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ohwynne · 10 months

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TIMING: 22 July PARTIES: Emilio @mortemoppetere & Wynne @ohwynne@ohwynne LOCATION: WRGH SUMMARY: Emilio is there when Wynne wakes up in the hospital. They return his necklace and ask who the ring on it belonged to. CONTENT WARNINGS: Abuse (cult and child), suicide ideation, child death (heavily present), sibling death (mention), parental death (mention)

Someone was screaming in the hallway.

It wasn’t the dangerous kind of scream, wasn’t the kind of scream that meant there was trouble, but it was familiar all the same. His voice was loud and anguished, repeating words over and over again as someone tried desperately to calm him. No, he was saying, no, there’s a mistake. Please, you’ve made a mistake. This isn’t — This can’t be happening. Please, keep trying, please. She can’t be gone, please, that’s my baby. That’s my baby, please —

It felt predatory, somehow, being a part of it from behind the wall that separated Wynne’s room from the hallway outside. Like he was part of a moment he didn’t belong in, like he was eavesdropping on the worst day of someone’s life.

Emilio hadn’t spent a lot of time in hospitals. His family had never frequented them, even when they likely should have. His brother had bled out on the ground somewhere out in the woods, his uncle the only witness. The massacre of his hometown had ended with bodies buried in the dirt, not loaded into black bags and carted to the hospital morgue. No doctor had asked him to identify the corpses of his wife or daughter; he’d done it all on his own in the living room floor, their blood staining his hands even now.

Hospitals were a relatively new experience. But already, he’d decided he hated them.

It was overwhelming, all the things going on. The man outside was beginning a journey of grief that would never leave him, and he was so far from the only one. Down the hall, a monitor stuttered in its steady beeping, shifted into a flat tone instead, and people rushed towards it. In the room next door, someone was crying beside a bed that he knew probably looked exactly like the one he was sitting beside now. The air smelled sharp, with something familiar underneath it. No amount of chemicals could really cover up the smell of blood when you were as familiar with it as Emilio was.

Hospitals, he thought, were not unlike museums. Each room was a new tragedy on display, and Emilio had seen enough of those already.

He tried to focus on Wynne on the bed, on the way their chest rose and fell. If he didn’t, he’d become too distracted by the man outside, whose screams had turned to quiet sobbing. He’d focus too much on the nauseating buzzing under his skin of undead, undead, undead as the newly turned who hadn’t yet realized their situation turned to doctors for answers. He’d slip back into the corner of his mind that had never left that living room floor, where the blood on his hands belonged to everyone he’d ever loved and himself, too.

None of it mattered now. None of it could matter now. Not when there was a kid on a hospital bed, bandages packed against their throat. Not when their blood was still under his nails, their name added to the ever-growing list of people he’d failed, people who were hurt because he wasn’t fast enough, strong enough, good enough. If he’d gotten there earlier, Wynne wouldn’t be in a hospital bed. If he’d done his job better, there’d be no bandage around their throat. If he were what he was supposed to be, they’d have a little less trauma to add to their already impressive pile of it.

Outside in the hall, a hand smacked against the wall. The grieving father sniffled, his prayers turning sour. Please shifted into why. Anger always snuck in the place of grief eventually. Emilio would know.

—

In sleep, they dreamed of flames. Siors was dancing around them with a knife in hand and Wynne could do nothing but watch, caged and tied, feeling the heat sear their skin as the Protherian’s patriarch neared closer and closer. Look left, Zack and Arden dead. Look right, Metzli dancing around the flames with heads in their hand. Look ahead: Siors, in front of them, knife glinting but teeth glinting more. He sunk them in their throat and laid them on the altar.

Look left, and their parents were watching with proud smiles. Look right, and so were all the people they had met and grown to love here.

In sleep, they screamed too.

There were flashes of wakefulness, Wynne awaking with sweat on their back and gasping for air, hands scrambling as if they were trying to get loose. They didn’t like it here. Protherians didn’t tend to go to hospitals, took care of each other by themselves. The demon was supposed to keep them all healthy, and often he did. And sometimes death came, through failure of organs or other disease and that was how it was. When Eirwen had broken her arm, Wynne’s aunt had taken her to the hospital despite the rules. Their entire family had felt the consequences when they’d come back.

And now here they were, waking in a bright and sterile room every time their sleep was interrupted. The sheets were cold. They were cold. The bandage around their throat was constricting. The room lacked Arden and Zack. But the room wasn’t dark and damp, wasn’t lined with bars, and their hands were free to move as they wished.

There was another dream. Crawling up stairs. Reaching the exit as behind them screams echoed. Crawling on all fours. Coming up, bursting outside and being right back in the cage, but this time lined with Protherian decorations. Corwyn Prothero smiling down — this was a recurring dream, him leaning down from his painting and expressing feelings of pride to them. Teeth dripping blood. Wynne was crawling away again, but weren’t moving forward.

When they awoke, they shot up in bed, pulling along the drip that had been slid into their hand. It was to rehydrate, apparently. Their chest moved up and down with rapid breaths, eyes flicking around the room before landing on Emilio. He was here.

For a moment, they remembered the panic that had taken a hold of them when he’d caught them, and then the instant relief. It spread through them again at the sight of him. “Hi.” With their raw throat, it was more a whisper than a proper sentence. They cleared it. “Hey.” That was better.

Wynne wasn’t sure what to do. They just looked at him, with wide eyes and lips somewhat parted. Trying to calm themselves from the dream. Trying to find the right words to express how much it meant, that he had come and that he was here. They let themself sink back into their pillows, breathing in deeply. They opened their mouth, but all they could seem to do was cry. And so tears leaked out their eyes and they exhaled shakily and wiped at their eyes, wrists raw and ugly from the rope that had bound them for days. “Hi.”

—

The figure in the bed in front of him shifted sometimes. Emilio wasn’t sure how long he sat there, couldn’t keep track of the ticking clock or the buzzing of his phone. People sending messages, continuing conversations that didn’t seem to matter anymore. The only real concept he had for how much time had passed came from that father out in the hall, came from denial turning to bargaining turning to anger.

He’d read up on it, after Mexico. In some city in Texas, in a grocery store he’d tracked a target to. He’d picked up a book to keep himself from being seen, and it had talked about stages. Five of them like a checklist, like a cycle you could track. But it didn’t seem to fit for him. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That hadn’t been his experience. It didn’t go in order, didn’t exist in a way that was linear. Denial came back every time he closed his eyes, bargaining reared its head with each vampire he ground into dust, depression hung like a cloak off his shoulders, anger was ever-present. And acceptance never came.

He didn’t think it would come for the father in the hall, either, didn’t think it existed in situations like this. You held a baby in your arms, cradled their head with so much care that you had none left to offer yourself. When the world tore them away from you, when it dug a hole in the ground and placed them inside of it and left you holding to the empty space they used to take up, how could you ever hope to accept it? How could you breathe in when their lungs were still, when their heart stopped beating? How could you ever?

The figure shifted again and, this time, Emilio snapped out of his head. The father in the hall had gone quiet, and he was glad for it. Any more screaming, he thought, and he would have joined in. Would have added his voice to the chaos until he was hoarse and aching, until his throat was raw and his whole body ached. It was all he felt like doing right now, anyway.

But that tiny shape on the bed shifted, and their eyes opened, and Emilio had known, logically, that they would, but the relief still felt palpable. It was hard, sometimes, to be in the presence of someone else’s grief and not take it on as your own even if you were only present in a tangential sense, even if your only connection to their situation was in hearing them curse God in the hospital hallway. It was hard not to want to curse God right along with them, not to adopt that anguish for your own. But Wynne’s eyes opened, and Emilio’s grief was two years back. Still raw, still present, still non-linear, but far away from the hospital hallway.

“Hey,” he said quietly, the word a quiet exhale. “Good to see you awake, kid.”

—

Though there had always been death at the commune, there hadn’t been a whole lot of grief in Wynne’s life. There had been loss, certainly, but never in a manner that was earth-shattering or undoing. Their grandmother had passed of old age and Jac had died on the altar as he was supposed to and all the others that had ceased to live at the commune had simply met death. There had been no grief, right?

But then there was their mother, who had put them on the earth and had soon been visited by the community’s patriarch. Siors had sat down at her bed and told her that the babe in her arms was destined for something glorious, something important, something definite. Two decades, Zahra was to get with her little darling, and then it’d be done. And as her husband beamed with pride and her in-laws beamed even more, she fell into grief.

Early grief. Prepared grief. Impatient grief. Wynne had never suffered a massive loss, but they had been ten when they’d been told that they were destined to die. They had grown up watched by the eyes of a mother who thought them already dead and a father who thought them the greatest gift that he’d gladly return to its origin. Wynne had never suffered a massive loss and thus, they didn’t believe they knew grief — but they had mourned their own life before it could even start, had been mourned before loved and now lay here, dreaming of dying over and over.

Would those five stages apply here, too? They’d been stuck in forced acceptance for most of their time, their anger like a sickly limb they’d cut off and their bargains silenced with a hard hand. In the months of the start of their second life, there had been depression and denial. But it had been misplaced grief, hadn’t it? Because Wynne had lived. No demon had devoured them. No vampire had turned them. They had lived. They ached with it, but they lived.

They looked at Emilio and wondered what kind of grief he had gone through. There had to be some, right? There had to be injuries there. Their cheeks stung as more salt mingled in raw skin and they inhaled sharply at the salt on their wrists. “It’s good to see you, too.”

Their tears ceased for a moment, their heartbeat slowing now that their body had caught up with the fact that there was no threat in the room with them. Their mind was catching up too, it seemed, albeit on different things. The right thing to say. The reality of the situation. The hospital room, the way the sheets felt under them, the look on the other’s face. For a moment they were back in that basement, Emilio looking at them with an altogether different look on his face. He’d put something around their neck — they recalled, now.

“Oh,” they said. “Your necklace. It’s …” They sat up a little more, head heavy with fatigue as they tried to open the drawer of their side table. The movement was slow but determined. Wynne was not very good at owing people things, even in this state. “They put it here.” Fingers closed around the metal, holding it out to Emilio. The iv had gotten all twisted, but it mattered little. “Thank you.”

—

They were crying. He almost missed it at first, almost didn’t recognize it. Grief looked so different on different people, he’d learned; the same shirt stretched out across different skin in so many ways that no two people had ever worn it the same. Wynne’s grief seemed a quiet thing, like they were afraid to let it be seen, like they didn’t want to hurt anyone with their aching. And Emilio’s had always been the opposite.

His grief was loud. It was like that father in the hallway whose wails had split the silence, like a hurricane tearing through bricks and trees and fences and turning the ocean into a whirlwind of water and salt. His grief wanted to be known but, more than that, it wanted to be felt by someone other than Emilio himself. Emilio’s grief strove to make itself everyone’s problem. It bloodied his hands and sharpened his knife. It thought itself too big for one man alone, thought itself deserving of a whole world of mourners. There were people who had lived and died inside his chest, and his grief screamed their names even when his mouth stayed silent.

Mostly, he thought, his grief didn’t look much like grief to anyone who wasn’t paying enough attention. His grief looked like rage, like violence, like an explosion big enough to engulf the whole world in flames. His grief wore different masks, played dress up in someone else’s clothes.

But Wynne’s grief was quiet and, right now, Emilio’s was too.

There was enough wailing being done by that father in the hall. The violence had come and gone with those vampire’s in the barn. There was blood on his hands and dust on the soles of his shoes, and the loud part was over now. The loud part had already screamed itself hoarse, already beaten itself into silence. All that was left now was to sit in the aftermath, to inspect the damage left behind. Walk the fenceline and see what parts were torn away by that hurricane’s winds, stroll the beach and remind yourself that the ocean was still there. Check the tree limbs, inspect the house’s foundation. Rebuild, maybe, if you had the time.

He wanted to ask Wynne if they were feeling okay, but he was so afraid his voice would crack or that theirs would. He didn’t know which would hurt more, so he stayed silent to avoid figuring it out. They said it was good to see him, and he wondered how that could possibly be true. How could they look at him and find relief? Didn’t they know he’d failed? They shouldn’t be in a hospital bed, shouldn’t be hooked to a bag with uncomfortable sheets beneath them. They should be at home in their own bed, with Arden and Zack in the next room. If Emilio had been faster, they would be.

“Hm?” Their voice broke through the static in his mind, and he glanced up to see them fumbling with the drawer beside their bed. He moved to help them, to do something, but they managed it on their own and his hand hovered in the air between them like a puppet suspended from an uncertain string.

Your necklace. They pressed it into his hand and he swallowed. He looked down at it for a moment, rubbing absently against Juliana’s ring that hung beside the cross. This better not turn my finger green, Cortez, she’d joked the day he put it on her, eyes sparkling with a secret he wouldn’t learn until the wedding was over and she pulled him away into their bedroom, whispering the wonder of fatherhood into his ear. It felt heavy in his hand now, like a weight he wasn’t quite strong enough to lift.

He closed his hand around the necklace, shoving it into the pocket of his jeans and pretending his hands weren’t shaking when he folded them together in his lap. “Thanks for keeping an eye on it for me,” he said hoarsely, thumb finding his own wedding band on his finger and twisting it in that familiar old habit.

—

Even in this space, in this room and this situation, their emotions felt too loud. The tears were spilled with quiet silence, rubbed into their skin to make them disappear and not vocalizing the way it even hurt to cry. Throat constricted, stitches pulling, their raw wrists burning with the salt and their cheeks feeling like they were going to crack. Wynne was quiet, wishing themself small enough to disappear while they were wrapped up in their sadness. Where this couldn’t be perceived. Where even this silent suffering went unnoticed.

What room for loudness had there been, before? What room for anger? They had been chastised for ill-fitting emotions and that had been most of them. Not just chastised — but punished, placed in the areas made for reflection (closed rooms, like the cellar, dark and silent) or met with squeezing hands around wrists. There was no room for anger, because there had been nothing to be angry about: Alys had told them as much, once, in the rooms reserved for solitary contemplation.

Do you want us to seem ungrateful to It, Wynne? Are you not glad that you can do this for us? You should be grateful, the way we are grateful of us. You have a purpose, the kind we only dream of having in our lives. Look at me, look at me when I speak to you — they all look to you now, and if you falter we all will. It’s not only unfair to be angry, but it is dangerous. You wish to risk us? After all we’ve done? We’ve given you? We’ve given your family? Think on it. There is no purpose to this anger, no direction, nothing. Purge it from your body. You can come back when you feel calmer.

Alys had been forceful, awe-inspiring, the elder Wynne thought perhaps wisest of them all. Who else was a fifteen year old to turn to, anyway? The cold mother? The proud father? The brother, who never wished to speak of what was to come? They had sat with those words in dark silence until the door had opened again and from then on, their emotions had burrowed deep into their body, digging holes and burying themself and they had become quiet.

Your calmness is a gift to us all, Wynne.

Alys had been proud and there had been no more stints by themself. Silence was safest, wasn’t it? Rage was selfish. Crying was weak, but being weak wasn’t the worst thing to be — martyrs were allowed to be weak, but never forceful.

Even in the basement they’d been quiet. Even then, they’d come easily. No screaming or scrambling, just a plea and a bleat and a cry. Even now, when thinking of Zane, they couldn’t find any anger — just a hollow fatigue. Even now, they were not angry with their parents, nor Alys or Siors or Padrig.

But Emilio got angry, didn’t he? He had been angry in the basement. He was angry often, even when he wasn’t — it was something that was hard to miss, when looking at him a little longer. It wasn’t in a way that scared Wynne, though: they thought it something else that might be right, where their own ways were wrong. Was that strength, then, contrasting their own silent weakness?

He didn’t seem strong as he took the necklace, though. Not weak either, just — human. Haunted, maybe. They looked at him. “Thank you for entrusting me with it.” Wynne managed to get the twist out of the IV and got up a little, trying to position their pillows so they wouldn’t just be lying there.

“Is the cross … can vampires not stand it? Do you believe in God?” They wanted the timber of his voice. Some kind of wisdom, or story, or anything. They wouldn’t mind if he just went on and on about Perro, or perhaps something else even less consequential. But they also wanted to ask questions, the ones that had nothing to do with the basement or their present situation. Ones that defied their quietness. “Does the ring belong to someone?”

—

Emilio wasn’t raised in a cult. Not the way he saw it, in any case. The sacrifices his family made were so different than the ones Wynne had run from, the martyrs so separate. His father died fighting, he’d been told, strong and brave until the very end, and that was the memory Emilio assigned to him. He had no face to give the man responsible for his existence, so he thought of him in concepts instead. His father was brave, his father was strong, his father was valiant. His father was also dead, was gone, was absent. Those things, in hunter families, always seemed to go hand-in-hand. The best hunter was a dead one, one who had fulfilled their purpose.

And yet, Victor’s death had felt so different. Maybe it was because, unlike his father, Emilio remembered his brother. He remembered training with him, looking up to him, admiring him. Victor was the oldest and Emilio was the youngest and there’d been some kind of a bond based on that. At twelve, his oldest brother had seemed so invincible, so untouchable. But when Lucio returned to their home after a hunt that had started with several men and ended with just one, Emilio had been reminded that no one was untouchable. Not the father he’d never known, not the brother he’d lost. Everyone was fallible.

His mother had talked often of the sacrifices his father and brother had made, but there’d always been a strange contrast between the two. His father was what a martyr should be, he thought; remembered only for his death, a story that began and ended with an epitaph. But Victor was different. Victor was a strange contradiction, an example of what to be and a warning of what not to become. Your brother was foolish, your brother wasn’t strong enough, your brother was good, your brother did what he was supposed to do. In death, Victor became putty in their mother’s hands; carefully molded into whatever she needed him to be in order to properly motivate the children she had left.

Emilio thought that might have been closer to what Wynne’s people had wanted them to be. If his father was what a martyr ought to be, Victor was what a martyr actually was. A carefully constructed concept, someone who became whatever people needed them to be after death. He felt sick with the idea that Wynne had almost suffered such a fate, felt uneasy knowing that they could have ended up just like Victor — an example for mothers to use when scolding their children, either as a guide on what to become or a warning of what would happen if they were unruly. Wynne, he thought, deserved more than that. Maybe Victor had, too.

But he’d never been given the chance to think on it much. His mother had never had much room for grief. He thought she might have loved his father, hoped she’d loved Victor, but their deaths had never affected her the way Juliana or Flora’s had affected Emilio. Part of him wondered, sometimes, if that meant he was the one doing things wrong. His mother lost a spouse and a child, just as Emilio had, but that grief hadn’t broken her. Mourning hadn’t turned her inside out, hadn’t carved an empty space into her chest that nothing ever seemed to fill. It hadn’t given her a crisis of faith, hadn’t made her give up the ideals she’d been raised with.

Was it Emilio, then, who was broken? It seemed so much easier to believe. After all, hadn’t he been scolded for his reaction to Victor’s death? Hadn’t he been told, at twelve years old, that grief was a weakness he needed to do away with? Maybe all of this was proof that he’d never deserved what was given to him to begin with. Maybe this thing his grief had become, this angry deity that understood nothing and was understood by no one was proof that he’d lost what he’d lost because he’d never deserved to have it to begin with. If that was the case, was Wynne just as doomed? Was he condemning them with this thing in his chest, with his hand resting on the mattress of their hospital bed?

He thought of Metzli, of their departure. Maybe they had the right idea. Maybe the only good thing a monster could ever do was lock themselves away. Maybe Emilio should find somewhere to rot.

But Lord, he was bad at leaving. He knew that. He was so bad at the departure, so bad at letting go. If he were better at it, he would have taken Flora out of Mexico before the massacre. He would have saved her when there was something left to save. This felt the same now, felt like packing his bags but never leaving. And weren’t there stories about that? Weren’t there tales of men who tried the same thing over and over again, always finding themselves shocked with the end result was the same? Didn’t those stories paint men like him as fumbling idiots, villains made villainous not by poor intentions but by stupid pride? He was weak, just as he always had been. The same stupid kid who’d needed to be locked in a mausoleum with hungry beasts because his grief made him stupid, made him sloppy.

You’ll win or you’ll die. And if you’re too weak to win, there’s no place for you here, anyway. His mother had never had room for sniveling children. He knew that.

He also knew she’d be ashamed of him now. Sitting vigil at the hospital bed of someone who wouldn’t have been there to begin with if he’d done his job better, if he’d been faster. He should have taken out Zane’s clan the moment he became aware of its existence, and he hadn’t. He hadn’t, and look at where it had gotten him. Look at how blinding his failure had become.

And in spite of all of it, Wynne was thanking him. As if he’d done something good, as if he hadn’t fucked up so badly that they were nearly as pale as the thin white sheet on top of them. The necklace felt heavy in his pocket, Juliana’s ring a well-deserved accusation. The guilt would eat him alive one day. He knew that. He thought it would be one day very soon.

“Holy objects,” he offered in quiet explanation. “Crosses, rosaries, the Star of David. Holy water, too. Religion doesn’t work on the dead. Or it works too well. I don’t know.” He swallowed, limbs feeling heavy. They asked if he believed in God, and he didn’t know how to answer. He never did, these days. “I used to.” It was a whisper, a quiet confession that he hated himself for. “I don’t know if I do anymore. I don’t know much of anything these days.” He’d tried to go to confession, not long after the massacre. He’d sat in the booth in silence, staring at the wall until the priest tried to prompt him into speaking. It felt more like a coffin than salvation. Everything did, these days.

Wynne’s question did, too. He’d known it was coming. How could he not? He’d given them a necklace with a ring too small to fit his hand, shoved it into his pocket like it hurt to look at. He put his hand back in that pocket now, twisted the chain around his finger until it hurt. “It did,” he said, closing his eyes. “It doesn’t anymore. It’s — It was my wife’s. Her wedding band.”

—

Perhaps the scariest thing about almost losing their life once more was the pointlessness of it in that basement. The vampires there had spoken of purpose, glorious and higher, but it hadn’t been — it would just have been monstrous transformation to become a murderous footsoldier in a twisted woman’s fantasy. Wynne had thought of home a lot during those days, about the death they had escaped and how that would have been glorious purpose.

Dying (and being reborn) at the hands of a cult leader wouldn’t have been glorious, though. It would not have saved anyone, would not have ensured the safety of their people for the next decennium, would not have meant anything in the name of a greater good. It would just have led to more of the same — more violence, more fear, more death. It was a terrifying thought, but they had thought it aplenty in that cellar, behind those bars with their hands restricted and their life looking like it was, once more, coming to an end.

There were deaths worth dying, just like there were sacrifices worth making. And though Wynne had rejected that one opportunity to having purpose, they still knew as much. In the darkest hours in that cellar, they had wished they’d never ran, they had wished they could have died the death they had been destined for — the one where they’d join the long list of former sacrifices, of the people that the commune spoke of highly. The one where they would have treated so kindly, hair and body decorated with oils and dried flowers and bones, body draped in a cotton dress. The one where they would have made their parents proud, where Siors would have been kind even as he slit their throat, where they would finally get to meet that demon who kept them all safe.

The death no one would save them from.

Now they knew what was better. Now they understood that their life being endangered in Wicked’s Rest was better than it could have ever been on the shores of Moosehead lake. Now they knew, that here there were people willing to go down into the murky depths of a basement filled with vampires for them, willing to catch them as they fell.

(But was it? Was it, truly? At home it would have been just them. In that basement people had died. Not just the vampires, but people, like them and Zack and Arden. Plucked off the street. People who had been afraid, who had not wanted to die and who had died regardless. One of them who had turned into that monster, that monster that had almost killed them but had been someone human in stead. Was it better? Wouldn’t it have been been better if they had been dead? If they had died that honorable death, then they wouldn’t have seen any of this. They would have had purpose, besides being this useless thing that needed saving.)

Here was Emilio, though, who cared. Who had come and came again, now, sitting at their bedside so they wouldn’t wake up alone. Here was the ache of their chest and neck, the burn of their wrists and cheeks — and Wynne knew one thing above all: they were glad to be alive. Still. Even if it hurt in a multitude of ways.

They were glad to know Emilio. That he was here. That they were here.

For a moment they closed their eyes, overcome with fatigue, and when they opened them they were looking at that broken man, who they thought so whole. They wanted to ask him if it ever stopped, being tired, or if life was just this exhausting.

“Oh. Okay. Maybe I should get something of my own then. I don’t …” They swallowed, considering the fact that the other had just confessed to having believed in God, once. Wynne didn’t want to be insensitive, after all. In a sense, they had believed in him too — but only his existence. Not in a way that meant anything, not in the way other people tended to. Protherians acknowledged the existence of God, but they did not answer to him. It was the demon, in stead. A fallen angel, perhaps. They weren’t sure where gythraul came from.

But there had been bible texts. They’d talk about Abraham and Isaac a lot, them and their mentor. How it had been the ultimate act of faith and devotion, that Abraham had been willing to tie down his son for his God. That this was not altogether dissimilar to what was waiting for them. Of course, no God was going to stop anyone from actually tying Wynne to the altar the way God had for Isaac. Gythraul did demand that the sacrifices to be fulfilled.

What parts of the bible had formed Emilio? What had happened to make him not believe any more? Wynne still believed in the demon, because there was no way not to — what they had ran from, what they had abandoned it had to be real. It was, considering the three demons they had come across who had confirmed the existence of creatures like gythraul. But God … now that was a question unanswered for seemingly both of them.

Sometimes they did crave a higher power like that. Higher than the demon. Higher than any of it..Something to answer to, something to blame.

Sometimes they spat on the idea altogether.

“I don’t know either. Would it be okay, if I wore a cross? Or something like that, even if …” They bit their lips. “Well, demons, and all. It seems blasphemous.” To them, the idea of wearing a holy object was blasphemous, but that was a line of thinking they tried to let go of. They had stopped answering to Protherian believes the moment they’d abandoned them. “And, I’m sorry. That you’re not sure. I guess maybe that’s part of things.” Life. Or being alive amidst all these ugly things.

As the other continued with the truth of the ring, Wynne thought maybe they understood. What else was going to trigger a crisis of faith besides loss? (Would it have, for their parents? Would their beliefs have shaken once they’d bled out? Or would they have clung to it harder?)

They tried to handle the revelation with great care, as if it was a baby bird fallen from the nest, being held in their hands. Maybe it was good, that they were injured and fatigued, because otherwise they might have drowned in overthinking right about now. In stead they just looked at him, quietly, before pushing their hand forward, palm up. They couldn’t quite reach Emilio’s to take it, but the offer was there. “I’m sorry.” They frowned. “I guess that she … is no longer with us?” Dead felt like an ugly word.

They swallowed, but continued on. “Did it happen long ago?” Regardless, they were glad that the necklace had been returned. Regardless, they suddenly felt heavy with the weight of what he’d given them, what he’d entrusted them with. The only reason they didn’t cry again was because it would feel selfish, now.

—

It was funny — there’d been no doubt in his chest when he’d gone into that basement. He’d descended down those stairs knowing, as he always did, that he might die in that barn, and he’d never once thought to question it. Even when he’d seen Wynne, Arden, and Zack in the middle of it all, even when the people he was saving stopped being nameless and faceless and turned instead into friends that he cared about, people that he wanted to protect, Emilio had carried no hesitation. He would have died in that basement if he’d had to. He probably would have if Zack hadn’t shoved him out, if Zane hadn’t told the spellcaster that Emilio wasn’t there even as his body continued the slaughter.

There hadn’t been a shred of uncertainty, not a hint of unsureness. He was there, he fought, he killed. He did what he was built to do, did everything his mother had told him to do except for die. And he knew he’d do that, too, someday. He’d die bloody and alone, the way martyrs always did. But unlike a good martyr, Emilio would always carry with him the awful, unforgivable sin of dying too late. He’d outlived everyone he’d ever loved, and maybe he’d outlived more than that, too. Maybe he’d outlived his purpose already. Maybe it was too late for him to die as anything more useful than a warning sign.

And that was where the uncertainty always began. Not in the battle, but in the aftermath. Emilio hadn’t carried any doubt in his chest when he’d gone into that basement, but it was all he could feel now. It weighed heavy on his chest, held his heart in a vice grip. For Emilio, it was the end of war that was terrifying. The fight itself, that was easy. You exchanged blows, you bled and made others bleed in return. You lived or you died, and it didn’t matter which.

Violence was the first language he’d ever known; it made sense to him in a way words never could. Even the quiet Spanish he’d once used to lull his daughter to sleep sometimes felt foreign in comparison, felt just as complicated as wrapping his tongue around English seemed to be most days.

The violence was easy. It was the parts that came after that never seemed to click. The standing in a grocery store comparing two boxes of cereal, the rocking a crying baby to sleep, the listening to someone tell him about their day, the sitting by a hospital bed with a trembling figure lying prone against white sheets… this was the part Emilio didn’t understand. He knew how to fight. He knew how to keep someone from being killed, sometimes. He didn’t know how to save them after, when the fighting was done. He didn’t know how to sit in the quiet aftermath of the loud thing. He only knew how to deal with the screaming.

At least there were some parts he still understood. He nodded at Wynne’s question, said “I’ll get you something,” because that made as much sense as the violence did. It was a preamble to it, a prologue. Vampires and their strengths and their weaknesses sang a song whose lyrics he knew by heart, hummed the only lullabye anyone had ever sung to him. A stake to the heart. Holy water. A rosary. Sunlight. Decapitation. He’d known every manner of death before he’d known his own name, thought of himself as a pair of hands with something sharp gripped between them long before he’d ever thought of himself as a person.

This was what he was, after all. Not a man, but a weapon. He liked to call himself a martyr sometimes, liked to aspire to be one, but he knew that even that wasn’t an apt description. No one built statues of the sword that delivered the killing blow, no one wrote hymns about the blade that broke in battle. He was the knife, the killing thing. He was not meant to be remembered, was never built to be loved.

Was it any wonder he felt out of place here? No one set a blade by a hospital bed. Everyone knew better than to try to grip hands that would cut them with their sharpness.

Everyone but Wynne, it seemed. Because Wynne still looked at him like he was a person, like throwing a ratty t-shirt and a dirty pair of blue jeans on the handle of a knife could make it sit tall like a man, like there was still a soul inside his chest, like there ever had been. Wynne looked at him the way Flora used to, sometimes, and that was the most dangerous part. That was the thing that would get them killed. He thought back to that basement, to their blood on his hands. His fingers trembled. They weren’t supposed to.

“God doesn’t care,” he said quietly. “Someone told me that once. God doesn’t care if you believe in Him or not. God is just God.” It was supposed to be a comfort when his uncle had said it, was meant as a firm hand against his back to walk him through his first crisis of faith. Will the rosary still work if I don’t believe in it, he’d asked, and Lucio had smiled the way Emilio always imagined a father might, had clapped him on the shoulder. God doesn’t care. If you protect what’s His, He’ll protect you. Use your rosary, mijo. Let Him save you.

It didn’t feel like a comfort anymore, this divine apathy. God didn’t care, and it wasn’t a good thing. God didn’t care, and it was a curse instead of a blessing because Emilio had lost everything. Emilio had scrubbed his daughter’s blood from beneath his fingernails, Emilio had choked on his wife’s name only in dreams, Emilio had watched Wynne stumble and fall with more blood outside of their body than was in it, and God didn’t care. God didn’t save Emilio, the way his uncle had promised He would. God didn’t stop the terrible things from happening. Emilio was dead on a living room floor a thousand miles away, and God didn’t care. No one ever seemed to.

So let Wynne wear a cross, he thought. Let them have that protection, even if it came from something that didn’t give a shit what happened. They deserved to be looked after, even if only by a piece of jewelry around their neck. “I’ll get you one,” he said again. It felt like a promise, and he’d always been told not to make those. Rhett drilled it into him with the closest thing to love that he’d ever felt back then, the closest approximation to worry that anyone had ever shown him. He wasn’t supposed to make promises, but he was making one anyway. To Wynne, to himself, to that God that didn’t care. He would keep them safe. He would die to do it, if he had to.

He shrugged off their apology, wanted to say it doesn’t matter anyway but didn’t want to lie. It shouldn’t matter was closer to the truth. It shouldn’t matter, but it did. He ached with it. He wanted to believe in God again, wanted to think that there was something out there that might save him if he asked. He wanted to think that something somewhere thought he was worth that. It seemed just as stupid as believing in fairytales now.

His fingers closed against that necklace in his pocket, the ring adding a sharp and uncomfortable pressure against the palm of his hand. He thought of Juliana, of how this ring used to sit on her finger for years and seemed too empty without it. He thought of how it burned, sometimes, when it sat against his chest. He thought about how grief was its own kind of curse, and how nothing you could do would ever really break it. It would suffocate you, in the end. Every time.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Yeah, she’s gone now. It’s been two years. Two years and a little over a month.” It had been centuries. It had been seconds. It happened in another lifetime. It happened a heartbeat ago. Grief did funny things to time, didn’t it? It stretched seconds into lifetimes, shrunk years into minutes. He couldn’t remember what Juliana’s laugh sounded like, but he heard her screams every night. “I didn’t save her,” he said, and it felt like a confession even though it was an obvious thing. If he’d saved her, she wouldn’t be gone. “I was supposed to.”

—

This thing Emilio said, it stirred something within Wynne. The idea that his God wouldn’t care if you believed in him or not — that he just existed, just was, like a permanent fixture in the sky. It had never been like that with the demon, had it? It had demanded worship, reverence, an endless cycle of sacrifice. Bled out animals, bled out young-adults, the best cut of meat, the juiciest apples. It had demanded it all, and when the Protherians had tried fleeing it once, some hundred years ago, it had demanded more.

Siors had always compared it to that story of the deluge, or the one of the plague. Sometimes an omnipotent, authoritative being had to bring the hammer down and take souls with it, to reset the status quo. To remember Its followers what was the order of things. The demon was the person holding the magnifying glass, and Its followers were the ants, crawling around in the sun and hoping not to get burned. We live in spite of It, yes, but because of It, too. There are no places out there any more like here, where we can do what we want, where we are free to live as we please. The demon was the keeper of the gates, making sure they were all safe in their luscious garden. We must, above everything, be grateful.

But God didn’t care, Emilio said. Could it be, then, that God still cared? Or that he was just out there, not minding if they were to wear that cross for selfish reasons. They weren’t sure if Emilio was suggesting apathy or a kind ambivalence, but either way it was better than what they had been raised with, wasn’t it? A demon willing to split a community, take a cut of its living members and leave the rest reeling in fear.

“Thank you,” they said. “Maybe that’s … good. That he doesn’t care. Maybe that’s the best way for a higher being to be.” Because then it all came down to them, didn’t it? Then there was no higher power demanding Wynne lay down on an altar. Then, maybe, their decision of running wasn’t that selfish.

It was hard for Wynne to get outside of their own head. To look further than their own experience. On a surface level they could, of course, wanting to be selfless and empathetic — but at the end of the day their own heart was so heavy, their mind so filled with memories, their conscience so distracted that it always came back to what they knew. That small world. That small, limited life that now seemed so bountiful. Too bountiful.

This world held not only vampires and fae, not only that. It held people. Caricatures. It was hard, sometimes, to think that they had histories of their own. That there might be a past there that was larger and scarier than their own. That Ariadne was not just a beautiful girl with a heart of gold and a few too many insecurities, that Luis was not just their kindly colleague who worked on farms sometimes, that Zack was not just a cool graphic designer and Teddy not just a fun person to be around. As the latter two had divulged their pasts, it had startled Wynne, who had felt selfish that they hadn’t ever searched further than what they’d been offered. Too fatigued, perhaps, to want to consider that there were horrors everywhere.

So take Emilio. There was something haunted about him. Something about his upbringing that made Wynne slightly uncomfortable, even if explaining why took a level of reflection they didn’t possess. Who seemed to lean into guilt so easily, as if it was an old coat he couldn’t get rid of. But even with him, they hadn’t really thought about it. That he might have had a wife, once. That he could have lost that wife. That besides that brother of his, there might be more family. A home-country, that he left, for a reason they hadn’t asked.

Now they pulled on that coat of guilt too, sitting in it snugly, wondering why they had never asked him more of his past. They had grown comfortable in relying on him, asking him for a favor and now even having been saved by him. They should have asked sooner, shouldn’t they have? He knew all about them.

There they went again, getting lost in the maze that was their mind — internalizing their guilt and shame over not having asked and, thus, forgetting to focus on the conversation at hand. Padrig would snap his fingers in front of their eyes whenever they’d gloss over, demand their attention back. Sometimes Wynne wondered if he wanted to keep them from thinking, as if he thought it a dangerous for them to consider all that was happening around them. It had been easier not to think back at home. To be led around like a meek sheep.

They refocused, looking at him with eyes they refused to let cry again. That they were good at, at least — to save their tears for a more appropriate time, or to simply not shed them at all.

Two years. What was time? Two years to Wynne had been everything — nearly a tenth of their planned life. For them, every day was valuable and so, if they got to live two more years they’d think it an eternity. And yet, these past nine months had passed by so quickly. Besides, Emilio was older than them, and this was different, wasn’t it? He must have been with her for a period of time and now he no longer was. Now there was no woman to return to.

For a moment they wanted to ask if you could ever move past it, losing someone. Because their longing for home was so painful at times, so breathtaking, that they couldn’t imagine it ever getting better. But this was not like that.

Because his wife was dead and his wife hadn’t been saved. Wynne wasn’t sure how to connect the dots exactly, but they knew this: they had been saved. Someone had wanted them dead, or at least changed into something not-alive, and Emilio had caught them as they had fallen. There was a path there, a logical conclusion — something must have come for his wife, something Emilio could have saved her from, but here he sat now. Her wedding ring no longer around her finger, and his voice something different altogether.

They almost didn’t recognize him. On another hand, they thought this was the most true they had ever seen him. Maybe they were both bleeding from metaphorical wounds today.

Part of them wanted to ask what happened, and yet another was entirely unsure if such a thing would be warranted. They felt themself sink under that coat, the one made out of guilt, and they wanted to wrap themself up in it as it would be easier to drown in self-pity than to confront this large grief in the room with them. But Wynne – despite the way they thought of themself as a selfish being – was at the end of the day not that.

“I’m sorry.” They had said that already, hadn’t they? But they were. They sat up a little, not sure what to do as the other seemed weighed down by his own coat of guilt. Guilt they didn’t think was warranted, probably, but that was a hard thing to convey. Self-condemnation seemed a permanent state of being, as if once the judgment had been made there was no going back. Once you ruled yourself guilty, there was nothing else to be.

They just kept looking at him, mute for a moment. “Sometimes …” They swallowed. “I think sometimes we can’t control or do everything even if we want to. And that isn’t on us.”

They did believe it, even if they said it in a way where their voice felt all twisted. They pressed their lips together, mind forming an image of Emilio with his wife. It was hard to. It made sense that it was hard to, as it seemed that the grief of it all might have changed him. They had been right to assume that there was grief in him, then, but it was not a fun thing to be right about.

Their hand remained on the bed, the offer continuing to stand. Wynne looked at it for a moment before asking, “What was her name?”

—

Was it better? Was an apathetic God preferable to a vengeful one? As a child, when the Bible had felt like a safety net beneath him instead of a noose around his throat, he’d often marveled at the wording. There were passages about loving God, of course. It was the foundation upon which the house was built, the thing that everything was meant to boil down to. But there were so many more about fearing him.

Your mother is a God-fearing woman, his uncle told him once, and Emilio had wondered if fear and love were some strange kind of synonyms. It seemed as though they must have been, made sense in his mind. After all, his mother’s voice often left his palms sweaty and his heart pounding, and didn’t he love her? Wasn’t the fear that kept him awake at night or the panic that gripped him each time he made a mistake he knew she would punish him for the same thing as the love he’d always been taught to bury?

Maybe he would have liked apathy more, back then. Maybe a mother who thought nothing of him would have been better than one that thought him weak. He remembered the shed where she’d often locked him, the creatures she’d put him with. You kill or you die and either way the family is stronger for it, she’d said. There was no room in their lineage for someone who couldn’t do what needed to be done, and his mother’s way of correcting that had been a stiff guiding hand. But what if it had been different? Would he be better now if he’d been cast out? If his family had abandoned him through choice instead of through death, would it hurt the same?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know, and he hated not knowing. He was a man who yearned for answers, who needed them. A detective, a vengeful spirit, a grieving father. They were all the same sometimes, weren’t they? They were the same thing in different coats, the same concepts stacked on top of one another like building blocks. Emilio was here, by Wynne’s bed, but he was everywhere else, too. At that desk in his apartment, in the hall with the screaming father, on the floor of his old house in Mexico. Maybe grief and God were the same in their omnipresence. Maybe grief was all God really was.

Maybe grief was all Emilio was, too.

There were days when it felt like it. There were days where he began and ended with that pit in his chest, days where his daughter’s name was the only word his mind could muster. Over and over again, like a broken radio. There were days when every corner housed her body, where his wife’s blood wouldn’t come off his hands. He wondered if everyone felt this way, or if there was something broken inside of him. Everyone grieved, he knew. In different ways, with different methods, but everyone grieved. But did everyone become it? Was everyone consumed by it the way he was, or was it a flaw in his system, some broken gear that had come off track and couldn’t be pushed back on?

Maybe his grief was like that old pain in his knee — always there, and impossible to fix. Able to be masked at times, with Teddy’s runes or the whiskey that always settled in the back of his throat, but never able to be removed entirely. A part of him. The biggest part, sometimes. Overwhelming one day, manageable the next, but still there. Always still there.

He wondered if Wynne saw it. When he looked at himself, it seemed so obvious. He didn’t used to be like this, after all, didn’t used to be so heavy. There’d been a time where he was lighter, where he’d lifted a child onto his shoulders and tried everything he could try to make her laugh. But Wynne had never known him then. They’d never known the husband, the father, the brother, the son. The only Emilio Wynne had ever seen was the one he was now. This quiet echo, this broken shadow, this man who existed not as something tangible but as the absence of it. Wasn’t it better that way? He thought of Rhett, of the way he looked at him. Being known was the scariest thing there was, and Emilio had never been as brave as he pretended to be.

And still, he gave them that necklace. Still, he clasped his wife’s ring around their throat to save them. Still, he answered their question when they asked it.

They said I’m sorry, and the words were too big to fit in that hospital room and too small to make any kind of a difference. What words were there for what he’d lost? For what they had? Everything was cheap. He could apologize for the bandage around their throat, but he couldn’t take away the things that had put it there. They’d leave the hospital in a few days, a little wobbly but so painfully alive, and everything would still be shit. The physical healed, but what about the rest of it? They’d never leave that barn basement. He’d never leave that living room floor.

So what was left for them? To carve tombstones into their chests, to carry with them corpses of the people they’d lost, the people they used to be? Was that all life was, in the end?

Emilio swallowed, and everything felt heavy but when didn’t it? How long had it been since he’d existed without this weight on his shoulders? Who was he if not just a collection of things he had to carry?

“Juliana,” he said quietly. “Her name was Juliana.” And there was another name, too. The one that was the only word his mind could form some days, the one that was carved into every inch of him, the one that made him who he was. The tattoo under the leather band on his wrist burned, aching to be spoken aloud, but his mouth wouldn’t form the words. He wasn’t ready for Wynne to know. Not yet. Maybe he never would be.

Behind him, the door to the hospital room opened. At some point, that grieving father must have left, because Emilio couldn’t hear him anymore. A nurse entered, a tight smile on her lips and a wary look in her eyes. “Visiting hours are wrapping up,” she announced. Looking to Wynne, she softened. “I’m sure your dad will come back in the morning, though.”

The word hit him harder than that rod that had gone through his shoulder, suffocated him. It took a moment for him to resurface, to remember how to tread water. He coughed to cover it up, trying to pretend like he hadn’t just drowned in front of everyone, trying to pretend that there wasn’t still water in his lungs. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Yeah. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

There was no place else he needed to be right now. Not if Wynne was here.

#for family only.#emilio.#thread.#how can one put into tags how much i love and hate bex

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rinny-rae · 2 months

Text

What Could Have Been

Chapter 2

Summary

The tadfools form a plan to rescue Wynn

Characters: Shadowheart POV, Astarion, Jaheira, Orin

Rating: M

Word Count: 2K

Tags/CW: This one is just a few friendos adventuring. Still grimdark but SFW for once!

Read on AO3 ~ Masterlist

Tick Tock

“Wynn is not in the dungeons,” Astarion yelled into Shadowheart’s ear, straining to be heard over the constant clank of metal on metal.

Shadowheart flinched at the unexpected sound of his voice, missing the vial and spilling runepowder all over the desk. The passage of time felt abstract underground. Rather than relying on things like clocks or sun positions, Shadowheart now measured time in the number of bombs she had put together. Astarion has been gone for exactly one hundred and thirteen. Wynn, for four hundred and twenty six.

”Could they have moved him from the fortress without the Harpers knowing?” she asked and moved to bite her nails but realized her hands were covered in explosive chemicals and thought better of it. She carefully swept the loose runepowder onto a piece of parchment and directed it back into the vial.

Astarion moved to wipe a streak of soot from his cheek with the sleeve of his formerly ivory shirt. He only smeared it further.

“Either that or our beloved archduke has him in some private torture chamber.” He picked up an empty bombshell from the heap and stared at it, wrinkling his brow. The dark circles under his eyes have only gotten worse since she last saw him.

Shadowheart shivered despite the sweltering heat. She shoved her chair aside and began circling around the handful of feet of unobstructed space.

“It certainly does complicate things,” Astarion admitted bitterly.

“Few things are more certain than the existence of a private Archducal torture chamber,” grumbled a burly dwarf who slumped on the floor a few steps away. He leaned one hairy arm on a crate of metal slags, taking greedy bites out of a loaf of sourdough bread. Shadowheart had forgotten his name but was reasonably sure he was the blacksmith.

“Here’s to hoping Jaheira brings some better news,” Shadowheart said.

The Ironhand Clan hideout brimmed with frenzied energy. Two forges roared at the center of the cavern that the gnomes converted into their base of operations. Smoke billowed and pooled around the fires. Too heavy to escape through the hastily constructed vents, it covered every inch of the space with a thick layer of grime and made Shadowheart’s eyes water incessantly. An unrelenting river of workers, almost all deep gnomes, flowed around the two forges.

Shadowheart took a deep breath, coughed and willed herself to sit back down. Breaking Wynn out of the dungeons would have been a piece of cake but things were never simple, were they?

Opposite the forges stood two rows of tables littered with a miscellany of tools. Hammers, chisels and empty bombshells were strewn about every surface. Under the dim light of torches, a dozen gnomes put together all manner of explosives.

Shadowheart noticed Laridda hauling a sack of grain practically the size of her body and absentmindedly waved to her. The small woman waved back, then tripped over a mold that lay forgotten on the ground.

The blacksmith finished his meal and, with a groan, lifted the crate of metal he had been leaning on.

“This one's for Wulbren,” he clarified to no one in particular before shuffling away.

A fluffy cat, somehow pristinely white despite its surroundings, hopped onto the pile of chopped wood beside Shadowheart’s desk. It yawned and moved as if to stretch but its small body continued to elongate in all directions, shedding clumps of fur. It grew and twitched, an uncanny mix of beast and human. Astarion wrinkled his nose and turned away, still twirling the empty bombshell in his fingers.

“I found Wynn,” Jaheira said, smoothing back her long silver hair and brushing a pile of white fur off her lap. Laridda appeared seemingly from nowhere and handed her a black cloak. Jaheira smiled appreciatively, covered herself and studied the room for a long moment before Astarion finally butted in.

“Do share with the class,” he said.

“Would you get me something to draw with, dear?” Jaheira said to Laridda.

She waited for the gnome to leave before turning to Shadowheart.

“Nothing happens in Baldur’s Gate without the Harpers knowing,” she whispered and winked.

A vaguely familiar tiefling child weaved his way through the mass of workers. Moving with spring in his step as if out for a lovely stroll, he bound over to Jaheira and handed her a package wrapped in thick linen. She nodded and whispered something in his ear. The boy beamed, tapped two fingers to his forehead and slunk away.

“They’re holding Wynn on the top floor,” Jaheira said tucking the package away, “across from the lordling’s own quarters but blessedly, in a bedroom and not a torture chamber.”

Shadowheart bit into the stubby nail of her index finger tasting the bitter explosive powder and then the salty copper of fresh blood. The difference between a bedroom and a torture chamber was but a matter of circumstance.

Laridda appeared again with ink and parchment in one hand and two flashblinder grenades in the other.

“All we can spare for the moment,” she said apologetically as if the gnomes haven’t repaid their debts a thousand times over.

Jaheira passed the grenades to Astarion and began writing, mumbling under her breath.

“We could go through a window,” Astarion suggested.

“No, you can go through a window,” Shadowheart corrected.

“Besides, the issue isn’t so much going in as it is getting out.” She bit the nail on her middle finger and watched the blood pool around the grungy cuticle.

“Last I checked Wynn doesn’t fly and he sure as hell can’t climb down a fortress wall,” she added.

Jaheira nodded, scribbling something.

“We must speak to him,” she said, “there may be a way we could use this to our advantage.”

Shadowheart crossed her arms and began pacing once again; The idea did not sit well with her.

***

Shadowheart pulled her cloak tighter and stared straight ahead, weaving through the crowd. The crimson glow of the setting sun flashed in the few windows that hadn’t been shattered or boarded over.

Rivington looked more dour by the day. The Flaming Fists received firm instructions not to allow any refugees into the city proper which meant the outskirts were flooded with the dispossessed. Forced to sleep in the streets, they took to erecting makeshift shelters to protect themselves from the elements as best they could.

A bearded man grabbed Shadowheart by the elbow, pulling her into his chest as if for an embrace.

“You’re one of them Sharess’ Caress lasses aren’t ya?” he said, licking his lips, assaulting her senses with the rancid stench of alcohol and sweat. Shadowheart recoiled and spun out of his grasp. The man lurched, spat at her feet, and stumbled away shaking his head, looking offended.

“Gods, this place is positively vile,” Astarion said, stepping closer to her and discreetly placing one hand on the hilt of his dagger.

“The city has plenty of resources to accommodate the refugees,” Jaheira said, forging ahead. She pushed past a group of shouting women and slipped a scroll out of the sleeve of her cloak. A stout half orc bumped into her, grumbled something into her ear and disappeared into the crowd, tucking Jaheira’s scroll away beneath his shirt.

“This situation is hardly the fault of the people,” Jaheira added.

“This way,” she said and, urging her companions on with a small wave, dipped into an alley between two dingy buildings. The alley stank of piss and rot. A frail beggar girl huddled against the wooden fence that separated it from the cliffside and the river below. Across the river, insurmountable walls of Wyrm’s Rock loomed, barring free passage to the city.

The beggar reached for Astarion, her pleading stare that of a wounded animal.

“Shoo, get out of here,” he hissed, waving her away.

The girl scurried around the corner and faded into the gap between the crooked buildings.

Astarion hoisted himself on top of the fence and, squinting against the fiery sunset, extended a hand to Shadowheart. She took his hand and hopped up beside him.

Once atop the fence, she peered over at the cliffside that plunged into the river; Her head spun.

”No way I’m getting down there in one piece,” she shook her head.

Astarion rolled his eyes and, with an air of casual indifference, vaulted over the fence. Jaheira’s black cloak dropped to the ground and a white raven emerged. It soared above the fence and over the narrow expanse of the river, perching atop a boulder on the other side.

Shadowheart pointed her soot-stained fingers at Astarion and muttered two spells in quick succession. A cloud of fine mist engulfed him, then absorbed into his skin making him glow a faint blue.

“Wish me luck,” Astarion cooed. He blew Shadowheart a kiss and dashed toward the cliff’s edge, hurling himself off and sending a shower of gravel and twigs raining upon the calm waters below. Rather than plummeting to certain death, his body glided over the water and landed gently on the other side.

The white raven cawed and began preening itself.

Shadowheart shielded her eyes and watched until the two disappeared into the thicket beneath the fortress walls. She hopped off the fence, snatched Jaheira’s discarded cloak and headed for the alley’s exit.

A small voice trailed after her.

“A spare coin, miss?”

Shadowheart rolled her eyes but tossed the black cloak to the urchin as she walked past. It wasn’t much but the kid’s own clothing was no more than rags.

The revolting sound of snapping bones froze Shadowheart in place.

“Look at it, weep and wail and pity the innocent, ripe for the slaughter.”

The unmistakable singsong cadence sent a twinge of panic through Shadowheart’s chest.

“Orin,” she spat the name out like a bite of rotting meat. Turning on her heel, she frantically rummaged for a suitable weapon.

The changeling cocked her head too far one way then the other, blinking her milky pale eyes. With a mad grin she drew closer, lithe and careful, stepping silently - a wolf on a prowl. Shadowheart thought to run but that would only serve to thrill and hardly prolong the inevitable.

Besides, Shadowheart was no prey.

She fished out the vial of runepowder and shook it at the changeling, fixing her with a stony gaze.

“Recognize this?” she spat, “or is your brain too rotted from your so-called worship?”

Orin grinned even wider and pointed the split tip of her dagger at Shadowheart.

The curves and ridges of the metal made it seem organic - the glistening tongue of a monster ripped from its maw with her bare hands. The blade itself and the Netherstone encrusted in the hilt glistened the same grisly crimson as the suit of human flesh that Orin wore for armor.

“It means to kill us both,” she snickered and licked the blade almost salaciously, circling her quarry, testing for weakness.

“You make allying with the tyrant sound tempting,” Shadowheart said and forced a faux-confident smirk.

A venomous shadow fell over Orin’s face.

“Do not let the lordling hiss hot air into your worm-weakened brain. His throat spits lies,” she snarled.

”I’m well aware,” Shadowheart said, smirking in earnest now, “any other pearls of wisdom you care to impart?”

“Your doe-eyed sweetling brat already sings into the tyrant’s ear,” Orin said with a distinct undercurrent of mockery in her voice, “and so your seconds and minutes and hours cowering in the gnome pit are numbered.”

She stuck her lip out pretending to cry.

Shadowheart bristled, sickened by the implications.

“Wynn would never…” She started but trailed off into a bitter silence.

Wynn was a scared little boy, alone and helpless, left to his own devices.

“See for yourself tonight, tonight, tonight,” Orin licked her blade not taking her pale eyes off Shadowheart, apparently delighted by her reaction.

“Tick tock,” she pranced, retreating into the shadow, “tick tock.”

She disappeared in a puff of smoke leaving Shadowheart alone in the alley. Trembling, Shadowheart slumped against the stone of a crumbling façade and hugged herself.

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