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cream-and-tea · 2 months

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LAY ME DOWN. chapter seven excerpt. unedited. featuring: agnes’s attempt to understand a new and troubling situation through understanding a new and troubling person. light body horror. self-harm adjacent behaviour. general freaky magic stuff.

[transcript under the cut]

oh brother. these guys again.

TAGLIST (ask to be +/-). @vellichor-virgo @transmasc-wizard @houndmouthed @muddshadow @just-wublrful @corkywantstowrite @shrunkupthejams @andromedaexists @caninemotiff @lungs-and-gills @lychniscitrus @phantomnations @onomatopiya @deer-in-headlights-stare @arctic-oceans @redbloodprose @definitelynotclayface @cannivalisms @atthenian

“Show me then,” the words are out of her mouth before she has time to think. Animal instinct. Too distracted to remember to bite her tongue.

Pallas blinks at her once, slowly. “What?”

She can walk it back, that would be safest, the nothing already crouched expectantly in the back of her throat. Instead she uncrosses her legs and swings them over the edge of the bed to better face them. Having feet on the ground makes her feel more solid, more certain.

“I want you to show me. Vita. I want to see it.”

Pallas raises an eyebrow. “Show you?”

She scoots forward slightly and nods, made a bit braver by the fact that they don’t seem to be angry or condescending, just confused. Probably really confused because Agnes is awful at telling what people feel by their faces and even she can see it clear as day.

“You’ve already seen it,” Pallas says, setting down the pen and shrugging back into their jacket. “You know what it does.”

And that’s true isn’t it? In the Haithwood and in the library. Pallas winding every bit of her body around their fingers and holding her frozen to the ground, Pallas making Calliopes nose break and bleed in a burst of icy rage, Judge reaching under her skin to pull her injured flesh back into shape. Vita. Blood and flesh and living bone. Honestly she’s seen enough for a lifetime. There’s still that sick feeling in her gut whenever she thinks about any of it.

So maybe it has less to do with the magic and more to do with Pallas, who’s spent every hour of every day since she got here pushing her to reach for the dead in a way she never has before. Pallas has had everything to do with her ghosts and her gravespeaking but every time they’ve used their power she’s had absolutely nothing to do with it, a bystander at best and a victim at worst. It's not that she’s upset, or ungrateful, just that she wants to see them the same way they’ve seen her. That isn’t so much to ask? Right?

“Yeah.” Agnes moves to rest her chin in her hands. “But I haven’t seen you use it when you’re not…”

Scaring me? Attacking people?

“...y’know,” she finishes lamely.

Pallas has gone still in the chair and she can’t help but feel the same hot embarrassment as before at the expression on their face, nakedly baffled in a way that feels too intimate for her to be seeing. It’s like something about what she’s asking has managed to fully shock the danger out of them, leaving just a person who doesn’t understand what’s happening. Agnes hadn’t thought that was even possible to do, and the revelation that it is fills her with a kind of mad, giddy joy. You’re just like me. You don’t know what’s going on right now.

All this time she’s been tiptoeing around Pallas, but now she’s knocked them off balance and hasn’t been reduced to a pile of blood and guts. So there are some things she can do. She is not totally helpless and they are human after all and they are being awkward! Being awkward in front of her!

“I don’t exactly have a broad scope,” Pallas says dryly. “I doubt you’ll like anything I have to share.”

Agnes doubts it as well, but that’s not really the point. And nothing they said just now was no.

“Maybe it’ll be nice. Maybe I’ll think it’s nice.”

Pallas stares at her like a chicken confronted with a bicycle. Then they look away. Then they let out a long, quiet breath and close their eyes before shifting to face her properly, both feet on the ground as well.

“Sit back,” it’s closer to their normal voice but with a faintness to it. Not quite trembling, but definitely not steady either. Agnes straightens up and tilts back onto her palms as Pallas shifts forward. It feels like too long before they open their eyes, which are just as grey and bad as ever.

“I won’t do anything to you,” Pallas says, as if that’s an option they were considering. Agnes can’t help but feel a twist of relief, the memories of that first meeting in the woods are never far from her mind and no matter how much she wants this, any chance to avoid something like that happening again is a welcome one.

“Right.” She nods.

“If you start screaming, or vomit, or pass out, I will cease interacting with you alltogether. That is a promise.”

“I’ll be okay.”

Pallas’s brows furrow with what could be concentration or could be concern. Their mouth opens, floundering for half a second, like they were about to say something else before closing back into a tightly pressed line. They hold their left hand out in front of them, like they’re waiting for a high five, and somehow Agnes knows that, whatever it is, it’s about to start and her anxiety feels like victory in the face of that.

At first it is nothing much, just a thin red line slicing down their middle finger. So straight and clean it could’ve been made with a scalpel. Not even that much blood. Then, simultaneously, the line begins to creep down their palm and out to each of their other fingers, dripping beads of crimson down the clammy pale of their skin. Somehow it doesn’t seem real, like Agnes is looking at a diagram in a book that’s mysteriously been animated in front of her. If Pallas feels any pain at all they don’t show it, face unchanged as the skin starts to peel back from their hand.

That does make Agnes draw in a sharp breath, even though she’s been very good at staying quiet and still up until now, fearful like she was in the classroom with Judge that any sudden action will throw the magic off-balance. But she doesn’t look away, because she asked for this, and Pallas doesn’t pause in their unfurling even if their brows furrow slightly at the sound. It happens in one smooth motion, practiced, effortless, performed with all the ceremony of taking off a glove. Agnes does not start screaming, or vomit, or pass out. She’s dressed animals before and, apart from how Pallas is not dead and the effect is contained to just the one hand, this isn’t really different. There's the careful separation of skin from muscle, the delicate definition that separates the parts underneath, the red and pinkness of it all.

Of course it’s not really the same either, because the parts of Pallas being stripped away are not set aside for later use; instead they stay floating in the air around the hand, held frozen in the same way her body had been back in the forest when they first met. Warm, wet flaps of skin, fresh as the blackgreen bark stripped from trees back home, hover drowsily like something pickled in a jar. It is also not separated, not really, everything still intertwined and beating with red and alive, muscle and artery and nerve working together, just lifted up and away. Agnes never paid her own hands much mind beyond the work they could do and how cold they got in the winter, but now she imagines her skin split apart and away the way Pallas’s is, wonders if all of that really exists inside her too. It feels wrong somehow, what’s in front of her now is just meat. A person should be made up of more than that. There are so many small parts to a hand, parts she cannot name but Pallas probably can or else they would not be able to do any of this. They don’t stop until the muddy white of their fingerbones begin to show, then the entire thing spasms with an uneven spurt of blood, a pulse that Agnes feels in her own chest, and goes totally still.

In the silence she can’t help but lean forward, marvelling at the web of flesh in front of her, and even as her scalp prickles and her stomach turns over and the air around her seems to hum with the urge to run a part of her itches to reach out a finger and touch. That really would just be the same as fiddling around with the guts of an animal, but also it would be different. Somehow she knows it would be different. Different in a way she’ll never be able to understand unless she does it. Which she won’t. Because Pallas is terrifying and this has only proved that a hundred times over.

Though maybe not as terrifying as she thought before. They did listen to her, or humour her, or whatever this is. It’s something for sure. Agnes can always make do with something. It’s how she stays alive.

Her breath ghosts across the bloody strand of a muscle, and that is what breaks the spell, that or Pallas is just done or some other condition she doesn’t know has been met. The coming back together seems to take a good deal longer than the taking apart, sweat glueing dark strands of hair to Pallas’s cheeks and the grinding of their teeth made audible despite the damp, slithering sounds of their hand seaming itself back together until the only trace of what just happened is a rusty crusting of blood packed around their nails and in their palm lines.

They pull the hand away while Agnes can’t help but keep watching, transfixed as they flex it in and out of a fist with a disinterested glare, impatient while a few stray cracks and pops fill the newfound silence. Once that’s done they hold it out one more time, as if proving to Agnes just how inconsequential vivisecting a part of them in front of her really was.

“There. Happy?” Pallas slumps slightly, tipping their head back enough that she can see their pulse fluttering frantically just beneath the skin of their neck. Again she resists the urge to touch it. She likes all of her flesh right where it is. Thank you very much.

Palla shifts to look at her and Agnes remembers that she’s been staring, not answering them, and internally kicks herself for being such an idiot.

“I am,” She breathes out, makes the monumental effort to meet their eyes. “I actually really am.”

#agnes: haha how you only ever seem to killmurder things with your powers that’s sooooo silly #pallas: i cannot express enough how that is literally all i know how to do #anyways! they’re bonding! yippee!#me writing agnes wishing she could mess around with pallass internal organs like. hold that thought for about #five more chapters girl. i’ve got you don’t worry.#she is NEVER beating the ‘obsessed with that freak’ allegations #this was one that was hard to write the little description bit for but i wanted to share pallas doing magic #because it’s one of my favourite things to write lol #wip: ghost story #pallas and agnes #creme does a writing #tw gore #tw body horror #tw sh related

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