[ and that -- that prompts a slow drawn breath. Not a sigh, just wariness. There is much he does not speak of, for very good reason. The better memories were the worst, and if there is anything to set him on edge where little else phased him, it remained, solely, in that.
So he waits, until she is seated first, patient in the decorum he knew best and really that says more about just exactly what had shaped him most. ]
No. I was a Lord then, and in her employ. It would look poor if her bodyguard did not eat at least as well as she did, do you not think?
[ She sips at her too-sweet tea, too impatient to wait for it to properly cool. It's not that she's incapable of carrying out the act of being as polite as he is, only she thinks this performance is best for getting what she wants; to keep him on guard and yet to needle him about, yes, grief.
Amber wants no sentimental answers. Only the raw emotion. The rage. The confusion. The rest still makes no sense to her. Her gaze is steady on him, near unblinking. ]
[ It's not an obvious response -- not in words or a single action but it's a stiffening of tension that sits heavy on his shoulder. The question they're too near and too pointed for him to sit easy with it. Not sure why she should care. Much he might be able to say of her for so short meetings, but empathy to his grief was not it.
-- And for the most part, it is not a question he hasn't heard before. Only then, crueler, sneered between pretty words. He does not think that her intention, but it makes him wary. ]
I was a gift to her father for my skill enough to speak of what it is, and bearing no title or peerage of my own, my loyalty was without question to her family.
[ Because I adored her, even then, and she had always known that, even as a girl. Is the simpler answer, and one that would take a great deal more for him to say. ]
[ Amber has been a lot of things: warm yet calculating, caring but ruthless. But cruel has never been one of those. Mindless pain holds no interest for her. In this case, her needling is important to her. She needs, simply, to understand him in the hopes of understanding herself. ]
I believe you.
[ That his skill was impressive, that his loyalty was without question. ]
How did it feel-- [ She rests her glass on the table as her eyes follow, gaze set on the tea's surface to hide her true feelings, and still her jaw tightens before she could speak out the words: ] How did it feel when you lost her?
[ And there it was, and the world goes void-still and void-quiet and he's half awash in her blood all over again. Pooling out of her and in desperate words, because it doesn't go away, it never goes away and it has been months now, with enough battle and blood between then and now to dull the seconds between --
but it takes nothing at all to send it spiraling back in. He cannot remember her eyes when they smiled but he knows them with such fear, he cannot feel her hand except where it is cold. Every memory, every part, washed over and over in her death till there was nothing else but it. Consumed and spat out. The pain real and sharp and claws through his chest. Rips and bites like the rats he sets on others and maybe if he took as many as he was empty, it might hurt less.
( It doesn't, it never will, no day will get better because she will never be in them again )
-- and maybe it is because no one has asked him. Skirts around him and his grief and his loneliness like a wounded beast because he is, he has been from that day. All teeth and claws and desperation. But the word comes blunt and easy, cruel because it's too much. His hands sit flat, and in the end it's not in them, it's the way he hunches into himself with the memory, the over bright in his eyes, the shift of nails against the table like he means to claw something open.
It is not past, it is not gone, he is sure in the way of old things, that it will never be gone. He will be this empty, this hollow with the thick black taste of grief on his tongue until the day he died. ]
it is either that you know, or you do not. If you do -- then I do not need to explain, and your question is pointlessly cruel, and if not? The closest is to drive knives into your feet and then be asked to march.
[ And that's as much as he can say, and with his tea untouched, he stands, bristling with the need to run from this. There is never a time and place to discuss this, or ever a want to. ]
With respect, I ask my leave of you. Good day, Miss Amber.
[ Amber notes his every move like a novice learning a dark art from a respected master --the way he claws that table like an animal needing to escape from a torture device-- but the difference is that she feels she does know even if others would say that she is incapable of it. Rather, she is capable of pretending not to know, that without the hope of sacrificing all she owns for the smallest chance of saving the one she lost, she would easily allow herself to waste away too. Because the alternative, living in a universe where he is dead, is something she can't bear.
She takes absolutely no offense to his accusation of being needlessly cruel, but it is his answer to her question that cuts much deeper. Because it comes the closest to describing just how much it hurts. Even now. ]
No, please. Stay.
[ She makes no move to stop him from running out the door should he do so, relying instead on watching him with eyes full of plea and-- pain. If such things are possible from people like her. Contractors. Her tears may have dried many hours ago but everything still aches. It shows only from the way her voice, steady as it is, cracks in some places. ]
I know-- I promised you sunshine, but the truth is I don't think I have anymore to give.
[ And where perhaps he is unmade most is that he has been forced to look every day since that with her absence. He reaches for her, in the dark, in small ways, finds himself standing where he should if she were to walk into the room. Lifts his head to ask a question of what to do, checks numbers for two when there is only himself.
He reaches and reaches and reaches and there is only empty air that curls under his fingers. He wants of those days, cut outside of time, where she was warm and there and beside him. Curled around and against and too far wrapped up in her to breath a world outside of her.
He was living without air, and it burns in a not yet death. Soon, he hopes and prays and hopes again, soon this will be over. ( it will not be, it cannot be, Emily is too young, she needs him, she is alone and young and all of a desperate child's drawings trying to make sense of what has happened are the only things that come to his mind--
-- and even then, not all, there is blood too, must be paid for this. One day, it will be his too. ) ]
Amber --
[ He hovers there, stood up with his palms still flat on the table. Looking down at her, and of course it is, of course that is what has passed, his own words come back like a slap in the face.
So he waits, and he waits longer, watching her in slow patient seconds that are breathed out in the silent sounds of a room, never quite empty. The kettle still cooling, the steady thud-rush of her heart beat, somewhere his own, and the echo of other things he has long gotten used to hearing. ]
[ Her fingers tense, curling against the sides of the glass like fists meant to be thrown at something, someone-- only now the target is beyond reach and so she is left only with the coiled motion without hope of release. There should be a word for when you hold another person's hands, trusting that their weight would balance out yours as you spin and spin but then they let go. There should be a word for the fear that rushes through your heart the moment your hands grasp only air where there was once an anchor.
What surprises her is how easily the tears return, though she heeds them not, lets them roll down her face unnoticed. ]
[ He's still all bright and cool, grief was a sickness in the heart, he was sure of that now. It did not get better, time did nothing to heal it. Not always in the wracking wails that he been when they had tortured him for things he would never do, but the little moments that were like tripping up stairs. Landing on elbows and knees and he was sure living was like crawling now. Desperate and moving because that's the only option left.
He understands, even if it's not his words. No more sunshine, no more light. No more stolen moments with her hair filtering morning air through it as she settled over him, teasing him comfortably awake. I thought you woke up at every little sound, Corvo and the air is bright with her laughter. Of tea shared like this as she shuffled papers with her feet on him. Telling him about this policy or that building plan. ]
No.
[ He looks to her, and back at the tea, the need to leave is still there. To not acknowledge this, or any of it. Maybe this place is making him kind where it shouldn't, or maybe he thinks -- it must have been a year since she passed. Maybe, everything is too different here to know, but it feels like it should be that long.
Too much had passed for it to ever be the same again. He looks back to her, it'd be easier to leave. To walk away from her. But he'd never been able to just leave well enough alone.
So slowly, he sits across from her, takes the tea and sips it slowly where it's cooled enough to drink. ] Tell me of him?
[ Amber speaks of sunshine as the good thing even if she has always been partial to the night sky, no matter that the stars aren't real. They may not be old photographs of giant orbs made of burning gas but more than that. Lives, of people like her and his sister. Isn't that more poetic? More meaningful? But she would understand his sentiment. No more goodness. Even sugar loses its sweetness. Fire loses its warmth. Everything is dulled and tasteless and bland. It's as if she has lost not only her attachment to that single person who matters more than universes, but to the world.
Untethered and without purpose. It's a sad thing to admit that finding her end here and now would be less of a tragedy than dragging her feet and walking on... towards what exactly?
Nothing. Nothing matters anymore. She doesn't even care to dry her eyes. ]
[ It's like drowning and they said -- say maybe, if he ever talked of her, that it should scare him to drown except it is only living without air, and he is proof that you can live without worse.
He holds the tea in his hands, it's warm, at least on one, the other is numbed to over much, the thrum of magic in it, and it comes back to when he had tried to explain why anyone would take the outsider's powers. Because it was nothing, a glorious flat nothing he could sink into until it ate his mind inside out. There was safety in madness, because nothing, nothing touched him. He is blood and he is death and he is shadows and he does not have to look on days made empty.
( except, it's never enough ) ]
How you'd like to remember him. [ It's all she had left, after all. ]
[ Her jaws clench, muscles tensing in an attempt to hold back, hold herself in. Because she fears that the moment she lets go, there would be nothing left of her but the pain and the sorrow that would inevitably spill out. That's the funny thing about grief. It is so frightening that nothing else can seem more dangerous than whatever is eating one from the inside out.
She wonders how Hei felt. In the end. It kills her to think of how much he suffered. ]
Both. Everything. [ Her brow furrows and she wraps her arms about the glass of tea just so she can hold on to something. ] I don't want to remember him, I want not to need to remember.
[ He drinks slowly, blowing the steam off the top of the tea and nods. He knows, how well he knows. ]
I cannot tell you it becomes easier. It does not. [ He takes a mouth, thinking on it. ] It's been months now, and I still do not know how to move past it. Busy myself, perhaps, work and endeavor to do all I can so that I cannot think.
Only then, she was who I would tell all things to, sometimes I find myself walking and it is how I would walk with her. We would spend hours just as that, and for a second, I forget that all has happened, and I go to speak to her, to turn to her, to expect her remark or reply.
But there is nothing, no word, no touch, no soft muttered thing, the only thing that greets me is that same silence where she should be, and I lose her all over again, then. It never goes cold like that. It seems there is nothing to do but live with it. Wear it for what it is.
[ it's not exactly true, she does speak to him, and that's what makes it worse is before, he had her, soft in the palm of his hands and her words were a torrent of suffering in his head and it is agony because she sounded so mournful, desperate, and he could do nothing because it was all he had left. But in that, for those first raw months, six long months where they cut him and bled him and burned him, there had only been the weight of her absence pressing down on him. ]
And it is then, I just wish, she would let me be. Let me rest. Let any of it go. [ his head still down, watching the tea quietly. ]
Edited (or html could break and eat lines of text fdfs) 2015-01-28 04:12 (UTC)
[ Wear it for what it is, he says. It's a more difficult command than it sounds, because grief isn't some summer dress you wear, light and easy on the eyes. Grief is-- she thinks it's iron shackles on one's ankles and an unbearable burden on one's shoulders always. Always. It crushes you down and makes you stumble over every little thing and yet you keep on walking. Because it's expected of you. Because there's no other option.
She wonders if death would be kinder and the thought frightens her. A Contractor's single goal is survival, isn't it? What does that make her? ]
You could have lied to me. Told me it gets easier. That one day I'll forget.
[ Amber lifts her eyes to meet his, her own meant to be stoic and vacant yet still betraying her pain. She can't hide it. ]
"If you pretend to feel a certain way, the feeling can become genuine somehow."
[ Hei said it. Or perhaps she said it to him first only to hear him repeat it to her. It's hard to tell sometimes. They mimic each other like mirrors, forever trying to understand each other by miming the other's words and actions, as if that's the only way they know to grow closer, to feel how the other feels. ]
[ It was and always would be as ugly as shackles. Weighted and heavy and they rattle, and everyone hears it for what it is. Carla's soft words in his ear you're obsessed. He is worse than obsessed, he simply has nothing else but his grief. Because once he lost that, he would just be ashes and shards to cut fingers on.
Wonders briefly, that for both their sakes that perhaps he should lie. Take her hand, kiss her brow with his scar marred lips and say the way shush her the way he had Emily when she'd clung to him. There, it is alright now, it will all be alright now.
It isn't, and it never will be again. The gesture dies before it gets anywhere near what might be called comfort for the pain she's in. He's shy on those gestures for those he doesn't know well, somewhere the demands of decency and the ever present feeling of waiting for the knife in his ribs. Different again with her, her and her old words out of a pretty young woman's mouth. Then again, he's talked to children that already have planned how they will die, so maybe that doesn't meant anything either. ]
To what end? I can not offer what I do not know to be true, I have always been a poor liar that way.
[ Still, -- that, he meets her eyes and the grief is there as much and as plain, he has had time she hasn't, and perhaps she will become the same. But it's bled out from the hot stab, it is dead and it is empty and it is dead. Nothing there, never will be again. ]
[ Ah, perhaps that's the difference between them. Amber has always been and will always be a brilliant liar. Fooling the polygraph is a learned and valuable skill for any spy. But more than that, she has kept secrets from those with whom she would have shared every private part of her, if only she could, but she can't, will never be able to. Because knowledge often means danger and ignorance, safety. It hurts to lie and deceive she loves more than herself, but it's necessary. Only to herself, she can't lie. That would make her weak and she needs to be strong to protect him.
Even now.
Amber closes her eyes and lets out a slow exhale. ]
I won't have to pretend. I'll change it. He won't be dead.
[ More than obsessed, more than devoted. If there's a word for this-- she doesn't know what it is. ]
[ There is no word for it, there never will be he is sure, what it is to have part cut out and ripped from gripping fingers that never thought it possible to let go.
But they were forced to, and no matter how he wished. and her words break something, small and simple and it might be crystal for how pretty those shards are and how soft her voice had been in his head when he never thought to hear it again. She was too kind, she was always too kind and he gets stuck in that all over again. He does not have her, but he barely needs to think to have that come back. Touched with void and ( -- these waters are greedy, they will never give back what they have taken ). ]
Be careful, Miss Amber, what comes back is not always... [ parts dry lips on a black deadened tongue, or at least that is how it feels, still feels where he dwells on how they seared him. ]
[ Her eyes meet his in challenge, barely contained fury in her gaze. How dare he question her resolve, let alone her ability, to make things right? He knows nothing of her. Nothing. He doesn't know how many times she would fight a war for the smallest chance at ensuring his safety and how many more battles she would still fight for him. An eternity is a very long, long time and yet she would spend it all to buy him one more second, one inhale, one heartbeat. ]
He's coming back. Not a what.
[ She means for her words to bite. You see, her devotion to Hei is selfless only in the sense that she would allow him to choose his own path in life no matter how much those choices hurt her. But she won't see him dead. Not even if he chooses it. ]
[ Knows that look, knows it utterly and sure and maybe, if he was less exhausted, less tired, didn't know better about it all, he might argue more with her. But he is as he has been since then, resigned, exhausted and past simple bitterness. Empty now. ]
I hope so.
[ That she should be selfish, it doesn't surprise him. He had been, he continues to be because he cannot let her go. He held her heart in his hands and she begged quiet without understanding anything of what it meant, to rest.
And he would not give it to her. Never mind if he could not, he could never lift a hand to her. ]
For the madness it might give you otherwise, I hope so.
[ There's no clear line between madness and sanity. She thinks that it all began the moment Hei smiled for her that one time, when she realized utterly and completely that there was nothing she wouldn't do for him. For him to keep being able to smile like that. The moment was worth everything, an eternity.
That's a kind of madness too, isn't it?
Corvo's warning doesn't frighten her. But she grows subdued nonetheless, nodding in agreement. ]
Are you angry with me? For bringing you here under false pretenses?
[ He blinks, in a muted sort of surprise. When had anyone cared for that? Not for a very long time. Terra, perhaps, for hurting him, but only so much as she thought she was afraid of him.
Fingers curl around the cup, strong and broad and broken. Holds there, solid. Looks up at her and shrugs, lopsided, one short jerk and lifts the cup again. ]
How could I be? You think I have anything left in me like that? [ and something in him that never makes it, laughs and laughs and laughs itself sick. It's black and writhing and void like and bubbles, and he swallows it deep, deep down, takes the tea and drinks slow like he could steal the warmth out of it. ]
[ Amber drops her gaze to the still surface in her cup, what could almost be a smile threatening to show in the corner of her lips but she doesn't let it. Because it's unlike the ones she wears to seem friendly, more humane, and unlike the ones that come easily when there's something to be joyful about. This one is wry, a parody of the real thing. Does she have anything of that sort left in her yet?
For a moment, she feels afraid of the moment she becomes just like the broken man before her. But then she remembers where she stands, what she had lost, and she would rather break than lose him. ]
Are we the same, you and I? Or have you walked on farther? [ Carried the burden for far longer. ] Tell me, what comes next?
[ the answer comes quick and easy. Spoken all rasp out from his lips against the warm steam of the cup. ] Farther, [ it's a long silence, looks past her and the void comes so easy, as it did with the first and he sinks into it in slow breathes. Water at his ankles, trickling over his wrists. Cools is blood, his heart, his head, dead and cool and not dead enough.
There will be relief there one day, but not yet. ] -- I may have accepted it as all grief comes, but they... made me be something different, with what they did.
[ That interests her, the hope that there may be something to be done about all this. Some promise of an end to the pain that she can't seem to silence no matter what she tries to do. She leans forward, lowers her head as if expecting to hear a secret from him. ]
[ He shrugs, idle, like this is all just normal conversation, like it was something that could just be spoken of, and he might never... except that it is all in his file. There's no point in pretending otherwise, and he doesn't have the energy of it. ]
They tortured me, for months and months, after they killed her. Accused me of the crime and burned me over and over to try and have me admit I did it. I refused... [ another sip, contemplating, and he has done too much of it. There was nothing else to do in that cell. In the long hours tucked up in the Hound Pits between missions. Just the river and the void and him. Slumped over and quiet. ] ... the grief became my only weapon against it. I used it, because it was the only thing left to me.
[ and it's not the answer she's looking for, but it is the only he one he has. the only thing he had to make the time passed easier. ]
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no subject
So he waits, until she is seated first, patient in the decorum he knew best and really that says more about just exactly what had shaped him most. ]
No. I was a Lord then, and in her employ. It would look poor if her bodyguard did not eat at least as well as she did, do you not think?
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Amber wants no sentimental answers. Only the raw emotion. The rage. The confusion. The rest still makes no sense to her. Her gaze is steady on him, near unblinking. ]
Why did she choose you?
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-- And for the most part, it is not a question he hasn't heard before. Only then, crueler, sneered between pretty words. He does not think that her intention, but it makes him wary. ]
I was a gift to her father for my skill enough to speak of what it is, and bearing no title or peerage of my own, my loyalty was without question to her family.
[ Because I adored her, even then, and she had always known that, even as a girl. Is the simpler answer, and one that would take a great deal more for him to say. ]
no subject
I believe you.
[ That his skill was impressive, that his loyalty was without question. ]
How did it feel-- [ She rests her glass on the table as her eyes follow, gaze set on the tea's surface to hide her true feelings, and still her jaw tightens before she could speak out the words: ] How did it feel when you lost her?
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but it takes nothing at all to send it spiraling back in. He cannot remember her eyes when they smiled but he knows them with such fear, he cannot feel her hand except where it is cold. Every memory, every part, washed over and over in her death till there was nothing else but it. Consumed and spat out. The pain real and sharp and claws through his chest. Rips and bites like the rats he sets on others and maybe if he took as many as he was empty, it might hurt less.
( It doesn't, it never will, no day will get better because she will never be in them again )
-- and maybe it is because no one has asked him. Skirts around him and his grief and his loneliness like a wounded beast because he is, he has been from that day. All teeth and claws and desperation. But the word comes blunt and easy, cruel because it's too much. His hands sit flat, and in the end it's not in them, it's the way he hunches into himself with the memory, the over bright in his eyes, the shift of nails against the table like he means to claw something open.
It is not past, it is not gone, he is sure in the way of old things, that it will never be gone. He will be this empty, this hollow with the thick black taste of grief on his tongue until the day he died. ]
it is either that you know, or you do not. If you do -- then I do not need to explain, and your question is pointlessly cruel, and if not? The closest is to drive knives into your feet and then be asked to march.
[ And that's as much as he can say, and with his tea untouched, he stands, bristling with the need to run from this. There is never a time and place to discuss this, or ever a want to. ]
With respect, I ask my leave of you. Good day, Miss Amber.
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She takes absolutely no offense to his accusation of being needlessly cruel, but it is his answer to her question that cuts much deeper. Because it comes the closest to describing just how much it hurts. Even now. ]
No, please. Stay.
[ She makes no move to stop him from running out the door should he do so, relying instead on watching him with eyes full of plea and-- pain. If such things are possible from people like her. Contractors. Her tears may have dried many hours ago but everything still aches. It shows only from the way her voice, steady as it is, cracks in some places. ]
I know-- I promised you sunshine, but the truth is I don't think I have anymore to give.
no subject
He reaches and reaches and reaches and there is only empty air that curls under his fingers. He wants of those days, cut outside of time, where she was warm and there and beside him. Curled around and against and too far wrapped up in her to breath a world outside of her.
He was living without air, and it burns in a not yet death. Soon, he hopes and prays and hopes again, soon this will be over. ( it will not be, it cannot be, Emily is too young, she needs him, she is alone and young and all of a desperate child's drawings trying to make sense of what has happened are the only things that come to his mind--
-- and even then, not all, there is blood too, must be paid for this. One day, it will be his too. ) ]
Amber --
[ He hovers there, stood up with his palms still flat on the table. Looking down at her, and of course it is, of course that is what has passed, his own words come back like a slap in the face.
So he waits, and he waits longer, watching her in slow patient seconds that are breathed out in the silent sounds of a room, never quite empty. The kettle still cooling, the steady thud-rush of her heart beat, somewhere his own, and the echo of other things he has long gotten used to hearing. ]
-- Who?
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What surprises her is how easily the tears return, though she heeds them not, lets them roll down her face unnoticed. ]
His name is Hei.
[ Not Li Shengshun. Not was. ]
Did you know him?
no subject
He understands, even if it's not his words. No more sunshine, no more light. No more stolen moments with her hair filtering morning air through it as she settled over him, teasing him comfortably awake. I thought you woke up at every little sound, Corvo and the air is bright with her laughter. Of tea shared like this as she shuffled papers with her feet on him. Telling him about this policy or that building plan. ]
No.
[ He looks to her, and back at the tea, the need to leave is still there. To not acknowledge this, or any of it. Maybe this place is making him kind where it shouldn't, or maybe he thinks -- it must have been a year since she passed. Maybe, everything is too different here to know, but it feels like it should be that long.
Too much had passed for it to ever be the same again. He looks back to her, it'd be easier to leave. To walk away from her. But he'd never been able to just leave well enough alone.
So slowly, he sits across from her, takes the tea and sips it slowly where it's cooled enough to drink. ] Tell me of him?
no subject
Untethered and without purpose. It's a sad thing to admit that finding her end here and now would be less of a tragedy than dragging her feet and walking on... towards what exactly?
Nothing. Nothing matters anymore. She doesn't even care to dry her eyes. ]
The best parts of him or the worst?
no subject
He holds the tea in his hands, it's warm, at least on one, the other is numbed to over much, the thrum of magic in it, and it comes back to when he had tried to explain why anyone would take the outsider's powers. Because it was nothing, a glorious flat nothing he could sink into until it ate his mind inside out. There was safety in madness, because nothing, nothing touched him. He is blood and he is death and he is shadows and he does not have to look on days made empty.
( except, it's never enough ) ]
How you'd like to remember him. [ It's all she had left, after all. ]
no subject
She wonders how Hei felt. In the end. It kills her to think of how much he suffered. ]
Both. Everything. [ Her brow furrows and she wraps her arms about the glass of tea just so she can hold on to something. ] I don't want to remember him, I want not to need to remember.
no subject
I cannot tell you it becomes easier. It does not. [ He takes a mouth, thinking on it. ] It's been months now, and I still do not know how to move past it. Busy myself, perhaps, work and endeavor to do all I can so that I cannot think.
Only then, she was who I would tell all things to, sometimes I find myself walking and it is how I would walk with her. We would spend hours just as that, and for a second, I forget that all has happened, and I go to speak to her, to turn to her, to expect her remark or reply.
But there is nothing, no word, no touch, no soft muttered thing, the only thing that greets me is that same silence where she should be, and I lose her all over again, then. It never goes cold like that. It seems there is nothing to do but live with it. Wear it for what it is.
[ it's not exactly true, she does speak to him, and that's what makes it worse is before, he had her, soft in the palm of his hands and her words were a torrent of suffering in his head and it is agony because she sounded so mournful, desperate, and he could do nothing because it was all he had left. But in that, for those first raw months, six long months where they cut him and bled him and burned him, there had only been the weight of her absence pressing down on him. ]
And it is then, I just wish, she would let me be. Let me rest. Let any of it go. [ his head still down, watching the tea quietly. ]
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She wonders if death would be kinder and the thought frightens her. A Contractor's single goal is survival, isn't it? What does that make her? ]
You could have lied to me. Told me it gets easier. That one day I'll forget.
[ Amber lifts her eyes to meet his, her own meant to be stoic and vacant yet still betraying her pain. She can't hide it. ]
"If you pretend to feel a certain way, the feeling can become genuine somehow."
[ Hei said it. Or perhaps she said it to him first only to hear him repeat it to her. It's hard to tell sometimes. They mimic each other like mirrors, forever trying to understand each other by miming the other's words and actions, as if that's the only way they know to grow closer, to feel how the other feels. ]
no subject
Wonders briefly, that for both their sakes that perhaps he should lie. Take her hand, kiss her brow with his scar marred lips and say the way shush her the way he had Emily when she'd clung to him. There, it is alright now, it will all be alright now.
It isn't, and it never will be again. The gesture dies before it gets anywhere near what might be called comfort for the pain she's in. He's shy on those gestures for those he doesn't know well, somewhere the demands of decency and the ever present feeling of waiting for the knife in his ribs. Different again with her, her and her old words out of a pretty young woman's mouth. Then again, he's talked to children that already have planned how they will die, so maybe that doesn't meant anything either. ]
To what end? I can not offer what I do not know to be true, I have always been a poor liar that way.
[ Still, -- that, he meets her eyes and the grief is there as much and as plain, he has had time she hasn't, and perhaps she will become the same. But it's bled out from the hot stab, it is dead and it is empty and it is dead. Nothing there, never will be again. ]
And what will you pretend?
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Even now.
Amber closes her eyes and lets out a slow exhale. ]
I won't have to pretend. I'll change it. He won't be dead.
[ More than obsessed, more than devoted. If there's a word for this-- she doesn't know what it is. ]
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But they were forced to, and no matter how he wished. and her words break something, small and simple and it might be crystal for how pretty those shards are and how soft her voice had been in his head when he never thought to hear it again. She was too kind, she was always too kind and he gets stuck in that all over again. He does not have her, but he barely needs to think to have that come back. Touched with void and ( -- these waters are greedy, they will never give back what they have taken ). ]
Be careful, Miss Amber, what comes back is not always... [ parts dry lips on a black deadened tongue, or at least that is how it feels, still feels where he dwells on how they seared him. ]
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He's coming back. Not a what.
[ She means for her words to bite. You see, her devotion to Hei is selfless only in the sense that she would allow him to choose his own path in life no matter how much those choices hurt her. But she won't see him dead. Not even if he chooses it. ]
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I hope so.
[ That she should be selfish, it doesn't surprise him. He had been, he continues to be because he cannot let her go. He held her heart in his hands and she begged quiet without understanding anything of what it meant, to rest.
And he would not give it to her. Never mind if he could not, he could never lift a hand to her. ]
For the madness it might give you otherwise, I hope so.
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That's a kind of madness too, isn't it?
Corvo's warning doesn't frighten her. But she grows subdued nonetheless, nodding in agreement. ]
Are you angry with me? For bringing you here under false pretenses?
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Fingers curl around the cup, strong and broad and broken. Holds there, solid. Looks up at her and shrugs, lopsided, one short jerk and lifts the cup again. ]
How could I be? You think I have anything left in me like that? [ and something in him that never makes it, laughs and laughs and laughs itself sick. It's black and writhing and void like and bubbles, and he swallows it deep, deep down, takes the tea and drinks slow like he could steal the warmth out of it. ]
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For a moment, she feels afraid of the moment she becomes just like the broken man before her. But then she remembers where she stands, what she had lost, and she would rather break than lose him. ]
Are we the same, you and I? Or have you walked on farther? [ Carried the burden for far longer. ] Tell me, what comes next?
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There will be relief there one day, but not yet. ] -- I may have accepted it as all grief comes, but they... made me be something different, with what they did.
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What did they do to you?
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They tortured me, for months and months, after they killed her. Accused me of the crime and burned me over and over to try and have me admit I did it. I refused... [ another sip, contemplating, and he has done too much of it. There was nothing else to do in that cell. In the long hours tucked up in the Hound Pits between missions. Just the river and the void and him. Slumped over and quiet. ] ... the grief became my only weapon against it. I used it, because it was the only thing left to me.
[ and it's not the answer she's looking for, but it is the only he one he has. the only thing he had to make the time passed easier. ]
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