terriblepurpose | Deer Country Contact

cw: mouth trauma

Paul.

[anna appears on a video feed near a plateau. the landscape stretches below her; she's stopped walking for now. the camera is steady, and she is sitting on a rock. she stares off into the distance, not even looking at the lens.]

If you ever take over my body like that again. [she is talking slowly, calmly, but with a hollowness to it. she wants every word to be understood.] Then I will reach into your mouth, and I will cut your tongue from your throat, and I will choke you with it.

[it's just a matter of fact. it's just. what she'll do.]

And when you come back to life, I will do it again. And again, and again. Until your body learns that it's better off without it, and your squid washes up on the shore begging to be thrown back in.

[she lets the words hang for five, ten seconds. there's nothing but wind as her hair blows in the orange sun. and she cuts the feed with a reserved hand gesture.]

[The first time Paul watches the message, he closes it unanswered. What can he say to it with his untorn traitor tongue? And there is so much else he has to do, and no time in which to see it done.

The second time, he pauses it on her silence at the end, her hair frozen in pale cirrus clouds around her face. He wonders if she knew she'd be dead by now. If she understands what he was trying, so hideously, to protect her from. If she still thinks everything unfolds in the right direction.]

Understood.

[A quiet, toneless rasp.]

Amarande.

[Cold, imperious, soft. A manner of speaking perfected by millennia of calculated violence, each word a whetstone on which a threat is sharpened. There are Voices, and there are voices, and Paul had let both lie unused so long here.]

House Atreides seeks a reckoning for the murder of Falco Grice.

These coordinates at dusk. Duelists' choice of weapons.

[His pitch slants, and his tongue is barbed with dire promise.]

Don't make me have to find you, Anna.

Atreides.

[this is something that she should have long foreseen. after her conversation with midoriya, it seemed inevitable. whatever kind of retribution, whatever Reckoning that paul atreides seeks in falco's name, she is ready to pay it.]

[she is terrified of it. she knows what paul is capable of, and she does not trust him to listen to her threat—but she scarcely trusts herself to follow up on it, now. she rasps out his name like opening a tomb and continues in something that sounds deeper, rougher, but not malicious at all. she inhales, and her lungs crackle.]

I'll be there.

[her own weapon is still there, is it not? that's convenient.]

Deer Country Contact

ic contact

2022.07.06

2022.07.07 | voice [1/2]

2022.07.17 | voice [2/2]

voice