fandomtownies | In and Around the Woods, Sunday Afternoon

The woods were dark.

The city was dark. Neither saw light from above, particularly not from under the canopy, the plate, the other half that sat above. There was screaming in those woods, and it mingled with the groan of metal, the sound of explosions in the distance, the pain of his injuries, all as before.

Reno ran. Reno was excellent at running.

A playground slide, short and round with a cat's face and large, twisted bits of rusted metal rammed through the top of it, watched. It witnessed him run, then fall from the platform over, and over, and over again.

From the playground in Sector Six, right where the border of Sector Seven had once sat, it had seen many, many things fall that day.

Reno leapt, and once again, the woods allowed him to plummet. One more falling body among the rest.

Ghanima had, finally, breached the woods. And while she was in search of any of her students or coworkers, there was one, in particular, that honor demanded she find.

To slip silently between the trees still felt alien after all these years, with the oppressive canopy sealing her off from the sky. Give her the streets to run or the dunes to stalk, any day of the week. Ghanima loved to hunt, be her prey human or animal, but these woods felt wrong, even more wrong than usual. But it was the forest that had stolen away the children and her lupi, and so it was the forest that she hunted, just as much as the lost residents of the island.

When Reno had jumped from the platform below the plate before, he'd had rescue. The helicopter had been waiting, he'd been caught.

Here in the forest, there was no rescue. He simply fell, and hit the ground, and the plate screamed down on top of him, millions of voices echoing in his ear. It never managed to crush him, though. Crushing would be too easy. Too quick. Once he hit the ground, he was on the platform again, staring AVALANCHE down, fighting like hell to keep them from stopping the countdown, because he was a Turk.

All he was worth as a Turk was his ability to do the job.

A sword that had no business being a sword slashed at him, and a blow that he had dodged readily the first time through practically threw him to the ground, now. He picked himself up, only to feel the bite of bullets from his next attacker. He tried to swing back with his baton, but it had broken in another fall.

He hadn't slept in days.

He had to protect the controls. Had to keep the countdown going...

She heard the fight, long before she saw it. And given of what she knew of what had been happening in the woods, and knowing Reno, sadly, there were no surprises once the trees finally released her to her destination.

Ghanima watched it play through once. Twice. And then on the third time;

"ENOUGH."

Her use of The Voice made the leaves on the trees shiver, and the lioness of House Atreides strode forth, to put herself between her former student and the phantoms of his past.

Reno swayed where he stood, the cold metal of his baton's handle grasped in his fingers, though there was little left of it besides. He was bleeding, was broken in several ways and he'd run out of potions yesterday.

The world was spinning. His lip curled. One of his opponents, there on the platform, lowered his weapon. The sword again. Always that damn sword. Reno shifted his weight to look at Ghanima, as if processing what about this scene was different.

He tilted his head a little. Waited, either for an incoming attack, or for the time to come for him to jump again.

That sword was utterly ridiculous.

"We are done, here," she said firmly, blades magically appearing in each hand from somewhere in Fremen robes. "You are not even ghosts. You are echos of souls, recreating your greatest failure; be at peace, and find yourselves a better afterlife. Or I will find one for you."

And she would see if these demonic tormentors could bleed.

The one with the sword straightened, spun the massive weapon in his hand. He was strangely faceless along with the other two who had been attacking Reno, but they were all shapes that he knew perfectly well. He'd fought them again later. Then alongside them, later still.

"Ain't their failures they're echoin'," the redhead said, vaguely, from behind her. Around them, the sound of screeching metal began again. Screaming. Chaos. "It's my success."

He practically spat the word.

Almost acting on compulsion, he looked at his wrist, checked his watch.

"It's time," he said, vaguely, with less certainty, less resolve, than he'd said the last three times she had witnessed this replay before. He turned, once again, to run for the edge of the platform.

To stumble for it, really.

"You are beyond this, Reno," Ghanima said, no recrimination in her voice, as she used the Way to move in front of him. "It happened. Stop running from it -- from them. This is not who you are anymore."

He very nearly kept moving, as though, for a moment, he was going to try to just run right through her. Everything else here wasn't real, how could she possibly be?

But even the illusions had made him bleed, and he pulled up short just a few steps in front of her, crouched forward faintly, unsteady on his feet, tilting his head at her silently.

This wasn't how this went.

From somewhere not nearly so far away as it had been when the plate had gone down, a playful cat-like face watched in silence.

"Not who I am," Reno echoed, squinting. Around them, the plate crumbled down. "I'm... doing the job."

No, that wasn't quite right, either. The job had been different for some time, now.

Yes, it had.

"You did the job," she agreed. "That's who you are, my lupi, always doing what needs to be done, regardless of the consequences to yourself."

"But this is not who you are. Not anymore. You know this."

Reno frowned. Swayed again where he was standing as he squinted at Ghanima. His vision blurred, or maybe something else blurred it right around the edges. She was standing there, she was speaking to him, but it seemed too good to be true.

The more he squinted, the harder it became to make out her face.

He raised his fists, the broken length of his stun baton dangling uselessly from his left wrist.

"You don't get to twist her too," he said, his uncertain mumbling resolving into something more certain. "She wasn't even here, you don't get to twist her too."

It was remarkable just how quickly a lupi could find his legs under himself when he suddenly had a very pressing need to get some mockery of his mentor out of his nightmares.

Well. She knew that stance.

"One. No one can twist me into worse than I already am, Reno," Ghanima said gently. "I am not half as good a person as the vast majority of Fandom likes to pretend I am. This you know as well."

There was a reason that once upon a time, long long ago, she had no dark double to duel when Nemesis Island came to call. Ghanima knew her both her light and dark places intimately; there was no room for self-delusion with the Pre-Born, unless she had wished to follow Alia's path.

"Two. You get one free shot. Ever. If you really think I am false, that you wish to do this, you had best make it count. Because I am not leaving these Maker-forsaken woods without you; your willingness to leave is irrelevant."

It was not a threat; it simply was.

Explosions were filling Reno's ears again, along with screaming as people began to realize, for the thousandth time, that something horrible was about to happen to them. Reno looked like he was about to be sick, though that could just as easily have been from his wounds. Couldn't it?

He took a half-step back, planting his feet, and then straightened himself up, ignoring the way it opened up earlier wounds fresh again. He was on the verge of a limit break, pushing on could very well be the death of him, or his only chance.

He didn't back down from a fight once it had begun. Even the ones he desperately didn't want to be having. He blurred, leaving only blood-soaked ground where he had been standing, and reappeared behind where Ghanima was standing, perfectly willing to play dirty against this ghost in this looping nightmare.

Ghanima simply closed her eyes, reaching out into the Way itself, to find the place where her personal reality overlapped with Reno's, and in the one instant where he reappeared, she had pivoted half an inch to the left, so that any hit would go whistling past her as she started her momentum and slipped into that part of herself that lived instant-to-instant, straddling that perfect place in her simuflow: the place where her Truthsaying, the Way, and her own prescience resided in balance.

"Sloppy. You should have been able to predict that," Ghanima said crisply, snapping out a high kick intended to connect with the side of his head. She had told him she was not going to pull her punches, in her own Ghanima-type way, and now he was going to need to live with whatever headache he earned. "If you needed a spar, there are easier ways to ask."

Reno's head snapped to the side roughly enough that the rest of him actually needed a moment to catch up, and he barely managed to get a hand down in order to catch himself from ending up on his face, as well. He turned around, the look in his eyes something gone halfway feral, his lip curled back in a snarl before he threw himself at her again.

No speed. No blurring. Just exhausted rage taking over where fear and trauma had been pushing him before.

Rage was barely better than fear.

"You've had this lesson before; apparently a refresher is in order." Ghanima went on the offensive, driving towards him. "We will begin with the basics."

"Fear is the mind-killer." A slash towards his arm, followed up by a second at his face. "Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."

Pivot again, this time to try and slam her elbow into his stomach. "I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me."

"And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Reno avoided exactly none of that, simply digging his feet in and taking it, feeling the slashes join all of the other bloody damage he was reeling from. Doubling over forward with a gasp, eyes wide, coughing up an ugly mouthful of crimson.

He straightened again.

Raised his fists again.

Swayed, standing uncertainly in place.

And then lowering his fists and staring at her as the plate came down.

This time, he didn't leap.

"I must not fear..."

Ghanima didn't flinch at the plate coming down around them. The screams of people, of concrete, of glass and animals and fire, as the world came apart. Reality to reality, in some ways, the end of the world never changed.

"Fear is the mindkiller," she agreed, continuing the Litany as she sheathed one knife and took a step towards him, offering her empty hand. She wasn't putting both blades away; Reno fought dirty, which she had always encouraged, and she wasn't born yesterday.

If this did not work, she had one other trick up her sleeves, before she had to resort to creative near-lethal violence.

Edited 2018-08-12 16:36 (UTC)

Reno reached up and idly wiped the blood from his face with his muddy sleeve. The knife that Ghanima had slashed at him with was almost impossibly sharp. The cut was clean, it was bleeding freely, right along with his other arm. There was a tickle against his chin that almost distracted him from something else. Something important.

"Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."

The illusion reset itself. The platform stood around them, the plate overhead, the trio of phantom attackers standing nearby. Reno ignored it all. There was something else his focus was on. This apparition of Ghanima, tapping into something deep and ugly in his head, his body so worn and pushed too far that he had tripped somewhere beyond his own limit.

And when people from Reno's world were pushed beyond their limit, when they broke, they most always had at least one trick up their sleeve. When he reached out for her hand, a fire began to burn in the palm of his own, bright and wickedly hot, and with his next step he was shoving it at her with everything he had left.

Not all magic needed materia. Sometimes it simply needed desperation.

In almost any other situation, Ghanima would be proud of Reno for standing his ground despite his wounds, even admire the way he had just let himself break in order to sucker-punch an opponent. It was tactically brilliant.

As it was, she reached for the Way with a desperation she hadn't felt since she had been a child, watching her aunt try to conquer her own demons, praying to the Maker for her to live, whole, unburdened, and then watching her make the only choice she could.

Maker, let that history not replay itself here, now, with Ghanima and Reno in the place of Leto and Alia.

Ghanima threw herself to the ground, becoming a blur as she appeared above Reno, dropping down on top of him. Her hair had lost a good five inches, the left shoulder of her robes had burned away, revealing an ugly red welt beginning to form, and there were smaller blisters along her left cheek and missing eyebrows. She could focus on cellular regeneration later. She had to subdue Reno now.

He was Bene Gesserit trained. He had not undergone the Spice trance. He had been exposed to Mako. And, worse -- or perhaps best -- Ghanima had once installed trigger words into his subconscious. At the time, so that the words would be his, forever. Now? She could use them against him.

She hated herself. She hated the island. She was no better than Mohiam, to use this against him. She would not let him die here, today.

Ghanima came crashing down, intent to bowling him to the forest floor, and slapped one bare hand against his cheek.

"I am charged to say this to you," she screamed, only her words were the clear ringing tonals of the Voice, swelling to drown out all other sound. No plate, no screams, nothing but them. "I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so."

And Ghanima began to force the Sharing on him. Every. Single. Memory. Of every training session, every class, every invasion they had worked together. The day she had given him the Oath. A progression of Reno going from feral dog to the person she was so very proud of knowing. Stripping away shadows and letting only the light in, to show every bright and shining moment, refusing to let the dark places hide and fester.

It could kill him. It could leave him brain-damaged. It would hurt like hell.

It was her last chance, before they had to dance and tried to kill each other.

Reno froze where he lay, bright blue eyes open wide, mouth agape in something that wasn't so much shock as agony. His head was swimming with memory; a teacher, amused, identifying him as a wolf. Helping him to find a direction. Teaching him that there was more to live for than a job and more to move forward for than guilt. Showing him the real meaning of duty, of possibility.

Of hope.

He couldn't scream. Couldn't fight couldn't sob couldn't breathe couldn't think. Around them, the plate fell again, and he paid it no attention at all. It was irrelevant.

It was only a ghost.

He managed, somewhere in that moment, to reach a hand up to grasp her arm.

And then, a moment later, he let her go again, resigned to laying back on the ground, staring at her.

"Ah..." His words were dazed at best, quiet and faraway while he tried desperately to make his thoughts work again. "... hell."

... Reno would be Reno.

"Are you going to try and set me on fire again, or can I let you up?" she asked archly, though her hand was gentle as she carefully moved his hair away from his eyes, so she could check for concussion. "Please tell me I did not just permanently scramble your brain; I am no telepath, and unfortunately I have only undergone the Sharing once before."

When she'd ripped memories out of the head of her Skrull-impersonator, and she'd wanted it to hurt. Putting them in was trickier, and not something she had any experience in, except in what guidance her Other Memory had been able to offer.

"Brain's already scrambled, yo," Reno muttered. "You took a good swing at it, s'all."

Like a busted television. Knock it back into working order. Reno groaned, and when he raised his hand this time, it was to just press it to the side of his head. Fuck, he was not having a great time today.

"No more fire. Promise."

Ghanima discreetly sheathed her other knife (which had been ready to stab him smoothly between the ribs if needed) and got up, offering him her hand again.

"Well then, if we're done with fire... on your feet. We still need to dispel this once and for all, and figure out how to get you out of here without it ensnaring you again. Thoughts?"

Get his brain going, analyzing the situation, with no space to wallow in guilt and slip back into the memories, and maybe she'd be able to get him out of here while she continued to search for the others.

"Somethin's makin' this happen," Reno mumbled, reaching for her hand without the bonus fire, this time around. He made it to his feet and turned to look at AVALANCHE, already geared up and ready for a fight. He shook his head. Slowly. It still felt a little bit like his brain wanted to run out through his ears like a goopy egg white, after all. "Not them. They're just shadows."

Glowing shadows that were well armed and who had been doing an impressive number on him since yesterday.

"Not..." He glanced up, at the plate that was hanging overhead, just waiting. And then looked around. "That."

It was slide. A cat. A piece of playground equipment. Sitting down below, not entirely looking immediately out of place in the slums of Sector Seven... But completely out of place all the same. It seemed to be staring back up at him now, its smiling mouth twisting into something more vicious.

"That don't go there, yo."

There had been a playground in Sector Six, right on the border of the plate. Not under it. Besides Ghanima, it was the piece that didn't fit.

In and Around the Woods, Sunday Afternoon

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