06-04-2023, 03:05 PM
who could ever leave me, darling,
but who could stay?
but who could stay?
Beneath the veil of darkness she had known she made a mistake, and already her heart is withering.
The darkness did not feel regret—it did not care when it acted in a way that its host might not prefer, it did not care when the light tried to rebel back against it. It did not care that Ryatah was the type to withstand blow after blow and never retaliate, it did not care that it went against her very nature to take the knife someone pointed at her and plunge it into their own heart.
It did not care that she had been built to withstand pain, not to inflict it.
But it knows, too, that she had always wondered what it would be like; to be the one watching rather than the one crumbling, and in that moment of weakness it takes control. It is only with the help of her fledgling magic—and the way she falters at the pain on his face, at the raw anger in his voice, at the realization of what she has done—that she reins the shadows back in, the light of her aura consuming it until all that is left in its wake is her and the consequences of her actions that he slams into her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps around the electric pain that his memories elicit, her chest contracting to a size so small it is a wonder her ribs do not splinter from the sheer force of it. The eerie glassiness of her eyes has disappeared, replaced again by their usual warmth and pain and regret. “Ashhal, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” but even she can hear how hollow that plea sounds.
Blaming it all on the darkness is too easy, and as much as she wants to pretend that the shadows from the void have a life all their own, she knows it is not entirely true.
The only thing the shadows had done was steeled her nerves so that she might find the answers she had always searched for, and now she had them.
In the aftermath of the emotional attack they had launched at each other they are left breathless and trembling, and she is hit with the stark realization that the rift between them is, finally, impassable. Whatever pieces of them she had salvaged from wreckages in the past are gone—crushed to something beyond dust, something that not even her foolish hope could cling to. It is not the first time it has happened—she thinks of Skellig and Illum, the way she had sabotaged seemingly without thought or regret—but it is the first time it has fallen apart in a way that was not entirely of her own doing.
There is nothing left to fight for, and it is an alien feeling.
“You wiped my memory of that day, but why didn’t you wipe your own?” she asks, referencing the now-filled gap in her mind and though her gaze is searching, there is nothing accusatory in her voice. She wants to understand, although she thinks that she already might; she would have done the same for him a long time ago, if she’d had the ability. Would have excised herself from his memory like the cancer she had become, let him be free of at least one ghost so that she might no longer haunt him.
But, she would not have erased him from her memory.
She would have held onto it like she holds onto everything,
And perhaps that is the mistake they keep making—both of them trying to spare the other, in their own way, while still being too selfish to let go entirely.
“Perhaps it would be best if neither of us remembered anything at all,” comes her soft suggestion, and it almost does not feel like her saying it. She has never willingly let go of anyone—but especially not him. And she knows that even if she were to walk away now the damage that she has done is irreversible, and that the only way to salvage him would be as if she had never existed at all.
She steps towards him, and though sorrow shadows her face there is an earnest plea there too, willing him to see the sincerity, to feel the way it thickens in her voice when she implores, “Tell me you want me to, and I’ll do it. I’ll remove every part of myself from your memory, and you can do the same for me. And then this—whatever it was, whatever it was never meant to be—will be over.”
The darkness did not feel regret—it did not care when it acted in a way that its host might not prefer, it did not care when the light tried to rebel back against it. It did not care that Ryatah was the type to withstand blow after blow and never retaliate, it did not care that it went against her very nature to take the knife someone pointed at her and plunge it into their own heart.
It did not care that she had been built to withstand pain, not to inflict it.
But it knows, too, that she had always wondered what it would be like; to be the one watching rather than the one crumbling, and in that moment of weakness it takes control. It is only with the help of her fledgling magic—and the way she falters at the pain on his face, at the raw anger in his voice, at the realization of what she has done—that she reins the shadows back in, the light of her aura consuming it until all that is left in its wake is her and the consequences of her actions that he slams into her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps around the electric pain that his memories elicit, her chest contracting to a size so small it is a wonder her ribs do not splinter from the sheer force of it. The eerie glassiness of her eyes has disappeared, replaced again by their usual warmth and pain and regret. “Ashhal, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” but even she can hear how hollow that plea sounds.
Blaming it all on the darkness is too easy, and as much as she wants to pretend that the shadows from the void have a life all their own, she knows it is not entirely true.
The only thing the shadows had done was steeled her nerves so that she might find the answers she had always searched for, and now she had them.
In the aftermath of the emotional attack they had launched at each other they are left breathless and trembling, and she is hit with the stark realization that the rift between them is, finally, impassable. Whatever pieces of them she had salvaged from wreckages in the past are gone—crushed to something beyond dust, something that not even her foolish hope could cling to. It is not the first time it has happened—she thinks of Skellig and Illum, the way she had sabotaged seemingly without thought or regret—but it is the first time it has fallen apart in a way that was not entirely of her own doing.
There is nothing left to fight for, and it is an alien feeling.
“You wiped my memory of that day, but why didn’t you wipe your own?” she asks, referencing the now-filled gap in her mind and though her gaze is searching, there is nothing accusatory in her voice. She wants to understand, although she thinks that she already might; she would have done the same for him a long time ago, if she’d had the ability. Would have excised herself from his memory like the cancer she had become, let him be free of at least one ghost so that she might no longer haunt him.
But, she would not have erased him from her memory.
She would have held onto it like she holds onto everything,
And perhaps that is the mistake they keep making—both of them trying to spare the other, in their own way, while still being too selfish to let go entirely.
“Perhaps it would be best if neither of us remembered anything at all,” comes her soft suggestion, and it almost does not feel like her saying it. She has never willingly let go of anyone—but especially not him. And she knows that even if she were to walk away now the damage that she has done is irreversible, and that the only way to salvage him would be as if she had never existed at all.
She steps towards him, and though sorrow shadows her face there is an earnest plea there too, willing him to see the sincerity, to feel the way it thickens in her voice when she implores, “Tell me you want me to, and I’ll do it. I’ll remove every part of myself from your memory, and you can do the same for me. And then this—whatever it was, whatever it was never meant to be—will be over.”
Ryatah
@Ashhal