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 Posted: Sat May 27, 2023 5:02 pm
It was strange to think of while looking upon the smoked-out husk of a building, but the memory came to him nonetheless. He remembered having spent the day holed up in his room, eyes swollen and wearied from tears, nose in an unfortunate book as he kept turning the pages listlessly. The book was a journal — it was his journal — and the pages chronicled his whirlwind of weeks spent dangerously in love with the new transfer student. He'd thought that they'd gotten along, he'd thought that he understood the signals and the chemistry, he'd thought he read the room, but when he gathered his nerves and made that confession, he was met not just with refusal, but also derision.
It was in the months before they moved to Destiny City. That was, he remembered, why he had the nerve enough to say anything at all, knowing that distance would soften the blow of any negative outcome. But they hadn't moved just yet, and Eion — then Elex — had to weather the last weeks of school nonetheless.
As he looked at the crippled silhouette of the bank, Faustite remembered the way he scrambled to scrape all his messy feelings back inside when he heard the thump of footsteps up the stairs. His knob turned, his father walked into the room, and Elex was kicking the journal back under his bed, acting like he was fine. It was then that his father spent over an hour chatting with him, both about the boy in question and Elex's failed expectations, about familial anecdotes that he father always found a way to relate to Elex's struggles. Much of the conversation was a blur, but he remembered quite well that his father warned him about his ruminating habit. That he spent so long staring at the doors that were shut that he never noticed when a different door opened.
That opportunity would pass him by because he wasted all of his time overanalyzing the failures. And, he thought, maybe that was true, even now, even with the projects that weren't his own, because he could not shake his own suspicions nor answer his own pointed questions over what happened, that day, at the Augusta Bank.
His attention then shifted to where he and Cybele had stood but weeks ago, squared off with each other until one sprouted wings and filled the sky with invisible arrows. Until the bank exploded and shot its rubble far enough to turn the pond grey and kill most of the grass over the days since. He remembered all her defiance, he wore still the gouges left in the puckish way that magic liked to curse his body with scars, but foremost he remembered that feeling of helplessness, of powerlessness — that reminder that, no matter how much power he held, he would still be unable to change anything. Not his circumstances, not the alignment of his enemy.
But there was always more work to be done. With a heavy sigh, Faustite dragged his feet toward the ruined building.
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Posted: Mon May 29, 2023 3:11 pm
The smell of fire never really went away. Pendour hadn't stopped smelling it for months now, except in the rarest circumstances, but the scent was certainly stronger here, in the charred bones of the bank. It made her head spin a little, but she curled a fist tight and didn't spin into any deeper unpleasant emotions than that. The curiosity had won out, when she'd been in the area, to see what was left. Given her work, it seemed wrong to turn a blind eye to the damages that had been wrought. She would have been satisfied seeing it, and moved on with thoughts about war heavy in her chest, but someone else was there, someone Chaos. She walked forwards and stepped over a charred door, her shoes cracking broken glass and small pieces of rubble into even finer dust. Then, through one of the empty windowframes, she saw him. Faustite. Oh. No wonder everything still smelled like smoke and fire. The others probably wouldn't want her to get close, wouldn't want her to talk to him, but she wasn't sure what else to do. He'd know she was here byonw. If he wanted her, he could just teleport after her. "Faustite," she called out, softly. "I'm glad to see you breathing easier." There was nothing false about her tone, or her words, although she did keep a little distance between the two of them just in case. "I know you told me not to listen to rumors, but I heard them, all the same. I was worried." She'd cried for him, more than he might know.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2023 6:23 pm
Auric sense warned him that someone was in his proximity, but not how close that someone was. All he could make out was that they were within a couple blocks of him, which served to keep him on edge, for he wouldn't know who they were or when they decided to show. There were a fair handful of transcended Knights, after all, and so few of them cared to greet him with anything other than their weapon.
When Faustite heard her voice, he turned from his thoughts. That she would invoke him to think about what he survived, and by extension, how foolish he felt when granted the boon of hindsight, galled him. He'd spent his time, in a hospital bed, counting the crevices in the ceiling while he reexamined every one of his mistakes. While he combed over his career with every shortcoming in mind as reason enough to ask that they take the power back, that they let him keep his old normal and they can dispense all their new responsibilities on someone else. But that sounded ungrateful, and that wouldn't do. In that respect, he would do his damned revisitation of those caustic months and humor her a little longer.
Wise of her to keep her distance. Faustite turned on more familiar shoes to get a better look at her; the view through the empty frame was of a girl soaked in moonlight and mired in scars.
"You were worried," he echoed incredulously. "Over me."
Was that pity? Or did this one genuinely give a ******** about someone who would rather see an end to the world?
She likely had questions for him, as before, as always. Better to head those off before she got started, he supposed, so he started with one of his own. "If I became a youma, would you dust me?"
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Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2023 1:45 pm
It wasn't easy to see from this distance, through the husk of a smoked out building, with the flames that danced inside Faustite's ribs shifting the light around him every half second. Pendour was half blind on top of that, but she looked over him all the same, best she could. It didn't take much visibility to tell that he was stronger. He stood tall without stopping to cough up any awful black liquids. His face was still delicate, but it was no longer all wan and carved out, like skin over bones. He looked alive, all the way, as much as anyone could look. She'd seen him briefly in the fight here, but that hadn't been enough for her to notice things like that, and the smallest look of relief, just for a second, even as he was already asking her questions. "Of course I wouldn't dust you," she said, gentle, although she was surprised he'd even thought to ask. "I told you, I've never dusted a youma in my life. I'm not about to start." She might bring them human food, and blankets, and use her sleep magic on them until Faustite rolled his eyes at her, but she'd never done anything to hurt one. "I don't like that they live off human life force, but I don't think making their lives miserable is going to help with that." A moment passed. Pendour breathed in smoke. "And, well, I worried for a while. Then I cried, when I thought you were dead." It was the same concept. There were things about Faustite she didn't like, things about the Chaos in him that she hated, but she didn't think being cruel about it was going to help anything. She glanced up, meeting his flame eyes for a moment. "Are you happy?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2023 8:01 am
So that didn't preoccupy her much. Not for more than a handful of words, an assurance, a confirmation, and then she was asking questions of her own.
He was tired. Not in a manner that stopped his body from brimming with so much energy that it nearly hurt to stop moving, but his mental bandwidth for existence — for existential questions — had worn thin of late. He disliked being asked such things, even by his own husbands. But she had asked, and he was aware it was fully within his power to refuse to answer anything at all.
Faustite didn't owe her answers. As he approached, footfalls landing in chunks of brick and broken glass, he reminded himself that he didn't need to keep on with this one. Thus far, she did nothing. Nothing to stop him, and so little of something to stop a youma that it may as well have been nothing.
"Do you keep anything in confidence?" He returned. He expected a no. A hand found his hip, where it toyed with a belt loop. If he didn't keep moving, his atoms were liable to vibrate apart.
"Because my happiness, my lack of it, isn't anyone else's business. If you give a s**t about ethics, like the rest of your comrades, you'll keep it to yourself."
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Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 4:04 pm
She wondered if he thought her some kind of blabbermouth, of if he always just asked his questions in such a brusque and slightly aggressive way. He had husbands. Nikki had told her as much, as well as detailing everything she could find out about those relationships in the database. Was he sweet as sweet to them, or were they just the types who enjoyed being treated a little dismissively, a little rude? No, she thought, he must talk to everyone like that, because she didn't know how he could think that she didn't keep secrets. People were constantly opening up to her about their doubts about the Negaverse, but also doubts about their families, their friends. When there was someone there to listen, people were almost always quick to open up their hearts, to show their sorrows, and their joys, and their scars. When they showed those things to Pendour, she held onto them carefully, held them close to her own chest. "All the time," she told him, easily. Of course sometimes, given the situation, she had to share things, but there were always exceptions to confidentiality where safety was concerned. "But if it's not my business, that's okay, too. I can go." She wasn't going to get anywhere if she didn't show him respect.
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Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2023 9:59 am
Faustite's attention returned to the looming husk of the wrecked bank. As far as he understood it, the Negaverse still owned the wreckage. Still owned the land it occupied. Now, whoever's name was on the deed — maybe Jada's, maybe Lepidolite's — was responsible for its recovery. Surely the city was telling them to do something about it, for it jeopardized the buildings nearby and any passersby who got a margin too curious about the damage. There would be pressure to wrap up the investigation, maybe. He didn't know much else about the complexities of building ownership, and certainly nothing about insurance, but he knew enough about their enemy to know that the building would forever be under suspicion as a Negaverse op whether it was rebuilt or sold off as a vacant lot.
There were enough traitors populating the White Moon ranks that he knew they'd never forget that this was the site of a known Negaverse operation. It had to be chronicled somewhere, along with the Database information they may have scalped from the Negaverse on their way out. Thus the Negaverse could only mitigate their losses from that op, and its unmitigated failure would forever be a scar on Jadarite's otherwise spotless record.
It was a mark against him, too, for his inability to rectify the situation. A General-King, and he couldn't bring home a single new senshi or officer. Couldn't have plucked the starseeds from a dozen of their adversaries in a simple tit-for-tat. One starseed for every hundred dollars lost to the fire.
Faustite's fist tightened at his side. If she was going to be a sounding board —
"My youmafication was stopped by suffusing me with an ineffable amount of power. Was allowed to keep the smallest fraction of it for my own. This was the first day I got to use it, and I made a ******** Princess out of her instead." Smoke joined the atmosphere as he let out a breath. "One of my officers ran this op. Now her record is marred. Mine, by extension."
He turned to face her once again. "If I were a youma, none of this would matter to me. But that wasn't my fate; now I have to live with this ******** atrocity while I wear a mantle too big for my shoulders. Hard to be ******** happy about any of it."
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 6:49 am
The confession came as much more of a shock to Pendour than it would have been if Faustite had simply burst into flames. She blinked, wide-eyed. It was true that she'd been working on relationship building, here, for months and months now. At the same time, for those months and months, people had been warning her of Faustite. Especially now that he was well and truly alive, now that his moment of desperation was over, he was back to being too far gone, back to being something dangerous, something heartless. She hadn't wanted to believe that whatever she'd done might have worked. But here he was, telling her that he was deeply unhappy now that he'd sworn her to secrecy. She might have guessed some of it, but she listened all the same to the way he said it in his own words. Of course she did. She was a good listener. "I was there," she told him, after. "Not, um, involved? But it was hard to miss. I wasn't happy with it, for what it's worth." Not much, probably, and it wasn't like she'd have been happier if Cybele had ended up corrupted. She supported Faustite as a person, but the things he thought he had to do now would hurt so many others. "I know a while ago you were desperate to keep some kind of humanity, but I also understand that humanity comes with a price. Living is hard." Her voice went stone-heavy at that, like she knew what she was saying. "War makes it even harder." She didn't have to imagine the smell of smoke that always haunted her, right now. "Do you want some music? It'll soothe your worries."
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 9:39 am
The bank was hard to miss. Especially once the fire caught and the wall crumbled and the ******** bombs went off. It was hard to miss all the White Moon signatures that swarmed it like wasps on a kill, or the severely delayed Negaverse auras that came to mop up after them. It was hard to miss the youma. It was hard to miss the enmity that still lurked in him, unsatisfied with the progress that they have made since.
The officer responsible was dead. The case was closed. But the damage still lingered, and that would take far longer to repair than it had taken to point out culprits and distribute culpability.
Of course she wasn't happy with it. This one was averse to fights, wouldn't even hit youma. Wouldn't even hit him, if he'd turned full youma, though he was certain there were a number who would've liked to see him dusted permanently. Why would she savor an all-out conflict at a burning bank, where physical and financial violence were left to flourish?
"You didn't do anything to stop it," he accused, hand on his hip. "All your White Moon friends circling the place like ******** vultures. Picking out and picking off everything they could."
There was the matter of Cybele, of her ******** wings, of the fact that she drew them from herself when his hand was in her chest. Was that his doing? Could he be implicated in such a thing, for naïvely using a power so new to him? Did he spend too much negative power on her soul and it flipped some sort of switch? Or was she just lucky, spoilt with planetary protection? There would be no way to know without asking her, and she was likely to never answer a single question from him again. He wasn't sure which was more galling, then — the fact that it happened, or the fact that he would never know the why behind it.
He didn't much care for thinking of humanity; he had enough headaches with only half as much as the next person. Shaking his head, he started to pace.
"Spare it. Won't fix what's broken, so what's the use in it."
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 3:08 pm
His words cut, but only because she'd been repeating the same things to herself for weeks now. She hadn't stopped it. She'd failed, and kept failing, at trying to get Order to see any solutions other than constant, senseless, violence. She sighed. "They don't tell me, if they're going to do something like that," she told him. Her own voice was soft, and thin, and honest, like it was her turn to confess. "They don't want to listen to me, telling them to stop, to find another way." A moment passed, and her eyes widened a little with realization when she said, "You call them my friends, and maybe one or two of them are, but I don't think any of them see me as their ally." Not even Encke. Not even the person she loved most in the world "By the time I got there, it was just fire and everyone running off. I'm, um. I'm sorry." That, and Princess Cybele, but she didn't think he needed any reminding of that. She glanced at a piece of charred brick. "So I guess we can sit here, um, being failures together." Not that she thought he was, by any sense, but maybe they'd found some common ground.
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Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 9:24 am
Faustite peered at her. In a few short sentences, Pendour revealed a multitude of unusual facts to him that he did not previously consider. It offset his perpetual anger, guttering it into a low-grade state of confusion.
Faustite had never once allied with the White Moon. Even when his youma side was burning away his body, the most he managed was a truce with a scant few. It made for strange approaches for common problems, like when he and Encke would try to jointly solve a youma attack to the satisfaction of their respective factions, and Faustite would prefer to banish the youma where Encke wanted a guarantee that it wouldn't bother anyone for a long time. But at no point did he feel like he was part of their group, or that he gained any real insight into how the White Moon worked.
But what Pendour had mentioned gave him a new way to consider it — perhaps the freedom that Encke so lauded was the freedom to exclude others of their kind. Faustite had always thought that they were, to some respect, all allied under the shared banner of their own brand of insolent heroism. Everyone thought they were doing right by opposing the Negaverse. But for them to not consider this one even the barest ally among them, something of a black sheep? That was telling. Perhaps the White Moon was more fractured and self-absorbed than he originally thought.
The downside to that was exterminating them all would prove that much harder if some of them did not even call each other ally. It would be hunting down every single one with nary a lead.
"Then why do you try?" He was curious — what was the motivation for someone who sounded convinced of their own failure from the outset? "If they don't call you ally."
And that she would suggest such a use of their time? He was seldom one to grow inert in the face of his own ineptitude, but perhaps her spirits were flagging so terribly that she couldn't come up with a more productive use of her time and rampant failures. "Do you always do that?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2023 1:39 pm
What did she try? Pendour pulled her one-eyed gaze from where it had blankly focused on a lone leaf twisting in the wind, through the ruins, to look at Faustite once more. This wasn't something she often talked about, wasn't even something that she opened up to her friends about, and yet here, standing by the man who she had nightmares about, it didn't feel so strange to say. Maybe it was because there was nothing here to lose. "I do it on my own," she told him. "I see if I can keep agents from taking starseeds, knights from crushing skulls." She didn't tell him that she'd been following him, specifically, as much as she could lately, trying to pacify him. If something here was going to set him off, it was going to be that. "I offer people a moment of peace, if they want it." Sometimes they did. "Don't worry," she told him, and the softness that she was always so careful to keep in her voice and her manner started to crumble into something tenser, sometime bitter. "It almost never works." Her gaze wandered again, but the confession kept on. "It's why I'm not afraid to talk to you," she said. "If you burn me to nothing, the world won't be missing much."
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Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2023 10:40 am
Faustite did not care whether she looked at him or not. No one asked him for his opinion on social conventions such as those, but he thought they were ridiculous and assumptive. Like someone who wasn't looking at him couldn't possibly hear and understand what he was saying, or that a soldier had to earn the right to look him in the eye. The latter had its uses, but the former did not — especially with such civilian conversations.
So while she spoke, dragging the words out of herself, he paced. It was easier to stay moving, to feel the heat leave his body little by little, though so much more of it was generated from inside of him. Smoke left him, too, and small bits of cinder left over from his last meal.
He understood her feelings of futility. That no matter what they did, no matter how fervently they tried, something would occur and foil those efforts completely. For another Knight to foil her, all they needed to say was 'no'. It was all Cybele needed to say, too, and she was given power enough to thwart him and push the rest of the Negaverse back from their own acquisition. That was a cruel twist of fate, wasn't it? But if he let that stop him, then Cybele would remain unchecked until Jet found it prudent to put a stop to her.
"You hate yourself because they choose to reject your offer. An offer you leave up to them." It was what he gathered from that — a loathsome sort of self-hatred that had very little to do with the cause a person took up or the manner by which they pursued it. It reminded him, however tangentially, of Heliodor.
But that reminder was only solidified after she explained why she spoke to him, and any sense of neutrality was struck from his face with an irritable scowl.
"Because you don't ******** succeed all the time, you're suddenly disposable?" His fist clenched at his side. He abandoned pacing in favor of going over to her. "That's absurd. If I burn you to ash, you know what'll happen? All the friends you never thought you had, they'd come after me with cold ******** vengeance in their eyes. All those people who rejected you, who might've said yes once and then you never saw them again? After you're dead, you're suddenly important to them. Someone to be granted 'justice', whatever the ******** that means. They'd murder me and hold some ******** vigil and then someone would take on whatever you did.
"Seen it all happen before. Dealt with it myself. Saw Kerberos take up Hvergelmir's bench. Had a knight on my a** for killing a Squire that she didn't seem to ******** know, then his friends kept coming after me. My own ******** mom —" He paused, took a slow breath. "Hated her, but I understood her better after she died."
Faustite wetted his lips. "You don't know what you mean to other people. Sometimes you don't get to know. And you'll never know if you're too busy staring at your own ******** failures."
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Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2023 9:03 am
Pendour didn't care much about social norms either. She didn't care if Faustite paced, or if he sizzled and swore. A part of her knew that he was probably right. The less logical pat of her disagreed. It was hard to sweep away feeling like a burden and a failure in a few words. Pat of her also thought that it didn't matter, if people would only start thinking she was special and important and that her words meant something if she was dead. She did know that some people owuld try to avenge her, though. She could almost see the lightning at Encke's fingertips, even now. It was part of why she tried at least a little not to get killed. "Maybe," she said, tangling her fingers in her own hair. "It's just hard not to stare at the failures sometimes. You know that, don't you?" He had to, if he was caught up on Cybele. "Everything you said, it applies to you, too. Maybe more. I think the Negaverse might break a little, if you died. I think some people would break a lot." Staying pat time in the Bell house lately meant being around Livie, which meant having late night conversations now and then where she heard second or third hand about Faustite's romantic escapades. Of course it was no secret how many people from different factions had been there that fateful night, trying to save his life in their own way. "The same if you'd have left to save a small part of yourself, honestly, although I wouldn't have minded the chance to talk like this without the, um, expectations?" She waved at herself, "That the colors of our clothes carry. Or, um. You know what I mean." She also wouldn't have minded if his leaving had shaken things up a bit, maybe made others see the way that Chaos took and took from people, but that wasn't something she could say. "Anyway. I'm saying you're holding things together more than you think. Maybe I am too-" she paused, and shook her head with a look like she'd tasted something awful, because she couldn't accept that so easily. "It's just, you're right. Always hard to see from the inside."
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Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2023 7:09 pm
He didn't answer her specifically because she was right. It was hard to look past the failures. It was all he noticed anymore. Failure in starseeding Cybele, failure in learning how to be a decent General-King in his intended timeframe, failure to contribute to any of the meetings they had concerning ongoing projects, failure to support Jadarite such that the White Moon wouldn't sabotage her project — they all lingered at the forefront of his mind, and he only added to their number with each passing day. He was swimming in failures, to the point that he did not understand why anyone would attribute successes to him. What had he done except fail?
Jet had told him, before, that they would not have promoted him if he hadn't earned it. Some accolades were given to him, even if he felt he didn't earn them. The decision wasn't made in a vacuum; it wasn't simply executed to save him. That helped him keep on, though the failures kept growing heavier.
"Negaverse won't break." He knew that to be true. He wasn't a part of it at the time that the Negaverse got invaded, but he had read about it. Heard about Apatite, about how Laurelite nearly died. The Negaverse hadn't broken, not a touch, despite their losses. "I'm not much of a leader. Don't have the charisma for it. Sovereigns've been lost before, but the Negaverse didn't falter for it. Doubt they would for someone so new to the roster."
He turned to trace over his steps. "But some people would break." And it was for them that he had to keep trying, keep moving onward. Keep looking for solutions, for changes, for next steps.
He stopped his pacing when she referenced it — that moment when he could've gone on to join them. She was right about that, too: even if he was still alive, still accessible and part of this world under some other alias, he couldn't erase the feelings of being abandoned for those he left behind. He wouldn't be the same person they remembered, either. It would be similar to when Lysithea left without a word, without giving any thought to the people she left behind. They didn't deserve to face that same pain twice, especially if it hurt more the second time.
He snorted, almost laughed. "Don't know that there would've been much of me to chat with." If all those memories were lost, and he didn't have much to say to begin with, would there be even less? Maybe, then, she just wanted someone to listen. People sucked at that, after all.
People were ******** garbage.
He paused for a moment, hand curled by his chin in thought. After a beat, he asked, "Do you want to hold things together?" By the sound of her response, he was disinclined to believe she did. And that was quite the unusual premise.
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