♉ [PROSE | DAY TWO]
Sep. 8th, 2018 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
activatingaggroSIPARA NZINGA | eight sweeps / 19 years old
HMS GLORY, ORBITING NUWA, DAY TWO OF SEVEN
HMS GLORY, ORBITING NUWA, DAY TWO OF SEVEN
When you enter your room, there's a fuchsia draped out across the chaise with your Steelborn plushie held high above his head.
“I had never pictured you the sort that enjoyed toys,” he says, warm as honey. When he shifts, his filaments shimmer across his shoulders, a rustle loud enough that it makes your ears pin back. “You always seemed very dignified in your interviews. That is not to say you were not jocular - you seemed to just possess a kind of self-assurance that would bely the need for any sort of comfort item, regardless of your age.”
When he turns to look at you, his eyes are as strange as any other seadwellers. The skin on the back of your neck pricks as he blinks once, then twice, the transparent lid flickering into place.
When his eyes open, they’re damp again.
Your room on Glory isn't particularly big. There's room enough for the recuperacoon tucked into the corner, and the chaise next to it. They're not meant to be double-boarded, no matter what the fucking oliveblood thought: there's a bit in the wall that folds out into a desk, but this close, it'd barely take a step for the seadweller to be in your face.
The seadweller? The Akairi.
"You need to be careful," Hap Ret had warned you, and your palms are damp, even as your jaw tightens. You've never been one for fear! It's just not something that's ever come natural, not since you were six sweeps and had a lion's paw on your throat.
You refuse to feel it now. You don't let yourself step back, and you lift your chin when he sits up, folding your arms tightly together. "And I didn't figure you were the sort of fucker to break into a troll's room," you shoot back, sharp. "Dude, what the fuck?"
“Is it breaking in, when I own the entire station? But. Ah. I suppose I had my expectations too high." He shifts, slinging his legs over the side of the chaise. They're long, as long as Muireach's, and -
You don't step back. You fucking refuse, for all that something in your ribs twinges.
"You are eight,” he concludes, dry, as he straightens up, “no matter how impressive of deeds you have committed. And with eight sweeps comes, I have come to realise, a certain amount of incompetence. Did you really think that I wouldn’t know who was boarding my station, miss Nzinga?”
“I hope you don’t mind my calling you that. But Oriole is a very.. Barcino kind of name.”
You've never been one for fear! But right now, you almost, almost, /almost/ feel it, all the way in the core of your gut.
When he stands, he's got over a foot of high on you, and it's all of your patience to keep you from just going at his throat. He looks nothing like Muireach! Nothing at /all/, when push comes to shove, but when he fans his fins out, that doesn't stop your throat from tightening. You hate him. You hate this.
"The name's Oriole." Your voice doesn't quaver! That's good, because you'd cull the both of you before you ever let it. "Oriole Orchard, dude, same as I said online.
He exhales all at once, his gills fluttering with the release, like you're some big disappointment. Then his mouth pulls down, even as he leans forward. You could've moved! You don't, because what's he going to do, cull you? He could've done that when you walked in.
Instead, his palm hits the wall above your head.
You're penned in, and as far as things go, that's not fucking better.
If he was blue, you'd have already ripped through him. You've culled bluebloods! It's no big deal, when push comes to shove: if you hit hard enough, anything will crumple. And you haven't taken off your prosthetics even once since you've gotten up in space. All it'd take is a thought to dial them up, pull them back, and take a swing.
But this is a tyrian. You'd barely even bruised Muireac,h in the end, for all that you'd bled him, and you'd nearly died to cause that one, minor nick. And you'd kited him the entire time, staying too fast for him to move. Gwydyn isn't that large.
Muireach was never in your fucking space like this.
("You have to be careful," Hap Ret had told you, and you hate him almost as much as you hate this fish.)
"Miss Nzinga," Gwydyn says, brisk, his eyes strangely bright, "why are you on my station?"
This close, you can smell the chill of him, a crisp ozone to the air. You can feel his braeth on your skin, and - a hysterical, giddy part of you can't stop thinking of how /jealous/ Ico would be, if he was here. This's the sort of thing he lives for. But the tyrian leaning over you is an adult, and a fish, and he might cull you, and it turns out you're not Ico.
There's nothing exciting about this. There's nothing even fun, and you just want him /gone/.
"This was fun, but, like if you don't move, brah," you warn him, and oh, goddamnit - there's the treacherous hitch, like you're a pupa, like you're afraid - "I am gonna cull you."
He doesn't move.
He just tilts his head, the frills of his gills shifting with the gesture, and then he doesn't have time to move when you sink your fangs into them.
You've never bit someone in the gills before. You've never even so much as touched them, outside of the seadweller that Myrrha had hauled to you that once. And then the body had already had time to warm! This is like biting into _ice._ There's nothing but blood vessels in gills, piled on top of each other in the hundreds of layers to carry oxygen back to the body, and your fangs rip through them like paper.
Blood runs in streams down your face. It's flooding your mouth, too much to swallow, too much to do more than choke, but you don't let go. You /hate/ culling people like this. It's too personal! You can feel the pulse of his heart against your lips, the frantic hop-hop-skip as he tries to push away -
- but he's not the only one losing blood. You've got an arm slung around his back, holding him in place, and your other arm's wrapped around his, just on instinct. Everything's on instinct. You've done this before, and your parasites know how to dig into your veins for power when he tries to thrash.
It doesn't last long. The pressure of your teeth's enough to pinch his airways, and it takes ten, fifteen seconds for him to stop thrashing. Another twenty seconds for the push of his heart to still. And then -
- you let go, shoving him back, and you bend over in half, gagging as the blood seeps out of your mouth.
Of course, that's when the door creaks open.
"Holy shit. Holy /shit/." He drags a hand down his face even as he's stepping forward. He kneels down next to the body, placing a hand against the undamaged side of the neck. Then he rolls the lids back. He doesn't seem bothered by the chill of it.
He doesn't seem bothered by the blood, either, because as soon as he's satisfied, he's back on his feet and turning towards you.
The snarl's reflexive. He doesn't pay it any mind, though, anymore than Ico ever did - and there's something of Ico, too, in the way he reaches into his pocket, snatching out a handkerchief to start on your face. Maybe that's why you let him, for all that you're rattling like an engine the entire time. It'd be easy to bite him.
You don't, not even when the cloth drags hard across your lips, scrubbing like it can soak the blood out of each thin line. "I said be less aggressive," he scolds you. "I said, hey, kid, don't be a fucking mess. We're going to be /subtle/. And what do you go and do?"
"You murder the Akairi."
"He was in the room," you hiss back, petulant, but you don't get much more out, because as soon as your teeth are bared, he's scrubbing the handkerchief over those, too.
If he was less aggressive about it, you'd bite him. But he doesn't act like he even thinks you might, and that, mostly, is what saves him.
"Well, if he was in the /room/, I guess it's a better call to go straight to /murder/ than just /leave/. Goddamnit, Sipara. Are you okay?" He takes a step back now, his brows furrowing. "He didn't injure you, did he?"
You ought to say something witty, or clever, or smart. Something that'll smooth out his brow, because he's been trying to handle this situation for you from the get-go, and he's been trying to wrangle you, and this -
This is all your fault.
"He knew my name," you say, miserable, and then your breath catches. But what starts to come out as a son strangles into a scream. Because behind Hap Ret, the body is moving.
Gwydyn's sitting up, his face scrunched up like he's smelled something unpleasant. You shriek, jolting back, but he just sneers at you, showing off fangs just as sharp as yours. "Calm down," he orders you, irritated. He's got a hand to his gills, and there's fuchsia slipping past his palm and between his fingers in sticky rivulets. "I don't know why /you're/ screaming."
Hap Ret spins on his heel, hard enough to set the silk of his scarf shifting. Part of you wants to bristle over the way he moves in front of you! The rest of you's content to stay behind him, and let him, because when Gwydyn pulls his fronds away -
His gills are in tact.
