A Match Into Water


Pepper’s strained smile became almost a bearing of teeth as she thought. She reached out to Hades, and he reached back, and they tangled for a moment in perfect harmony. Her skin glowed lightly, a shade of golden yellow that seemed to radiate from deep inside her. It pierced through her clothes in tiny streaks as she conversed with her god.

“Strings can’t find out. What do I do? I need to have their word it won’t get back to him.”

“You could… ask for a binding agreement from them. Or maybe only tell Gail and have her agree to never tell him, and to never allow it to get back to him?”

“I don’t know if that will work. I can certainly try though.”

“I think it’s the only way he doesn’t find out about Eurydice. I think you can do it, I think they’ll agree if you phrase it exactly the way I’m about to tell you.”

In a voice that was more hers than his but still overlapped and rnag out with music, Pepper repeated word for word what Hades whispered to her. “My first and only allegiance is to the Foundation. I was raised by the Foundation, have always been part of the Foundation. I wouldn’t hide it unless I thought it would cause problems for certain people in the Foundation to know. If I could know that they wouldn’t find out, then I would tell you. But you won’t like it. It may be better if I could tell someone not so… intricately related to the person who can’t know. Not unless I can get something substantial, a real agreement, that you won’t tell him. It’s in his best interest that he not know… yet. And I can’t elaborate on why it is until after said agreement.”

She swallowed hard as she finished speaking, and the glow on her skin died back down in her fear. Her heart was pounding hard and there was a stretching pain in her chest. Anxiety, most certainly. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, trying to relax from the uncomfortable feeling. She didn’t want to play games. She didn’t want to be in trouble. She didn’t want to have to get an agreement, a contract, but it was the way it had to be. Eurydice could not be found out by Strings. Not yet. Not until she was ready.
 

"Oooh, she's shiny!" Pepper had blanked again - she was really not very subtle - and Cait was still holding her hand, which she held up in a displaying sort of manner. "Look, guys! She's shiny"

"Cait, she's not a Pokemon."

Cait looked at Nic. Nic looked at Cait. "Prepare for trouble!"

"And make it double!"

"You two are such dorks."

"Brian you have a Pokemon spreadsheet and you play Pichu in Smash- Pepper! Welcome back! We weren't talking about you!"

"Oh my god." Pepper had decided to be talking again, so the chatter stopped, at least until Pepper had finished.

There was silence, for a moment.

"'Intricately related.'" Nic waggled his eyebrows. Cait snorted in what was undoubtedly a very ladylike and dignified manner. "Gail, I do believe she thinks you're bangin' the councilman."

"She does... not know whether or not she believes that. Why do they always not know whether or not they believe that?"

"He's just a boy,"
"You're just a girl,"
"Can I make it any more obvious?"

There was a sigh, which was somewhat undercut by the fact that Gail was also humming along, or at least something was, using her voice. "Pepper." This was somewhat obvious as a change of subject. "I know Strings much better than you do-"

"Intricately related!"

"Thank you, Nic. Shut up. And. I will be the judge of whether or not it would be good for him to know, after I know what it is we may or may not be keeping from him. That's my offer. You won't get a better one."
 

All of the talking, all of the pressure, all of Pepper’s frustration, it reached a tipping point. Hades surged forward and entwined with her mind, his frustration matching hers and doubling it. Pepper dropped her head to her knees, letting her face rest there for a minute. She was silent as she did so, and then she threw her head back and screamed, loudly, “[EXPLETIVE]! [EXPLETIVE][EXPLETIVE][EXPLETIVE]!! I met the other half!! I met the other half of your [EXPLETIVE]ing child, which is why I know, not think, it exists. She asked me to find out for her. But he can’t go to her, because then Ira will kill him!! [EXPLETIVE]ing okay?!”

She breathed out harshly as she finished, and as she opened her eyes, her vision was blurry. Tears fell down her cheeks. She clearly was distressed, but she tried to hold Gail’s eyes, anger in her own. She could feel Hades’s anger overlapping hers, and in a moment of harmony, the glow returned, even brighter this time. Then she stood up, and gesturing wildly with her hands, she continued, her voice still raised, the air vibrating strangely around her.

“You may know him better and all of that [EXPLETIVE], but if he’s anything like she, the one who was in his head, thinks he is, then he can not know. He can’t. Ira, in her universe, cannot be fought. We should all be very aware of that fact. Here, she’s just a child, but there? She is an Eldritch deity, and Strings might be good with weird, but this one is out for him. She told me as much, the other half. And I made a promise to a scared little girl that I would find out if the rest of her was alive. That’s all she wanted, all she asked of me, and I will [EXPLETIVE]ing keep this promise! So tell me that you won’t. Say. Anything. Please.”

She was panting as she stopped moving, her hands still partially raised. The glow didn’t die down this time. Hades was in the exact same headspace as Pepper, and that meant that she looked… weird, beyond the light. Almost like the glow was now concentrated in her eyes, almost like she was a mirage as the air continued to vibrate. Almost like something was happening. Until, very suddenly, it retreated. Pepper felt Hades abruptly recede to the back of her mind, and her anger was suddenly halved. She looked around and then drew in a shuddering breath.
“I’m… so sorry. I don’t know why I just… I’m sorry.”
 
Steady arms wrapped around Pepper from behind. Not to constrict, not to contain - just to hold. "Hey... hey. Pepper. Shhh. It's okay." Cait's voice was in her ear, soothing, like a person with a scared little lamb - or, given that it was Cait, a scared little many-tentacled horror beyond comprehension.

Actually, given that it was Pepper, maybe that was pretty close to the truth. Cait stayed with her, keeping the hug loose enough that Pepper could get out of it if she really wanted, so that she wouldn't feel trapped, because feeling trapped wasn't going to get them anywhere.

Gail left her to it, reaching down to set the coffee mug carefully on the floor before standing up as well - not jumping over the chair like she'd very much implied she could have earlier, just walking over, calmly, patiently, stopping just out of arms reach.

"If any harm comes to that scared little girl, I will pull the teeth from the fleshscape of HER world and salt the wounds so that nothing ever grows there again. I will scar the landscape and sow hatred for HER and all HER kin. I will kill that god deader than the one you have inside you, and HER many many many children. I will flense the flesh from their bones and build their grave effigies with their skeletons, streaked with cracked marrow." Her tone never rose, not once. Her eyes met Pepper's, unflinching, even as something reddish and wormlike seeped out beneath her eye from the lower lid, as another wriggled its way thought the flesh of her cheek, as others twisted their way out of her arm, around it, and the ichor that coated them calmly went plip onto the floor, where it hissed its disgust and hummed in symphony with the rest.

"I think, perhaps, SHE is worried about the wrong person." Gail tilted her head to the side, almost idly, with a smile whose threat was reserved for later, not here, not now - but the anticipation only made it worse. "SHE can be out for Strings all she likes, but I will be out for HER. And you can tell that scared little girl that, if you like." A pause, and the flesh-toned things receded, or were gone, or hadn't really been physical at all in the first place. The ichor they'd left behind remained, an oilslick mark on her skin and clothing.

Gail smiled once more, this time almost sweetly: a sheathed blade rather than a bared one, then added, in the same quiet even tone: "And that I would do the same for her sister."
 
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Pepper not only let Cait’s arms stay wrapped around her, she wove her own arms over them and held them tight against herself. She leaned into the hug as tears started to fall down her face, her body shuddering. She’d never felt that level of anger before, never felt such a distinct rage. It left her shaken at how fast it had come on, and then at how fast it had left her. She realized, belatedly, that she had started to do something. That she could feel strings and hear notes, and when she breathed it all in, she felt like she could manipulate all of it.

That was decidedly not good.

She looked up at Gail as she came close and listened to the woman. It was clear even without the… fleshworms? Even without them, it was clear that Gail was being serious, and that she meant every word of what she said about Eurydice. The tears in Pepper’s eyes continued to overflow as she nodded her understanding at the words “her sister”. A wave of something undefinable washed through her, a complex array of emotions that she decided she would try to process later.

“I promised but was not bound, to not tell him, or let him find out. She’s scared he will do something and try to get her. From what I was able to gather, from the little I know about things being binding, she is bound to HER. SHE doesn’t want to hurt her, but she can’t leave HER.” She said the words softly, no hint of the rage that had been there earlier left.

“I… do have a binding pact with her, however. Information about… her sister… in exchange for an undefined favor down the road. That, I know was binding. She just wanted to know if her other half was alive. She… she’s very lonely. I’m trying to visit her. To give her someone to talk to and try to ease some of that loneliness. I don’t know what else i can do for her, if there’s anything else that can be done.”
 
"I can work with that." Gail could work with anything. That was, more or less, what she did. "I don't suppose you have a copy of any of these bindings?" The more information, the easier it would be to find a loophole, and this seemed like the sort of situation where they might quite like to have a loophole.

"I can start looking into some things," Cait offered. Breaking a binding was actually super easy, she had found. Now, if you wanted the entities and dimensions involved to be intact afterwards, that made it a lot more difficult, but just breaking? Breaking was no trouble at all. The Locusts were great at breaking things.

"Good. But don't try anything until I tell you to." To Nic and Cait's occasional dismay, the Locusts were also good at knowing when not to break things, or at least some of them were.

"Aww." Cait pouted. She was good at pouting. As usual, it didn't last. "Hey! Maybe I can visit her, if she's lonely. I'm great at visiting people."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, [expletive], no."

"Actually, I like it."

"Yes!"

"Oh, no." This was spoken with a sense of existential dread that could only be matched by anyone who had spent more than five minutes in Cait's presence.

"Just don't do anything I wouldn't do. And... don't do most of the things I would do, either." A fair statement, given a number of things Gail had done in the past - and that was even before she'd gotten herself soul-twined with a demon and shuffled into Strings' personal favorite team.

"Well, that takes the fun out of it." Cait sighed, but turned on Pepper anyway. "So, what do you say?"
 

“I can offer you handwritten documentation of my binding with Eurydice. But I don’t know the exact binding between her and HER. I can describe what I saw though, and maybe you can do something with that?” Pepper gave a look to Gail, one that was slightly defeated, but also grateful. She didn’t agree, not really, but it seemed like she would do anything for Eurydice, the same way Pepper would. Hopefully, that meant not telling Strings about her.

Then Cait pitched something, and Pepper went a little stiff in her arms. She pushed her arms away finally and turned around to look at Cait. There was a moment of silence as Pepper thought what the ramifications of taking Cait with her might be. With how intrinsically Ira was entwined with her dimension, there would have to be some rules in place before they could do anything.

“You could come, but there are things you can’t do.” Her voice was soft and slow like she was thinking a mile a minute. “I don’t think you can do any magic there. Not only do I think it won’t work because anything that bends reality doesn’t work there, we’ve tested it, but because if it did… I think you’d catch her attention. And we don’t want her attention. So no magic, no reality-bending, none of that. And you have to stay on the Path with me. That’s a must.”

Although she had begun softly, she ended firmly. As long as Cait could agree to those things, she didn’t mind taking her through the Dark Dimension. Cait could take care of herself, for sure, even without magic. And Pepper trusted her to behave. That trust might have been ill-placed in someone else so early on in a relationship, but Pepper got a, for lack of a better word, a vibe from Cait. One that said she was probably one of the best people to have at your back.
 

Codifying everything would be an excellent thing to do, but that wasn't the part that caught Gail's attention. They had all noticed it, she knew, because they were trained to notice things like that - but no one said anything about it, because this was a not yet situation.

Sometimes it was a When and not a Why, after all. Or a Whom.

She gave Pepper space to have the standard reaction that people had whenever Cait said something, which was perfectly understandable. Cait, for her part, let Pepper step away for as long as she needed to, let her be stunned and silent for a moment, because that was all stuff that she was used to.

Pepper didn't deny the idea outright, which was definite progress in the L-9 direction. Whether or not that was a good idea remained to be-

No, actually, it was pretty obvious already that it was a terrible idea, but hey, that was what they were here for. Pepper set down some ground rules, which Cait was absolutely going to ignore if it suited her, but it was good to know where the boundaries were so that she'd be aware of when she was breaking them.

"Ira offered to make magic work for me in there," she said, conversationally. "I didn't take her up on it yet, but the option is there! Also, I argued that if it were possible it wouldn't be magic, and she agreed with that... so, you know, I might still be able to do a few things. Who knows!"

"I mean, Cait doesn't even need magic, she can just start talking to them in there until they all give her the same look you just did and then go find other places to rethink their existence." Nic seemed to think this was a helpful suggestion.

"Wow."

"Don't fall for it. She's secretly pleased that he has such a high regard for her powers of chaotic conversation." Brian didn't even look up from the computer to deliver this pronouncement, which had at some point stopped showing the Foundation's message client and started showing The Binding of Isaac.

"You guys are rude. They love me in the other dimension."

"That's because they haven't met you!"

"Duh. So, how many buddies can I bring and when are we going?"
 
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