Carrying Ghosts
This... is surreal, I'm not going to lie. Even more so than normal. It takes place in the weird space between IC and OC which allows all of the Golden Bonded to interact with each other. Make of it what you will.
This is Josephine centric, FOIP for mindset. Contains obscure references to backstories.
WARNINGS: Blood, gore, insanity, surreal dreams, memories of the dead. Also Multiverse weirdness.
"Are you sure that you want to see?"
The man met her eyes calmly but with a hint of crystal clear clarity in the grey eyes, his hand stretched out to the void, poised ready to cast, robes and wings swirling out behind him. He looked like an eternal or herald of some kind, but she was assured that he had been human and this was just a manifestation of his power in this strange place.
She'd grown... accustomed to the fact that things here didn't work here like they did back at home. She was also fairly sure this place wasn't actually real. At any rate, strange things happened in dreams and she would forget this as soon as she woke and only remember it on returning here.
Nevertheless, things were happening and she should be paying attention. She looked out to the space just beyond the motes of light clustering around the man's fingertips and nodded sharply, hazel eyes steady.
"Yes."
"Very well." The man's fingers moved and the light swirled, spreading out to form a net at his fingertips stretching into the void. Nodes and lines glowed, looking for all the world like a strange constellation anchored by the man's will.
Another flick and a net in a different colour spread upwards from the nearest dot, but this one was a cone instead of a plane, further motes of light drifting down inside it, all funneled down into that one point at the bottom.
Her eyes softened as she looked at that small glowing dot, "So that's me, all of space and time, and it comes down to a small glow I could hold in my hand."
"Only when you look at it this way," the man said calmly, his hand moving to cup the glow gently, "It is a star, reduced to something we can understand. It is by no means nothing." He looked up with a slight smile, "Look at how brightly it glows."
Josephine smiled, "Yes, I suppose."
He smiled back properly, a flicker of understanding between them. He knew what stars meant to her, they all did. It was strange, how the people here all understood each other, but it made them kind. Her attention shifted away from him to the rest of the net, "So what is this?"
"The network of you," he said simply, "the cone, as you have probably worked out, is a representation of your past lives, different people, different selves, but all you. The other net..." he paused, "You might want to call it sideways reincarnation. We call them Alternates."
"So they're also me and not me?" the woman drifted forward to look at the stars, "they're so far away from each other."
"They are different universes, after all." He drifted up to float alongside her, "the same soul, born in different places, living and shaped by different lives."
He stopped in front of one whose line connecting it to hers was particularly bright. He was difficult to read, but something about the way he stood seemed sad somehow, "We found you through this one."
"Wait," Josephine frowned, "I wasn't the first of me?"
The man shook his head, "No, we... well, Estantia, wanted to give you another chance."
"Another..." Josephine trailed off, "that sounds ominous. I'm not going to like what I see here, am I? That's why you were so careful about asking me in the first place."
His wings didn't quite shift uncomfortably, "Yes."
She looked at it for a moment, "Let me see."
"You are sure?" Carefully neutral, dammit, he knew what she was going to say, fucking prophets.
"Yes. I've come this far, I'm not going back now."
The man reached out his hand to the star and gestured...
Her head flopped on one side, hair swinging to the side just enough to let one eye look out through the gap, oddly wide and unblinking as she looked round at the door, half turning as she did so.
Red. Red blood on a pristine white dress, sprays across the wall, warm wet drops on her face and the sharp scent of blood. It felt like her dark fingers should be dripping darker, but the perfect skin was untouched just as surely as it had been her hand that painted the walls with the organs she had torn from her lover and his filth of a mistress.
The dead eye remained fixed on her, head still tilted at that strange, broken angle before her lips split in a mockery of a smile from that dead face.
Chuckles started to leak from her smile before erupting into laughter that shook her shoulders helplessly. But despite that the dead eyes didn't move and a whispering voice, her voice, slipped into her head.
"It's so pretty, isn't it?"
Josephine threw herself out of the vision, scrambling backwards through the starlit void, breathing heavily, eyes wide as she fought to get her body under her control, "That thing was NOT, fucking, me!"
The man hadn't moved, still watching her with that same cool expression, "It was you, from a different place and time."
She shook her head vigorously, still backing away, "No, no way, that wasn't..." she trailed off as information poured into her head, like it did so often here.
The feeling as her Dawnish temper snapped, the sword slicing a neat line in the air in front of heated eyes.
"That's not what happened there!"
The cold calculating feeling as she laid out the political situation in front of her, the clinical cut and dodge in the fight against the Feni, calmly working out her next move like a general on the battlefield.
"I'm not..." her voice was faltering.
"You have the potential to be, and you see that, don't deny it." he said calmly, "You can see how all of the pieces could come together in exactly the right way to cause that."
She looked back at the innocent little star and said nothing.
"But you are right, that is not who you are, and the rules of your world have shaped you to, quite correctly, see that action for the horrifying thing it is." He continued, walking over to stand a respectful distance from the woman, turning to look back at the net, "As I said, same soul, different circumstances. In some, people are screwed from the start, simply due to the conditions they were born in."
"Without your talk of Fate even coming into it." Josephine spat, knowing full well the man wouldn't take any offence at the disgust largely directed at herself, straightening to assume her normal demeanour, "So I assume you managed to gain something from this?"
The man nodded, "Estantia saw who she could have been. So she gave them a choice."
"She gave them the chance to try again," Lady Josephine said slowly, "the chance to escape that outcome. That's why I'm here, isn't it? A last chance for a broken soul."
The man nodded again, "You must understand that That Josephine is not you." He lifted her face gently and met her eyes to allow other images to fly between them, her hand twining with Macsen's, the righteous fury, the flicker of moving souls, lifting her head to speak calmly and firmly to a room full of egregores. A flourishing pattern of her life, beauty, emotion, choice, virtue, growth.
"You are worth so much more than a soul looking for redemption."
Josephine's eyes met his with a challenge, "But I still carry her ghost, somehow, somewhere. And there's this little lost soul who's watching me, waiting and hoping that I won't screw up, that I'll keep being virtuous and growing and kicking ass."
"Yes."
It wasn't like she'd be the first person to carry the ghosts of those that had come before. She thought of a group who carried their friends on their banner, of a lady living for the siblings who didn't survive. She thought of her own name, the story of behind it and the woman who was left behind.
She smiled, "I guess I can work with that."
The man smiled back, and even though he didn't speak she could feel him saying thank you.