who: helena and others! what: variety catchall for the month. when: end of july/ all of august. where: across the boat. warnings: likely discussions of death.
"Of course. That's yours alone to know." Presumably Helena's heard about the screens by now, but it's the principle of the thing. "What I need to ask is ... "
Dimitri draws a breath.
Measured, he says, " ... some time after we parted ways, I was attacked by a young woman who said she'd kill me slowly to make the excursion more productive. She was wrong. But the spear she wielded ... the only time I've felt anything similar was the Night Watch. And when I killed her, she said she'd acted in your name." Dimitri takes a breath, settling his figurative feathers before they can start to ruffle. His voice is quiet. He wants the truth to be anything but this. "Is one of your Hunters a passenger here?"
There's a specific taste she's come to associate with the feeling of being cornered, of needing to decide whether one makes a break for it or commits to death - the bile of an empty stomach, twisting and wanting to turn itself inside out. In her name. She can only blame it on the panic of the sinking ship, but she wants to find Grace, demand a response on what she meant, if she knew how that sounded. The bitter, acidic taste fills her senses, but she breathes. Careful. Careful.
"Yes."
Why ask, when he knew the answer? Surely he can't seek to revenge himself for Ithaqua on Grace. He already killed her.
"Her presence is something that is hers or mine to disclose, depending on circumstances. Her weapon might feel the same, but beyond that, she is not the Night Watch in attitude or desires. She seeks, in all truth, a chance to be herself, and not a Hunter. To live, for she was as caged a creature as myself."
Helena can't soon forget how it felt to hear the vehemence in the other woman's voice, longing for her revenge on the one who trapped them both.
"I would ask, if you can't find it in yourself to treat her with the civility you would any other passenger, then avoid her. Let her be, to make the most of her second chance."
Dimitri releases a heavy breath. "I see. I'd hoped I was wrong. I understand why you didn't tell me, but I would have liked to know before her spear was pointed at me."
A flare of tension starts at the base of his neck and spreads across his shoulders. He shakes his head to dispel it. "May I sit down?"
Not like she could stop him, regardless of his choice, and she turns the stylus she has in her hands before she speaks again.
"...Her name is Grace. I've known about her since the day of her arrival. And...for all that we've been through, she apologized to me. Swore that she'd never raise her weapon to me again. I trust that she'll keep to that, as much as she can." Pause, as something else clicks into place. "And, knowing what I do now...I pass on her thanks for a swift death."
All of that said, she will not apologize for keeping Grace's presence discreet. It was to allow the woman room to make allies, friends on her own time, without her reputation being tarnished by what came before. Inevitably, it's bloodstained already, with those that do know, and how they feel, having known Helena first - but she can refuse to add more to it.
It's the asking that's the point; that, and Dimitri feels increasingly uncomfortable having this conversation while towering over Helena -- he's here to talk, not pass judgment. He retrieves a chair from a neighboring desk and takes a seat opposite Helena, hands open on the table.
"You know her better than I; I defer to your evaluation. If she wants to redeem herself, I won't stand in her way. I won't lie if asked directly, but you have my word that I won't divulge your past or hers purely to sabotage her. And I'm glad you've found an accord." Goddess knows Dimitri would have no such charity if Rufus ever showed his face.
He's still troubled, though. "I don't believe you asked this of her -- I can't imagine you doing such a thing," despite the dead berating him, despite the long hours he's argued with them, despite the hard-learned paranoid insistence that everyone in the world acts only out of cryptic malice towards Dimitri specifically, "but ... do you have any idea why she claimed to hunt for your sake?"
An inhale. A measured exhale, a setting of the stylus down.
"Because she knows that this ship is a better place than where I was before, and that to keep it sustained until such time that we can all exit is a better course of events for me than the opposite. That's the best guess I can make. Even though to hear it makes me feel..."
How to put it delicately, to quiet the unease in her gut over it? She raises a hand almost helplessly, and then sets it down.
"Very strange. Because you're right. I would never ask her to hunt for me, or to come on the excursion and die for me. All of that is her own choice, and to put my name on it is deflecting that it is."
"You're quite right. You're not her lord, nor are you her keeper, and she has no right to claim you as either. Her actions are hers and hers alone."
Dimitri can follow the logic, warped as it is. The whispers of the nameless dead turn menacing; indistinct, but their tone is clear enough -- Are you really different? Are you really better? Wouldn't you do the same? He blinks rapidly, and forces himself back to the present.
"I won't interfere with her redemption, and I won't divulge her nature without cause," he repeats. "But if she proves herself a danger to the rest of us, I won't be silent about her actions. If she wishes to be something other than a Hunter, she cannot continue to Hunt. We suffer more than enough at the Captain's hands without having to fear each other."
A sigh. "I'm not asking you to mediate, or intercede with her. I'll speak to her myself. But I want to make it clear where I stand."
There's a way she stiffens, minutely. A subtle thing, but threaded through every bone and joint, as if someone took hold of her strings and nudged them to attention. Helena breathes, and considers how to phrase this, before settling on having her sightless eyes shut.
"There is something you are overlooking, from where you stand, Dimitri."
A pause, because Dimitri is someone she finds fair, is someone dear to those dear to her. But none of that changes how she wants to spew bile on this table, wants to ask him who he thinks he is, to claim such things.
"How will you define when she is a danger? When she is offering swift death on an excursion? When she is hurting and scared on the same? When she and I go through the motions of a ritual that helps us both? And forgive me, but why must it be you who sounds the alarm among us?"
Why does he want to lay claim to it, when he's only been through one real hunt in his existence? When she's here, riddled with invisible scars, able to name and explain every single one of the hunters, and what drives them on.
"The death she promised was not swift, Helena. By her own declaration, her intent was torture. From someone else, she would have had it -- and she may have. I have no way of knowing if she Hunted anyone before me. I only know she Hunted no one after."
The air prickles with the smell of rain. Dimitri runs a hand through his hair, forcing it to settle with a faint buzz of static.
"I am going to speak with her. I will attempt to impress on her that if she wishes to prey on other passengers -- outside of any mutual arrangement -- there will be consequences. If she agrees to keep peace, and holds to that agreement, then we need have no further quarrel. If she doesn't ... as I said. Her actions will have consequences."
Dimitri cocks his head. Fabric shuffles as he folds his arms; his armored gloves click together. "There's no reason it must be me. Only chance, that I'm the one she turned her spear against. If I didn't know you -- if I hadn't stumbled into your memory -- if she hadn't happened to mention your name -- then I wouldn't have known her as a Hunter; I would only know that a passenger attacked me with the intent to wring as much pain and suffering from her victim as possible, and I would have already spread word that there was such a person on-board. As anyone reasonably would, after encountering such a stranger. If she attacked anyone before me, this may already be out of either of our hands."
"It was never going to be something that we alone dealt with."
The words are hard, the snap of wood against stone, a honed edge that will cut a silk thread draped over it. Helena does not move in her seat, but her voice carries the clear precision of a hammer on an anvil. The volume, for once, matches his own.
"Security died in my arms because of her."
Her companion. Someone she'd delve into death itself to bring back, should it take too long returning. Its body weighting her down, where it was so quiet beneath the waves. By all rights, she should call it agony ripped from her chest, her very soul to feel that loss so close - but they had known, going in, what it might be.
"You would hold the intention of torture against her, when torture was the entire point of that day. To die in agitation and pain and tears, for it to be bled from us that it might be used for fuel - and for it to be shown to those who stayed behind, to take more suffering from them as well. That was what that trip was for, Dimitri - you are lying to yourself if you think otherwise. And you want to raise the alert to others because...she did exactly what was asked of her so that we might continue to survive?"
She shakes her head once, deliberately. Still, otherwise, not even a twitch. Her voice softens a notch, but her eyes open, and her expression is deliberately unreadable.
"When she hunts for the hunt's own sake, when she is truly a threat to us, then I will be the one to spread word, as the one who has felt her spear pierce every one of my limbs many times over. But until then, why you cannot accept that I have brokered peace with Grace is frankly insulting. Speaking of consequences as if she isn't acutely aware that the friendship and community she longs for could be taken away at any instant."
You do not have the right to speak to her like that. Not when she was grateful for her death.
"You already taught Grace her own mortality. Will you demand more?"
"No. Not at this time. As I already said, all I want from Grace is a promise that she will not Hunt without an agreement. Which should not be an issue, if, as you say, she wishes to stop being a Hunter." Dimitri's frustration mounts as he repeats himself. It seems straightforward. He's been reasonably clear, hasn't he? The logic is simple enough, isn't it? Disagreement, he could work with, but they're just speaking past one another. "All I am going to do is speak to her. Do me the courtesy of seeing me as a thinking person, and not a wild boar."
His tone bristles, despite himself. He clamps his jaw shut, and wrestles it back under control.
"You have brokered peace with Grace for yourself. Demonstrably, she has not extended that peace to the rest of us. No one asked her to Hunt, Helena. She took that upon herself. If she acted to all our gain, did I betray the rest of us in stopping her? I could have fed," his voice curdles, "so much pain and fear to that excursion. Was I derelict in my duty for not joining her? By that logic, should we all not have broken into an orgy of senseless violence the moment we realized what was happening?"
His shoulders bunch. His hands flatten on the table. "No. The point of that excursion was suffering, and that is exactly why we must be able to rely on one another. If we can't, we may as well join Daisy's voyage and every other before it, where they tore each other apart to preserve an existence of tearing each other apart until nothing remained to tear. This place is nightmare enough on its own. There is no point to living in a world where we cannot trust each other."
Too much of what he says raises the emotions in her, makes her want to overturn this table or screech or tear at her own hair to do something, something to work with how she feels. He doesn't understand, and it rolls in on itself, twists, tightens, makes her want to say things that would land like barbs in the skin. He's putting words in her mouth and she hates it, she told him she hates it before -
She says nothing. She shows no indication. She takes everything she feels and bundles it into a sack, to set in a bucket and lower into the well of herself that is deep, deep, as a vault. Quiet, quiet. She lets them stand, because there's nothing else to do with them except try to chisel out an apology from her ribcage that nothing in her wants to give, it all wants to cling onto those emotions like muck, to ask irritated questions-
(but you have to, make no excuses, apologize, and control yourself, don't think of being stubborn now, you can't, you can't)
She shows not even a twitch of movement. Like this, she could be a doll girl, and it would be difficult to tell. Even her breathing is slow, careful, to ensure she's quiet. No words, until she can be sure that the next ones out of her mouth are docile. More acceptable. Her usual volume. Believable that she's calmed down. She has. She has to have done so. That well is very deep.
"...and what are the consequences you are placing on the table, Dimitri."
Fine. Fine. Helena's retreated into herself. Good fucking job, Dimitri, you brute, you beast, you damned boar, bludgeoning your way through every argument with your muscle and your Crest. It's so easy to get angry, isn't it, when you're the strongest person in the room? So easy to wield that strength as a blunt instrument, to launch directly to the full assault without stopping for diplomacy, to charge with teeth and tusks unprovoked. Claim you're capable of reason and let the lie curdle on your back teeth. You coward. You monster. You fucking animal.
... what's worse, he still doesn't think he's wrong.
His shoulders sag. His voice is soft. "You speak as though I mean to enforce this singlehandedly. -- The same, I hope, as would apply to me. Or to anyone else who began to prey on our fellow passengers. If she attacks again, she will die as many times as it takes for her to understand that we won't tolerate an active killer in our midst."
"Dying once has reaffirmed to her that she's not untouchable. Not the way they were. Are."
His voice is quieter. He's still talking to her. She did the right thing, cutting herself off when she did - she's stopped things from going out of control, from ruining it beyond all salvaging. She needs to be contained. Small. Quiet. Careful, as a lady must be. No matter the rage in her heart, no matter what it feels like, like someone carefully carving out the nerves in her arm and setting them all alight -
Breathe. Breathe.
"...Why did you come to tell me all this? You could have gone to seek her out and I would have been none the wiser."
And there a hint of it is. Why bring this to her, and make it hers to hold?
"To make sure what I'd felt was truly there, and not a paranoid imagining of stress and delirium. And because if you hadn't known of her presence, I would have been remiss not to warn you."
A twinge of irritation -- swiftly crushed. The last thing Dimitri needs is to make this worse again.
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no subject
She says it calmly, clearly, but she means it with all of herself. If she has to discuss that with anyone, she'll have to leave the room.
no subject
Dimitri draws a breath.
Measured, he says, " ... some time after we parted ways, I was attacked by a young woman who said she'd kill me slowly to make the excursion more productive. She was wrong. But the spear she wielded ... the only time I've felt anything similar was the Night Watch. And when I killed her, she said she'd acted in your name." Dimitri takes a breath, settling his figurative feathers before they can start to ruffle. His voice is quiet. He wants the truth to be anything but this. "Is one of your Hunters a passenger here?"
no subject
"Yes."
Why ask, when he knew the answer? Surely he can't seek to revenge himself for Ithaqua on Grace. He already killed her.
"Her presence is something that is hers or mine to disclose, depending on circumstances. Her weapon might feel the same, but beyond that, she is not the Night Watch in attitude or desires. She seeks, in all truth, a chance to be herself, and not a Hunter. To live, for she was as caged a creature as myself."
Helena can't soon forget how it felt to hear the vehemence in the other woman's voice, longing for her revenge on the one who trapped them both.
"I would ask, if you can't find it in yourself to treat her with the civility you would any other passenger, then avoid her. Let her be, to make the most of her second chance."
no subject
A flare of tension starts at the base of his neck and spreads across his shoulders. He shakes his head to dispel it. "May I sit down?"
no subject
Not like she could stop him, regardless of his choice, and she turns the stylus she has in her hands before she speaks again.
"...Her name is Grace. I've known about her since the day of her arrival. And...for all that we've been through, she apologized to me. Swore that she'd never raise her weapon to me again. I trust that she'll keep to that, as much as she can." Pause, as something else clicks into place. "And, knowing what I do now...I pass on her thanks for a swift death."
All of that said, she will not apologize for keeping Grace's presence discreet. It was to allow the woman room to make allies, friends on her own time, without her reputation being tarnished by what came before. Inevitably, it's bloodstained already, with those that do know, and how they feel, having known Helena first - but she can refuse to add more to it.
no subject
"You know her better than I; I defer to your evaluation. If she wants to redeem herself, I won't stand in her way. I won't lie if asked directly, but you have my word that I won't divulge your past or hers purely to sabotage her. And I'm glad you've found an accord." Goddess knows Dimitri would have no such charity if Rufus ever showed his face.
He's still troubled, though. "I don't believe you asked this of her -- I can't imagine you doing such a thing," despite the dead berating him, despite the long hours he's argued with them, despite the hard-learned paranoid insistence that everyone in the world acts only out of cryptic malice towards Dimitri specifically, "but ... do you have any idea why she claimed to hunt for your sake?"
no subject
"Because she knows that this ship is a better place than where I was before, and that to keep it sustained until such time that we can all exit is a better course of events for me than the opposite. That's the best guess I can make. Even though to hear it makes me feel..."
How to put it delicately, to quiet the unease in her gut over it? She raises a hand almost helplessly, and then sets it down.
"Very strange. Because you're right. I would never ask her to hunt for me, or to come on the excursion and die for me. All of that is her own choice, and to put my name on it is deflecting that it is."
no subject
Dimitri can follow the logic, warped as it is. The whispers of the nameless dead turn menacing; indistinct, but their tone is clear enough -- Are you really different? Are you really better? Wouldn't you do the same? He blinks rapidly, and forces himself back to the present.
"I won't interfere with her redemption, and I won't divulge her nature without cause," he repeats. "But if she proves herself a danger to the rest of us, I won't be silent about her actions. If she wishes to be something other than a Hunter, she cannot continue to Hunt. We suffer more than enough at the Captain's hands without having to fear each other."
A sigh. "I'm not asking you to mediate, or intercede with her. I'll speak to her myself. But I want to make it clear where I stand."
no subject
"There is something you are overlooking, from where you stand, Dimitri."
A pause, because Dimitri is someone she finds fair, is someone dear to those dear to her. But none of that changes how she wants to spew bile on this table, wants to ask him who he thinks he is, to claim such things.
"How will you define when she is a danger? When she is offering swift death on an excursion? When she is hurting and scared on the same? When she and I go through the motions of a ritual that helps us both? And forgive me, but why must it be you who sounds the alarm among us?"
Why does he want to lay claim to it, when he's only been through one real hunt in his existence? When she's here, riddled with invisible scars, able to name and explain every single one of the hunters, and what drives them on.
no subject
The air prickles with the smell of rain. Dimitri runs a hand through his hair, forcing it to settle with a faint buzz of static.
"I am going to speak with her. I will attempt to impress on her that if she wishes to prey on other passengers -- outside of any mutual arrangement -- there will be consequences. If she agrees to keep peace, and holds to that agreement, then we need have no further quarrel. If she doesn't ... as I said. Her actions will have consequences."
Dimitri cocks his head. Fabric shuffles as he folds his arms; his armored gloves click together. "There's no reason it must be me. Only chance, that I'm the one she turned her spear against. If I didn't know you -- if I hadn't stumbled into your memory -- if she hadn't happened to mention your name -- then I wouldn't have known her as a Hunter; I would only know that a passenger attacked me with the intent to wring as much pain and suffering from her victim as possible, and I would have already spread word that there was such a person on-board. As anyone reasonably would, after encountering such a stranger. If she attacked anyone before me, this may already be out of either of our hands."
no subject
The words are hard, the snap of wood against stone, a honed edge that will cut a silk thread draped over it. Helena does not move in her seat, but her voice carries the clear precision of a hammer on an anvil. The volume, for once, matches his own.
"Security died in my arms because of her."
Her companion. Someone she'd delve into death itself to bring back, should it take too long returning. Its body weighting her down, where it was so quiet beneath the waves. By all rights, she should call it agony ripped from her chest, her very soul to feel that loss so close - but they had known, going in, what it might be.
"You would hold the intention of torture against her, when torture was the entire point of that day. To die in agitation and pain and tears, for it to be bled from us that it might be used for fuel - and for it to be shown to those who stayed behind, to take more suffering from them as well. That was what that trip was for, Dimitri - you are lying to yourself if you think otherwise. And you want to raise the alert to others because...she did exactly what was asked of her so that we might continue to survive?"
She shakes her head once, deliberately. Still, otherwise, not even a twitch. Her voice softens a notch, but her eyes open, and her expression is deliberately unreadable.
"When she hunts for the hunt's own sake, when she is truly a threat to us, then I will be the one to spread word, as the one who has felt her spear pierce every one of my limbs many times over. But until then, why you cannot accept that I have brokered peace with Grace is frankly insulting. Speaking of consequences as if she isn't acutely aware that the friendship and community she longs for could be taken away at any instant."
You do not have the right to speak to her like that. Not when she was grateful for her death.
"You already taught Grace her own mortality. Will you demand more?"
no subject
His tone bristles, despite himself. He clamps his jaw shut, and wrestles it back under control.
"You have brokered peace with Grace for yourself. Demonstrably, she has not extended that peace to the rest of us. No one asked her to Hunt, Helena. She took that upon herself. If she acted to all our gain, did I betray the rest of us in stopping her? I could have fed," his voice curdles, "so much pain and fear to that excursion. Was I derelict in my duty for not joining her? By that logic, should we all not have broken into an orgy of senseless violence the moment we realized what was happening?"
His shoulders bunch. His hands flatten on the table. "No. The point of that excursion was suffering, and that is exactly why we must be able to rely on one another. If we can't, we may as well join Daisy's voyage and every other before it, where they tore each other apart to preserve an existence of tearing each other apart until nothing remained to tear. This place is nightmare enough on its own. There is no point to living in a world where we cannot trust each other."
no subject
She says nothing. She shows no indication. She takes everything she feels and bundles it into a sack, to set in a bucket and lower into the well of herself that is deep, deep, as a vault. Quiet, quiet. She lets them stand, because there's nothing else to do with them except try to chisel out an apology from her ribcage that nothing in her wants to give, it all wants to cling onto those emotions like muck, to ask irritated questions-
(but you have to, make no excuses, apologize, and control yourself, don't think of being stubborn now, you can't, you can't)
She shows not even a twitch of movement. Like this, she could be a doll girl, and it would be difficult to tell. Even her breathing is slow, careful, to ensure she's quiet. No words, until she can be sure that the next ones out of her mouth are docile. More acceptable. Her usual volume. Believable that she's calmed down. She has. She has to have done so. That well is very deep.
"...and what are the consequences you are placing on the table, Dimitri."
no subject
... what's worse, he still doesn't think he's wrong.
His shoulders sag. His voice is soft. "You speak as though I mean to enforce this singlehandedly. -- The same, I hope, as would apply to me. Or to anyone else who began to prey on our fellow passengers. If she attacks again, she will die as many times as it takes for her to understand that we won't tolerate an active killer in our midst."
no subject
His voice is quieter. He's still talking to her. She did the right thing, cutting herself off when she did - she's stopped things from going out of control, from ruining it beyond all salvaging. She needs to be contained. Small. Quiet. Careful, as a lady must be. No matter the rage in her heart, no matter what it feels like, like someone carefully carving out the nerves in her arm and setting them all alight -
Breathe. Breathe.
"...Why did you come to tell me all this? You could have gone to seek her out and I would have been none the wiser."
And there a hint of it is. Why bring this to her, and make it hers to hold?
no subject
A twinge of irritation -- swiftly crushed. The last thing Dimitri needs is to make this worse again.