Daji fiddles with their claws, long voluminous sleeves hanging so low their hands practically vanish. "I um. I really did have fun today, you know," they say haltingly. "I really liked getting to spend time with you like this. Thank you."
"Heh. Wasn't so bad for me either." You lapse into awkward silence, what you had planned to say to them wen you got home dying before it even reaches your lips much less threatening to be spoken aloud. You fiddle with the door handle slightly, working over the words in your head. "You know, you don't... have to go back in yet," you say. "Into the-" you gesture at your chest region "-whatever we call it."
"Soulscape," says Daji.
"Soulscape. I still don't want you going out without me but... I dunno. If it's just in the house it's alright. If you wanna. Stay out. Take a look around. Or anything."
Daji smiles. It makes your lips twitch up a little too. You barely recognise them compared to the haughty little shit-stirrer demon you first met on the road to Thousand Steps. You can barely name how it makes you feel. But if they're smiling it can't be that bad, can it?
"I actually wanna head back inside for a while if that's okay?" they ask. "Might as well check in on Sidir, make sure he didn't set fire to anything."
"Hah. Yeah good call."
I actually really really like this exchange- I mean I love the whole update to bits too but like, this in particular. Where things very clearly aren't okay, but they managed to navigate the issue without blowing up at each other or ripping into each other and they're very much like- neither of them are perfect, or even necessarily great about it (Daji has like All of Jiro's emotional intelligence but they're also still an inveterate shit-stirrer and pathological brat, especially to people who Aren't Dad now), but they're very clearly putting in the work and trying. And this moment is a great example of that. It's kind of wobbly and a little fragile and Jiro's not doing great and Daji can't help a ton, but by the same turn neither of them have made things actively worse and are both trying very very hard not to.
It's actually kinda funny taken in context with the later chase sequence of like- Daji being super nervous about making a scene and about being late and how they're not, actually, completely and consistently irresponsible. They're 100% still anxious about shit, especially shit that their dad cares about (like Lilunu, implicitly, given that Jiro is actually going out of his way to try and make a good impression all on his own). They're not completely immature! Just selectively so. Or maybe selectively mature maybe given that they're basically still a kid.
You get to finish that bath you started earlier. It doesn't help as much as it should. You sit there in the tub, near-scalding water still failing to bring any colour to your skin, and at times it feels like you aren't warming up at all. Again and again your thoughts return to that strange feeling on the lookout point, that indescribable chill that set your body trembling and your breath misting. Only the waters of the underworld have ever made you so cold before. You sink down deeper, drawing your arms in and hugging yourself again, only your head left above the surface as you will the water to please just warm you up. You stare up at the ceiling and all you can think of is the presence you felt, the shape in the glass. The shadow flitting through the ruins of your old home the first time you entered the soulscape.
And the Underworld River bit.
When you were eighteen you slipped and fell fording a river so cold your bones still ached an hour after the rest of the squad dragged you to the riverbank. When you were fifteen you set out across the satrapy alone in the dying hours of autumn, forced to scrape and steal and hide in a hole like an animal just to escape the cold each night. When you were thirteen you ended up locked out in the middle of a blizzard, had to hide in the barn buried under straw and pray you woke up in the morning. You were astonished you hadn't lost anything to frostbite in the night. All of these moments, shards of ice in your mind you ignore so that their chill can't spread, all pale in comparison to what it feels like when you're dragged into the black lake. Ice-cold hands grip your lungs and your heart, squeezing life and light out of each of them. Another hand around your throat, crushing it as thin as a reed. You twitch helplessly in the tentacles' grip, choking and coughing up pale grey bubbles. Your desperate thrashing manages to free something - your left arm? You claw and grasp and tug but there's no strength to it, no purchase. It can't free you. Can't save you. Even your demon eyes are blind in this darkness. Is there even a bottom? You don't know. You'll probably die long before you know.
You think Daji and Sidir are yelling at you, begging you to break free and surface. You imagine the black water seeping into your soul, flooding the 'control room' where they stand, slowly rising and sucking the life out of them too. Yeah... that's it. It's not just leeching away the warmth, what little your half-dead body has. Your life. Your essence. Your soul. It's like you're dissolving in ice, bits of you crystallising and breaking off a little at a time. Slowly grinding you into snow. It's... familiar, somehow.
This is really, really interesting imo given the like- given the reincorporation of death-as-cold and Jiro's-memories-of-his-old-life-as-cold. When he was sinking in the Underworld waters, Jiro was basically flash-flooded with these sensations of like- trying to survive as a kid in a blizzard, of being almost (but very, terribly, not totally) alone in his childhood house, of being rejected and isolated and kinda insensate and the kinda overlap of very real physical cold with emotional numbing and the way it bleeds over into associations with darkness and death. The associations and connotations of exposure, of being without shelter or warmth either abstract or literal and I wonder if that's what the Very Probably Ebon Dragon Soul keys into y'know? Those things that are left alone in the darkness, in the cold, outside the light. Those things that live in the shadows of brighter places, outside the warmth. The dead and the despised and the doomed and the unclean. It's tied into and grown out of the part of Jiro's history and sense of self that he
least wants to grapple with and might genuinely be unable to given how much Trauma(tm) it is in general, so no wonder he hasn't really been able to engage with it despite it implicitly being the first.
It's evasive and reclusive by nature and Jiro doesn't even have the tools in place yet to really reconcile himself with what he'll need to unearth to actually approach it.
As a tangential note, and I can't remember if this was canon or fanon, but one of the Ebon Dragon's names that I really liked was Drinker at Night's Springs. He's the one Yozi who went farther and further than all the others, deeper into the darkness than any of the others would dare, who drank from strange rivers beneath the world and came back anyway. And like- for all that they're different, afraid of each other or just resentful of each other, Demons and the Dead exist as strange, estranged kin in certain respects. The Neverborn used to be Primordials and they've left traces of that in the deepest parts of the Underworld. The Yozi remember and fear the Neverborn even if there's really only one who'll openly acknowledge them.
What lies beyond is a dragon. A massive, maimed, mutant dragon like what you'd get from the fevered dreams of some demon-summoner. The beast is skinless, freshly flayed muscle glistening wetly in what little light there is down here, bare silver veins visibly twitching and pulsing with each beat of its great heart, spurs and flanges of blackened bone rising up from the shuddering skeins of hypersensitive meat like dozens of jagged knives, a crown of four horns twisting and branching from its brow like warped antlers. It looks like it went unfinished, or maybe some parts of it wasted away without flesh to protect them, and sleek machinery of breathless complexity created to replace what was lost. Swooping, polished curves and arcs of sapphire and translucent blue glass, lapis lazuli talons the size of boat hooks clawing and scratching and grasping at everything in reach. It's crying, weeping bitter tears of toxic green that sizzle and smoke as they burn blackened tracks down the vulnerable meat of its snout, where it drips onto its arms and underbelly. The wind swirls violently with each frantic flap of its great wings, so great they don't even fit in the enclosure, not all the way. The dragon's roaring, bellowing to the roof of its prison, screaming in complete soundlessness as the glass robs its cries of all strength.
So like- one of Lilunu's component souls is a fucked up mutated dragon with the amalgamated features of multiple yozi (including some of the real toxic ones like- well like Szoreny with that quicksilver and mercury and heavy metal, and Kimbery with the green tears and acid blood and the sea dragon name, and Cecelyne with the blue glass, and mmaaaybe Elloge with the exposed skin and nerves although that could be General Thematic Mutation, although that machinery and implants and sci-fi stuff might be SWLiHN mixed in with the Cecelyne too so who knows, the Endless Desert aesthetic is pretty prevalent here though) that's literally kept jailed by its cousin Orabilis and is in constant pain when its not literally drugged out of its mind or unconscious.
But I'm sure that doesn't reflect on any part of Lilunu's own self image or caged desires in any way.
[X] Let Daji speak. Anything they have to say is probably going to be more insightful, and definitely more eloquent, than you ever could come up with. You want their perspective.
[X] Tell her about you and Daji. The good and the bad. That moment of deep, unsettling, nauseous uncertainty of who you were and who you were becoming. Daji may not have had the...
condition Leviathan has but maybe, just maybe, the two of you can figure out how to manage your souls together.
I really really like the balanced symmetry of, like, Daji and Jiro
both talking about how fucked up things initially were and how things got better and the way Jiro's extending a real genuine, sincere offer to try and help someone else based off on his own experience (which he has very, very little experience doing, mostly the opposite tbh). And in general I'm sort of leery of...not opposed exactly, but kinda wary of dumping something Real Fucking Heavy from Jiro's past on Lilunu at what's clearly a real fraught and emotionally vulnerable point. Something can be true and really relevant and well intended but also just be a kinda- well A Lot to dump on someone when they're clearly having a moment too, no matter how well meant it may be.
A big thing I think is just the reassurance that Jiro isn't repulsed or horrified or disgusted or whatever, which is something that all of the options emphasize regardless so I figure it's like- none of the options are going to 100% nail the response. But they're going to heavily contextualize the relationship going forward and I like the Daji and Jiro tag-teaming the problem angle, just for the way it really leans into the solidarity.
