[PRP] Camaraderie (Shiloh & Lady)

[Melancholies]

"Let her go."

"Beel."

"Shiloh..."

Shiloh stopped and wheeled around to look at his fetch, his posture still tense and ridged. Beel on the other hand was relatively calm, his long leathery fingers tapping against one another with dull fleshy sounds. The fetch spoke up again, "She was... upset. Perhaps it would be best to give her space." He said evenly, without malice for once. Was it because Shiloh himself was infuriated?

"Maybe..." Shiloh sighed, "But I wanna talk to her. I know what she means. I know." He turned to start walking again, though decidedly a lot calmer.

"I'll take my leave then..." Beel drawled softly, his footsteps slowly fading into nothing as he vanished behind Shiloh.

Shiloh himself didn't know if Julian was still with Lady or not—or if Lady was even here still—but he called out for her regardless, "Lady, you still here?"

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

Lady sent Julian back to her quarters with strict orders to take a bath and read a nice book. As for her? She was in one of the public areas of the court, crumpled up in a corner, crying. Her shoulders heaved and her hands shook where they covered her face. It was not quiet, or pretty, or poignant. It was just sad. Her face had gone all puffy and red and she looked ******** miserable.

"I'm not gonna apologize," she said to Shiloh, once she'd identified him. "I'm not sorry. People like him made the Court what it is. And I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

One thing Shiloh still wasn't good at was the wonderful art of comforting people. Sure, he could comfort Jamie, but that was a little... different. Sort of. He watched Lady sob and wail and let her say her peace.

He didn't speak for a little while after that, instead opting to sit down next to her. "I ain't sorry either." He said after a bit, "And I'm not hunting you down for an apology." He wanted to make sure she was okay, which she was decidedly not okay. Shiloh learned that it was best to let the hurting party do their talking and act normal on his own accords. Don't butt in. Don't make assumptions. Don't give unsolicited advice...

"I stormed out right after you did." right after your tithe outed me knowing the geas too; but he kept that to himself. Lady obviously didn't take Julian with the regular notions of a Noble in mind. "Told him he didn't know what the hell he was even talking about 'cause he prolly had it the easiest out of everyone in there."

He thought for a moment. "Everyone who was a Noble anyway." He didn't mean that as a way to talk down anyone's abuse; maybe he had faced some of that under Thorne, but he knew damn well it wasn't the severity that Melany had graced him with. Lady too for that matter.

"Do you wanna hug?" This was his usual go to in the comforting-Jamie-situation, but he felt like it wouldn't hurt to ask.

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

Lady hiccuped, and hid her gross face behind her hands, and nodded. Yes she wanted a hug, damn it. "Julian's got to practice his self-care," she said miserably to her palms, "I told him to go home and take a bath and read a book and we could play Custom Robo later." Taco night wasn't until Thursday anyway.

She leaned into Shiloh's hug. It was awkward, because she was tall and leggy and elbowsy, but she seemed pretty well comforted by it. "She was awful," said Lady, "you know she was awful. Ezra was better but not much. And I was trying, Shiloh, I really was."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

Self care huh? He didn't mind the awkward positioning from their size difference, so long as the comfort got across. Seemed like Julian's trial was all about becoming a better person fundamentally, being healthier, being built up instead of stripped away like Shiloh was and Lady was and morphed into something terrible.

He squeezed her. "I know..." Whether it was to the 'she was awful' or the 'I was trying' was ambiguous enough, but it was probably to both. "I didn't want jack s**t to do with the Court after I got out, but I feel like s**t running away from it after everything..." Not that he had anything against anyone who would. He was just desperate to reclaim those three months of his life back. "She was god awful." He didn't know much about Ezra but he took her word for it.

"It's ******** up that people even ended up that twisted in the first place." He said after a while. "That's why I wanna change it. Stop this s**t from happening again. Smother it in the cradle or whatever the ******** you wanna call it." He sighed, "But not like... whatever the ******** that was. We're not changing s**t like that."

Shiloh was silent for a moment. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to, you know." He knew that she knew, but sometimes verbal confirmation helped.

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"I know," said Lady. "Everyone says I don't."

She didn't sit up. This was a comfortable place for the moment, after all. "But that's why we need to burn it down, don't you see? We can stop ourselves from becoming immortal, or at least make it possible for us to pass this on. We could end the tithing process and make this heritable, or something. It doesn't have to be this way..."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

Shiloh hummed out a thinking sort of sound. "That sounds... kinda nice, honestly." The idea of him outliving both Jamie and his brother absolutely tore him up inside. Jeremiah had touched on that in the meeting, but Jeremiah also had the benefit of being married to another noble. "I'd like to see an end to how tithes work. How fetches work too." He hated Beel for what he did, but the fact of the matter was they existed with a far different morality than humans did, "I'm tired of watching people hurt all the ******** time for no goddamn reason."

A thought struck him then. Would he still be immortal due to his ties as a principal? Or was that specific to the old three?

"I would like to see an end to the immortal bullshit for everyone else though." He mused out loud, "Immortality is just a slow ********' death... what else would you wanna do?" He had all the time in the world to listen.

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

Lady took a deep breath. "I want to free the fetches. They were people, too, once, you know? They had lives. If we break the contract, burn it all down, the fetches can pass on and they can go to be reborn instead of waiting for one of us to kill them and being bound to our wills like they're dogs. They were people once. And I want to get rid of all of this--" she waved a hand to indicate the physical structure of the Court "--the blood's all soaked in the stones, don't tell me you can't feel it there. Why can't we change all of this? If we need to rule, we can have heirs and heiresses. No more geas or prerogative or anything to control us. We can pick good people to take up our places when we're gone. We could make the Otherworld a safe place to be, maybe we could even regulate time so it doesn't run crazy in all directions anymore..."

She shifted away to sit up straighter. "We could make all of this better, Shiloh. Nobody has to hurt the way they've been hurting."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

Shiloh nodded, his grip loosening to let her move away, though he kept a hand on her shoulder. "I've thought about that, actually." He cleared his throat, "The fetches. They... they don't deserve this s**t either. But do you think they'd want that? I mean, hold on, let me think." He took a deep breath, "Pass on I mean. Die. I know Beel doesn't want to die, even if being a fetch bothers him. You think there's a way we could restore their humanity now? Let them go out that way like they wanted? Rather than," He waved his hand, "Poof, rewritten, you're dead till the next time."

"I dunno if that makes sense." He leaned back against the wall, "I just don't want to resort to mercy killing even if it is merciful."

"Regulating time though... you think that's possible too?" Did the Court really have that much power? "If we ever—" He paused, "—when they have another meeting, I'll make sure to bring all of this up, unless you think you're gonna be there again too. I'll back you though." The one complaint he had was the instability of the court and how easy it could be to usurp everything.

"I just don't want it to be in one person's control. I don't want to see what happened with Melany happen again."

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"I think we can do anything we put our minds to," said Lady. "We could probably make them human again. But this eternal-life stuff, it makes people crazy. It makes them so hungry to feel stuff they'll hurt people just because it gives them something to get wet about."

She frowned. "I don't want to be there next time," she admitted. "I forgot how much I hated how old people get when kids tell them something they don't want to hear. I think the ideal is no one controls anyone else, we're just like, responsible? Like mediators."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"You don't gotta be." He patted her shoulder a final time before taking his hand away. They both settled in his lap. "But if there's still stuff you wanna say, I can say it for you. Or I guess you could get Julian to do it or something." He shrugged. "I feel you though. Talkin' with adults is usually the ******** same. They try and make you think you got the freedom to say whatever while lowkey thinkin' they still know what's ********' best for you."

He cleared his throat and, in a very mocking voice, started to prattle on, "Well, when I was your age!" He coughed, "All that dumb s**t. Times change." He opted into hugging his knees. Even if he hadn't been personally attacked or whatever in the meeting, he still felt for Lady. He'd had too many teacher lectures in school that went the same way.

"Whatever though. I'd kinda like to see them made human. I'd like to see the control spread to everyone equally too. No more eternal life..." It was everything Lady had said so far, but he was just summarizing it. "Jeremiah is prolly going to try and talk to Noeh again to look for the document. He actually mentioned this stuff to me before the meeting... a little, anyway. Just 'we gotta get together and discuss stuff'." Except they all saw how well that went. He was mostly rambling to himself. "You gonna be ok?"

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

Lady's posture wasn't that much different. Her arms went beneath her knees rather than under them, but the feeling of trying to become small was the same. Her hair, long and straight and the color of dry blood, snaked over her shoulders and coiled on the floor beneath them. "I'm gonna be okay," she said. "I got good people. Like Eve and Julian and Leila and you. I mean... Melany's tithes gotta stick together, don't we?"

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"Duh." He said 'duh' in the most serious, genuine, one-hundred percent resolved way. "Not many other people really get it. They don't know what it's like going through that." He set his chin on his knees. "I'm not like, going to ditch you or anything." He had been meaning to get back in contact with her, actually. "I'm glad you got a like... little family thing going on though. It helps."

He shifted again. "Do you want my number or anything? We can hang out sometimes if you need a break from stuff. Or if you're just bored or whatever."

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"I always thought if I was just good enough she'd love me," said Lady dully. She reached into her drapey top and from some kind of hammerspace (there was no room for it to be hidden in her bee-sting tits anyway) pulled out her phone. Her hands were dry and cool in comparison to her puffy face as she handed it over for him to enter his number.

(The interface was not in Russian, but a lot of the messages were.)

"Thanks, Shiloh," she said. "You're the real MVP."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

Thankfully Shiloh didn't snoop. He wasn't the type to in the first place, so he went about punching his name and number in (It was under "Alltimeloh 🌼", which may or may not have been an edgy username from his past). He handed it back without any fanfare.

"I get it." He said after a moment. "I mean, I really fought back against her at first, but like... my mom left when I was really young, so..." He stopped himself from finishing the thought. The memory was fuzzy and thinking back on it hurt too much. Shiloh shook his head. "It's dumb." He hated that lonely desperation, how far he had sunk for approval and purpose at the end. He decided to leave out the tidbit on how Melany was now a college student and apparently one of his childhood friends or some s**t.

"It's no problem though." He offered her a dumb little smile, "You ain't too shabby yourself y'know." He elbowed her.

shibrogane