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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [private]  what do you have to live for
    #1


    Agetta had gone into Hyaline looking for death, or at the very least a fight that would calm her mind, but she had walked (no, ran) out after things had ended very differently. She had not been expecting it. But she had not stopped it. Had not wanted to at the time. Her self-loathing doesn’t know a limit, and by the time she realized what a colossal mistake had been made, it was too late.

    And now, turning to look at the swelling of her sides, she can feel herself shatter a new.

    Her midnight gaze drifts down, to the blood that still stains her sides and legs. The injuries from her fall (jump) healed without so much as a scar. She knows there is a stain on her cheek and neck as well - matting her mane in a spot where her neck had broken, but she’s beyond caring to try to clean any of it off. There are only clean tracks where the tears had traced - tears of frustration, of the pain she cannot escape.

    She closes her eyes and sees Plume flinching when she said she loved him. Sees him turn and leave as he took to the skies.

    She thinks of Garbage and how she couldn’t bring herself to find him afterwards, knowing she did not deserve any comfort - knowing she did not have the strength for a second conversation.

    Agetta drifts along the riverside in the winter night, following it to where it meets the ocean, and in the cold shallow waters she stands - staring out at the horizon - trying to figure out just what the hell she’s supposed to do now.

    Agetta



    this is just supposed to be a one-shot but if someone wants to reply send me a message first!
    Reply
    #2

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    Sleaze had thought, perhaps, that he would not return here.
    For what did Beqanna hold? It was the land of his father and forefathers, sure, but Sleaze had come to the land and been met with madness, with an impossible reality, with years of trying to salvage something from himself. And had he succeeded?
    He’d kept quiet, had gone to those in-between lands where he was left alone in a meadow to pray. It reminded him of simpler times, as his knees wore bare again, as he murmured half-formed prayers to gods he barely believed in.
    It wasn’t the belief he needed, but the ritual. The burn of his knees as he bent to pray. He needed pain and for his mind to go blank as he recited the same words over and over until it was all just nonsense spewing forth from him.

    But something called him back, in the way so many are called back. He wonders, sometimes, what it is – if there is some sort of honing call inside him, a migratory desire to return to this land, again and again, even as it only grants him pain, as it undoes his reality.
    He walks the river, and looks at all the unknown faces. He had not known many in his time here, and he is sure the few he did are long gone, but he hopes, impossibly, to find them.
    He does not – of course he does not – but instead he sees a pale mare, standing in the shallow water. He knows nothing of her – certainly does not know that she has met, has loved his father – but there is a draw about her, and his gaze keeps returning to her.
    He summons his courage and steps closer, steps beside her in the river. It feels bold – feels stupid – but tonight, perhaps, Sleaze can be bold and stupid.
    “Hello,” he says, and though he wants to say more – to apologize, immediately, for standing near her, to make some asinine comment on the weather – he does not, and instead stands silent, the water rushing at his ankles.

    Sleaze



    @[Agetta]
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    #3


    Someone joins her, and the white mare cannot decide who she wishes it was most. There are fantasies of different friends, different loves, joining her. Telling her she’ll figure it out, that someday it will be alright. Even though she can’t imagine how, even though death feels like the only attainable peace - and it isn’t even attainable for her. If she were to walk into the ocean now, would she be able to keep herself beneath the icy waves long enough to be claimed by the sea? Or would she just wash up on shore, her brain healed of the lack of oxygen.

    How has she gotten to this point? Driven mad by her own imperfections, eager for love and yet afraid of the frailty of it all at the same time. It was so easy to convince herself that seeking comfort from those she loved was selfish.

    Agetta does not respond immediately to the hello - and by the time she remembers it has been said it feels too late. It does belatedly stir her from her thoughts enough to turn and look at the stranger standing in the freezing cold water next to her. He is not familiar, which fills her with relief. From looking at him she does not know how she is connected to his family. Even in the darkness, she remarks the tint of his coat and a small hint of a smile appears just for a moment on her blood-splattered face though her dark eyes remain unfocused. “I had a daughter once who was purple like you.”

    A small pause.

    “I think she died a long time ago.”

    Agetta


    @[sleaze]

    me to Agetta:
    [Image: tenor.gif]
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    #4

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    The silence extends until it takes on a weight. Sleaze considers leaving, maybe sputtering out some apology, and moving on, leaving her alone with her thoughts. He shifts his weight, eyes tracing an exist, when she finally does speak. But it’s not the polite, distant greeting he’d expected. A comment on his color, the deep purple of it, almost indistinguishable from black.
    He'd been born black, like his father (like one of his fathers). He’d been black up until the day that trickster – that god? – had taken him, had thrown him recklessly into a new, impossible world.
    He had emerged from that world with splitting realities, a new color, and an awful power that he does not want, that he keeps quashed deep down inside.
    (There was a girl -- )
    “Oh,” he says.

    The same silence extends, and he’s distinctly aware of his own heartbeat. He’s nervous, has gone too long without speaking to others. Sleaze was never great with social graces, and isolation has only roughened that edge.
    There is still a chance to go. He could be nothing more than a brief, strange exchange, forgotten easily.
    But instead, he speaks.
    “I died, once. Well, several times. In a quest. Decapitated first, later burned alive.”
    He’d been brough back from that first death. And the second one, in the flames – it had mattered so little, by then. He had known nothing of himself, swallowed by new identities, a new reality that he sometimes still thinks of, still wants for.
    “I’m sorry about your daughter,” he says, as if he hadn’t just casually related it to his own false demises, when the daughter was gone and he was here, before her.

    Sleaze



    @[Agetta]
    Reply
    #5

    For a moment there is a bizarre sort of comfort over knowing others have walked back and forth between life and death but it does not last long. In its wake comes a flood of sadness for this stranger, amplified by how easy it is to imagine her daughter going through those horrors. Fire rippling along his - her - purple skin as she screams. She inhales sharply against this grief, against how unfair it is that these quests can bring such terrible things.

    She thinks of Garbage, forced to see the day he killed his mother. Thinks of the injustice of the broadcasting of that moment to anyone else that had slipped into the deserts that day as she had. It might have drawn them closer, that sliver of a shared piece of history, but she knew she had no right to those memories.

    Agetta closes her eyes, as though that will help settle her thoughts. It doesn’t and eventually the only thing to interrupt them is the voice beside her. He offers his condolences for her daughter, and she thinks she nods but she’s at a loss for how to respond verbally. How to say she did not even know for sure whether her daughter was dead or not and how that uncertainty stretched for all of her children but for the very latest.

    It wasn’t natural, wasn’t right, for her life to continue on while the bright stars that were her children flickered and faded into obscurity.

    When she finds her voice again, she chooses to drown in his sadness rather than her own.  “I’m sorry you had such violent deaths. Mine first was too.” Her memories of her encounter with Carnage were hazy now, that first taste of death, but there’s the lingering sensation of a crushed skull and a rotting corpse on the borders of the Gates.

    Her eyes remain closed as she speaks again, making a quiet confession into the cool night air. “And now that I’m ready for my second, I can’t seem to make it happen no matter what I try.”


    Agetta


    @[sleaze]
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    #6

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    Was it really him, who died?
    It’s a question for the philosophers. If you lose yourself so completely in a magic-made body, a new identity, and that body – that name – is the one that is beheaded, is the one that burns, was it still your death?
    Sleaze was there, somewhere – but Sleaze was buried under other identities. Other realities.
    Perhaps that was a kind of death, too.
    Whatever the case, he does not try to correct her, for the situation would be much too complex.
    (“Oh, it’s quite all right, for I was a toy, I was hers, I wasn’t myself….”)

    He focuses instead on the rest of her words. She alludes to her own deaths, likely closer to home then his, and he nods. He doesn’t know what to say to that – doesn’t know what to say to her at all, really, with the strangeness of this twilight conversation – but he listens. She speaks further, of another death that will not come, and he thinks, suddenly, of his father. Garbage had not idolized death – not then, not with Sleaze – but he had never spoken of it with any apprehension, and there had been an undercurrent of something in his words, something that unsettled Sleaze.
    “Why?” he asks, bold and stupid as the water rushes past his ankles, and he thinks she’ll leave for the insolence of his question, which, he realizes now, wasn’t even clear at all, so he doubles down, keeps on digging that grave.
    “What’s happened that’s made you ready, now?”

    Sleaze



    @[Agetta]
    Reply
    #7

    Agetta’s not sure why it doesn’t bother her to hear the question - but she barely even flinches. She’s the one that brought it up, after all.

    And maybe a part of her thinks this conversation isn’t even real. It feels surreal, and if her focus slips just a little more she can easily convince herself that it is Lillith there with her, ready to escort her into the ocean. Into rest at last.

    Instead of leaving, she’s quiet for a moment - not quite as long as her initial silences between responses but long enough. Her eyes are unfocused, staring at the horizon that is almost invisible in the night, when she speaks - her voice cracking as she tries her best to explain.

    Maybe, maybe she just needs to convince him that death is the right choice and then she’ll be able to let go.

    Maybe this is her last confession.

    “I loved someone, a love that passed through time and death and too many years to count. He came back to the world for me and would have given me everything. And then I fell in love with someone else.”

    And then she didn’t tell him for over a year, and then she didn’t tell that someone else the first existed either, and then she went and had sex with someone who used to be her greatest enemy (and by extension of that rendezvous, hurt a friend - but god we have to stop it somewhere). There is a limit after all to what she’ll say to a complete stranger.

    One of her hooves raises out of the chilly water and she takes a single step forward as she feels the despair rising up - eyes still fixated on the horizon. What if she just… walked until she couldn’t any longer? Could her body heal from that?

    For now, that step is all she makes and more words begin to spill out. “I’ve hurt them both now, though one of them still doesn’t know it. And I’m just… so tired of failing over and over. They’ll miss me, probably, but if I’m gone they don’t need to ever worry about forgiving me. I can just remove myself from the equation. And maybe they’ll remember the good parts and move on, and everything will be finally be okay. I think... I think I've been ready to die for a while now. I just was too scared to do anything about it before. Now it doesn't seem so bad.”

    Finally, she turns back (if he has not moved) to look at the stranger - her blood-matted hair tugging at her skin as she does but she wants to see his face, wants to know if what she has said makes any sense at all.


    Agetta


    @[sleaze]
    Reply
    #8

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    There has been very little of his life that has felt concretely real. Maybe Before (he thinks of it in that way – a proper noun, a time that he can barely imagine) things made more sense, had an order to them, a sense of grounding. But After –
    (this, too, is made proper, because it shaped – no, remade – him, and he was never entirely sure of himself as a result)
    well.
    So this makes its own stupid sense, that he is at a river talking to a pale woman whose name he does not know about death.
    She makes her confession, which is, of course, of a romantic nature – another thing Sleaze has little experience in. He’s loved, perhaps, but it was never healthy, and he had never told them that he’d felt such a way.
    (Etro, whose presence stole his power, who gave him peace. Malis, who confirmed his worst fears, but also confirmed a shred of sanity. Both gone to him, now.)
    He isn’t sure how to respond, so he only says, “oh.”
    It means so little. Everything means so little.

    She moves, then, takes a step into the river. He wonders if this is it, if she has had enough of this conversation. He wouldn’t blame her. She speaks again, and the words are heavier this time, and he realizes, suddenly, that he doesn’t want her to die. Her confession does not warrant a punishment such as death, and Sleaze thinks he might rather be loved and betrayed – if it was indeed betrayal – than not loved at all.
    “I think,” he says, “they would still rather have you alive. Even if you’ve hurt them. You’d want the same for them, wouldn’t you?”
    Sleaze does not know what it is like to be hurt by someone else, not really. There has been no one to hurt him. No one save for his father, and his sudden, unexplained departure, but he thinks he would forgive him for it, if their paths ever crossed again.

    Sleaze



    @[Agetta]
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    #9

    She doesn’t move again when he speaks, keeping her head turned around so she can watch him. It sounds so simple, coming from someone else, and her answer to his question comes without hesitation. “I would.” Of course she would! Whether or not she could forgive them was something else but Agetta knew she would be absolutely devastated if she were to learn they had died.

    She had been the lone wanderer, a ghost haunting Beqanna, and never wanted to feel the desolation that comes with knowing everyone you love has moved on but you are trapped in life alone. Agetta had wished for roots, for a new beginning, and she never could have expected it would have turned out like this when she got her wish.

    But this, it feels like it’s different. It is so hard for her to believe that her death would bring anything but a sense of closure and peace (perhaps after a brief time of pain).

    “But it’s so much easier to forgive others than it is to forgive myself. That’s something I haven’t yet learned.” In all her years, Agetta wasn’t even sure she had ever tried to learn that simple thing. She was still carrying the weight of mistakes she had done when she was a few years old and now she was - well, she didn’t know for sure but several lifetimes have passed since then. It was just so easy to tell herself that she deserved every pain and none of the forgiveness. Easy to give in to the dark thoughts that haunted her dreams.

    “Have you learned how to do that? To forgive yourself?” She asks quietly, as if this could be something she could be taught. Or maybe she is just looking for some hope.


    Agetta


    @[sleaze]
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    #10

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    He thinks about the question.
    It is not that he bears the weight of sins that need forgiveness. His pain comes from a different place – an unraveling of the self. He had glimpsed, or lived, a world that was not this one, and there he had found an identity – and it had been taken. Stripped from him, as the trickster told them it was make-believe, and Sleaze was left with nothing but a new purple coat, an ability he did not want, and the crushing, debilitating weight of those memories.
    But he has wronged no one – not in this world. Not that he is aware of. He is not close enough to anyone to hurt them, and vice versa. Sleaze is, in fact, remarkably unharmed in that area.
    His only harm came by the way of his own mind. The memories of the not-world, the unreality.
    Tigers and clowns and fire, oh my.

    She is waiting for an answer, still. So is he. What could he say?
    “I do not know myself well enough to forgive,” he says. This is true. He should be quiet, now. She doesn’t need to know the why.
    He isn’t quiet.
    “Years ago,” he says, “I was taken into another world. Put in a different body. A different everything. It felt…very real.”
    It was real. She loves us. She loves us.
    “There was a place for me there. I belonged. I died there. And then…then I was back here. As if it had never happened.”
    It’s still a surface-skimmed version of the story, but it’s more than she should have, as he speaks like a madman to her, the river coursing at his knees.

    Sleaze



    @[Agetta]
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