sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] PLOT: Siren's Call

[MINGLE] PLOT: Siren's Call

WHERE: Anywhere
WHEN: August 25-26
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Mental manipulation, drowning, death
NOTES: Details here. This post is for EVERYONE, not just the affected. Please make sure and note if your thread is locked for plot purposes.

It began slowly.

A wisp of song or familiar sound on the breeze swept in from the lake. No source to be found, only the uneasy feeling it had been heard before as it coiled itself steadily inside the minds of the chosen. The sound was a mantra, pulsing soft at first and then louder, growing over days until it seemed to fill the skull, relentless. Come here, the lake whispered, cajoled, shouted. It is cool and quiet beneath the waves.

Come here, it presses now in time with the melody until there is nothing but to blindly follow. The water is calling.

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[CW Mental Health, Possible Violence. Possibly other things too. I may add an open part to this for the 26th but would rather see how this is playing out first. Characters are all, of course, welcome to have witnessed what happens.]

It was supposed to be a good day. Later, when the quiet enveloped her and she had time to look back on what had happened. Rose would remember that. It was one of those rare days when she’d woken up with a sense of purpose, maybe even hope of something good coming their way. What she’d also remember is the niggling feeling of doubt that had tugged at the corner of her mind. The one that had whispered silent warnings in her head all through her run and again as she attempted to eat breakfast. She’d gotten a sense in the time since she’d first arrived here that things weren’t allowed to be good for very long but she’d allowed herself a few moments to think, just maybe? It didn’t have to always be awful.

Her long dark hair, whipped around her face as Rose sprinted through the South Village. No time was taken to even hastily pull it back, before she’d set off into a run. She hadn’t asked any questions when she’d caught the first murmurings of something happening at the lake. She knew Elena would be there, just as surely as she should have known that she was already too late.

The sound of her feet hitting the bridge she’d avoided since the day she first arrived, fell into a rhythm with the blood that drummed in her ears as she pushed her body into motion. The ache of a recently eaten meal barely noticed as she allowed her legs to carry her, any consideration of time and distance lost to the single-minded need to lay eyes on one of the few real friends she had here.

It never once occurred to her that by the time she reached the edge of the shore, there would be nothing she could do. As long as she was moving, there was still that foolish hope that she’d be able to make it okay. Even as she heard Elena’s name pass the lips of several people she flew past, she wanted to believe there was a chance. She needed to, even. The alternative just wasn’t something Rose was ready to consider, let alone willing to accept.

“Elena!”

She never stopped, not even as she crested the hill that slopes toward the water's edge, Rose allowing momentum to carry her as she headed straight for the too still lake. She was vaguely aware of nobody doing anything. Standing around, in varying stages of shock or grief but not one of them appeared to be trying to help the girl that was said to be in there.

Drowned. She’d heard somebody say it. That one word scraping at the inside of her head but she’d refused to believe that of all the people here, that could happen to Elena. Not after everything the other girl had been through. Not after the cruelty of her arrival and subsequent return. Not to the girl who would sooner face down a Wendigo on her own than be sent to a watery grave.

“ELENA!.”

It’s the water that finally slows her as her feet sink into the softened ground. Her body becoming weighed down by the damp as she tries to reach somebody who is no longer there.

As it turns out, freeloading actually isn't something that particularly appeals to Sirius on a long enough timeline. Back home, before Azkaban, he simply paid for whatever he needed and quite a lot that he didn't, and thanks to Uncle Alphard, there'd barely been a blip between the time he was spending his parents' money and when he was spending his own.

Here, though, it's quite a bit different, and manual labor really isn't something Sirius Black does.

Picking peaches seems like an easier proposition than getting his knees in the dirt to dig up carrots and potatoes, and it's a walk he might make on a normal day anyway. It feels appropriate, too, that the peaches are enchanted, and after a few hours of languidly picking his way through the little grove, he has a pillowcase full of them to sling over his skinny shoulder and carry back to the inn.

He isn't even aware of anything happening until he approaches the main road from the spindly path leading back to the grove, and catches sight of Rose sprinting past. There's an urgency in the forward press of her body, the slap of her feet on dirt, and he frowns as the sack slides from his shoulder and thumps to the ground. Peaches spin out across the path, but he doesn't notice, already taking off after her.

"Rose?" he calls, but knows it's no good, and follows at full pelt by the time his feet hit the main road.

The scene at the lake's edge is chaos, people blinking themselves from a daze, some of them soaked and coughing up water as they splash back to shore. She drowned, one of them says, Elena drowned. In the distance, a little building sits poised above the gentle waves, sunlight blinking sharp against its windows.

It definitely was not there before, but there's no time to think about that now.

"ROSE!" he barks, but she doesn't hear him or doesn't care. He surges in after her, his arms fixing across her chest from behind. "She's gone, love," he huffs against her ear. "She's gone."

She has this vague awareness of the noise and movement around her, but it’s almost like she’s already underwater. Everything drowned out by the sound of her blood rushing through her body, her heart pounding against her ribcage as she tries to surge deeper. Her movements look uncoordinated, like she hasn’t figured out that she can’t keep running. The disconnect between her body and mind, keeping her from trying to swim instead

It’s not that she can’t hear Sirius, or even feel him at her back but it's as if he’s trying to halt the momentum of an unstoppable force, Rose managing to shift them a few inches deeper before the struggle causes her feet to lose traction in the silt.

“Let me go.” The guttural demand rips at her throat as soon as she registers the arms that bind her, Rose trying to tear herself free even though they both know she's capable of putting him down. There is no training at this moment, though, no calculated moves to get to her target. All she has is the knowledge that Elena is in there and she has to get to her.

She has to. She has to. She has to.

“Let me GO!”

"No," he says, surprised by the steady firmness of his own voice — He, Sirius Black, who has never been the steady one in nearly any situation in the whole of his life. "I'm not going to stand on the fucking beach and watch you drown yourself."

She's flailing, all emotion, and he shifts his arms up to hook under her armpits, hands clasped against her slender, heaving shoulders. It doesn't keep her from smacking him as she tries to get free, but it's a more solid hold, lets him lever back more easily even as her feet slide and flail and kick bruises into his legs.

"Rose, stop— Fucking stop! It's done. It's done."

She tries to seize upon that shift, launching her body forward and not seeming to understand why she can’t do it. Like a child who thinks just wanting something will somehow make it happen. She’d never been good in close combat, though. Not even at the top of her game and this wasn’t the Rose who could take to a mat and best grown men twice her size. This was raw and out of control, a wildness in the air that didn’t fit with the Dhampir who tried to keep a steel grip on her control.

“No!” She can feel it, the shift in momentum, her body being pulled back now that he has a lock on her upper body, her arms flailing wildly at her sides as she tries to claw the air to gain some traction. There is a part of her that even understands this is useless. That knows what she's doing won't change anything. A part, that even knows that something about this is all wrong, but the shadows that twist through her mind won't allow her to fully register it.

She hears a scream, a grating, ripping noise that sounds more animal than human, Rose unable to comprehend that she’s the one making it. Her legs and feet kick out as he manages to drag her further back, wild eyes focused on the center of the lake as outstretched hands try to reach for something that just isn’t there.

“No-no-no! You don’t understand.” If he did - he’d let her go. “I have to. I have to get her.”

The sad irony of all of this is that he does understand, in a way more intimate than perhaps anyone else here — That white-hot flash of madness when reality has stepped on your neck one time too many, when the centre has finally proven it cannot continue to hold. It's a baptism, that sort of madness, and he wouldn't dare try to wrench it from her had he any other choice.

But she isn't going to die here, from this. Not while he draws breath.

"They're getting her," he presses to her ear, as calm as he can make his voice while panting with the effort of holding her back. "Rose, they're getting her." It's a lie, perhaps, but he delivers it as a solemn truth, barely past his lips before her flailing sends them both splashing down onto their arses in the shallow water.

He does not, even for a blink, loosen his grip. Not even now, seated with her between thighs that he wraps fast around her waist just in case, the water lapping in against her lean, splashing legs. He pulls her tighter, his breath hot at her ear.

"You be as angry as you like, scream as loud as you like, beat the bloody shit out of me," he huffs, and then swallows, his throat bone dry. "I'm not letting you go. You hear me, Rose? This is what you would do for her, you'd not let her go, either."

She doesn’t understand it; The calm in his voice as he talks to her. How he - anyone - can be so calm when Elena is out there somewhere. It makes her want to fight harder, scream louder, burn the world down just to make him see. If she could just make him feel even a shadow of what she did, he’d have to let her go.

Another wounded, animalistic roar peels past her lips as she fights uselessly against his grip, the sweet lies that spill from his own barely registering before they land in a heap. Again she tries to get free - again she’s just too slow and before she can even lurch into the depths of the lake beyond, he has his whole body wrapped around her, clinging to her as if his life depends on it, when really it’s her own.

Still, she tests - she pushes - she tries to wriggle free but he’d be able to feel the fight slowly weakening, her chest heaving with every desperate breath of air as he keeps a steady stream of words, whispered against her ear. It’s those words that keep her here, teetering on the edge of an abyss without slipping into it. The hot press of his breath against her ear as she stares at the center of the lake.

This time when she cries out, it’s a pain so raw and visceral that it rips at her soul and it comes again, and again, getting louder each time as if she can make it all stop if she can just force it out… but it can’t. There is no chasing away the pain or the anger. There’s only this - existing with it, trying desperately to hold on but she wants so much for it to go away.

Her leg kicks out in defiance, in frustration, her body sagging beneath his grip as her hands move to claw at her head. The bite of her fingernails against her skull, helping to focus her if only for a moment or two. Physical pain to make the mental pain go away. Wasn’t that what Lissa had always said?

“But I did.” - let her go. She hadn’t been there. She’d known something was happening and she hadn’t been there and now Elena was sitting at the bottom of a lake. Dead. Gone. “I did - I did - I did - I did - ” Those two words repeating on a loop, the heel of her hand keeping time with her head as her body begins to rock back and forward.

"No, Rose, it wasn't you," Sirius replies, his voice edging into a plea now, all of this too entirely real, too eerily familiar to simply be swallowed back and soldier on. He wants to take hold of her wrists, keep her from further harming herself, but is afraid of what opportunity even that brief loosening of his grip might afford her. She might very well come out of this with bald spots or scratches, and no doubt he'll be at least as badly off, but at least she won't be at the bottom of the lake with her friend.

Stomach twisted into a hard knot, he drops his head forward, forehead pressed against the backs of his knuckles where they're clamped over the crest of her shoulder. "It wasn't you," he repeats, voice wavering with emotion. "It wasn't you."

"Should have been..." Maybe not today but the countless other times when she should have died. How many times was it going to happen? How many times would she walk away when somebody else would take her place? Mason, Dimitri, Peeta? Was this what it was like for Anna? What it means to be kissed by shadows?

"And now I can't -"A hysterical bubble of laughter spilling over and she can hear it, the madness in her words as she rocks her body back and forth. So like Adrian, like Lissa at her worst but it was Dimitri who could always pull her back from the edge. The one who always knew how to get through and he was gone. Dead. Just like the rest. Just like Elena. " - skipped the line and now it's all."

"Should stay away - safer...."

Now that Sirius has given the emotion a foothold, it's strictly instinct that's keeping him attached to her, his head still pressed against her shoulder, shaky breaths filling the little space between his chest and her back. They're each of them in their own prisons now; she doesn't understand what he meant, but it doesn't matter.

He can't stay away; nothing is ever safer when he's around anyway. They'll just have to wallow in that harsh reality together.

At length, he huffs out a loud breath, hooks his chin over the top of her shoulder and just closes his eyes. "She's gone," he manages at length, voice stronger but rough, like those first days out of Azkaban.

She can feel it slipping, the grip she has on this reality. It's like trying to hold onto fine grains of sand but she can't keep her fingers close enough together, the minuscule granules falling through the cracks as the water laps at their bodies. The only part of her that feels like it belongs to her is the warmth that burrows at her back. The heat of his breath pressing through her shirt as the lake beyond moves out of focus. She doesn't need to see it to have the image pressing in on her. Elena's hair billowing around her as she sinks to the bottom. Her eyes open without seeing. The hands that reach for somebody to help, but nobody comes.

Her body seems to shrink in on itself, as if she can minimise the hurt by taking up less space, Rose desperate to hold back the storm of emotion that she’s sure will rip her apart. The gentle rock of her body continues, sending ripples across the water and though she feels the tremble of limbs set in, she doesn’t fully register the shaking is coming from her.

“Don’t…” It’s soft, almost like a plea but it comes too late, his words echoing in her head and filling up all the space between the shadows. She knows it. Perhaps she’s known it from the moment she’d set off running, had known that wanting and wishing for something to be so, wouldn’t actually make it happen. It’s not that she wants him to lie, to give her mind something to cling to, but more that she’s not ready to accept the truth yet, to feel another part of herself get cut away when it feels like she’s already missing too much

“Please.” Her lip trembling as she manages to squeeze out that word. A word that has almost never passed her lips, because Rose has almost never asked anyone for anything.

He ought to get them out of the water. Ought to dig deep and find the strength to drag her back or pick her up. There are probably a lot of things he ought to be doing right now, more sensible things, but the weight of simply getting started, of beginning the process of forcing her to move on, seems far too heavy to bear.

And so they're still sitting, the fight gone out of Rose but his limbs still wrapped fast around her, water lapping in around them as she rocks them in time with the waves.

He turns his head, nose and mouth pressing against the hot shell of her ear. "I'm not letting you go," he insists again in a furious whisper.

She just wants to crawl into herself, to shut down and let the current of madness take her, but he’s not just anchoring her to the shore with his arms. He’s surrounding her in every conceivable way; his body, his breath, his scent, his words. Its as if he thinks that by enveloping her very existence, he can keep her from drifting away.

She can’t even say that he’s wrong with the way his voice seems to push back the shadows, like it can reach inside of her and pull her back to the surface as she begins to drown in the darkness that has its hold on her.

“Don’t -” Her voice a little stronger this time. The emotion that almost causes her to choke, having its roots in a different kind of grief.

“Don’t say that.” Because she’s sure he doesn’t mean it, not in the way she hears it. No matter how tightly he holds onto her or how close he keeps her now, she’s certain that it can’t last. He’ll hold her, keep her from killing herself trying to save somebody who's already lost, but when tomorrow comes and reality sets in? He’ll already be gone.

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[MINGLE] PLOT: Siren's Call

Rose ][ Closed to Sirius

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CW: Mild self-harm

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