bigapplesauce | CUT TO: [closed]

Melanie goes very still, staring fixedly down at her half-eaten steak. She wasn't expecting Aziraphale to be happy that Illyria had pledged to visit, but she wasn't expecting him to snap at her, either. He almost never raises his voice to her, and she looks, a little, like a dog who's been caught rooting through the garbage. Even though it certainly wasn't her fault that she caught Illyria's interest in the first place.

But there are more important things to address, first. "There won't be a battle," Melanie says. She's too ashamed to sound firm, but she does sound certain. "When she mentioned fighting you before, I told her I wouldn't talk to her if she tried it again. We have a--an understanding. She said it was a fair trade."

Only then does she lift her gaze from her plate, a faint hint of wounded reproach creeping into her tone. "And I didn't try to catch her attention. She found me when she went looking for the cordyceps." Her brow furrows. "She said she could hear it."

Aziraphale sighs and relaxes his posture a bit, trying to look calm. An understanding, is it? He doesn't like the idea of Illyria making deals with his - er, with Melanie, especially not when it's what, to protect him? But Illyria does operate under a code, so. Perhaps this won't end in disaster.

"How odd," he murmurs, frowning at the last remark. "Yes, well, I can see why you'd want to pursue that. I'm sorry I snapped." He reaches out awkwardly across the table and rests a hand over hers. "I'm sure it will be fine. I just need to... get used to the idea."

He pulls his hand back and takes a sip of tea. "I don't suppose she gave you any idea of when she intends to drop by," he says dryly. He was going to go out today, but no longer, not with that on the way.

Feeling marginally better, Melanie sits up straight and shakes her head. "No. She said she would try to find me, but I'm not sure if she really knows where to look." Could she track Melanie across the island by just listening for the cordyceps? It's an uncomfortable thought. Granted, if anyone could hear the fungus, maybe it's just as well that it's someone who finds their whispered words interesting and not horrifying.

"Hrm." Aziraphale frowns thoughtfully into his tea. "I suppose she might be able to sense me. I'm not entirely sure how she works. She is very - unmanageable." But then again, apparently Melanie was able to manage her just fine.

Oh dear. Does Melanie know about the human that is still trapped in the body? He hopes not. He really has got to figure out what to do about that.

"I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what happens," he says lightly, trying to make the best of it. Who knows. Maybe she won't show up!

To presume a god would not keep her oath would be a false presumption, and a foolish one at that. She has failed to locate the principality at its place of books but locating its current living place was of little effort to she who once conquered untold millions. She knows its energy, she can smell the trails of the emotions radiating from it, those that smell so pathetically human yet should not be present at all.

But no matter.

She has located the building, she has favored the looks of alarm she received on her way (they are well-earned, heads should turn and the masses should gaze upon her grandeur), and she has found it, the door.

The door that does not open.

In Illyria's times of glory it would have simply swung open at a glance from its superior.

Here it is inert.

She stands and stares at it. It offends her, its very existence, by being an object so mundane and simple and human and yet yielding nothing, feeling nothing, doing nothing in the face of a god.

Melanie relaxes a little, relieved that Aziraphale seems to at least be getting used to the idea. If she could have discouraged Illyria from visiting, she would have tried, but the god-king didn't strike her as the sort who'd take 'no' for an answer. Negotiating a truce regarding Aziraphale had seemed like the most she could do.

"She did say it might be a few days," she offers. Maybe that's a good thing? Or maybe that just means Aziraphale is going to spend the next few days hovering around the flat and waiting for the inevitable. "Maybe--"

A tell-tale creak from the hallway floorboards pulls her up short. She can't smell anyone out in the hallway - Aziraphale made sure of that - but there's nothing to stop her hearing, and she's especially attuned to the sound of anyone just outside their door. The angel has made it clear that there's no need for her to hide herself away from whoever might stop by, but if it is someone besides Bee or Daniel… maybe she should find something to do a bit farther from the door.

"There's someone out there now," she says, swinging her legs off the side of her chair, ready to move quick if she needs to.

Already? Good grief, he hasn't even had time to get ready. He sighs and gets up, and - yes, he recognizes that twinge of power beyond the door, that's them all right.

He huffs out a breath and goes to the door. "You stay there," he advises. He doesn't think Illyria would attack Melanie, but one can never be sure. He doesn't like the idea of them getting close in any case.

He opens the door and frowns with displeasure at the blank-faced God-King.

"You can come in provided you behave yourself," he says, "and do as I say. This is my domain."

A bit melodramatic, but 'domain' is probably more her language than 'flat'.

At last, the cursed thing opens, but not by the will of any god. On its other side is the principality, looking far from pleased to see her again.

"You are not one to order me," she replies. "I came here of my own will. I desire an audience with your symbiote."

With that pronouncement, she purposefully crosses the threshold and enters. It is...small, much like Illyria's own tiny square of a kingdom, but unlike her bare space it is bedecked with useless mortal things. Books for one, and it is with great annoyance that she realizes it is growing progressively more difficult to dispel the unpleasant mental associations of grief that have coupled themselves to the idea of books. She wishes to burn them.

Once, she may have. Now she merely sweeps past, following the whispers of the green things. Their host looks precisely as it did in the dream. What an odd little thing.

"I have no wish to cause violence," says Illyria, directing her gaze to first the principality, then its charge.

They're both talking like kings and queens in stories, all 'domains' and 'audiences.' But at least they're not fighting, and Illyria seems to remember her promise.

"There won't be any violence," Melanie agrees, sliding out of her chair and looking up at her. "We have an understanding." After a beat, she adds, "Hello again."

Aziraphale's lips quirk in a faint, involuntary smile at Melanie's show of diplomacy. He shouldn't have doubted her - she always manages to surprise him.

"Yes, well," he says mildly, retiring to his armchair with his tea, folding his legs and raising his eyebrows at the pair of them. "I'll be an audience to your audience." He glances at Melanie, hoping this is reassuring. He's not going anywhere.

They have indeed, as the symbiote-thing has pointed out, achieved an understanding. The principality is an annoyance, a gadfly, but Illyria will tolerate it. It has made no movements to encroach upon her territory or her purposes. This is acceptable.

The God-King turns to the object of her interest. This tiny, interesting thing with singing in its blood.

"It sings loudly here," she murmurs. Her shell's gaze becomes distant as she looks at some point beyond the symbiote-child's physical self, tracing the outlines of the alien shapes within. "Louder than in a dream."

Melanie gives Aziraphale a faint smile. It should have occurred to her last night that if she tells Illyria about what she did in her universe, that means he'll hear about it, too. He's always insisted it doesn't matter. Will he still feel that way if he hears the details?

It's too late to worry about it, now. Maybe Illyria won't even think to ask. Melanie shifts her focus to the god-king, brow furrowing. "Does it really sing? Like music?" The cordyceps has stark, clear wants, but even if it had an actual voice, she can't imagine it singing. Roaring, maybe. That would make sense.

Aziraphale frowns sharply at Illyria's pronouncement. He doesn't like it one bit that she can hear the cordyceps - that they 'sing', apparently. He doesn't like that Melanie will have to talk about them. He has to stay out of it, he thinks, to let Melanie handle this as she wishes, but - he levels a glare at the back of Illyria's head, watching her carefully. If she asks anything that makes Melanie uncomfortable he is going to be put a stop to this at once.

The principality's distaste is dismissed as irrelevant, even as Illyra feels it coiling off it in maddening spirals. For now the symbiote is what has the whole of the god's attention.

"I hear all the songs of the green," she answers. "The many trees and branches, all their voices clear and distinct. Even the tinier skittering things - the gray, if that is what you call them." She recalls the child's insistence on that particular terminology, not that it matters in any great capacity to a God-King. "Once I could hear much more, so many of them, all their voices in worldly harmony. The world sang, and I listened. When I sang back it trembled. Rightfully." Her eyes drift to the window, to some distant region beyond the scope of immediate sight, her voice verging on wistful. Illyria will concede to that emotion; she does indeed experience loss, and grief, and mourns the erosion of the glory she once was.

Her shell's eyes snap back to the subject of her primary interest with unsettling focus.

"The things that live in you are less articulate. They have little mind or thought or conception of what they are. They express only hunger."

Melanie is bursting with questions. What sort of things do trees and grass and flowers sing about? Can Illyria still sing back to them, or can she only listen? What would happen if she did sing back? Would the plants - or the cordyceps - listen to her, too?

Could she make the fungus so loud that it bursts out of the box Melanie keeps it in?

Could she make the fungus stop singing?

Melanie folds her hands neatly so she won't fidget with them. She needs to choose her questions carefully. "That's what they called the people who had been taken over by the grey, in my universe: hungries. All most of them did was hunt and eat. There was no room in their minds for anything else." She meets Illyria's gaze, a little puzzled by the intensity of her focus, but not shrinking from it. "The symbiotes were - are - different. We can still think."

Aziraphale watches Melanie closely, trying to spot any sign of discomfort, but she seems only composed and perhaps curious. This is rather novel for her, he supposes.

And he can't deny that he is curious in turn. He's heard Melanie's story in pieces but never the whole of it; he senses there is some she's keeping from him, and he wonders if she'll tell Illyria any of that. Where he has deemed it impolite to ask directly, Illyria has no such filter. He feels a little guilty for thinking he might benefit from that trait, but it's not as if he arranged this. He's only a bystander.

To have one's mind overridden by some collection of squirming, lesser things is a horror Illyria almost does not dare fathom - and she must privately assert to herself that she laid claim to this body, she is the one who owns it by resurrective right. Illyria is no parasite and gods are incomparable to such things.

That she feels the need to remind herself of this at all is obscene.

"You are neither human," says Illyria, tranquil despite her concerning, nonsensical parallel, "nor fully taken by the things you carry." Illyria swallowed Winifred Burkle whole, until only the shell and its scattered memories remained. "How are you not overcome? How can there be balance? My shell was emptied in allowance for a god. Yet you are whole within yours."

"I don't know for certain," Melanie admits, frowning a little. "Dr. Caldwell only had a theory. Some hungries retain a little of their humanity - not a lot, but enough to do things besides hunt. She thinks my parents were infected with the grey before they had me." She shrugs, then sits back down in her chair to finish her steak. "So it wasn't something that I caught, or something that infected me - it's always been part of me."

She takes a bite, then glances up at Illyria. "Your body used to belong to someone else?" She's careful not to sound accusing, but curious. Couldn't a god just make their own body?

At this, Aziraphale can't help but sit up a little straighter, frowning tightly. He doesn't like that Illyria is denying Winifred's existence like this. It isn't empty at all.

"It still does," he says, unable to keep quiet about this. Not if she's trying to befriend Melanie, or whatever this is.

"This shell belongs to me, principality," Illyria growls. "I could not change that, even as I desire to shed this flimsy vessel and seek another."

The symbiote has been forthcoming, and Illyria has no need to conceal what she is.

"This body belonged to a mortal creature once." Her tone is disparaging as ever. Winifred Burkle's final act in surrendering her body for a god's use was the only notable thing about her; certainly not the fragmented emotional output Illyria still senses on occasion. "I was bound to it in the act of my resurrection. My true form would have dwarfed much of this city, but it is lost."

Uh oh. Melanie glances at Aziraphale, brow furrowed, then back to Illyria. If the god-king took over some woman's body just like the cordyceps would…

… Well, what then? Who is Melanie to judge, after what she did? How many pockets of humanity were still holding out when she set the cordyceps alight? When she was finished, only one woman was left. One woman lost doesn't seem that bad in comparison.

She shifts in her seat, uneasy. "I don't understand," she finally says. "Were you bound on purpose?"

Aziraphale huffs loudly but forces himself to keep quiet after this. Melanie still has questions, and she's right to question - and he believes that any attempt to remove Illyria from her stolen body might prove disastrous. It's a problem that does not have a simple solution. Something with which he's far too familiar lately.

He is curious to hear more of Illyria's story, as well. Their attempts to get to know each other have not gone historically well.

The principality continues to be infuriatingly disapproving and Illyria shoots it an equally disapproving look. It has little right to judge. A rebirth to this world, bound to this shell, would never have been this god's choice.

"A disciple raised me," she tells the little thing icily. "Many ages had passed since the time of the Primordials. One by one, many of us fell." The darkest period of her past, in which all she was had crumbled and been compartmentalized into a coffin in a hole in the center of the world. "This body was marked for my resurrection. I had little choice in the matter, and now it is mine."

She raises a hand in this tiny shell and flexes it, studying the complex workings of skin and bone and muscle with cold disinterest.

"I find it to be a fragile substitute. Were it possible, I would seek another." Illyria is loathe to admit weakness in any context, even to something so small and mortal that could do a god no harm. "Compacting such cosmic energy within such an insubstantial shell has left my power - reduced."

Illyria didn't even try to do what she did, then. It's rude of her to scornfully dismiss the body she's taken, but Melanie still isn't in any position to claim the moral high ground. She clears her empty plate, rinsing it off beneath the tap before setting it in the sink. A proper wash can wait.

"How powerful were you in your old form?" she asks. It seems like the sort of thing Illyria would like talking about, and she is curious. "Stronger than the rift?"

"Stronger than anything." There were many reasons, after all, that her enemies and followers alike deemed her 'The Merciless'. "I was unconquerable. It was only when the time of the Old Ones was past that all the Primordials were defeated, and even then they could never destroy me." She lefts her shell's chin, pride blazing from its eyes (a reasonably godlike emotion, therefore acceptable). Illyria reborn, as she should be.

"That's what the cordyceps was like, back home," Melanie says with a thoughtful little nod. "It took over everything." She pauses, considering, then says, "I'm not sure if it's made it to the poles, though. So I guess there might be some humans still alive down there."

It's a strange thought, and she's not sure if she likes the idea. There'd be no harm so long as they stayed put, and she supposes there's nothing wrong with humans surviving where they can. But she doubts they could stay so cold and isolated forever, and they wouldn't last long once they left.

"A truly potent weapon," Illyria notes quietly. Had she not already bound herself to Wesley's wish, that would indeed be an avenue of extermination worth pursuing. Wipe away the traces of the vermin that populate every dark corner and crevice. Cleanse this miserable world of their filth.

The thought is satisfying, and disturbing for reasons Illyria cannot fully describe to herself. She pays no heed to that disagreeable sensation. It is not of her concern.

"There is no means for defeating one such as yourself." This symbiote - it acts like a virus, perhaps, swallowing everything. Or its little creatures are merely too mindless to be anything but viciously potent against all they touch.

"She is not a weapon," Aziraphale flares up, standing before he can stop himself. He crosses to them in a few quick steps and plants himself halfway between them, frowning hard at the presumptuous God-King. "And there is no discussion of defeat. You will not speak to her that way. Is that understood?"

A little of his angelic fury seeps through, his voice slightly deeper than usual, more vivid. Without looking away from Illyria, his hand finds Melanie's shoulder, resting firmly on it.

Melanie starts at the interruption and looks up at Aziraphale in astonishment. It's sort of thrilling to be defended this fiercely, but she's also not sure what the fuss is about. Illyria's sworn an oath not to hurt anyone, and it seems to Melanie that referring to things in terms of battle and conquest is just how the god-king speaks. She doesn't mean to use Melanie as a weapon, she just thinks she'd make a good one - like a weird sort of compliment.

She can understand why Aziraphale wouldn't like it, though. She'd been thinking of pointing out that she could be defeated so long as her body was destroyed properly, but Aziraphale wouldn't like that, either. She gives his hand a reassuring pat.

"It's okay. She wouldn't try to use me as a weapon, because she swore an oath." It's not the only promise she made, either, and Melanie gives Illyria a pointed look.

The god skewers the principality with an intensely withering glare. Such hostility without impetus. Illyria was led to believe that this would be a purely diplomatic function, and the principality's predisposition toward aggression seems entirely counter-intuitive.

"It is a statement of fact, principality. Regardless of intent," she replies coldly. "There is little I could do while confined here, and even less while I am under oath." It was Wesley's wish. She will not deviate from that. She could not possibly sully his memory so. Yet she stalks closer to the principality regardless, shell's head canted to one side, a quiet taunt.

"There is little you could prevent me from doing if I so wished." In case it had forgotten their previous encounters, though Illyria does not believe it has. "Be grateful for my acquiescence to your request for peace in this circumstance."

"That's not the point," protests Aziraphale, directing his gaze first to Melanie, then, more irritably, back to Illyria. "Intent is not my objection. You will not refer to her as some sort of thing. You will respect her as a person, insofar as you're capable of respecting anyone." He knows she isn't sitting there debating ways to unleash the cordyceps on the city, but that she comes in here trying to describe Melanie like she's some kind of - of doomsday device, and that Melanie isn't even perturbed by that, that's intolerable, and he won't stand for it.

This is starting to get out of hand. Melanie side-steps around Aziraphale, placing herself between him and the god-king. "No fighting," she insists, frowning up at Illyria. "That means no threats, either." That wasn't a specific part of their agreement, but it might as well have been.

Taking a breath, she adds, "And I'm not a weapon, because I won't let anyone else use me to hurt people. That's why I'm here. Aziraphale offered to bring me here, but I chose." She might not entirely trust herself, and she is acutely aware of the threat she poses, but she's not a pawn.

It is absurd, having this meeting on this tiny creature's terms. Compared to the ancient creatures it addresses - a god and a principality - it is practically an infant. Illyria scowls at it, at them both. She has not consented to ordered about in any capacity, and this meeting is as much on her terms as it is on either of theirs.

"Respect is not freely given, principality," she cautions as she stands away again, ever aloof. "It is earned."

The principality wavers between earning respect and the lack thereof; it is a decent opponent. Its intentions are of sufficient interest. And yet - it completely disrespects Illyria as a rightful ruler and as a god, and under any other circumstance this would not stand. The symbiote, however, is appropriately intriguing. This is no indicator of respect, but Illyria knows well enough that if she does not follow that social dictation, the principality will make any further contact with the symbiote quite difficult.

Thus, she relents.

"You understand your potential, then," she returns to the symbiote, the less currently infuriating of the two. It understands its own power well, this much is clear. It understands it and it - fears it. Perhaps in such a contained field, when the will of the shell contradicts what it carries, such fear is justified. But Illyria would not know, nor does she care to. Gods do not know fear. "And that is why you keep yourself restricted so."

That's better. Distantly he feels quite proud of Melanie for diffusing the situation, though all he's capable of registering right now is a stiff loosening of tension and a frowning acknolwedgment that Illyria has not continued to displease him. He steps away, keeping a suspicious eye on the God-King, removes himself from their conversational field again. That was a warning, and this will continue so long as she continues to do well.

CUT TO: [closed]

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