[MINGLE] PLOT: Siren's Call

[sixthiteration]

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.

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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.

Comments

[littledhampir]

"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...."

[reprobate]

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.

[littledhampir]

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.

[reprobate]

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.

[littledhampir]

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.