Dæmonverse AAU (3-4/16)
Title: Principles of Growth
Author: dominus_trinus
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Chase, House/Wilson (established).
Genre: Alternate alternate universe, à la Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Summary: Secrets and stories shared among heretics.
Notes: My sincere thanks to ruby_took for various R & D conversations and assuring me this story wasn't too bizarre to post, and to bluerosefairy for the truly excellent beta.
Curiouser and Curiouser
When he comes in to work this morning, Kylie loping easily alongside him, House is seated in the conference room, Minerva curled up beneath his left hand.
Self-comforting behavior. Not surprising, given the events of the previous week.
He feels the subtle energy shift as colors flare into place around both man and dæmon, House’s usual cocktail: bright yellow and dark orange, streaked with red (bright and dull); and Chase is immeasurably relieved to see a dyadic band, gold and silver entwined, connecting his heart to Minerva’s.
Dyadic, not triadic. Like Mum’s with Zeru, Kylie says. Missing the distance-strand.
I guess it’s only possible to restore so much, he says, and opens the door. Kylie enters ahead of him, takes a place beside his preferred chair, and House looks up, intense blue eyes meeting his in a penetrating stare.
He nods acknowledgement of the other man and sits down. Any idea what’s going on here?
No, but she’s watching me like he’s watching you. The ‘fascinating puzzle’ look…and something else I can’t quite-
“Wilson said you were the one who told him to take us to the witches,” House says.
“Yes. And?”
Minerva’s gaze shifts from Kylie to him, and she moves a little nearer the edge of the table. For propriety’s sake, he scoots his chair back. “And if not for that we’d be worse than dead. So…thank you.” She reaches out, one hand-like paw resting briefly atop Kylie’s head, and Chase is surprised by the genuine gratitude, respect, even affection he senses in the contact.
“You’re welcome,” Kylie says.
In the silence, his witch-sight recedes again, and he looks up at House. “Do we have a case?”
“No. But I have questions.” A vague gesture encompasses Minerva, clarifies he means ‘I’ in totality. “You never said your mother was a witch.”
“You never asked,” he says calmly. Another short pause as he considers, weighs the risk. “It’s safer for us both if you don’t.”
“They won’t bother cutting us again,” House says, and Minerva flinches, though whether at the word or the memory it evokes he can’t guess. “That’s corrective. If we screw up a second time, they’ll shoot me and be done with it. And you…” He shrugs. “You’re obviously not going to tell, and we’ve said everything we have to say to them.”
There’s a glint of satisfaction in Minerva’s eyes. “Here’s hoping it seared their oh-so-holy ears forever.”
He’s blank-faced, but they can see Kylie’s grin. “Why does it matter if we tell you or not?” she asks.
“We need to know,” Minerva replies. All the mirth is gone now, and her tone is serious bordering on grim. “It’s who we are. If we let them take that from us, we might as well still be dead.”
He nods slowly. “All right.”
“What was a half-witch doing in the church?”
He laughs humorlessly. “Figures you’d ask the question with my life story wrapped around it.”
House might have smirked before, self-satisfied, or made some smart remark. Today he does neither. “Whatever protection you had from seminary, last week was the end of it. They kill relapsed heretics.”
Technically, there can be no relapse where there was no belief in the first place, but better to be relapsa and killed than severed on charges of heresy. “And having earned one death sentence, what’s a few more?”
“Essentially my logic, yeah.”
Another pause. It’s infinitely safer to keep his head down and his mouth shut, but…
But it’s been so long since he’s been able to share this secret with anyone. And keeping it alone is a heavy burden to bear. “After work,” he says. “It’s mad enough to discuss this at all and worse to do it here.”
There would have been protests once, a glib dismissal of his caution; but House just nods.
He’ll never be as reckless as he was before. Not now that he’s experienced hell made real.
He reaches for Kylie and strokes her fur, trying to lull himself into calm.
Head down. Mouth shut. It’s a necessary lesson, but he can’t think for a second that it was worth the price.
No Greater Love
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” He normally speaks to Kylie mind-to-mind, but they’re the only one in the car, so filling the silence is preferable.
“Besides the fact that we’ve gone mental?”
“Yes.”
“Because it’s safe to tell him if it is to tell anyone,” she says, “and we know he’s not going to let it go. He’ll keep pushing-”
“Until the puzzle pieces fall into place,” he finishes for her, decelerating and making a left. “Thank Goddess for that. If he hadn’t been interested, then it would’ve been reason to worry.”
“Right turn,” she says. They drive a little farther in silence, and when he brakes for a light, she says, “Minerva’s never done that. Not in all the years we’ve-”
“He’d been as vulnerable as he’s ever going to get, Ky,” Chase says. “After that, admitting he gives a damn about us was worth getting…whatever information he was looking for.”
“He does care.”
He’s silent for a moment, remembering precisely how that caring felt-wishing he could read its shades and qualities as clearly as he can personality, moods and injuries. “Yeah. But the line where caring about the puzzle stops and caring about us starts would be hard to find. It’s all twisted up, for him. Always has been.”
Shifting the car into park, he turns it off, undoes his seatbelt and Kylie’s-modified for her shape-and gets out and heads into the vestibule, his dæmon at his heels. Though her ears he can hear the piano, some intricate classical composition played in an unsettling minor key.
They stand there for a bit, listening, because in its own way this is as much of a signpost as any aura, and what it says is ‘anxiety.’
He can understand that.
Wilson answers his knock and lets them in, and although he hadn’t expected Wilson to be here, he also hadn’t expected him not to be here, as potentially disastrous as this is for all of them.
Oddly enough, once they’re inside and the door closed behind them he feels calmer: this is the atmosphere of his childhood, storytelling and conspiracy and the omnipresent knife-edge threat of being found out. It’s tense, but it’s familiar.
The piano falls to a crashing silence, and House moves from the piano bench to the couch, Minerva in his arms and his gaze daring Chase to acknowledge the fact.
He knows better.
Wilson sits down beside House, Rona in front of them both in a sentinel’s pose. She’s not guarding either of them from him, because there aren’t any threat signals coupled with the vigilance; but her body language says that Wilson’s hardly calm.
Not surprising. This isn’t a reaction to him; it’s a reaction to knowing they’ve all committed enough heresies to be killed on the spot.
You’re only a heretic, Kylie murmurs, if you get caught.
And the public eye-human collective and glass camera lens-can’t see them here. He sits down with them in the empty space nearest House, Kylie climbing up to lounge half on his lap and half on the arm of the couch.
Colors flash on-it happens sometimes when he watches people, although of course when it activates itself it’s hard to guess when it’ll subside again-and he notes that nothing’s changed in House’s signature before shifting his attention to Wilson’s. Yellow and green, primarily; light and deeper blue, some brown at the feet (which is a good sign; House will need someone who’s grounded).
And at his heart…
Two strands: one silver, one gold. The third, the warm brown that forms the physical link, is gone.
Physics and magic agree that energy can’t be created or destroyed. But it can change. It can be tapped and moved.
Holy Mother, Kylie whispers, and he feels his breathing hitch. Sacrifice like that is the strongest magic-even the Church acknowledges it. Agape: selfless love.
Selfless, and the most terrifying risk. If the wrong strand had broken-or no, not broken; this was more like transplantation, giving a measure of energy to recreate what had been destroyed. But if something had gone wrong, if either of the other strands had been damaged, they’d have lost the ability to feel together, or to think with one mind; and that's provided they weren’t killed outright by the shock-
“Chase!” House’s voice.
He looks up sharply, concentration broken, and-for once at a convenient time-human perception reasserts itself.
“You were staring,” House says, and Chase hears the weight of calculation in the phrase. “And until I snapped at you, you were unresponsive.” A pause. “Do I get an explanation, or do I need to give a diagnosis?”
“Sorry,” he says automatically. Then, realizing an apology isn’t what House wants, he says, “I can see energy signatures. Sometimes. It comes and goes, but when it’s on, it’s easy to get distracted.”
“What did you see?”
“I see it as color-”
“No,” House breaks in. “I meant, what did you see that shocked the hell out of you?”
“Where the energy came from,” Kylie says, “that put you back together.”
Rona’s eyes meet Minerva’s. “We couldn’t do anything else.”
Greater love hath no man than this. He’d memorized the words in seminary long ago, but until this moment he never understood them. Not with the clarity of a living illustration.
“Meaning you take after your mother,” House surmises. The awkward silence that had been pressing in on them is gone now, and Chase can see the beginnings of the animation elicited only by puzzle pieces. “But witches’ sons are supposed to be human.”
“‘Supposed to be’ as the operative phrase,” he says. “And I am, mostly. But what I’m able to do, I can because Mum saw fit to throw tradition out.”
“So…what? A little hocus-pocus while you were in utero to stack the odds?” House’s expression is quizzical. “Was there a good reason for that, or did she just really, really want to pass down the cauldron and broomstick?”
“Cloud-pine branch,” he corrects automatically. “And yeah, she had a good reason.” Can you? he asks, and Kylie obligingly takes over.
Some things are still painful in the telling.
“Our father was a controlling bastard,” she says bluntly. “And that Mum fell in love with him in the first place is all the proof we need that love’s blind. He made her promise to recant everything that made her who she was, and they married, and she pretended to be human.”
House is quiet, the look on his face almost…sympathy?
“She couldn’t have kept that up forever,” Wilson says.
“No,” he agrees. “It made her miserable. So when she was expecting-”
“She made sure you’d be like her,” House says. “Or at least close enough that there’d be an opportunity to let the mask drop.”
He nods. “He was almost never home for very long, so it was easy to hide what she’d done.”
“Especially when he didn’t give enough of a damn when he was home to pay attention,” House mutters. Then, at Chase’s questioning look, “He flew across the goddamn Pacific and hardly noticed you; what was I supposed to think? He was an idiot then and a worse idiot when he called and told me not to hire you in the first place.”
Kylie grins their satisfaction. “Which’s why you did?”
“I don’t like to be told ‘no,’” House says. “And it made you interesting. Although”-a measuring look, tinged with approval-“I didn’t think this interesting.”
Wilson shakes his head, affects a commiserating expression. “Translated from House to English, you’ll never know a moment’s peace again.”
“I’m not sure I’ll know the difference,” he says dryly. He’s pleased, though, because he’s heard the banter between them hundreds of times and realizes that they’re opening it a bit to include him.
Seeing Minerva fidgeting and recognizing House’s impatience, he continues, “I was…probably about five when I walked in on Mum in Circle in the living room…”
Continue...
Author's Notes:
At some point, I will go back and write the reconstruction of House and Minerva's bond, so please don't be too disappointed that the story veered off in a direction many of you probably weren't expecting. In the meantime, I'll continue to post the story as it told itself.
"Zeru" means 'sky' in Basque. He is a kestrel (specifically a Nankeen, or Australian kestrel: picture here). Kestrels are associated with creativity, intuition and independence.
The colors of House's aura indicate "intelligence, memory, action, logic, and ambition, streaked with strength, passion, survival and force." Wilson's represent "intelligence and logic mixed with healing, fertility and growth; then a mix of wisdom, protection, reassurance, creativity, grounding, friendship and influence." The gold and silver strands in their bonds represent the masculine and feminine energies respectively.
Finally, the Bible verse Chase references is John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." (Quoted from the King James Bible.)
Author: dominus_trinus
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Chase, House/Wilson (established).
Genre: Alternate alternate universe, à la Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Summary: Secrets and stories shared among heretics.
Notes: My sincere thanks to ruby_took for various R & D conversations and assuring me this story wasn't too bizarre to post, and to bluerosefairy for the truly excellent beta.
Curiouser and Curiouser
When he comes in to work this morning, Kylie loping easily alongside him, House is seated in the conference room, Minerva curled up beneath his left hand.
Self-comforting behavior. Not surprising, given the events of the previous week.
He feels the subtle energy shift as colors flare into place around both man and dæmon, House’s usual cocktail: bright yellow and dark orange, streaked with red (bright and dull); and Chase is immeasurably relieved to see a dyadic band, gold and silver entwined, connecting his heart to Minerva’s.
Dyadic, not triadic. Like Mum’s with Zeru, Kylie says. Missing the distance-strand.
I guess it’s only possible to restore so much, he says, and opens the door. Kylie enters ahead of him, takes a place beside his preferred chair, and House looks up, intense blue eyes meeting his in a penetrating stare.
He nods acknowledgement of the other man and sits down. Any idea what’s going on here?
No, but she’s watching me like he’s watching you. The ‘fascinating puzzle’ look…and something else I can’t quite-
“Wilson said you were the one who told him to take us to the witches,” House says.
“Yes. And?”
Minerva’s gaze shifts from Kylie to him, and she moves a little nearer the edge of the table. For propriety’s sake, he scoots his chair back. “And if not for that we’d be worse than dead. So…thank you.” She reaches out, one hand-like paw resting briefly atop Kylie’s head, and Chase is surprised by the genuine gratitude, respect, even affection he senses in the contact.
“You’re welcome,” Kylie says.
In the silence, his witch-sight recedes again, and he looks up at House. “Do we have a case?”
“No. But I have questions.” A vague gesture encompasses Minerva, clarifies he means ‘I’ in totality. “You never said your mother was a witch.”
“You never asked,” he says calmly. Another short pause as he considers, weighs the risk. “It’s safer for us both if you don’t.”
“They won’t bother cutting us again,” House says, and Minerva flinches, though whether at the word or the memory it evokes he can’t guess. “That’s corrective. If we screw up a second time, they’ll shoot me and be done with it. And you…” He shrugs. “You’re obviously not going to tell, and we’ve said everything we have to say to them.”
There’s a glint of satisfaction in Minerva’s eyes. “Here’s hoping it seared their oh-so-holy ears forever.”
He’s blank-faced, but they can see Kylie’s grin. “Why does it matter if we tell you or not?” she asks.
“We need to know,” Minerva replies. All the mirth is gone now, and her tone is serious bordering on grim. “It’s who we are. If we let them take that from us, we might as well still be dead.”
He nods slowly. “All right.”
“What was a half-witch doing in the church?”
He laughs humorlessly. “Figures you’d ask the question with my life story wrapped around it.”
House might have smirked before, self-satisfied, or made some smart remark. Today he does neither. “Whatever protection you had from seminary, last week was the end of it. They kill relapsed heretics.”
Technically, there can be no relapse where there was no belief in the first place, but better to be relapsa and killed than severed on charges of heresy. “And having earned one death sentence, what’s a few more?”
“Essentially my logic, yeah.”
Another pause. It’s infinitely safer to keep his head down and his mouth shut, but…
But it’s been so long since he’s been able to share this secret with anyone. And keeping it alone is a heavy burden to bear. “After work,” he says. “It’s mad enough to discuss this at all and worse to do it here.”
There would have been protests once, a glib dismissal of his caution; but House just nods.
He’ll never be as reckless as he was before. Not now that he’s experienced hell made real.
He reaches for Kylie and strokes her fur, trying to lull himself into calm.
Head down. Mouth shut. It’s a necessary lesson, but he can’t think for a second that it was worth the price.
No Greater Love
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” He normally speaks to Kylie mind-to-mind, but they’re the only one in the car, so filling the silence is preferable.
“Besides the fact that we’ve gone mental?”
“Yes.”
“Because it’s safe to tell him if it is to tell anyone,” she says, “and we know he’s not going to let it go. He’ll keep pushing-”
“Until the puzzle pieces fall into place,” he finishes for her, decelerating and making a left. “Thank Goddess for that. If he hadn’t been interested, then it would’ve been reason to worry.”
“Right turn,” she says. They drive a little farther in silence, and when he brakes for a light, she says, “Minerva’s never done that. Not in all the years we’ve-”
“He’d been as vulnerable as he’s ever going to get, Ky,” Chase says. “After that, admitting he gives a damn about us was worth getting…whatever information he was looking for.”
“He does care.”
He’s silent for a moment, remembering precisely how that caring felt-wishing he could read its shades and qualities as clearly as he can personality, moods and injuries. “Yeah. But the line where caring about the puzzle stops and caring about us starts would be hard to find. It’s all twisted up, for him. Always has been.”
Shifting the car into park, he turns it off, undoes his seatbelt and Kylie’s-modified for her shape-and gets out and heads into the vestibule, his dæmon at his heels. Though her ears he can hear the piano, some intricate classical composition played in an unsettling minor key.
They stand there for a bit, listening, because in its own way this is as much of a signpost as any aura, and what it says is ‘anxiety.’
He can understand that.
Wilson answers his knock and lets them in, and although he hadn’t expected Wilson to be here, he also hadn’t expected him not to be here, as potentially disastrous as this is for all of them.
Oddly enough, once they’re inside and the door closed behind them he feels calmer: this is the atmosphere of his childhood, storytelling and conspiracy and the omnipresent knife-edge threat of being found out. It’s tense, but it’s familiar.
The piano falls to a crashing silence, and House moves from the piano bench to the couch, Minerva in his arms and his gaze daring Chase to acknowledge the fact.
He knows better.
Wilson sits down beside House, Rona in front of them both in a sentinel’s pose. She’s not guarding either of them from him, because there aren’t any threat signals coupled with the vigilance; but her body language says that Wilson’s hardly calm.
Not surprising. This isn’t a reaction to him; it’s a reaction to knowing they’ve all committed enough heresies to be killed on the spot.
You’re only a heretic, Kylie murmurs, if you get caught.
And the public eye-human collective and glass camera lens-can’t see them here. He sits down with them in the empty space nearest House, Kylie climbing up to lounge half on his lap and half on the arm of the couch.
Colors flash on-it happens sometimes when he watches people, although of course when it activates itself it’s hard to guess when it’ll subside again-and he notes that nothing’s changed in House’s signature before shifting his attention to Wilson’s. Yellow and green, primarily; light and deeper blue, some brown at the feet (which is a good sign; House will need someone who’s grounded).
And at his heart…
Two strands: one silver, one gold. The third, the warm brown that forms the physical link, is gone.
Physics and magic agree that energy can’t be created or destroyed. But it can change. It can be tapped and moved.
Holy Mother, Kylie whispers, and he feels his breathing hitch. Sacrifice like that is the strongest magic-even the Church acknowledges it. Agape: selfless love.
Selfless, and the most terrifying risk. If the wrong strand had broken-or no, not broken; this was more like transplantation, giving a measure of energy to recreate what had been destroyed. But if something had gone wrong, if either of the other strands had been damaged, they’d have lost the ability to feel together, or to think with one mind; and that's provided they weren’t killed outright by the shock-
“Chase!” House’s voice.
He looks up sharply, concentration broken, and-for once at a convenient time-human perception reasserts itself.
“You were staring,” House says, and Chase hears the weight of calculation in the phrase. “And until I snapped at you, you were unresponsive.” A pause. “Do I get an explanation, or do I need to give a diagnosis?”
“Sorry,” he says automatically. Then, realizing an apology isn’t what House wants, he says, “I can see energy signatures. Sometimes. It comes and goes, but when it’s on, it’s easy to get distracted.”
“What did you see?”
“I see it as color-”
“No,” House breaks in. “I meant, what did you see that shocked the hell out of you?”
“Where the energy came from,” Kylie says, “that put you back together.”
Rona’s eyes meet Minerva’s. “We couldn’t do anything else.”
Greater love hath no man than this. He’d memorized the words in seminary long ago, but until this moment he never understood them. Not with the clarity of a living illustration.
“Meaning you take after your mother,” House surmises. The awkward silence that had been pressing in on them is gone now, and Chase can see the beginnings of the animation elicited only by puzzle pieces. “But witches’ sons are supposed to be human.”
“‘Supposed to be’ as the operative phrase,” he says. “And I am, mostly. But what I’m able to do, I can because Mum saw fit to throw tradition out.”
“So…what? A little hocus-pocus while you were in utero to stack the odds?” House’s expression is quizzical. “Was there a good reason for that, or did she just really, really want to pass down the cauldron and broomstick?”
“Cloud-pine branch,” he corrects automatically. “And yeah, she had a good reason.” Can you? he asks, and Kylie obligingly takes over.
Some things are still painful in the telling.
“Our father was a controlling bastard,” she says bluntly. “And that Mum fell in love with him in the first place is all the proof we need that love’s blind. He made her promise to recant everything that made her who she was, and they married, and she pretended to be human.”
House is quiet, the look on his face almost…sympathy?
“She couldn’t have kept that up forever,” Wilson says.
“No,” he agrees. “It made her miserable. So when she was expecting-”
“She made sure you’d be like her,” House says. “Or at least close enough that there’d be an opportunity to let the mask drop.”
He nods. “He was almost never home for very long, so it was easy to hide what she’d done.”
“Especially when he didn’t give enough of a damn when he was home to pay attention,” House mutters. Then, at Chase’s questioning look, “He flew across the goddamn Pacific and hardly noticed you; what was I supposed to think? He was an idiot then and a worse idiot when he called and told me not to hire you in the first place.”
Kylie grins their satisfaction. “Which’s why you did?”
“I don’t like to be told ‘no,’” House says. “And it made you interesting. Although”-a measuring look, tinged with approval-“I didn’t think this interesting.”
Wilson shakes his head, affects a commiserating expression. “Translated from House to English, you’ll never know a moment’s peace again.”
“I’m not sure I’ll know the difference,” he says dryly. He’s pleased, though, because he’s heard the banter between them hundreds of times and realizes that they’re opening it a bit to include him.
Seeing Minerva fidgeting and recognizing House’s impatience, he continues, “I was…probably about five when I walked in on Mum in Circle in the living room…”
Continue...
Author's Notes:
At some point, I will go back and write the reconstruction of House and Minerva's bond, so please don't be too disappointed that the story veered off in a direction many of you probably weren't expecting. In the meantime, I'll continue to post the story as it told itself.
"Zeru" means 'sky' in Basque. He is a kestrel (specifically a Nankeen, or Australian kestrel: picture here). Kestrels are associated with creativity, intuition and independence.
The colors of House's aura indicate "intelligence, memory, action, logic, and ambition, streaked with strength, passion, survival and force." Wilson's represent "intelligence and logic mixed with healing, fertility and growth; then a mix of wisdom, protection, reassurance, creativity, grounding, friendship and influence." The gold and silver strands in their bonds represent the masculine and feminine energies respectively.
Finally, the Bible verse Chase references is John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." (Quoted from the King James Bible.)