As Illarion speaks, part of his thoughts aren't on what's being said so much as what scenarios would require it being told to someone else. Not much really comes to mind right away, especially if it's true that most of Illarion is invisible to normal senses, including things like touch. Fighting something that can't be perceived would be.. difficult, and in another dimension, an impossibility to really even conceptualize ...what good would it do, except to someone who could also interact with it?
"I see." He does not. He can only see what's in front of him. "..Is everyone like that?"
"No. Very few people here are like that, outside Thirteen and her iterations."
The God of the Nine Houses and his Lyctors could see him at his full extent, but weren't themselves that extensive. Of all the rest of the people he'd encountered... There was the youth's guardian, but that is not Illarion's secret to share--whatever it was he'd sensed in Vincent.
"It was how I knew you were something other than human; it's your mother's blood, I'm guessing." The inhuman mother.
"But your whole species is." It was wildly improbable that Jenova just happened to be one and he was speaking with a member of her uncanny, space-faring kind. There was no point in asking what that looked like, when he couldn't even describe accurately what happened exactly when Illarion had touched him. Touched some part of him he couldn't sense.
And if it were that obvious, then Illarion knew as soon as they crossed paths in the desert.. "..Likely. She's a shapeshifter, so the stories say. My other genetic donors were ordinary humans. I don't look right for human, to those with sight. But not... terribly so."
"Yes. But we are also the unnatural result of tampering with something better left sleeping."
To draw none too fine a parallel between them.
"Is she also capable of splitting herself?"
As Illarion asks, Iskierka wisps into being, her wings flashing pale in the moonlight as she drifts off after Casimir. She's got eyes not for the other (faux) Omen, but the tether she'd seen between Sephiroth's halves when he'd split. Might it have atrophied by now?
Finding Casimir wouldn't be hard even without looking for the link between them, making noise, but not too much noise, is still the name of the game. And.. It's still there, reinforced and deeply veined in the odd golden light that etches parts of the unphysical forms. They are, and are not, two separate beings, the tether so deeply buried that causing injury to one may well simply be transmitted right to the other. As soon as Sephiroth's attention shifts to watch Iskierka's translucent flight, the guard hound pauses too, reorienting neatly with perked oversized ears.
It's a distraction that allows him to not answer immediately. But he does, eventually. "I don't know. What she's capable of is .. what I've been able to piece together from barebones descriptions of fights that happened years ago to them."
The roiling unease gets worse. It's one thing to know one of his three parents is an inhuman monster, it's another to discuss it - and her - so frankly. "Being beheaded didn't slow her down, and given Reunion at the least being broken into pieces isn't much of a problem."
So--they are still one being, from the strictest point of view, and in a way much more tangible than a Sleeper and an Omen are one being. Iskierka alights in a bush--attempts to alight; more, hovers with her claws clasped around a twig she can't actually perch on--where she can continue to peer down at Casimir. She doesn't do much else beside that.
For his part, Illarion catches the edge of that worsening unease. Can't quite pin its source, but it's a reasonable guess that it's something to do with the current topic of discussion.
He weighs his own need to know--well, no, label it for what it is: curiosity, though well-intentioned--against the youth's discomfort, and silently sets aside many of his questions for later. If Reunion and indeed all the fight against Sephiroth's inhuman mother are in the past for the others from his world, then the shrike would be better-served asking those questions elsewhere. Whether they'd get the answers he needs...
Well. Let tomorrow's problems belong to tomorrow. "That would seem to explain how you," hm, "summoned your companion, then. To our sight, he's a split-off part of yourself."
Something had gone awry somewhere. The guard hound isn't simply magic externalized, as an Omen should be, Sephiroth had gone far deeper than he should have. Casimir sits, amongst the leaves and grass, and peers right back up, yellow eyes bright in the gloom.
There is a sense in both of them that they are being weighed, and Sephiroth isn't quite ... sure why. Searching, perhaps, for those elusive eyes or other marks of lingering problems. "...Well, yes. That's what he's supposed to be, isn't he? Part of you on the outside."
Wait, that's not what he'd been told. Not exactly.
It is not, in fact, what Illarion had said about the nature of Omens-- Except in the very most liberal and poetic sense. The feathers on his nape ruffle up; his tail, abruptly appearing, gives a rustling thump against the packed earth they're standing on.
He'd suspected something like this, and it's truly a gift from the Saints the ritual had not gone worse.
"A part of your soul, made manifest," he corrects, without rancor or condemnation. "Poetically, the best part of you. But you've done something very literal instead.
"I should have explained better, I think." Not that the results were less than desired, but if Sephiroth had not felt he was making a choice in the matter... That was viscerally upsetting.
"...Yes?" Aside from the 'best part' thing, anyway, that's what he tried to do as best he could. Even now he's certain he's simply followed directions as stated. Any efforts to get a soul on the outside would necessitate some work to get it there.
But it's more cautious, this time. Sephiroth was not overly adept at human body language but monster tells towards irritation were somehow more universal. Annoyance suggested he'd done something wrong. "I think you explained it well enough."
He doesn't live in a world where metaphor is the direction, even with magic. Even here. A lifetime of instruction has long since removed any potential towards interpreting directions as anything but very literal, and he knows something on the outside thus couldn't be inside anymore.
Illarion worries at his lower lip with his teeth, silent a moment in the face of that hesitant yes? There's a gap in understanding here he clearly has not judged the whole depth of, and may not have adequate words to fill. His own understanding of souls has expanded greatly since being plucked off Nephele and thrown into Mariana's ocean, but it's still bounded by his own upbringing--by the veil of mystery surrounding the whole idea of a soul, and what it was, and what could be done with back home.
Who was to say Sephiroth is wrong, from his own lights?
"Perhaps I did," he ventures, thoughtfully, "though the results I'd expected were not, hm, so physical. I couldn't perceive the bond between other Sleepers and their Omens. You, however, have an artery between you and your other half."
He glances in the direction of the guard hound, who's broken the steady stare on Iskierka to glance back, ears canted at an angle of unspoken uncertainty.
"That ... seems sensible," is the even more cautious response, thoroughly expecting a chastizing now in some form. "I'm not sure how you'd sustain yourself outside yourself otherwise, maybe it's different for Sleepers. From what .. little I know of my future ability to puppet others, that too requires a part of me on the outside, and presumably a link remains else the part outside would die." Though the tether is beyond source and satellite with boy and canine, a lethal blow to one will certainly reverberate to the other, whichever half that was.
He's missed something, that much is obvious in Illarion's reaction, but what? "Though usually that's just a small number of cells, I don't know how much blood went into making Casimir. I wonder if there'd be a similar .. 'artery'? With these controlled people."
The expected chastisement doesn't materialize. Illarion himself has no expertise here--and more importantly, no pride to be caught up in whether he's right or wrong about a magic he barely understands himself, applied to a person and situation he has even less understanding of. Yes, it might rankle a little that he hadn't explained the expected process and outcome of the ritual well enough--or more correctly, that he hadn't known enough about Sephiroth's own knowledge and nature to offer a proper explanation--but it's incumbent on him to learn enough to fix that.
Lashing out over it would be unproductive at best.
"I must believe it is different for Sleepers, given all the other ways we changed to suit the Waking World." He has not tested whether he can still turn into a squid. "And undoubtedly what a soul is--if it even exists--and how or whether it can be manifested outside one's flesh at all differs from world to world, too.
"The souls of Sleepers can manifest Omens all on their own, and the souls of speaking beings from my home can be split into pieces and used to animate dead flesh." Don't ask him how he knows that one. It's not a pleasant story!
Then a moment's pause, before he adds, with a kind of rueful cheer: "So even if I had explained better what I meant, it might've been impossible for you to achieve exactly that result. What you've done," and here he nods in Casimir's direction, a motion echoed by Iskierka, "is a remarkable use of your own nature."
And hopefully, now that he understands that nature a little better, he can better tailor his future advice. He tucks away all that Sephiroth's revealed under that very thought, some part of him dimly pleased that this has achieved his original aim of getting a fuller explanation what the youth was doing and how. The mere fact it's a blood-borne ability is relieving to his own anxieties; don't eat infected monsters would certainly suffice for keeping safe, for now. Though... a thought occurs to him.
"If you wish, we'll look for it, next time you're out practicing. If there is such a physical thread, it would seem to imply you can't exercise your control from too far away. Or that it could be broken, if the tether were.
"It is interesting, though, that a predator would have the ability to manipulate anything that took a bite out of her. Perhaps she wasn't at the apex in her native environment."
One silver eyebrow rises. Animating dead flesh is not exactly something that happens often on Gaia, the Planet seemed to be naturally disinclined towards allowing that kind of magic. Even if it could form, it .. didn't.
But at least Illarion's spent quite a bit of time around powers that revolved entirely around blood - in that, perhaps, there's a similarity. "If I can manage it I intend to be out every weekend. I need the exercise regardless, I might as well kill two birds with one stone, though I don't know who will be attending with me this time." Even though he was willing to bring Vincent or Mayerling, there was a reasonable chance Vincent was there whether or not he was actually brought.
"..Unfortunately, all information on Mother Jenova is two thousand year old legends, and what scientists could garner from a corpse. Her position on a galactic biosphere is .. guesswork at best, though it might be more accurate to think of her as an infection than say, a coeurl." There's that uneasiness again; he doesn't know. Would being a predator be better than being a disease? "A virus doesn't care how it gets inside its host."
"I'll speak to them about it." He'd already opened a dialogue with Mayerling, at that.
Then, thoughtful-- "Merely the physical exercise, or hunting particularly?"
At the further information--or confession to a lack thereof--on Jenova, he's silent a little space of time. "So strange," he says at length, "to imagine a world where you don't have anyone old enough to have known her firsthand." And after only two millennia!
"But, so--for practical purposes, then, you're a new kind of being. Guesswork aside, which metaphor better suits what you know of yourself?" Predator, or disease?
"To hear stories, there were. Gaia's had .. two or three different intelligent species on it besides humanity. One at least regularly lived several hundred years. They're just relics, bones and stories now." He glances in the direction of Casimir, who's resumed watching the mothbird with unblinking regard. "Mother destroyed them, as I did the Rhadorans."
Genocide runs in the blood, it seems. He was following orders, until the last.
That question is weightier than Illarion knows, but the silence that follows it is telling, as it's considered. "Bacteria or virus," he concludes, at great length, and there's not a single shred of emotion in his voice, absolute stillness in himself and not-Omen aside from what's necessary for speech. "Or a form of it. The ones that inhabit host cells and wield control over them. Certain fungus too. She'll kill everything, given the chance. All life. She has no need of their meat, only their life force." In the dark, his eyes are a ring of faintly glowing blue-green around oblong wide pupils, unblinking. "What I do may be hunting. I don't remember a time where I wasn't regularly assigned things to butcher."
He listens, and waits out the silences, and weighs what he's given with the nonjudgmental dispassion appropriate to a Warlord. They're just relics, bones and stories now, and so too had been the Sea People when the pillar of salt and sorrow had finished with them.
To say nothing of the carnage the shrikes had wrought after binding themselves to it, and its persistent visions of the All-War.
"But a disease cannot reckon nor regret the consequences of its actions," he says, soft and thoughtful. "As you can. It can't choose only deserving targets, when given the chance to choose."
He may need to ask after these Rhadorans, in time.
"Yet even humans don't so consistently put others before themselves. Nor elves, nor any other sort of thinking being I've known--" But one other, and how he suddenly and painfully wishes Bigby were here, to speak to this child that's so like him.
"What, then, is a proper ethos for someone of your nature? What would you determine it to be?"
Whether or not Jenova understood what she did, it didn't matter in the end. Entire worlds had fallen to her hunger, and Gaia would have been another.
"Maybe she can't." The boy shakes his head, a slight, brief gesture. "I don't. Not forever. There comes a point where there's no hesitation, no regret, and I am not sure it is coincidence that this occurs approximately the same time humans reach full maturity in body and mind."
It could be. It could be that he's pushed to that point, by the deliberate actions of others. Any mind can break. "I'm not so selfless as you think. If I could .. rip it out, throw it all away, and just be a normal human I.." There'd be no hesitation at all. Even if the cost was that nothing was there to check Hojo, or Shinra, he'd do it.
It's utterly selfish, and he knows it. The same selfishness that would have led him to abandon Sharon to the monstrous illusion of Hojo's tender care, placing his fears and anxieties first. ".. Everything I want is impossible. So as long as I can maintain some semblance of sanity I will do what I must, the only thing I'm good for, and that's .. more death. 'The right people', as if that makes it righteous."
"If you could, you wouldn't be unjustified." To bear all the weight of knowing he was a monstrous alien endling doomed to follow his mother's past atop the ruins of an empty childhood?
No, there was no justice in condemning the youth for wanting to put that burden down.
There is something heartbreakingly familiar in how that wish trails off into nothing, followed by another profession of the impossibility of a better future. It finally breaks Illarion free of his patch of moonlight; he crosses the short distance between them to reach out and rest his hands on the youth's shoulders.
"Sephiroth." Gently said, in the same tone he'd use on one of his own children. Not pitying, not rebuking, but concerned. "She might not be capable, and the man you become might not care. But you, here and now, can and do. Start here, with what you are: What rules do you need, to feel safe enough to learn and grow? What lines must be drawn?"
He knows the difference between justified and good. It would still be the wrong choice, the choice that ends in cruelty and suffering and death, for all that it's justified. If he simply sat on his hands and did a lot of nothing for the rest of his life, that would be with the full knowledge that he could have interfered. And chose not to.
Just like all the people who knew he was in the labs and did nothing.
Although there's a twitch upon being touched, any immediate violent reactions have been long since trained out. But it's a catalyst of a sort, a reminder that he is showing far too much belly and not enough teeth. Like so much else, it would simply have to be put away. This isn't a battlefield but it would lead to them. "Do you ... understand, that's not possible?"
Did anyone? This close, there's no reason to speak loudly, and he doesn't. Illarion isn't shrugged off, but there's a ribbon of tension that doesn't fade. "It can't be separated, I don't need to feel safe to do my job. I'll do what needs to be done." At any cost, so long as the cost is only paid by himself.
"I understand that it appears impossible. I don't know enough to say whether it truly is." He does not say: And you don't, either, because while he suspects it--the very young are driven to think in absolutes--he also doesn't know enough. Not yet.
Sephiroth's other objection, though, is safer territory for an objection. The shrike's tone shifts sterner, more commander than parent. "Yes, you will do what needs to be done; you've made as much clear. But you will not save one person more--might even fail to save any of them--if you squander your resources. If you burn yourself out through worry about what will be.
"No." Now he's carefully examining his own answers before giving them, and when they're ventured it's with the caution of someone who's aim is providing the answer that's expected of them, but not quite sure what that is.
If it's mentioned, it's intended to apply. That's all he needed to know.
Unfortunately for the question that follows, Sephiroth has lived a lifetime under those very expectations. He knows this one, with absolute confidence. Injury didn't matter, it never mattered.
Failure was marked not only in unwillingness to perform, but showing pain at all. "Yes, of course. Depending on the break's location it may not work very well, but under most circumstances I can comply."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 08:03 pm (UTC)"I see." He does not. He can only see what's in front of him. "..Is everyone like that?"
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 10:40 pm (UTC)The God of the Nine Houses and his Lyctors could see him at his full extent, but weren't themselves that extensive. Of all the rest of the people he'd encountered... There was the youth's guardian, but that is not Illarion's secret to share--whatever it was he'd sensed in Vincent.
"It was how I knew you were something other than human; it's your mother's blood, I'm guessing." The inhuman mother.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 10:59 pm (UTC)And if it were that obvious, then Illarion knew as soon as they crossed paths in the desert.. "..Likely. She's a shapeshifter, so the stories say. My other genetic donors were ordinary humans. I don't look right for human, to those with sight. But not... terribly so."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 11:19 pm (UTC)To draw none too fine a parallel between them.
"Is she also capable of splitting herself?"
As Illarion asks, Iskierka wisps into being, her wings flashing pale in the moonlight as she drifts off after Casimir. She's got eyes not for the other (faux) Omen, but the tether she'd seen between Sephiroth's halves when he'd split. Might it have atrophied by now?
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 11:34 pm (UTC)It's a distraction that allows him to not answer immediately. But he does, eventually. "I don't know. What she's capable of is .. what I've been able to piece together from barebones descriptions of fights that happened years ago to them."
The roiling unease gets worse. It's one thing to know one of his three parents is an inhuman monster, it's another to discuss it - and her - so frankly. "Being beheaded didn't slow her down, and given Reunion at the least being broken into pieces isn't much of a problem."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-10 01:37 am (UTC)For his part, Illarion catches the edge of that worsening unease. Can't quite pin its source, but it's a reasonable guess that it's something to do with the current topic of discussion.
He weighs his own need to know--well, no, label it for what it is: curiosity, though well-intentioned--against the youth's discomfort, and silently sets aside many of his questions for later. If Reunion and indeed all the fight against Sephiroth's inhuman mother are in the past for the others from his world, then the shrike would be better-served asking those questions elsewhere. Whether they'd get the answers he needs...
Well. Let tomorrow's problems belong to tomorrow. "That would seem to explain how you," hm, "summoned your companion, then. To our sight, he's a split-off part of yourself."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-10 01:47 am (UTC)There is a sense in both of them that they are being weighed, and Sephiroth isn't quite ... sure why. Searching, perhaps, for those elusive eyes or other marks of lingering problems. "...Well, yes. That's what he's supposed to be, isn't he? Part of you on the outside."
Wait, that's not what he'd been told. Not exactly.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-11 05:51 am (UTC)He'd suspected something like this, and it's truly a gift from the Saints the ritual had not gone worse.
"A part of your soul, made manifest," he corrects, without rancor or condemnation. "Poetically, the best part of you. But you've done something very literal instead.
"I should have explained better, I think." Not that the results were less than desired, but if Sephiroth had not felt he was making a choice in the matter... That was viscerally upsetting.
Or would be, could Illarion be upset.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-11 08:49 am (UTC)But it's more cautious, this time. Sephiroth was not overly adept at human body language but monster tells towards irritation were somehow more universal. Annoyance suggested he'd done something wrong. "I think you explained it well enough."
He doesn't live in a world where metaphor is the direction, even with magic. Even here. A lifetime of instruction has long since removed any potential towards interpreting directions as anything but very literal, and he knows something on the outside thus couldn't be inside anymore.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-14 01:38 am (UTC)Illarion worries at his lower lip with his teeth, silent a moment in the face of that hesitant yes? There's a gap in understanding here he clearly has not judged the whole depth of, and may not have adequate words to fill. His own understanding of souls has expanded greatly since being plucked off Nephele and thrown into Mariana's ocean, but it's still bounded by his own upbringing--by the veil of mystery surrounding the whole idea of a soul, and what it was, and what could be done with back home.
Who was to say Sephiroth is wrong, from his own lights?
"Perhaps I did," he ventures, thoughtfully, "though the results I'd expected were not, hm, so physical. I couldn't perceive the bond between other Sleepers and their Omens. You, however, have an artery between you and your other half."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-14 01:54 am (UTC)"That ... seems sensible," is the even more cautious response, thoroughly expecting a chastizing now in some form. "I'm not sure how you'd sustain yourself outside yourself otherwise, maybe it's different for Sleepers. From what .. little I know of my future ability to puppet others, that too requires a part of me on the outside, and presumably a link remains else the part outside would die." Though the tether is beyond source and satellite with boy and canine, a lethal blow to one will certainly reverberate to the other, whichever half that was.
He's missed something, that much is obvious in Illarion's reaction, but what? "Though usually that's just a small number of cells, I don't know how much blood went into making Casimir. I wonder if there'd be a similar .. 'artery'? With these controlled people."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-16 08:38 pm (UTC)Lashing out over it would be unproductive at best.
"I must believe it is different for Sleepers, given all the other ways we changed to suit the Waking World." He has not tested whether he can still turn into a squid. "And undoubtedly what a soul is--if it even exists--and how or whether it can be manifested outside one's flesh at all differs from world to world, too.
"The souls of Sleepers can manifest Omens all on their own, and the souls of speaking beings from my home can be split into pieces and used to animate dead flesh." Don't ask him how he knows that one. It's not a pleasant story!
Then a moment's pause, before he adds, with a kind of rueful cheer: "So even if I had explained better what I meant, it might've been impossible for you to achieve exactly that result. What you've done," and here he nods in Casimir's direction, a motion echoed by Iskierka, "is a remarkable use of your own nature."
And hopefully, now that he understands that nature a little better, he can better tailor his future advice. He tucks away all that Sephiroth's revealed under that very thought, some part of him dimly pleased that this has achieved his original aim of getting a fuller explanation what the youth was doing and how. The mere fact it's a blood-borne ability is relieving to his own anxieties; don't eat infected monsters would certainly suffice for keeping safe, for now. Though... a thought occurs to him.
"If you wish, we'll look for it, next time you're out practicing. If there is such a physical thread, it would seem to imply you can't exercise your control from too far away. Or that it could be broken, if the tether were.
"It is interesting, though, that a predator would have the ability to manipulate anything that took a bite out of her. Perhaps she wasn't at the apex in her native environment."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-16 09:16 pm (UTC)But at least Illarion's spent quite a bit of time around powers that revolved entirely around blood - in that, perhaps, there's a similarity. "If I can manage it I intend to be out every weekend. I need the exercise regardless, I might as well kill two birds with one stone, though I don't know who will be attending with me this time." Even though he was willing to bring Vincent or Mayerling, there was a reasonable chance Vincent was there whether or not he was actually brought.
"..Unfortunately, all information on Mother Jenova is two thousand year old legends, and what scientists could garner from a corpse. Her position on a galactic biosphere is .. guesswork at best, though it might be more accurate to think of her as an infection than say, a coeurl." There's that uneasiness again; he doesn't know. Would being a predator be better than being a disease? "A virus doesn't care how it gets inside its host."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 01:00 am (UTC)Then, thoughtful-- "Merely the physical exercise, or hunting particularly?"
At the further information--or confession to a lack thereof--on Jenova, he's silent a little space of time. "So strange," he says at length, "to imagine a world where you don't have anyone old enough to have known her firsthand." And after only two millennia!
"But, so--for practical purposes, then, you're a new kind of being. Guesswork aside, which metaphor better suits what you know of yourself?" Predator, or disease?
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 01:26 am (UTC)Genocide runs in the blood, it seems. He was following orders, until the last.
That question is weightier than Illarion knows, but the silence that follows it is telling, as it's considered. "Bacteria or virus," he concludes, at great length, and there's not a single shred of emotion in his voice, absolute stillness in himself and not-Omen aside from what's necessary for speech. "Or a form of it. The ones that inhabit host cells and wield control over them. Certain fungus too. She'll kill everything, given the chance. All life. She has no need of their meat, only their life force." In the dark, his eyes are a ring of faintly glowing blue-green around oblong wide pupils, unblinking. "What I do may be hunting. I don't remember a time where I wasn't regularly assigned things to butcher."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 02:06 am (UTC)He listens, and waits out the silences, and weighs what he's given with the nonjudgmental dispassion appropriate to a Warlord. They're just relics, bones and stories now, and so too had been the Sea People when the pillar of salt and sorrow had finished with them.
To say nothing of the carnage the shrikes had wrought after binding themselves to it, and its persistent visions of the All-War.
"But a disease cannot reckon nor regret the consequences of its actions," he says, soft and thoughtful. "As you can. It can't choose only deserving targets, when given the chance to choose."
He may need to ask after these Rhadorans, in time.
"Yet even humans don't so consistently put others before themselves. Nor elves, nor any other sort of thinking being I've known--" But one other, and how he suddenly and painfully wishes Bigby were here, to speak to this child that's so like him.
"What, then, is a proper ethos for someone of your nature? What would you determine it to be?"
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 02:24 am (UTC)"Maybe she can't." The boy shakes his head, a slight, brief gesture. "I don't. Not forever. There comes a point where there's no hesitation, no regret, and I am not sure it is coincidence that this occurs approximately the same time humans reach full maturity in body and mind."
It could be. It could be that he's pushed to that point, by the deliberate actions of others. Any mind can break. "I'm not so selfless as you think. If I could .. rip it out, throw it all away, and just be a normal human I.." There'd be no hesitation at all. Even if the cost was that nothing was there to check Hojo, or Shinra, he'd do it.
It's utterly selfish, and he knows it. The same selfishness that would have led him to abandon Sharon to the monstrous illusion of Hojo's tender care, placing his fears and anxieties first. ".. Everything I want is impossible. So as long as I can maintain some semblance of sanity I will do what I must, the only thing I'm good for, and that's .. more death. 'The right people', as if that makes it righteous."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 03:09 am (UTC)No, there was no justice in condemning the youth for wanting to put that burden down.
There is something heartbreakingly familiar in how that wish trails off into nothing, followed by another profession of the impossibility of a better future. It finally breaks Illarion free of his patch of moonlight; he crosses the short distance between them to reach out and rest his hands on the youth's shoulders.
"Sephiroth." Gently said, in the same tone he'd use on one of his own children. Not pitying, not rebuking, but concerned. "She might not be capable, and the man you become might not care. But you, here and now, can and do. Start here, with what you are: What rules do you need, to feel safe enough to learn and grow? What lines must be drawn?"
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 10:01 am (UTC)Just like all the people who knew he was in the labs and did nothing.
Although there's a twitch upon being touched, any immediate violent reactions have been long since trained out. But it's a catalyst of a sort, a reminder that he is showing far too much belly and not enough teeth. Like so much else, it would simply have to be put away. This isn't a battlefield but it would lead to them. "Do you ... understand, that's not possible?"
Did anyone? This close, there's no reason to speak loudly, and he doesn't. Illarion isn't shrugged off, but there's a ribbon of tension that doesn't fade. "It can't be separated, I don't need to feel safe to do my job. I'll do what needs to be done." At any cost, so long as the cost is only paid by himself.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 02:31 pm (UTC)Sephiroth's other objection, though, is safer territory for an objection. The shrike's tone shifts sterner, more commander than parent. "Yes, you will do what needs to be done; you've made as much clear. But you will not save one person more--might even fail to save any of them--if you squander your resources. If you burn yourself out through worry about what will be.
"Do you know what a moral injury is?"
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 05:13 pm (UTC)That too is acceptable. Not ideal, he didn't want to die, but since what he DID want was a stark impossibility..
"Yes." He knows because it keeps coming up. "It's a close cousin to hypocrisy."
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 05:50 pm (UTC)"It's hypocrisy's teeth, that wound us whether we chose or were commanded to transgress our own beliefs.
"Do you think you're immune to them?"
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 05:55 pm (UTC)If it's mentioned, it's intended to apply. That's all he needed to know.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 06:08 pm (UTC)(He may recognize that hesitance and what it betokens.)
"If you broke one of your wings, would you keep flying on it before you healed?"
no subject
Date: 2024-09-17 06:10 pm (UTC)Failure was marked not only in unwillingness to perform, but showing pain at all. "Yes, of course. Depending on the break's location it may not work very well, but under most circumstances I can comply."
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: