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Post by Satra on Aug 12, 2008 1:21:10 GMT -5
The boy open and closed his mouth, trying to vocalize a protest as he was cleaned off, the handling irritating the exposed flaps of skin on him. Finally he was able to get a noise out as he was put back next to his siblings. He was a very vocal one, mewing often and looking around. He nuzzled against the squirming mass of his siblings, not really understanding the need that attracted him to them. Then he felt the toes of the faceless one and lay still as the toes rubbed his back, not quite having the control of his own body yet to arch his back into it. Unaware of his hideous appearance, he mewed desperately more. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he needed a larger form... his Mother and Father to comfort and protect him... where were they? |
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Post by The Jenn on Aug 12, 2008 1:37:31 GMT -5
The little bat flapped her wings feebly and squirmed, landing near one of her siblings and twitching. She didn't know anything about what was going on, but something in her felt the emotion bubble over in the words spoken around her and it stirred emotions she couldn't even acknowledge, much less recognize. Unthinking and confused, she bit down on the body nearest hers.
Her brother jerked, letting out a yip as he felt small teeth sink into his side. His back legs kicked out in reflex with the full mobility of a biped while his front limbs stuck out awkwardly and his noise turned into a brief wail of confusion. The sound echoed oddly from the tubes on his back, sending chills down Lior's spine as he stared from the children to their mother, eyes flicking back and forth as if they couldn't decide which situation was going to be worse.
The feline met the look in her eyes with one akin to panic, the emotion slowly building inside of him until he let out a pitiful noise in the back of his throat when she turned away to retch. She knew this was his fault. The look in her eyes had confirmed it. He didn't really know what, exactly, had happened, but he was quite sure the cause of it had to be him. Now she looked sick and the infants looked very ill at ease and he was left having to come up with something to do. He so rarely faced a dilemma that left him in charge.
With his mouth, he grabbed a leftover blanket to throw over her, one that wasn't covered in blood or other disturbing messes. He then grabbed the sheet with his paw and half-tore it towards him, shoving it off of the bed. It had already been ruined. He flipped a blanket over to cover the children, partly keeping them warm and partly from keeping both parents from seeing them again until they could calm down and breathe for a moment. He didn't know what was going through her head, could only guess at revulsion and resentment and pain, and froze with one paw in the air to touch her for a long moment, hesitating. If she despised him for what he'd done to their children, would she want him touching her? Things couldn't have progressed that far already, could they? He hoped for both their sakes that they hadn't and leaned over, pressing his head against one of her shoulders and trying not to just crumple like the useless thing he knew he was. "I'm sorry, Rhi," he whispered, voice choked. "I'm so, so sorry... but... maybe it will be okay?" He didn't believe it, but if she did then he could pretend hard enough until he did.
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Aug 12, 2008 2:01:02 GMT -5
Rhiannon closed her eyes again as her vomiting began to subside, the bitter taste strong in her mouth. Her body shook as she took several deep gasps for breath, expression unchanged. She could hear those... things... mewling behind her, desperate for their mother, and some instinctual part of her called to her to go to them and give them what they needed. Her stomach, on the other hand, churned at the very thought, and her mind went perfectly blank. In that instant, something inside of her snapped.
She couldn't do this. How could anyone even expect her to try?
At the gentle touch from the feline, the woman jumped - for a moment, she thought it was one of the parasites that had lived in her having finally found her, but she settled the moment she realized it was only Lior. She turned to face him, her smile almost widening as she looked upon him, the corner of her eye twitching subtly. His words seemed to go unheard by the woman, however, and she turned back. Oh, good, they were covered... She didn't have to look at them anymore, even though the one was wailing... She didn't know how he was, he didn't have a mouth to wail with, after all.
"Shhh, shhh, don't be sorry. I quieted the voices,[/b]" she said strangely, nuzzling Lior, her muzzle tracing a line from his neck to his jaw before pulling back and regarding him closely. She had told him of her illness soon after they'd met, and her medication had done wonders to keep her sane even through the worst of her pregnancy... All of that seemed to fade away now. "I took away their speech, so they found a new way to come to me. I'm the one who is sorry. It's all my fault. If I leave, they'll go back to normal, and they'll love you as I love you. It will be okay. I promise.[/b]"
The feeling of his brother's back under his foot caused the faceless one's wailing to stop, and he began to kneed, a soft and stuttering purr rising from him as he did. He had found what he was missing, at least for now, and he would make sure his brother did not cry like that any longer.
The girl, however, felt lost - who was she touching? She struggled to her feet, and fell a moment later, yawning as she found herself pressed against the Joker child, her tail flopping lightly on the bed. She was so tired... Who knew simply being alive could take so much out of you?
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Post by The Jenn on Aug 12, 2008 23:19:43 GMT -5
Lior didn't really understand what she was talking about and he stared at her with confusion mixed into everything else. Oh, she'd told him about the voices and her medication a few months back, but she'd never really talked about them beyond that one time and he thought it was probably a subject best left alone, rather like some of the effects of his cloak. This was different.
"I... you... love? Leave? Which... one?" A bit of panic came back into his eyes, having died down at first and now reappearing with a vengeance. 'Love' and 'leave' did not go together in his vocabulary, nor would they in most peoples'. What exactly was she trying to say? He wasn't sure he understood her meaning, didn't want to understand if his mind was going anywhere near the right direction. In his wildest imaginings, he hadn't anticipated an outcome anywhere even close to this one, not since they settled things months back. "Please don't leave me," he pleaded, voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
Once the bat-child's teeth were out of his back, the Joker stopped his wailing and leaned against the warm body that had pressed near to his. He was hungry and tired, but the first didn't seem to be improving. At least he could do something about the second. He began to drift off without realizing it and his bat sister joined him, once she identified the warmth near her as something to welcome rather than attack. She couldn't sustain any kind of emotion so soon after coming into the world.
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Post by Satra on Aug 12, 2008 23:30:46 GMT -5
Suddenly, the world went black. But not like he had any idea what that meant. He just felt the kneeding on his back and heard the purring. He began drifting off himself, slowly. With the world dark that way it was, it encouraged sleep... he drooped fully, not wanting to stop the touch. Every once in a while he'd give a small, trilling "Myer?" Eventually those quieted and became much more infrequent with the cat until he fell asleep. The nameless child completely still among the slowly dying wriggling of his siblings.
It wasn't the motherly and fatherly touch he was looking for, but it would do.
[and he's asleep until you guys need me again. P: ]
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Aug 13, 2008 0:04:41 GMT -5
Rhiannon's smile began to fade as she looked over Lior. The confusion on his face almost managed to snap her back to herself, but it wasn't enough. She smiled again, reaching out to him with a paw, tracing her nails through his fur. At the soft noise made by her son, she turned back to the children, fur beginning to bristle with anxiety. She shook herself, bringing her attention back to the stunned Lior. He needed her more now than they ever would. All they needed of her was her absense, having her around would do them no good at all.
The panic in Lior's eyes caused her to step closer to him, nuzzling the cat again, movements extremely gentle and caring. She licked at his snout, but her eyes seemed to be looking through him as she did. "Can't it be both?[/b]" she said softly, laughing.
His desperate plea seemed to reach her for a moment, and she stopped. She shook her head, pawing at her own face, then threw herself at Lior, clinging tightly to him. "No, no, Lior... Not you, I could never leave you...[/b]" she turned to glance at the writhing blanket again, shaking her head. "Them. I'm leaving them. I need to leave for them to have a normal life, can't you see? Yes, it's all I can do. Don't be so sad. Once I'm gone it'll go back to normal.[/b]" Slowly, the woman untangled herself from Lior, smiling a little unsurely at him.
She activated her pain ability fully then, and walked away from him and their children, never once even pausing to look back at him.
The faceless one managed to find his siblings, his purring a mental note that filled the minds of all of the other children and his father. He could feel the others beginning to still but struggled to keep awake, basking in the simple joy he gained from being near his siblings. They all seemed so happy now, tangled together as they were... His sister found her way into the pile as well, burying herself among the limbs. She knew that while she was with them, she was safe, and she fell easily into sleep.
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Post by The Jenn on Aug 13, 2008 0:24:21 GMT -5
Lior's throat closed and he couldn't say anything, could barely swallow. Why did it have to be both? Nothing would be helped by her leaving. Nothing would be normal. He and his strangeness, the damned cloak, had seen to that quite nicely. The words wouldn't leave his mouth. He didn't even know if they were the right thing to say. He should say something, but nothing came out. He had the strong feeling that if anything did, it wouldn't be coherent or intelligible.
He needed her. Living on the streets for years, fending for himself while trying to balance the cloak's alter ego and his own survival, he now realized how desperately he needed someone else to get along in the capital. He was dependent, if not always on her presence. Her embrace and words briefly gave him hope, a flare of it almost too sharp to breathe around, but it was crushed in the next instant and he just stood there, staring after her as she walked out the door.
His mind shut down for a few minutes and he continued to stand, staring at the door as if willing it to open again, silently pleading with her to change her mind or come to her senses or do whatever she needed to do in order to come back. But no, she was gone. Forever. That was what she'd implied. And he was left with... the children.
Slowly, his head turned to look at the blanket-covered shapes. He wasn't sure if he would be able to handle some of them without gagging. What was he supposed to feed them? Did they even have any milk in the fridge? How would the one without a mouth eat?! Or would it just slowly wither away and die a skeletal wreck without an umbilical cord. He shuddered at the thought, of both the circumstance and the child himself. He needed to look over all of them more closely but he didn't want to. He needed to see about feeding them, but again, he didn't want to. He needed to take care of them, period, and try to keep them all alive and healthy as best he could. If she ever came back... for any reason... he couldn't bear the thought of her further distancing herself from him because he didn't do a good enough job.
Besides, he had done this to them. It was his fault. Now he needed to deal with the consequences of his failure. Maybe if he tried hard enough, he could pretend that the bodies under the blanket didn't make him want to scream and run and hide somewhere he wouldn't have to deal with this reality. He doubted it. Would he ever be able to see any of them as children, rather than... whatever they were now?
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Aug 13, 2008 0:53:57 GMT -5
The street stretched out in front of her, endless miles of freedom from worry and responsibility. If the powers had given her these children as a test, then she embraced her own failure. All she needed was the road under her feet and the knowledge that she could go wherever she needed to. She would find her own place in the world, her private little corner from everyone she knew. She needed to exist as her own creature, for Lior and for her children. For a half and hour Rhiannon felt alive and invincible and for that full time she ran and ran, not caring where she was going. Eventually, her pain ability began to ebb and then wore off completely. The woman barely had the energy to crawl into some dingy alley, her entire body wracked with pain. She was happy to find that the blanket Lior had wrapped around her was still draped across her shoulders, and she wrapped herself in it, willing herself to sleep.
The days that followed that one went by in a blur of places and faces that she'd never seen before and would never see again. It was a refreshing change of pace for her, and as her body began to heal she found herself travelling farther with each day, moving on the outskirts of the Capital for days before she gained the nerve to leave the city completely.
A week away from home, she began to feel the pangs of lonliness. She knew that she couldn't go back to Lior, as that would ruin everything that she had worked so hard to accomplish. She considered returning to the Court, but she knew that would be messy - she couldn't return yet, not until she'd figured out some excuse as to why she had no children with her when she'd been so pregnant during her last visit. So she continued to keep only her own company, her only company the voices that occasionally found their way into her mind, soft and insistant. She never listened to them, however, enjoying them as little more than background noise to her life.
Until, that was, until she dreampt. There was a voice in her dreams, and a soft touch that hushed the terrified part of her
-what are you doing, Rhiannon?
She twitched, shivering in her sleep.
You leave them? Leave him? Why? Are you afraid, too weak to face up to your own-
Something in the voice woke the part of her mind that she'd pressed to the back of her consciousness, and it clawed its way to the surface once more. She awoke with a start, breathing desperate and terrified. Where was she? Why was she here? Where were... Her children?
The truth hit her in a desperate blur, and Rhiannon set off in a desperate run towards the Capital. Towards Lior and her children. Towards her home. She ran until her muscles burned with the effort, her lungs desperate to take in whatever air she could manage, her pawpads bleeding. And when she felt that her body couldn't carry her another step, she used her pain ability to run further, pressing herself to the limits, until her vision was filled with the dull lights of the capital. When she finally reached the stairs of the apartment she'd called home for all those months, she collapsed on the stairs, unable to drag herself a step farther, sobbing desperately between her breaths, letting out a high and keening whine.
All she could do was hope he'd hear, hope that he was still there.
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Post by The Jenn on Aug 13, 2008 1:21:43 GMT -5
In the weeks following Rhiannon's delivery and abandonment, Lior took it on himself to care for the children in between his bouts reaper trance and a few nights of almost debilitating depression. He had found and lost the best thing that had ever happened to him, both ironically because of the curse that had seen fit to change his life in so many ways.
Looking at the children was painful. He could handle the pretty little coyote with the bone wings without issue. She was so pretty, looked like a combination of her mother and, oddly enough, his uncle. It was the Highland swirls in her mane that did it. Similarly, the child with no face and beautiful wings reminded him of family, when he wasn't staring at the spots on his head where features should have been. He found it funny in the nervous-near-hysterical kind of way that the one who had everything else didn't have ears, and vice versa. The faceless boy didn't die from lack of tangible food, which he decided after a few nights' contemplation was a good thing. He unofficially decided that was the one he would call 'Kieran', one of only two names in the Bog language Rhi had mentioned. He didn't know any girls' names besides hers.
The other three made his head do unpleasant things and occasionally upset his stomach when he really let it get to him. From the bat with no eyes or discernible region to the Highlander with a hideously disturbing flap of skin covering his face to the half-Bog child with no rank marking and breathing tubes coming out of his back... they scared him in ways he never thought would happen. Seeing bits of himself or Rhi in them just made things that much worse. Still, he cared for them as best he could and tried not to just drop them in misery when he tended to them.
He was in the midst of a paralyzing fit of depression, sprawled on the bed they'd shared - without sheets so that he could still smell what of her scent remained - when he heard a high-pitched whine outside the open window. His spine stiffened and he held still, half of him thinking it was his mind playing nasty tricks on him while the other half tried to shove down a desperate thrill of hope. He waited and heard more sounds, panting breath with the occasional sob catching it.
The wall nearly collided with his face as he leaped from the bed and scrabbled out of the room, heading for the door. He flung it open, half of his mind sneering at him for believing it would be her, and could only stare for a moment while he took in the fact that it was her.
In terrible shape, with the smell of blood and sweat in the air, but... it was her! He jumped forward and hovered over her for a minute, trying to decide what to do, then just whimpered and half-fell next to her while one wing went around her. "Rhi...?"
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Aug 13, 2008 1:41:42 GMT -5
The few moments that passed between her desperate cry and the sound of footsteps were, to Rhiannon, an eternity of suffering. He had left the apartment, she was sure, why would he stay in such a place? The children would be gone too, he was sure to have taken them away from her reach. It would make perfect sense, wouldn't it? After all, she was the one who had left him in such a mad panic, dropping every bit of responsibility in his lap without any real warning. Why would he want to stick around in a place that would make it easy for her to find him again? She felt, in that moment, as if she was the lowest scum in the darkest parts of the world.
She raised her head slightly at the sound of footsteps within the house. He was there, and as her initial panic began to fade a new worry began to Even if he was there, why on earth would he want to see her again after what she'd done? She couldn't even remember why she had decided to come back in the first place now. Had she been so utterly naive to think that showing up again and simply apologizing would right everything she'd done? She struggled to rise to her feet again but there wasn't any strength left in them and she collapsed once more, sobbing into her own paws.
Then Lior was there, and Rhiannon found herself shaking all over. He didn't slam the door in her face, didn't sneer at her, all he did was fall at her side. It took the last little bit of energy that she had, but the woman pulled herself up, clinging to Lior as if he was the only thing left in the world, whimpering desperately. "I-I'm so, so sorry... Please, please, will you take me back? Oh hills, Lior, please, I'm so sorry![/b]" she was babbling between her tears, but she didn't know what to do. She was utterly and completely lost and she needed him.
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