Scene #9186:

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	Petra is kneeled by the foot of the four poster bed in Lilian's room, which isn't an unusual place for her to be. It's also not unusual for her to be anxiously fidgeting with the hem of the oversized t-shirt that she's wearing over the little else she has on, flushed and anticipatory. It's evident to anyone who's been paying attention that there's almost no boundaries in their relationship that they don't mutually disregard, but there has been one that they've clashed over ever since they met that has never, and until now could never, been resolved. The stomach-turning, itch-inducing barrier that Petra drags around with her has never been indicative of a lack of trust, exactly. The sanctity of her internal self was never meant to be untouchable, though she's shied away from people attempting to enforce their control on it a thousand times; with her psychic walls in place, she's innovated plenty of other ways to allow certain people metaphorically elbow-deep in her psyche. No, the problem has always been 'denial' in an absolute sense, to seal and entomb her heart, to cut the stem of the rotten things that infected it and ward away the gentler hands that might reach for it, like psychic aposematism. The primary effect of the inability for psionics to affect Petra was that Petra's own psionics couldn't either, but now that the Beauty of Ash is back in her possession, that's an unacceptable way to be. The secondary effect is that, by design but not by desire, Petra has been drifting in a psychosocial void where the depths of her heart have been unknowable even to the people that she loves the most. So today, she plans on peeling her ribcage open and fixing that. Petra's eyes are squeezed shut while a heated conversation goes on inside her head. It's still inaudible to Lilian at this point, but the rhetorical strength of each of the Voices' back and forth correlates with the fluctuations of her aura, and the trajectory is noticeably trending down. Voice of the Tempered: Hello? It's Lilian! We have to clean up in here!! ASAP!!!! Voice of the Pure: Have you considered that, maybe, it's actually a totally pointless task to try and do that? Voice of the Pure: It's not going to get clean! That's why we don't let anyone see! Voice of the Tempered: You're such an embarrassment. Voice of the Tempered: 'Wait, wait, what about the other darknesses in my heart, that are secret and also worse than the darknesses we already talk about and are literally the reason why we got close to Lilian in the first place?' Voice of the Tempered: That's what you sound like. Voice of the Tempered: Grow up. Voice of the Tempered: And clean up, too. If your idiotic, half-baked doubts make this painful, then I'll give Lilian permission to completely erase you from our brain. Voice of the Pure: Uh, see!! See?! That's exactly the thing, huh?! Voice of the Pure: Listen here you psychological cumstain, there's a reason I exist! There's a reason that these walls exist! Voice of the Pure: And that's because we have to be discerning about this sort of thing. Everything that goes in and out of our mind. Voice of the Pure: Because you know Lilian will never actually think of us as good in totality. The reason we're tolerable to keep around is because of filters and deflection, so-- Voice of the Pure: --Hey. Hey! Are you even listening?! Voice of the Tempered: Oh, sure, sure. I was just distracted by thinking about Lilian calling me good. Petra hesitantly cracks open one eye, while her aura flickers and then snaps off fully. She sighs in relief and releases the fabric twisted in her fists, then looks up at Lilian with wide eyes and lips slightly parted in a breathy pout. "Um... I think I've got it. I'm being as careful as I can, but if it starts to hurt, just let me know."
Lilian Rook	Lilian, in Lilian's room, occupies one of the many traditional poses that people tend to default to in their inner realms of comfort without their realizing. Sat on the edge of her bed, one leg folded over the other, leaned back on one palm for support while the other browses her phone, the sight rendered is that of Petra's existence being so unspecial as to effectively be invisible. Casual-dressed down from her outdoor layers, coat hung up in the entry and long sleeves hung up over the chair to her well-loved desk, while Petra has the mental battle of a lifetime-- at least in its uniqueness-- Lilian scrolls, texts, and sets reminders for herself, toe bobbing idly with carefully maintaind patience. After all, she isn't privy to any of Petra's inner dialogue nor turmoil; for potentially the very last time. The dramatic process of Petra slowly haggling her own psyche down to a place that is nearly normal for every other human being around Lilian is for only one girl out of the two to experience. For her, it's Petra keeping her waiting. 'Um... I think I've got it. I'm being as careful as I can, but if it starts to hurt, just let me know.' "Do you have to be so unforgivably whorish about everything?" Lilian sighs. Allowed to gravitate to a Pose of Power, she tosses her let-down hair back over her shoulder with a shake of her head and rolls her eyes away back to her phone at Petra's expression. "I'll let you know when you need to know and no sooner. If you start fretting about the slightest discomfort then we're never going to get this done." she says, tossing her device back onto the bed and sighing a second time; this one just for emphasis. Lilian closes her eyes, shakes her fingers lightly, and brings her hands up to her neck, sliding up the back of her head and bunching up her hair behind her, letting it fall again moments later but instilling a sense of organization and sleeves-rolled put-togetherness. Despite how weapons-free she chooses to be with her vented impatience, she hasn't at all failed to register the obvious importance of the occasion. Perhaps more than that, the unspoken quality to Lilian's silence and the serious demeanour that accompanies her opening her eyes is that she understands perfectly well that this is Petra's fumbling virginal moment as a psychic; though she won't say it, something about how she looks at Petra says plenty; at least about how well she understands that this state of carefully calibrating calm is something she understands the precariousness of, and the anguish of letting it slip, harder to recapture it the second time. "Don't bother to tell me how you feel. I'm going to need to focus more than you will." she says, and leaning forward, lays her fingertips on Petra's forehead.
Petra Soroka	"Do you have to be so unforgivably whorish about everything?" Petra lets out a surprised 'puh' of air, but the bubbling protestation in her mind doesn't even get close to making it out of her mouth. 'I wasn't even thinking that until you said it,' and 'What was that about you tying me upside-down again?' both barely flicker between neurons before disappearing in the placid ocean of her current mindstate, neurochemical ripples fading to nothing on the effortfully serene surface. Even the indignant plosive she puffed out dissolves into a quiet sigh halfway through. Voice of the Tempered: You haven't forgotten, that you can't un-speak whatever stupid thing you're thinking, right? Voice of the Tempered: So just go ahead and shut up. Voice of the Tempered: I'll do the talking for now, okay~? After a few seconds, Petra just obediently nods at Lilian's direction. She places her hands on her thighs to brace herself, tilts her chin up to face Lilian, and leans slightly forwards to press her forehead to Lilian's fingertips. It'd probably be more natural if she closed her eyes, but she doesn't. In abandonment of all social contracts about eye contact, keeping her grey eyes breathlessly locked on Lilian's is the best psychologically stabilizing force she'll get. And she'll need it, because even though the outwards radiation of her aura is gone, the interior of Petra's mind is still a haze of splinters. Strikingly similar to the first steps Lilian took in Petra's mindscape when Flamel opened access to it, the sensation of clinging thorns and snapping resistance greets her when she reaches out, but unlike then, the resistance is irregular, like it's being laboriously pulled back and away as Lilian interacts with it. It's only a short trial to work through that, until the mental texture of 'thought' finally reveals itself to her, and the resistance sloughs away entirely. i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i l Voice of the Tempered: Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, e you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love y The actual texture of what Petra attempted to describe that Flamel did to give her control over her psionics becomes much more clear when Lilian actually experiences it. The thoughts that greet her in Petra's head are undeniably Petra, but with a lens held up as intermediary to view them through. A faceted-but-complete shape, transparent but present, indicative of the 'mindset' that Petra needs to induce in herself to allow Lilian to do this going deeper than just her surface emotions. ou i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you Voice of the Tempered: Welcome in, Lilian~ Voice of the Tempered: Feel free to look around all you like. Voice of the Tempered: After all, what's mine is yours~ love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i lov She's not feeling as much anxiety as Lilian might have expected, from how long coming this has been. It's almost entirely smothered by another feeling, that Lilian could name in theory, but it's nearly unrecognizable in the form it takes inside Petra's heart. Heart-thudding, breath-holding, looming unfathomably large in every direction, like a tidal wave perpetually blocking out the sun, an imprint on every emotion and carved into every thought, is a feeling so all-consuming in the most literal sense that its manifestation is practically alien.
Lilian Rook	Petra doesn't have to speak the thoughts aloud, nor be a psychically open book, for Lilian to get the general impression. Though she may be decidedly below average at reading people outside her narrow specializations in 'threat' and 'desire', the amount of time Lilian has spent around Petra is enough to arm her with an in-depth understanding that she very occasionally exercises; too much, and she would reveal how interested she is. "I apologize for the tone, but I don't tak it back." Lilian says. "Honestly, people would probably like you better if you let it show more." Her fingertips touch. "Not that it reflects well on them, or you, so don't take it as a suggestion." Her eyes momentarily close, while she breathes out what she anticipate she's holding, but they don't stay that way. Petra, too, can tell without mind reading, that it's the look she makes when lining up the assorted urges to say several different things and killing them. There's always a little twitch around her eyebrows somewhere along the line. "It's empowering when I do it." makes the cut as soothing babble prelude. She stares back down into the centerpoint Petra's reverent gaze as if it were an afterthought. Her eyes find the exact center of gravity between all of her features that will let her use Petra's face as an interpretive prop. She doesn't say anything to welcome herself in. Though it should seem obvious that the experience would be far different from what it was like for Dimo to try, or to simply passively be around Persephone, it isn't necessarily the case that Lilian touching her mind should feel 'fitting' in any way; so it's perhaps a little surprising in the way that it does. Even when she's being warm, the invasion feels oddly cold. Her delicacy feels like the place where a scalpel was, filled with the contoured chill of outer air. The edges tingle in the way that the touch of a moonbeam feels like it should. Her attention is a narrow ray of crisp winter starlight, and Petra's thoughts fog like breath within it. The way it broadens, slides, penetrates deeper, without ever quite 'entering' nor 'permeating', leaves pins and needles and the taste of iron. Without disturbing anything, it undeniably cuts what it touches, by the act of drawing a line across them. The grazes left behind draw nourishment from the wandering light, and then draw groundwater, and finally encode the thoughts they touch on their surfaces. §Oh my god.§ Lilian didn't think that. Not in those words. She just quietly gasped "Oh my god" out loud, and the words automatically became the shape of it. Breathless. Grimly fascinated. Entranced by the sight of a thorny and incestuous rosebed. A little of how Exigent Serenity's 'speech' comes across is better conveyed in the moment that Petra processess 'Oh my god' as composed of the characters for revulsion, amazement, giddy surprise, and temptation. She touches her fingertips to her lower lip, and the place the light falls upon in Petra's mind-- the tip of her scalpel and the burning bush from which her mental voice speaks-- quivers like an unwholesome saccade inside her. The next thought she perceives from Lilian is spoken like a scandal; precious as 'I love you' and softly awed as a prayer. §I've completely ruined you.§
Petra Soroka	"Honestly, people would probably like you better if you let it show more." Without shifting her eyes from Lilian's, barely moving her jaw and lips to not disturb the fragile air, Petra breathes, as a response hardly more complicated than acquiescing, "I don't want people to like me." you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love yo Voice of the Tempered: Only you~ u i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i Lilian can feel it all across Petra's mind. Like hot skin feverishly pressing into the scalpel's touch, the sensation of 'only you' is carved indelibly into the surface by the convulsions of flesh. The backwash of psychic energy thrown off by Lilian's probing beam feels like glittering sparks scattered through refractions, goosebumps turned inside-out, the overstimulated crackle of a bare nervous system that's dizzyingly touch starved. Tracing a finger with a perfectly sharp nail down it begs for a whole hand. §I've completely ruined you.§ Petra pants a tiny bit, and her fingers press into her thighs slightly harder. Rather than glancing off of Lilian's face in embarrassment, Petra's stare shivers within the narrow confines of Lilian's eyes. Even though she's nearly perfectly still, each motion feels magnified a thousand times under a surgeon's examination or a voyeuristic audience, not daring to move without direction. Animated only under Lilian's light, her chest barely rises and falls for each rapid and warm breath. i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i l Voice of the Tempered: Whatever I was before, it wasn't as precious to you. Voice of the Tempered: So how could I be ruined? I can't be ruined by you. Voice of the Tempered: All of everything about me is only worth anything because of you. Voice of the Tempered: As long as you touch me, I'm worth something. Voice of the Tempered: Any way you want, as long as it's you. ve you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love Petra finally starts to get flustered at that, and the accompanying tide of feelings, but there's nothing she can do about it at this point. Rather, there probably is, but she's recklessly choosing to keep every layer of shell peeled away for Lilian, blindly subjected to exhibitionism in its full vulnerability. Her cheeks puff up from her lips being pressed shut, and her face starts to turn pink, but the texture of thoughts in her head displays no such recitence. e you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love y Voice of the Tempered: Anything. I mean it. love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i lo Voice of the Tempered: Break and rebuild me all over again. ou i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you Voice of the Tempered: Stay in my head forever. ove you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love Voice of the Tempered: Wear me like a puppet. u i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i Voice of the Tempered: Just use me and want me and keep me and change me and hold me and touch me and fuck me and own me and need me and love me and love you and love you and love you and love you and love you and love you and love yo
Lilian Rook	The ordinary way to feel about Petra's shiver, raptly attentive, with eyes locked in a way that feels abstractly unwholesome, should be some form of offput. People, even without psychic power, aren't supposed to be able to look like that while experiencing such a visceral reaction. Baring the soul by a such straight view through them sheds a sense of mere vulnerability and takes on one close to luridness; underscored, emphasized, and offered up. Lilian thinks, distantly, that something is altogether sinful about the moment that Petra should glance away and doesn't. But her feelings are seldom ordinary, and her grip of Petra's psyche is up to the metaphysical knuckle already. The perversity of it has the strangely charged energy of shedding clothes to treat a ragged wound, somewhere far outside of the medical context that has the exclusive power to make it acceptable. Both of them are so far outside the framework from which this necessary action originates that it takes on a dizzyingly organic kind of singular, almost sacred significance, despite its utter straightforwardness. Just staring at each other next to her own bed feels as if it has the energy of dressing a gunshot to the thigh, in the corner of an empty train car in some overgrown, abandoned city. Or so she thinks. Distantly. §Whatever you were before was human.§ §Worthlessly so. Like most. Only collapsing in on itself for losing the <adaptation/compromise> to <breathe water> and being forced to seek air. But it was still something people recognized; that you, yourself, recognized, as human. A person.§ §But there's no going back to living as a human being for you now, is there? I was mistaken to even think of you like one. Whatever you are inside; whatever this is; you'd die without me.§ §And you've completely surrendered to that fact, haven't you? You don't even want to be anything on your own. You've told me over and over again, but to think it was a fact and not just an aspiration . . .§ §That's completely <unconscionable/enthralling/alluring> . . . There's no way I can . . . but if . . .§ If it's exhibitionism, then Lilian is transfixed by Petra's shamelessness, entertained as an exotic beast from the other end of the earth at an Empress' forum; drunk in and memorized and touched with the perverse aesthetic gravity of dissecting a first cadaver; appreciated for a value that would be an offensive simplification to call 'artistic', both for its lack of any intrinsic merit, and for the sense that it isn't meant to enter the lives of ordinary people in the first place. The way that Lilian intensifies her attention, until the tingling feels like pins and needles and the light is like snowblindness and moonburn, feels undeniably like something only a chosen class of people will ever know, and others can only grasp by rumours and sayings. The shallow lines drawn by the grazing touch of nerve-crackling light are doubled back across, and forced to open with probing, then firm, then painful pressure. It slides deeper into Petra's mind without having to twist or bore or burrow, felt as a void, a blade of not-her, in her thoughts. Psychosoma fills her lungs with bitingly chill air, and dims the room around her, and the iron taste in her mouth invades her sense of smell. She can dimly perceive the blood vessels in the back of her eyes; the invasive radiance that apathetically ignores the barrier of her flesh feels like hard radiation, saturating her thoughts with beautiful Cherenkov <blue?> that can only be poison to them by degrees.
Lilian Rook	The cold rivulets of trickling numbness, like icy branching roots, touch upon something, and Lilian's stare flicks to a specific point in-- behind, Petra's face. The smooth progress of the sharp-edged thing redefines itself with a new, perfect angle, and cleanly parts psychic coherence in its way, sliding through like a razor until it grasps a certain memory-- a certain set of words that bracket a single unspeakable name-- against its edge, halving and quartering and folding itself around it, suspended by only their collective pressure. And only then does she twist. Petra feels a sense of torque to it. As if Lilian perceives navigating her psyche as the movement of a sword through matter, more natural and more intimate than the use of hands or mental abstraction; and her grip is kept firmly on the handle, turned and leveraged just so. It's kinetic, visceral, diamond hard and sharp as a beam of light, and white-hot cold in the moment it contracts and cuts to pieces and devours the thought in a disintegrating burst that leaves pleasantly cool and soothing void in its place. And Lilian watches Petra's face in fascination.
Petra Soroka	Petra's mind is a bleeding wound without a doubt, but where before the itching discomfort was like haphazard stitching and oozing inflamation, the effect Lilian is having on her now isn't 'repairing'. It's healing, and the sense of intimacy and blood is there for Petra too, but the biggest improvements for Petra always involve the annihilation of what came before, not mending forwards. The clean precision of Lilian's mind is the opposite of the hazy chaotic mess of Petra's thoughts typically, and each incision is like lancing a boil, leaving the thoughts around them aligned in the direction of the cut. Petra can imagine it like a cut across her stomach, with Lilian wrist-deep to pull out a handful of entrails-- and of course, Lilian is privy to the mental image at the same time that it jumps into existence in Petra's head, complete with bloody fingers caressing her cheek. It's distantly alluring to her in the same way this is; that Lilian might decide to use this opportunity to obliterate Petra as a person, completely and permanently, and leave something in her place that 'she' could still experience. That's also pretty embarrassing. It's all embarrassing, with every new thought that appears in her head, and that emotional pressure increases with seemingly no limit. Petra's expression, still locked on Lilian's, shifts anxiously plaintive, but in contrast to her outwards facial expression, the hope inside her heart is that Lilian doesn't stop because of her building stress, followed immediately by blossoming trust that she wouldn't, piled on by a dozen more thoughts straying in different directions. Watching the process play out in real time is intensely enlightening: thoughts inside Petra's mind don't feel like they exist as experiences in of themselves. Instead, a 'thought' is more like the centerpoint of a near-instant spiderweb of a hundred faceted derivatives of varying applicability to the original, lost except for the negative outline that has to be manually matched to the next-closest facet. The only time this isn't true, and strikingly noticeable because of that, is when she's either responding to Lilian or accessing her mental paradigm of her for reference. §But there's no going back to living as a human being for you now, is there? I was mistaken to even think of you like one.§ Petra's internal reaction is almost identical to the flustered warmth of a deeply personal compliment, with a shadowy undercurrent of unwholesome neediness. As Lilian examines that feeling more, it becomes more clear; as integral to the foundation of her mind as love, the 'ravenousness' pervades practically every feeling with a second-degree distance. If 'love' is a looming tidal wave in her mind, then this bottomless, drooling pressure of wanting 'more, to be more, to feel more, to be given more' is the riptide that drags the rest of her mind in. love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i lov Voice of the Tempered: Eheheh. Voice of the Tempered: Before you I was just dying. Voice of the Tempered: Now I'd die without you. Voice of the Tempered: I'm really really really really nothing at all without you and I know that and I'm glad you know that. Voice of the Tempered: If you took control of me and made me strangle myself to death in front of you then I'd just want that to be worth something to you. e you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love y
Petra Soroka	The train of communication abruptly ends in some kind of mental explosion. Thoughts decohere and fragment into a trillion unreadable pieces, unreadable static to Petra exactly as much as it is to Lilian, until the pieces snap back into place around several simultaneous and unconsidered followups. i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i l Voice of the Tempered: I shouldn't say that out loud. Voice of the Tempered: Wait, it's already too late for that. Voice of the Tempered: Actually, on reflection, I'd be disappointed you didn't do it yourself, but I figure you'd have a reason to do it that way if you did. Voice of the Tempered: Wait! I don't even want to die! Voice of the Tempered: I'm happy being alive, because of you! u i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i For the first time, Petra shuts her eyes to concentrate. Her lips part and she evens out her breathing through her mouth, running the blood-and-poison scented psychosomatic air across the roof of her mouth as if to fill her senses with it like a snake. She squeezes her thighs and pants, chin briefly ducking to her chest before she lifts it back up to reestablish eye contact. ove you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love Voice of the Tempered: Sorry. Voice of the Tempered: I'm-- kind of a whore. e you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love y The drifting, unvoiced thought of 'you made me one' is captured by some mental subprocess and injected with the positive belief of 'and that's good, because Lilian can make me whatever she wants, especially a toy'. The followup thought of 'wanting to be touched' seeps up like fog out of the bedrock, but that doesn't need any adjustment. As Lilian exerts more force on her mind Petra's face and emotions are in harmony for her building terror. The understanding support she has for the target isn't lessened by that fear, and bizarrely, it's not lessened by Lilian excising the memory in question from her mind either, just lingeringly recontextualized as absolute trust in Lilian, and being reassured by Lilian's fingerprints on the absence left in its place. The fear Petra's feeling isn't the instinct to flee or hide or say 'no'; it's fear without recourse. Existential and exhilirating, making her heart pound and her breath pick up speed, the fear in Petra's eyes is radiant, like seeing the face of God when offered up on the altar.
Lilian Rook	§I'm reminded of something I said once. After Meika burnt out. I don't typically share it, but that time, the thought came to me in that company.§ §That the ideal way to interact with the entire world is a blade.§ §You're built for it. You're such a mess inside that cutting through you only puts it in order. And it heals straight away.§ §You're a fucking freak. You're perfect.§ Lilian shares the knowledge, mind to mind, with a glimmer of fleeting conveyance. Something reflected on the flat of the edge she thinks with. Petra experiences a flash of indoor chill, the crisp scrape of skates on ice, the foggy dissociation of the numb time after someone's death, the idle fascination with the grief in other faces, the swift and silent undercurrent of angles and speeds and intuitive tensions and vectors and orbits instead of their feelings, and the sense of fleeting freedom; from the muddy hell of Meika, and from the plodding pace of footsteps on Earth. It's all hyperreal; more vivid than her own senses ever are; and Lilian drips it into her needy mouth from the tip of a proverbial finger, one drop at a time. §Your head is a mess. Worse than anyone else. It's a wonder you can possibly live like this. You're like a fucked up scientific specimen. That's probably the only real value to your existence outside of me.§ She receives Petra's greedy, shameless, self-indulgent ramble, spurred on by self-consuming need, in a way that could nearly be described as 'beaming'. Lilian reaches up to touch her own face, on the opposite side of the scar, gasping in soft fascination that diffracts in Petra's mind and scatters straight in all directions into finely split and demarcated slivers of the feeling. She finds it disgusting. She finds it contemptuous. She finds it utterly enthalling in how naked it is. She thinks less of Petra for being so degraded. She thinks the world of Petra for showing it. She thinks Petra is so, so special, for denuding herself like this for her. Something deep inside of her tingles with feeling like a slept-on limb at seeing that single-minded obsession. Something deeply, primally fascinated with the idea. Something her superego feels a pang of inwardly directed fear about, and something that her id suffuses with inexorable, luring, gravity-lik desire to know more about. §Good lord you're a whore indeed.§ §You should be. You're nothing and I'm perfect. Everyone should be as utterly obsessed with me as you are. I'm a goddess and they should worship me as you do. You're the only one smart enough to know how worthless you are and how special I am and how much your existence is improved by devoting yourself to me.§ §I can do anything and everything to anyone anywhere. I'm the existence that matters most in the entire world; more than anyone else. Humans should be like me and they're all lesser for not being like me at all. Smiling, thriving, feeling pleasure in that subservience, is just adapting to the way things are.§ §That was fucked up. I shouldn't think that way. You always bring this out of me. I hate you. Thank you.§
Lilian Rook	The dregs of purging the memory are psychically licked from her own fingers, one at a time. The blade-shaped beam of focused thought and intent is withdrawn in a way that's slicked with clicking psychic ephemera; loose and fluid thoughts that are bled from Petra's mind by the incision, inevitably lost droplets of random, scattered, formless and inchoate feeling, soon to be regenerated by new experience. Lilian holds in in aweful disdain. She imagines the instrument must be cleaned, and the brilliant scattering of light is infused with the kinetic feeling of flourishing the blade, scattering droplets of Petra; herself; across the inner walls of her skull. The channel it leaves is so perfectly aligned; so utterly perfectly defined that Petra can feel all of it in its entirety, without static or incoherence, that it forms a permanent mark. Like the insubstantial walls of her mind is heated and hardened into something lasting; something that would require a great deal of effort to break down again. Because the memory of Lilian being there is so perfectly formed, so much clearer than every single thing in Petra's life; even the lingering after-impressions of Lilian's perspective and memory more addictively lifelike than her own; it's perfectly shaped for Her. A familiar gap to gouge her fingers into and tweak and adjust and beautify and maim whatever she wants. A difficult to reverse mark that Petra is an extension of her will. Lilian's heart thuds against her ribs. She lays her hand to her chest, and breathes out, then fans herself with her fingers. The feeling of that much power is a little overwhelming.
Petra Soroka	Like captured light twinkling within a diamond, scattered coruscations of Lilian's feelings are absorbed into the parts of Petra's mind where they fall. Simultaneously heedlessly greedy to grasp for the stars, and rapturously colored over by their consumption, Lilian's transmitted impressions reshape Petra's consciousness and the landscape of her mind to possess and internalize and magnify every scrap she's allowed to have. Texture shifts to extrapolate out from Lilian's touch, dimpling it like raindrops in the desert. The insatiable totality of Lilian's impact on Petra's mind makes another aspect about her click into place. Compared to the way Lilian's fingerprints can mold the very structure of Petra's psyche, how a grazing incision blooms color into the foundation around it, the exaltation of her touch, simply laying a hand on her body feels wildly insufficient. Handprints wrapped around her neck, burn marks and knife wounds staying unhealing, are all the same phenomenon. In an abstract way, the glorification of Lilian Rook has been painted on Petra's skin ever since they first met. Each note of backhanded praise Lilian sends in Petra's direction is met by ratcheting increases in the intensity of 'need' underlying all of her thoughts. Greedy for both the carrot and stick, because any contact of Lilian's is better than the ashen chaos of her mind left alone, and being hurt is as much being wanted as being praised. you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you Voice of the Tempered: You're perfect and I'm nothing and I love you. Voice of the Tempered: Everyone should be obsessed with you. Voice of the Tempered: But they don't deserve to, or they already would be. Voice of the Tempered: And I'm glad, because I want to be the one who understands best, so I can be the one who's special and precious and loved and best to you. Voice of the Tempered: I love you and I want you and you're everything I need, like air and sunlight and art, and the whole world is meaningless without you. Voice of the Tempered: So I'm yours; forever and ever and ever and always. i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i lov e you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love y
Petra Soroka	Petra breathes heavier from the suffocating intensity of her thoughts coalescing tighter and tighter around the blade tip of Lilian's attention. The mounting tide of 'love' builds up to put straining pressure on her entire psyche, creaking with the all-encompassing magnitude that blots out every other thought, overwhelming like it puts a physical weight on Petra. When it's retracted, the sudden mental uncoiling makes her gasp and bow her head, leaning forwards on her knees and panting like she's just ran a marathon. It takes her a minute to recover, and when her breathing slows to the point that she can respond, it takes her another few seconds to remember she needs to speak, already so accustomed to Lilian's presence in her head that she stumbles without it. "I love you," leaks out of her mouth like drool. Pink-faced with her bangs messily stuck to her forehead by sweat, t-shirt squeezed between her thighs and red imprints left by her fingers digging into them, Petra raises her face to look up at Lilian with a familiarly hopeful expression about a job well done. She shuffles and re-folds her legs to get comfortable again, then lays her fingers gently on the compact mirror case beside her with the delicacy of stroking a friend's arm. Her thoughts still feel fuzzy and clear at the same time, crystalline in focus but dazed and warm when required to interact with the world as an individual person, suffused by afterglow. "Um... if that's okay, then... I'm ready for the other thing, too." Upon Lilian's confirmation, an intangible nothing changes everything at once. Like a light flicking off and an impossibly vast impact passing through everything and touching nothing, the wholeness of the world drains of some abstract factor that's hard to name but impossible to un-notice. Essentialized to the point of being empty of meaning, with light and sound and texture becoming senseless noise, tilt-shifted and toyetic without fondness, the entire world suddenly feels absent of the qualities that give it life and purpose beyond its material construction. Even Petra, meat and chemicals and plastic and glass. All lifeless, except for Lilian. It's a bizarrely familiar experience for her, except for two things. First is that in this dissociation, the dead world still moves; second is that the comparative feeling of realness radiates off of her in invisible sunbeams to where Petra is reverently kneeled in front of her, open to being illuminated like nothing else.
Lilian Rook	'I love you' "I could tell." Lilian says. The hand by her face presses to her cheek, not trusting herself to touch Petra in the moment. She presses on her own face too firmly to be coy. "You fucking freak." she purrs the words, just a hair short of adoringly. Or perhaps exactly there. "It's different than just hearing it. Knowing the depths of insatiable little plaything you've descended to, I mean. What a disaster. You're so hopeless I'm afraid I'm going to get addicted." The heady mixture of contempt and fascination, both morbid and addictive, makes Lilian's head spin. The sense of being given what she'd only dreamed of in weak-willed moments of taboo fixation makes her pant for air. She might feel guilty, for hollowing Petra out and staining every thought with her colours, ruining her for life, making it impossible to be away from her, defining herself as the center of this poor girl's entire world-- if any of it was her fault. Cracking open the shell that neither magic nor psychic power could pierce and finding that the viscera within is already sugary sweet is beyond belief. "Forever and always is a big promise." Lilian croons to Petra, finally leaning down and releasing the touch on her own chest, pushing back a strand of Petra's sweat-damp hair and stroking her flushed cheek instead. "I might keep you an awful long time, you know. It's not exactly often that a greedy degenerate like you comes along, with enough sense to be meant to be twisted into shape." That particular cruel word flies by in perfect elegance. It's sung like praise. It must be, said as something other than a mindless insult. Petra's degeneration from the person she could have been, but never world be, into almost an aspect of Lilian rook; a facet, an extension, a prosthetic, is something she only can sing praises of. What use would there be in degrading such overwhelming love, rather than admiring it for the inherent beauty of lowly obsession? And it is familiar; what comes next. It can be said, not inaccurately, that Lilian has learned to feel some fondness for the world, in small and innocuous places, but not enough to change the fundamental nature of her power. But it's a little different. Petra can feel it, near the epicenter of Lilian's aura; of the realness she impresses upon the world within her arm's reach, and no further, where a thousand kinds of touch are available to her and only her, here and nowhere else. It comes off her in waves every time her eyes saccade around the room. Its staticky impression washes over Petra's thoughts like radiation prickling the backs of her retinas. Less than even the hollow nothingness of distance; of absence and plastic emptiness, which one still can and must exist in, and be subjected to its eroding vacuum; the gulf is between the reality unto itself of 'Lilian', and the world without any reality at all. Without tangibility. Real and illusion. By its juxtaposition, Petra feels for the first time, through the touch of Lilian's fingers on her cheek, burning through her skin and radiating into her skull, the understanding that something has turned off.
Lilian Rook	Petra has to bear the torture of existing in the world, in all its contemptible falsehood. Lilian doesn't. Hers is the unfondness of a show while it's paused. A game while it's off. Something that she elects to participate in only voluntarily, that she can stomach only by suspension of disbelief. That people think and feel, that things are tangible and have meaning, that consequences can loom anywhere at all, is kayfabe on the order of an effortful investment in fiction. That everything stops when Lilian wills it is fundamentally incorrect. That bright and terrible star of knowledge that burns on Petra's brow, ignited by Lilian leaning down, grasping a fistful of Petra's hair, and the touch of the warmth of her lips, is searingly unignorable. Wanting it all to be nothing, mean nothing, to be fake and harmless and powerless and utterly inconsequential, is so naturalized to her that it is her ground state. The idea that she chooses to put pause to the world is backwards. Everything and everyone in the world, Petra included, only continues when Lilian can summon up the desire to wish for it. That the clock ticks at all and she experiences anything but sweet frozen oblivion is proof that Lilian has spun up her imagination and projected meaning, reality, herself into everything she sees; it moves because she has breathed life into it. Just like Petra. That's what this is all about. Playing by rules. Being the hero. Being human at all. It's all for everyone else. In its own sick and twisted way, she's right; it truly is unbelievably kind, and for no reason at all.
Petra Soroka	"I might keep you an awful long time, you know." Petra presses her cheek into Lilian's hand, a full-body shudder escaping through her mouth in an unsteady, warm sigh against her wrist. Her eyes are wet with a sheen of tears that don't threaten to fall out, overwhelmed by sheer intensity beyond emotions, and she upturns them to look at Lilian's face while needily nuzzling into her palm. "Please? That's okay with me. That's what I want." "I need you to keep me forever. I want any part of me that'd want anything else to be crushed and rebuilt better. You can keep me until I die and then after if you can. Heaven is where you are." Petra's breathing only picks up heavier for venting the delirious pink haze of thoughts. Squirming and feeling the room spin around the anchor point of Lilian's hand on her, Petra presses her lips closed and swallows her building saliva. "I like having the option to lie taken away from me, if it's you. I like that you know. If I can only be honest or wrong, then I'll just become more and more, yours." Having seen the inside of her mind and all the incoherent machinery within, the process by which Petra's moral reasoning is drowned out by spiritual gluttony is practically painted on her face. It's hard to imagine ever looking at her again without seeing it. The way her understanding of the world is oriented around Lilian, that words spoken fondly rewrite their definitions to become blessings lowered to her brow. She resents that the narrative refers to her separately. She understands for the first time why monks choose new names when joining the faith.
Petra Soroka	The center of the universe is where Petra kneels by Lilian's bed with their lips pressed together. When the planet stops spinning and the sun freezes in the sky, and everyone's heartbeat comes to a simultaneous stop, the color of Lilian's wish that leaks into Petra's from the point where their lips touch resuscitates her like a doll magically coming to life. She blinks and sharply inhales, jolted into awareness at the diagonal sensory shift from her own blearily meaningless world to the one that Lilian inhabits alone. Not alone anymore, though. Petra drunkenly giggles and then leans in for another, longer kiss, slipping into the causatively comfortable position where there aren't any static air molecules to disturb between them. After she sits back again, breathlessly giddy, she lifts up her hand and twists it around experimentally, making little extranneous motions just to show that she, of all people everywhere, can. "I want to understand, more than anything." The only reason her voice can reach Lilian through the air is because Lilian wants it to, but it's still a voice that she can hear. "I want to know what it's like, so you don't have to be the only one." Dreamily excited, possessed by the urge to wander and observe the world, Petra pushes herself to her feet and does a silly little twirl with her arms out in Lilian's room. Look at her! She's real! "I think the difference between one and two is infinite. Everything means so much less when you're not sharing it with someone, right? If they're like action figures, then I want to laugh at the stupid games they play with you. If they're irritating, I want to hurt them with you. I don't ever really remember movies that I watch alone that well, but even bad ones are better memories if they're with someone else." Petra comes to a stop and holds her hands in front of her chest, fists squeezed earnestly. Her feet are starting to smolder a bit from spinning around on the carpet like that. "So, um, whatever it takes. I'll be the kind of person that can stand alongside you, so you don't have to be so alone anymore. I really, really love you."