thing a lot of people would complain about running out of.

The shorter the days get, the more he can be found scavenging the wooded areas; the more his staked out blankets and drying paper are replaced with him out in the yard, chopping wood while it's dry on the ground. Sometimes he tosses what look like perfectly good branches away from himself, wiping his hands furiously on his denim jacket.

Sometimes, though always mid-morning or mid-afternoon, he squints down a path at a familiar enough figure, only to watch the world pass through it. By the time the sun sets, he can't be sure the person even exists, and he swallows down the urge to ask. It's always just been in his head.

When he takes meals at the inn, he keeps his head down in his portion, refusing to look at certain corners, out certain windows. When he sits on his porch or on a rock in the southern field, his sketches of the trees include pale figures or bright eyes. For those who venture out at night, he's sometimes on the porch or also wandering, and there are dark circles growing under his eyes behind the lengthening fall of his hair, his already quiet nature burrowing down as if to prepare for winter, as he struggles with a stress that compounds its source.

[Jude's struggling with some hallucinations as the weather changes--though some of those figures might just be villagers waxing and waning from existence. His hallucinations tend to be shadow-figures and insects, and you can choose if your character notices his behavior or just his general not-doing-great.]

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He takes them up with heavy-browed curiosity, not realizing some kind of exchange was in order. Maybe she just wanted to show it off, or show it to someone who would understand the work that went in. They're good--each subject recognizable not just in form, but in mood and movement. There's Isabelle, not entirely gone so long as Clary could put her on a page. There's one of the dogs attached to someone in the village.

Jude shuffles the pages carefully, not wanting to smear one by laying it under the next. A hum of recognition for Isabelle, but otherwise silent observation, until he gets to the angel. It sticks out to him--brings a snatch of his mother's voice, a sensitive itch along his tattooed arm.

It looks less like something Clary imagined, something he recognizes from stories, and more like one of the things he forgot. The demon on the next page is so close to something Jude might draw himself, he winds up holding the pages side by side, looking between them. "These are good," he remembers to say, but only barely, still blinking down at the pictures.

It was something like an exchange but not in the traditional sense. Each drawing was a glimpse into the other person like a window to their soul. Without even knowing her, Jude had allowed her to see his work and she wanted to pay him back for that. Clary rarely shared her art but with Jude, she could make the exception.

She waited a little anxiously, unsure of what his reaction might be. When he paused at the image of the angel and the demon, she suddenly felt more nervous. She couldn't help but draw them. They were a piece of her new world. The world of the Shadowhunters and as creepy as demons were, she didn't want to forget what she was fighting, what was at home waiting for her.

Not that her father had the cup, nothing would stop him from controlling the demons.

"You think so?" She asked as she looked between him and the two pictures that he was currently looking at. "Do you know what those are?" She asked, the question wasn't that strange given the situation though there was still an awkwardness to her voice that she couldn't hide.

"I wouldn't say so if I didn't think so," he says plainly, still studying the drawings side by side. It doesn't mean anything: plenty of people latch onto these kinds of subjects, especially growing up with talk of it every Sunday. That's just--average. It's normal.

Jude tries to distract himself with an actually critical eye, like she's a classmate he's been given to review. He doesn't decide to elaborate out loud, but--he can see where she's probably as early into schooling as he is. Good talent for symbols and composition. Needs more life drawing to nail down the way people actually render, but--she has that eye. And you don't--you don't draw angels and demons from life anyway.

Her question brings him back. "I think most people do," he points out, knowing their homes are similar enough to include a New York with Starbucks every few blocks. "Do you draw this kind of thing a lot?"

Clary's head tilted to the side as she looked over at Jude. She didn't know why she asked a question that he had already answered. She was a little surprised. She hadn't thought her drawings were anything amazing. Her mom was always better and Clary hoped to be as skilled as her some day.

You could absolutely draw angels and demons from real life.

"Not until recently. I've always drawn syombls like these." She took one of the pages that had an image of the creature that she had seen in her house when she went looking for her mother. Around the edge of the page were runes like the ones burned into her skin. Clary had completely forgotten that the runes on her neck and arms were visible. They were easy to forget when she wasn't using them.

The angel, she thought to herself. That was Jace: beautiful, slim, strong, with bright vibrant blue eyes. The picture was in black and white but when Clary looked at it she could see his eyes staring back at her. She shook her head and coughed to clear her voice.

"I just pull things from memory. Little things that remind me of home but not exactly. If that makes sense." She wasn't going to admit that she's seen things that were exactly like what she had drawn.

It makes too much sense. Even his teachers wanted to know how he decided to piece together the forms in his works. His scholarship had been partially based on it--how his sketches of monstrosities were like a particularly morbid life-drawing session. Gesture drawings, light studies--and all he'd been trying to do was understand the world he sometimes saw.

"What do you remember angels and demons from," he asks, a bit too direct. He backs off: "Movies or something?"

The tattoos he's used to, since Isabelle. Looking at the pages now, he wonders if Clary designed them, like some friendship thing. Not that he knows what kind of friends go for matching neck tattoos.

Clary had a similar experiance with her scholarship. She had been accepted thanks to the runes and drawings that had unknowingly been influenced by the Shadowhunter world. They had felt so natural for her to draw, only to find out the memories of those creatures and these runes had been hidden inside her head all along. Magnus Bane had been the Warlock to lock away her memories.

"Or something." She replied with an awkward smile. Her mother had always told her that she was a bad liar.

Clary didn't expect Jude to believe her if she said that she saw demons and Fea and whatever else. It had accidentally slipped out when she spoke too Fenris and, while Isabelle wasn't here, Clary had figured there was a reason she hadn't talked about the downworlders or anything involving them.

"Why do you ask? Do you um... have experiance with these sorts of things?" Angels and demons? Clary hadn't meant to sound that ridiculous...

Did he--

No, no he didn't. He just saw things, just like his mother, and he didn't talk about it to Charlie because it would break Charlie's heart or it would kill him, working to pay what it would take to fix Jude's head.

"Just--just the stories. Sunday school, movies, that stuff," he answers, cagey enough that he swaps one drawing over the other and has to force himself to hand them back gently. "You know, like the comic I said my friend wanted to do."

Clary took the pictures back with a half hearted smile. She hadn't realized it when she asked the question, but she'd been hoping for another answer.

"Yeah. Me and my best friends comic was like that too. A lot of crazy stuff. I mostly just drew what he had in mind. Except for the symbols. I put those in the comic." The same symbols that were burned onto her skin. Clary knew it looked like a tattoo though she imagined a tattoo wouldn't hurt as badly as having the stele pressed to her skin.

"I've always liked angels. I used to dream about them when I was little." She hadn't had those dreams since arriving here.

Maybe it isn't a strange thing in and of itself, but it feels like a strange thing to say out loud. To talk about dreams at all, much less dreams about--religious iconography. Jude can't say he's had the same, but--some old dreams do come to mind. Bright, abstract things that always had him missing mom when he woke up.

He still has them sometimes, but they're not as bright now.

"What are those," he asks, instead of pursuing the topic. Isabelle had explained some of it, but he'd--well, if he didn't do a thing every day, he didn't always remember it. Things people told him could be like that too. "With the tattoos and all?"

"My marks?"

It was easy to forget the marks that littered her neck and arms. She didn't always see them and it was easy to forget that they were visible to non-shadowhunters while she was in the village. "Oh right." She chewed on her bottom lip as she tried to come up with an answer.

"These are runes of the angel azreil." She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "That's what I was told anyway." They didn't do anything here but they usually augmented her abilities.

Some tattoos you can shrug off: Jude doesn't think that's really the case when you have that many of a set. Sure, she drew them over and over in her notebooks, but--it's not like every kid at his high school was getting multiple tattoos of that geometric S.

Just the one, and just the one guy.

Okay, three guys.

"Did you get that told to you before or after you got all those," he asks, gesturing at the tattoo on her neck. He's not really one to talk, with a wing on his arm, but he still doesn't remember how the fuck that happened.

"After, technically."

Clary winched at the memory. Jace had saved her life by potentially risking her life. If she had been Mundane, she would have gone crazy from the power of the rune. As it was, she was a Shadowhunter and the rune had cleared the poison from her body and healed her. It was still creepy that he had tattooed something onto her neck though.

She didn't know how much she should say or if it even fucking mattered. After another moment Clary rolled her shoulders in a shrug. "I was attacked and this rune saved me. I don't remember the details because I was passed out but it was weird and since then I've gotten more. They're suppose to augment power but they don't do anything here." There, she said it. If Clary was going to be stuck here by herself then she was going to talk about all the weird shit in her life. She really didn't want to keep all that information trapped in her head; it would have been maddening to dance around every topic.

It wasn't like New York where you could default to the local sports team.

"So you don't--remember getting the first," he asks, latching onto and trying to clarify passed out. It's all just a little too similar, a little too close to home. There are no runes on his arm, and none of the shapes in Clary's sketches or on her body look like something his mother ever had. But a tattoo she might not remember, from some strange group, related to angels?

It's not that he wants to remember, really, but if the tattoo on his arm is supposed to do something, it would be nice to know. Even if it might be fine here, unable to do anything at all. "Can I show you something?"

"That would be correct." Clary nodded her head in a brisk motion. She didn't realize that the situation that she was describing was similar to Jude's. She honestly didn't think anyone could relate. Her introduction into the Shadowhunter world had been startling and unusual by all ordinary standards.

She blinked, a little surprised at his question. "yeah sure." Clary had no idea what it could be, except that it probably had something to do with what they had just been talking about.

"What is it?"

There's no way to do this that isn't fucking weird, and Jude's not one with foresight enough to ask, can I show you something under my shirt instead of barely enough information to get by. But he doesn't have the luxury of the tattoo running up over his neck.

Hopefully the discussion of tattoos is enough of a clue. "My mom," he starts, but that's too much, too soon. He doesn't want to talk about mom. He doesn't want to talk about any of this, at all. Sighing, he grips the bottom hem of his shirt and tugs it up, untangles it from his arms and hair, and shakes the hair out of his face. There's only the one wing done, an old itch by now, nowhere near as bad as it was back home. The linework of feathers starts at his shoulder blade and curves up the shoulder, sweeps down his arm. The longest feather touches his elbow.

"When I was at school, I blacked out for a few days. I woke up with this."

A voice in the back of Clary's head told her to look away. That's what you were supposed to do when a boy stripped in front of you but the logical part of her mind told her that there was a reason that he was stripping and that looking away would probably defeat the purpose.

Even with that logic she probably shouldn't stare.

Her eyes drop to the tattoo and Clary has to resist the urge to reach out and run her fingers along the edges. His story sounded like bad judgment but the more she looked at it the more she wondered if that was the case. "An angel."

Bright green eyes looked up at Jude with an accusatory stare. "Are you one of the Nephilim too? A shadowhunter?" She hadn't seen anything like this but there was a lot that Clary hadn't seen.

He's clearly struck at something, and it doesn't make him feel any better. This is why he so rarely roots around for answers, does his best to just put his head down and make it one day at a time. It hadn't gotten him through school unscathed, and it hadn't done that here either--sometimes a thing was too big and too powerful to be ignored, but it let him get up and go to class. Sometimes.

Holding the shirt loosely in front of himself, his shoulders hunch, and he wonders if it would be weirder to immediately put the shirt back on.

"I don't know what those are," he stresses, or rather--releases some of his own stress. "My mom talked about angels, but that was just--she grew up in some cult. She was crazy. Is crazy. But she never said anything about shadowhunters."

Clary can't help but ask questions. She hated not knowing and once that shred of doubt was planet, she had to know everything.

"Shadowhunters are the decedents of the Angel Azrael." Or something like that. "They are tasked with fighting the demons that slip into Earth. The human side of Earth." All of the portals and travel has confused Clary a little bit and she hadn't had the time to sit down and get an explanation for everything.

The tension in Clary's shoulders fled. She could tell that Jude was a little uncomfortable and she really wanted to talk about this. She kept her voice even and as calm as she could manage. "Maybe it's called something different where you're from. My mom..." Clary paused. "My mom never told me and I found out when demons attacked my home." She had already told Jude more than anyone else, might as well tell him everything.

The problem is, his mom had told him things--impossible things, the kind of shit that kept her locked up years after the trial. Related as the two seem, he can't put it into words: my mom drowned me. Even if Clary might know some reason why. Even if Clary--or especially if Clary--could prove how crazy Fiona Sullivan wasn't.

If she wasn't, they'd ruined her. Left her to rot while--demons won? No, it was too ridiculous. "She never called it anything," he says, splitting the difference. It isn't a lie, just--not all of it. Not all of it at once. Jude tugs his shirt back on, wanting to be dressed, but also wanting to not have to look at the tattoo anymore.

"She just quoted scripture a lot, or things she heard that weren't in the book. She'd gotten out of the cult, it was just--she couldn't let go of it all." That's all it was. She'd just been stuck in that place too long.

Clary looked at him like he had just left her out in the rain.

There were clearly demons and angels and they were fighting for control of the earth, he had the history to prove that it was true so why did he insist that his mother was going through some cult backlash? Clary didn't understand it and she couldn't agree with it.

Then again, Shadowhunters weren't unlike a cult...

"That's it? You don't believe in demons and angels?" She felt a little heartbroken over it, even if Jude wasn't someone she was super close too. She wanted to talk to someone about this.

"Maybe," he says, caught between hating to lie and a lifetime of lying about this. About anything he saw, about doubting his mother was wrong and wrongfully kept away. There are things he knows that he isn't supposed to. There are things that just--aren't anyone's business, even if they say they've seen the same things.

"Maybe I believe in those things, it's not like I never went to church. But why should I believe in whatever you're talking about?"

Clary was beginning to find this conversation frustrating but it was really her own fault. This was what she got when she thought that someone might understand. Without Isabelle, no one was going to understand.

she exhaled a slow breath, attempting to calm herself down. "That's really up to you." She carefully began to reorganize her pictures and slide them carefully back into her bag. "And I never really went to church." She remembered what Jace had said when they went to find the weapons behind the church, that all religions were open to Shadowhunters. She found it odd that he hunted demons and didn't believe in a God. Maybe there wasn't one, there certainly wasn't anyone this far away from... everything.

Is belief really a choice? He does his best to shut it off. Head down, blinders up, does his best to ignore what he can't handle. And there are so many reasons not to engage this, but--he wouldn't have so many reasons if deep down, he isn't terrified that it's true.

If it's true, he let them take his mother away, and keep her away, for over a decade.

If it's true, and he admits it, there's nothing he can do to fix that from here.

Jude watches Clary gather her things from under the fall of his hair, understanding that this is a moment to say something, or let her walk away. A moment to decide what's more important: connections, truth, or keeping one foot in front of the other. Keeping himself even, whatever it takes. He just--he needs a reason. "You said your tattoos, they don't work. Isabelle said something like that, once. Do you." He pauses, considers, sighs: "Do you see them, here? Maybe they're real, but do you see any here?"

You always had a choice.

That was how Clary saw it. It was her choice find her mother, to work with Jace and the Lightwoods, and to accept the Shadowhunter way of life. In some instances, it didn't feel like she had a choice. It felt like she was thrust into this new world without care for how she felt about it; meeting her father made Clary realize that everything she'd done up to this point, she'd do again and again if given the chance. It didn't always work out but it was her choice. She wasn't going to let someone else, be it fate or another person, take that power from her.

There was no one to blame for her actions or inaction except herself.

Clary paused with one strap over her shoulder and her arm back reaching for the other. She listened to Jude's question as she settled her backpack into place and pulled her long hair over her shoulder. "No." Her voice softened as she continued. "I haven't. I thought the foxes were possessed when I first ran into them but I'd been wrong. There aren't any demons here." No angels and no Shadowhunters.

She felt her stomach drop when she realized just how powerless she was. Clary wouldn't stop fighting, she was too stubborn to stop but she didn't have help from the runes anymore.

"Then what does it matter," he asks, unthinking as the words sigh out of him. Is he relieved, to just be fucking crazy? To know that the things he sees, are really only for his eyes? At least it means they're harmless. At least it means nothing's going to latch onto one of them and twist them inside out.

If Parker came through the fountain, would he just be Parker, or would that thing follow? What a thing to think, what a thing to wish--to be here, to have people be here, instead of go home.

Maybe he does believe her. Maybe he's always known, but it's so hard to figure out the truth when some of it's in his head, and some of it's just fucking invisible to everyone else. "Aren't you glad to be safe, if that's the case?"

"Because that doesn't mean that they won't come here." Clary exhaled a slow, even breath in an attempt to settler her nerves. "Me just being here could bring them." She didn't know if that was true or not but her father now had the mortal cup. He could control them and he made it very clear that he didn't want anyone standing against him.

Would he come this far out of the way just to reach her? Maybe. Probably not but Clary didn't want to chance it. She didn't have the runes here or her stele or any of the heavenly weapons. If he brought a mess of demons here she's be so very screwed.

"I'm not sure what it feels like to be safe anymore." Her father saw to that.

Clary sighed as she finished pulling her backpack onto her shoulders. This wasn't a confusing topic for her. She both wanted too and didn't want to talk about it.

"Do they...get attached to people, like that," he asks--not exactly the question from someone who doesn't believe in a thing, but believing and admitting to belief are how Jude's divided this shit up for years. "Do you think--"

It's a weird question, and he falls quiet as she tugs on her pack, considering how to ask it. He still isn't sure what she is, or what she's trying to describe to him.

How do you tell someone you believe them, but that you're not ready to talk about it? He'd be leaving her alone with it all either way, so better not to make any kind of promise. Still, he has to ask: "You said you had like, angel powers? Are there people like that, but with demons?" Had someone done to Parker what they'd done to him, just, decades before?

Clary watched him for a few seconds. She thought about her father, his experiments and her brother. Could a demon get attached to someone? The question rattled around in her head before her mouth finally formed its answer. "Yes." Her reply was very soft, almost pained.

"I think that someone would have to do that to them. Someone very cruel." Clary didn't know the full extent of what her father had done nor did she know exactly what Jude was talking about but she knew that it was possible.

Clary was beginning to realize that Jude believed her but something about the topic scared him. She didn't blame him. If she hadn't been thrust into the Shadowhunter world, she probably would have been happy to pretend it didn't exist either. She was being mean and unfair by putting this on him but at the same time, she didn't want to be rational. "The angel gave us these powers. Demons are selfish and desire power but I think that power can be taken from them." She hoped that made sense.

That - tracks, considering Parker's family had been trying to escape something incredibly similar to his mother. If she'd been trying to escape at all. It begs the question: "Can someone do that with an angel?"

Fiona had said that, hadn't she? On the stand, and that night in the bathroom. Lay down in the tub, Jude; I'm going to make sure someone protects you.

He was eight, she was his mom; he'd trusted her completely. If she'd just had it in her to lie, maybe she wouldn't have been locked up. Maybe he would have been, and that was the point. Rolling in his lips, it's a kind of admission in and of itself, asking her all of this. Why ask if he doesn't believe her answers? He allows them both another: "Do you ever think, if they'd just fucking told us stuff like this from the start, everything would have gone a lot better?"

Clary was about to answer but she found it hard to find the right thing to say. She was the descendant of an angel but there was no way to prove that. If she hadn't seen that world first hand then she might not have believed it either. She didn't expect Jude to believe her on her word alone.

She bit her lower lip when he offered her another question. It hit closer to home than she cared to admit.

"Yes." The word was out in an instant. "If she had told me then I might have been able to help. I would have been ready when he found us." Clary stopped herself from saying more. Jude probably didn't know what she was talking about. Clary never did talk about her father.

It didn't seem to matter if he knew; she'd more or less brought it to the fore, and they were on some slippery plateau between keeping it all secret, and letting it all out. They were just, perhaps, slipping in different directions for now.

"I think mine tried," he admits. "I was just too young for it to matter if I believed her. None of the other adults did." She should have told Charlie, from the start. Proved it to him before he signed the birth certificate. It would have been the right thing to do, giving him a real choice. After that, he'd had to do what he thought was best for his son.

"I don't think we had any of your people, where I was. Not enough of any kind of people, I guess."

"Probably not." Clary admitted softly. "If you had, then they would have stepped in when your mother tried to tell you."

Her mother had kept it a secret, running and hiding, while wondering if the Clave or Valentine would find her first. If she had said something to someone then they would have found her. As it was, only Luke and the witch living in the apartment below them knew anything about her and Clary.

"I-" Clary paused, once again weighing what she should say. "My mom hired a warlock to lock away my memories and my sight. She didn't want me seeing that world or questioning it. She went through a lot to hide us." From everything. "I think she knew what would have happened if people found out."

Their situations weren't that similar but Clary wondered if Jude would understand how that felt. Would he believe her or push her away? She was ready to leave at a moments notice, feeling the tension of the conversation already pushing her towards the door. Should she leave?

Does that really sound any crazier than my mom drowned me? That was how people always described it to him, starting with Charlie, but at the time that isn't what he'd thought. Less and less is he sure that's ever what he thought. Everything had followed from that point - the tics and hallucinations, and the things that felt a little too real.

Those haven't followed him here. But if his mom could unlock something, why couldn't Clary's lock it in the first place? It still pushes the limits of what he can deal with, but. "I," he sighs, shaking his head. "I believe you, alright? I don't know what that does for either of us here, but. I believe you."

Clary noticeably relaxed, her shoulders dropping while her fingers uncurled from the straps of her backpack. She hadn't expected him to say that but a little part of herself was happy. It was selfish but she didn't want to feel alone and that's how she'd felt since Isabelle's disappearance.

"Thank you." Her voice was soft but warm and heartfelt. Even if only one person believed her, it was enough. She might not be able to talk about the Shadowhunter world but that didn't mean she had to be alone in it.

"I'll go now. Maybe... we'll talk more later." Maybe not about this but Clary didn't think that Jude wanted her to stick around.

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[OTA] every single night's a fight

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