[Like running full-tilt just to realize too late that he's skidded off a cliff— the words cut through his growing rage, leaving him balking on the back foot. The air bursts from his lungs and does not return, every subsequent inhale suddenly too shallow; he stares at Astarion for a few seconds too long, eyes wide, before he finds himself again.]
I mean people like her.
[The saccharine concoction Petras brought him has long since melted, neon colors now muddled and watered down. Fenris reaches for it anyway, draining the cup with a grimace. The sugar lingers on his tongue, nauseatingly cloying, but the world mercifully blurs a little more.]
Petty, pathetic children who despise their own weakness and take their bitterness out on anyone they can.
[Fenris, her lilting tone at such savage odds with the wide-eyed sadism shining in her eyes— and it's so overwhelmingly unfair that in the cloudy, smeared annals of his memory, it's that which he remembers with crystal-clear clarity.
And the thing is: he doesn't want to talk about this. He doesn't want to say her name, as if she is a wraith who might somehow be summoned by the mere invocation. He doesn't want to give her anything, even this conversation— and yet he's never much had a choice when it comes to her, has he?]
. . . Hadriana.
[Has he ever sounded so bitter?]
My— Danarius' apprentice. A bitch of a sorcerer from a middling family who knew she was fated to amount to nothing— and so took every opportunity to torment those beneath her, just to distract herself from that fact. She hounded my sleep, denied me food, humiliated me, and she . . .
[The silence hangs between them, black and jagged, full of a thousand memories impossible to articulate.]
They could be twins, she and Violet. They act just the same.
[. . .]
You ruined twenty-five careers before I came along, but you did not destroy their lives. You thrill in seducing lesser nobles just to laugh about their subpar skills, but you do not rip them apart just to say you could.
[Leon, Dalyria, Aurelia . . . there are shades and shades of grey, but they all of them pale when placed against something so starkly black.]
There is a difference. And she is not like the other vipers whose company you keep.
no subject
I mean people like her.
[The saccharine concoction Petras brought him has long since melted, neon colors now muddled and watered down. Fenris reaches for it anyway, draining the cup with a grimace. The sugar lingers on his tongue, nauseatingly cloying, but the world mercifully blurs a little more.]
Petty, pathetic children who despise their own weakness and take their bitterness out on anyone they can.
[Fenris, her lilting tone at such savage odds with the wide-eyed sadism shining in her eyes— and it's so overwhelmingly unfair that in the cloudy, smeared annals of his memory, it's that which he remembers with crystal-clear clarity.
And the thing is: he doesn't want to talk about this. He doesn't want to say her name, as if she is a wraith who might somehow be summoned by the mere invocation. He doesn't want to give her anything, even this conversation— and yet he's never much had a choice when it comes to her, has he?]
. . . Hadriana.
[Has he ever sounded so bitter?]
My— Danarius' apprentice. A bitch of a sorcerer from a middling family who knew she was fated to amount to nothing— and so took every opportunity to torment those beneath her, just to distract herself from that fact. She hounded my sleep, denied me food, humiliated me, and she . . .
[The silence hangs between them, black and jagged, full of a thousand memories impossible to articulate.]
They could be twins, she and Violet. They act just the same.
[. . .]
You ruined twenty-five careers before I came along, but you did not destroy their lives. You thrill in seducing lesser nobles just to laugh about their subpar skills, but you do not rip them apart just to say you could.
[Leon, Dalyria, Aurelia . . . there are shades and shades of grey, but they all of them pale when placed against something so starkly black.]
There is a difference. And she is not like the other vipers whose company you keep.