( if only she felt a saint for it, and not like a tomb that's been excavated, some half-dead thing that's been made to walk among the living. more shambling body than jacaerys velaryon. more sankt ilya drowning in chains — the mother to an abomination of nature, merzost polluting her marrow, carving out her bones to sow life where nothing should ever grow. giving pieces of herself away, little by little, until she's hollowed insides.
it feels like minutes stretched to hours by the time alicent's knock comes, each second prolonged by the pervasive grief living in her chest. she refuses to ask the existential question of how a year might feel, a decade, a century of loves lost and friends forgotten — whether she might withstand digging each grave, or if aleksander had truly known what she risked burying with them. alina rises, instead. goes through the motions of living as she peels open the door, creaking like the voice in her throat. )
You shouldn't be wandering alone.
( light-footed, she steps away to invite alicent inside. the scant bit of sunlight peeking through the drawn curtains does little but shadow the tired, swollen cavities of her eyes. spotlights the waning, waxing paleness of alina's complexion, and snow-white strands that melt through the dark fall of her hair, more severe for how it's been haphazardly pinned to the back of her head. a hundred tiny details that age her beyond her years, in a universe that has made her fragilely eternal, an immortal contradiction of frailness and power. )
[ at the sight of her, alicent looses a rush of air, as if her very bones were held aloft by it. her grief has worn down her queenly mask, features carved open, shadows etched beneath her eyes and skin sallow. the pale blue of her cloak contrasts sharply with her black dress, lace climbing her neck. she slips her hood back and shakes her curls free of it, spread across her shoulders. ]
[ first, she scoffs, unstifled. then, her tone drops, bone-dry by choice and coarse by cost, ] My goodbrother has deigned to seek his ruin and left me untended, fool that he is. [ a roll of her eyes, any thought for decorum gone with the latest round of revivals and attacks. ]
Better his sword meet another’s flesh and not Alia’s, when it looks like to crumble.
[ her word kept, albeit not by her hand. she did not seek to dissuade him from his end, only learn why he sought the man he named. perhaps predictably, he and aemond both lack the sense to interrogate their findings. the folly of men, ever-troublesome.
as she steps within the room, alicent assesses the damage to alia’s person, expecting crusted red upon her skin, not icy white threaded through her hair. guided by impulse, she hooks an unbandaged finger under a snowspun wave, stepping closer to examine it in the low light. ]
( thinly, the sides of alina's mouth stretch into a paper mache smile, frail and like to tear itself apart. if anything is unchanged, it's this: alicent hightower is unlikely to suffer a fool. pulled by instinct, the fat of alina's thumb smudges at the bruises painted beneath alicent's eyes, concerned by the dulled colors of her strength. she occupies no part of my heart any longer, paul had said, liar that he was. a boy searching for a mother, the way alina has always been drawn by a hard maternal hand, the way alina has ever been the orphan, unable to abandon the few things that have ever been hers.
mal. aleksander. now alicent. moth-eaten and riddled with holes, like keramzin's blankets, but still hers. in his death, she doubts paul's heart would begrudge her that. )
Men should have never made you a queen. ( this, she offers like an apology, for the barbs she had made on alicent's cleverness. men should have never made alina a queen, either, when she was always meant to be a reckoning. ) You should have been on a council, running circles around strategists.
( she holds still, for all that there's a small tense flinch in her shoulders, wanting to shy from inspection, the questions alicent must be shrewd enough to ask. you said i knew nothing of sacrifices, alina wants to say, still half-resigned to her bitterness. but i've never known how to stop paying the price for what i am. eyes drifting, she silently watches the strand loop around alicent's finger like a white-spun thread, instead. )
Perhaps he'll get lucky, ( he'll, she says, when it's we'll she means. bone-dry and flat, as if she's already coming to expect otherwise from such a rash choice. one she can't condemn, regardless, with baela taken from him. ) And he'll put down one wolf, by some ill-advised miracle, but I'm not wagering my life on it.
[ just as alina flinches from her inspection, alicent braces under her touch, certain that a slap would sting less than the gentle arc of her thumb. why do you destroy yourself? her father’s eternal question looping in her unquiet, sleepless mind and aching fingers. a counter forms now where she has never before allowed it: how dare he ask why she burned, when it was he who walked her to the pyre?
the compliment (and she sees it as such) finds her wounded flesh, a balm to the deepest and oldest ache inside her. ]
They give us roles to imprison us. [ agreement, almost warm, on her tongue. roles within and outwith the game, for how different is a wolf from a pawn, or a mayor from a queen? ] I was not clever enough to see it as a girl, but now.
[ a shake of her head, a tousle of her hair, attempting to rid herself of lingering weakness. now alicent knows she did not lose her way. it was taken from her. she will not allow that again. ]
Nor should you. [ you meaning we. ] It shall remove one uncontrollable piece from the board, regardless. [ daemon, a known danger, or david, an unknown threat. it matters not. she releases the white strand only to slide her hand under alina’s sharp jaw, meeting her gaze. ]
And leave the wolves for us to claim.
[ like a prized kill or a cursed throne. they’ve three shots in the game and an endless number outwith it. better odds than the last round, if they aim wisely. ]
( nodding, alina's chin tips under the blade-point of alicent's touch. imperial defiance, even as her neck strains under the weight of an invisible crown. not for alicent, no. but those that would see them as movable pawns on a board, two queens stripped of the protection of their knights and rooks. for the way they must want her to feel cornered into their checkmate, weak and vulnerable. easy to own, easier to control. a victory they might have succeeded in, if aleksander had not taught her the hard lesson of how to play a gruesome game.
a harsh swallow bobs her throat, the ragged line of scar tissue at her throat pulling taut. the soreness lingers, but it's a pleasant pain — secondary to the hole in her chest, keeping paul close to the chest, like a burial plot. )
Aemond wants to know who I've slighted. ( the corners of her eyes crinkle, but there's no spark of warmth in her eyes. just something vacuously tired, grimly resigned to the reality they live in. her fingers reach out, cuffing alicent's wrist, a ghostly light touch. ) I think it would be easier to list who I haven't insulted, lately.
( a breath billows out of her, though there's no sign of alina deflating, held taut to attention. rest, so many had said before. you should be resting. as if there's any peace in hiding away under the covers, and pretending the monster in the corner away. as if she can trust them with paul's justice. as if she isn't the voice who speaks for him, when his own can't. )
He views it from a place of pride. ( no insult meant to aemond, but it's what's to be expected of princes, upheld by their titles. nikolai would take it much the same — another point in favor of his vanity. she strokes, idly, over alicent's pulse point. ) But the only men who have ever hunted me were sick with obsession.
[ alicent can’t help but follow the line of the scar with her too big eyes, then with a delicate finger. a flickering gaze, checking for pain. she has never been harmed by a man in any way that would leave a scar, even as they diminished her, kept her, spilled themselves inside her. decades of little mockeries and neglect. larys had never even touched her — and yet he took from her all the same, bleeding her with every visitation.
there is something to be said for the undeniable, irrefutable brutality of alina’s harm. none can deny her. none can say she did not suffer — though men have tried, alicent grants. she may wear her pain as armour and reflect it back on those who would question it. ]
That is the way of it. [ men. ] They want for power — possession. They will take what would threaten them and think they might keep it. [ didn’t daemon ruin rhaenyra to buckle her claim? hadn’t larys sampled her flesh so she might be cowed by him? once cole had her, he thought he could command her. name her alicent, not your grace. ] Or they will cast it aside, as if that might lessen their weakness for it.
[ she thinks of aemond’s repeated dismissal of her and fails to keep the sourness from her pert mouth. ]
Let us take from them instead. [ with unmasked venom, she clarifies, ] Someone gave Daemon the name David Collins. I know him not, but I know Daemon as well as if he were mine own wretched brother, for all my husband loved and resented him — he is a Targaryen, forged in blood and fire. He trusts dragon dreams above all. If he has not seen it, someone else has and told him thusly. [ a necromancer, a seer. ] A tall man with a mask of pink, red or orange.
( it takes concentrated effort to hold rigidly still, allowing alicent to inspect alina's grooves like a grotesque sculpture, carved by sharp hands and sharper cuts. power. possession. the bite engraved in alina's shoulder itches with phantom pain, as if it were fresh punishment — for her foolish hope there was anywhere in this world she might run from the darkling's shadow. anywhere he would not, could not follow her. even here, she lives with the ghost of his cruelty, his darkness threaded through her power like the blotted oozing of an ink stain. the one shelter she might have had, collapsed, the moment paul and alia had become its crumbled pillars.
a hard-learned reminder that there is no safety, for creatures like her. morozova's stag, meant to be mounted as a trophy on a collector's wall, for the prize of it. for the power of it. anxiously, she spins the loosened band of leto's ring where it dangles from a finger, rotating with the gears in her mind. )
I've never spoken with him. I couldn't tell you what he even looks like. ( her gaze drifts to a distant corner of the room, looking more like a memoriam for the dead than a space for the living, with the relics of paul's books stacked high. alina's expression pinches, like a screw being tightened, to keep from what wants to spill free from her. ) But I've suffered the hatred of strangers all my life for what I am. Perhaps he didn't need much more of a reason to wish me dead.
( her mother's daughter, first. grisha, second. a misfit among misfits. the glassiness of her eyes wipe themselves clear with her next blink, more alive than ever, with alicent's venom seeping beneath her skin, her insides corroded by a fresh burst of grief. )
Whoever came for us didn't come alone. They wanted the comfort of knowing I wouldn't survive. Or — ( they had wanted paul gone, punishment for the life he had spared. one death, traded for another. alina's mouth pinches, steels itself from its wobble, as her eyelashes flutter. a rapid shuttering, against the moisture that swells. coward would be too kind a name for it. ) Does David Collins have allies among us? Friends? Family? A lover? Enemies he might convince, even.
[ alicent abandons the scar to cup alina’s pulse in her neck, thumb soothing unmarred skin. her eyes flit over alina’s features, taking in every shift and pinch. if it becomes too great, she’ll draw away. the thought of losing alina — of both her and rhaneyra being taken —roils inside here. she’ll not forget how alina looked that first morning, bled and bruised to the edge of death. ]
A fair point. [ quiet and thoughtful, a conflicted look crossing her face. ] He is a recent arrival, unlikely to be allied with others.
[ she swallows hard, then. for the first time since she entered the room, her eyes drift from alina, fixing elsewhere. ]
There is another, of course. [ spoken from faraway, in the depths of her memory or the halls of her grief. ] Hawkins Fuller has kept the details of Embry's death to himself until this day. [ a hesitant look back. ] He believes Danny Johnson to be responsible, the same man Ash named. The circumstances of his death were — [ she falters, features crumpling at the thought of embry laid out in the chapel as alina was in the maze. ] Similar to your attack.
[ an almost pleading look in her eyes. do not make me speak the violence into reality again. ]
( alina's imagination has always been an overactive thing. to her benefit, mostly, under ana kuya's strict watch — marching her pencil across the page, so that she might only ever imagine the brutality of the frontlines, a soldier more valuable for her maps than her trigger-finger. she can't say it's to her advantage, now, as it fills in every horrific, grotesque detail alicent can't bear to share, like the very taste of it in her throat might open it.
as alina's had. as embry's must have. her mind fills in the details of a blank canvas for her, in shades of gore and viscera — embry, shattered like a stained glass window. embry, bleeding into the basin of an altar. embry, made into a sacrilegious carving, at home in the vicious pages of the book of saints. her throat bobs, choking on nothing but air and frothy bile. scoffs through it, like the saliva clogging her mouth doesn't taste like sputtering up blood, the unforgettable stain of copper on her teeth, on her tongue, on the knife that kissed her that night. )
And I thought Nikolai held the title for most seasoned liar I've met.
( for days, the blood in her veins has coagulated into thick sludge. now, she can hear the rush of it in her ears, feel new rage revive the clamminess of her pulse. it kicks to life beneath the trap of alicent's thumb, thundering like a drum. it's hardly the first time a man has set her on fire to keep himself warm — revolting, still, is the reminder that this is all she'll ever be. the lamb you lead to the altar in offering to please an angry god. the sacrifice that needs to be made.
alina's mouth twists into an angry, snarled knot. for all that she tries to restrain it, her temper has always burned bright and incandescent. )
And he said nothing? ( her fingers blanch into fists, tight enough she can feel the bone creak. ) So it was my head under the executioner's axe, and not his?
He said nothing. [ her voice firms and sharpens in turn. justice for embry, denied. alina, endangered. rhaenyra, killed. ] He begs forgiveness, but I have none to offer, as I know you do not.
[ she still harbours softness in her heart for him — for the one who tim loves best — but it seems a tainted thing, shaded by the knowledge that his duty is only to his his own. alicent doubts he would count her among that number. and she cannot have faith in his judgment now, besides. ]
One who thinks nothing of women is as dangerous as an obsessive.
[ for their carelessness will always cost the most innocent among them. hawk watched alina turn and turn in search of her attacker; tim listened to her draw the parallel between alina and embry. cruel, fanatical precision ended them both. ]
Tim will accuse him this night and another will name David. One of them is responsible, I know it. [ venom on her tongue. ] Your suffering in this game will end, Alina.
[ alicent doubts there is anything to be done about the suffering that will continue beyond it, but she can do this — support the accusations and spread the votes. like a politician. like hawk. ]
( self-loathing bleeds her more than the sharp curve of a knife ever had. the darkling. hawkins fuller. david collins. danny johnson. every man she hadn't taken for a wolf until it was too late to ignore the glint of canines in the dark, oblivious to an obvious threat. she shakes her head, like it might shake free the wool from her eyes, her permanent blindness to their intentions.
her fingers drift from alicent, a slow fall — like even that small uptick in energy exsanginuates what's left of her strength. when the rage empties, all she has is — this. too much space to fill inside of her. the invading grief that follows like an overgrowth of weeds, strangling anything else that tries to grow. the feeble cold that tries to seep into her bones, her warmth smothered under the thin layer of merzost lingering in her soul.
she drifts to the window, sifting her fingers beneath the straining october sunlight, just to feel its kiss on her skin. just to watch the light refract from paul's father's ring, turning metal-warm, as she spins it around her finger )
You were wrong to say I haven't sacrificed. ( numbly matter-of-fact, resigned to the truth wedged between them like a double-edged sword. alina can't move forward without impaling herself on it, without thinking of alicent's cutting condemnation. ) I thought I could escape it here. I thought ...
( her voice trails off, a pensive heartbeat of thought. )
I thought I could be free from making the hard choices, the decisions everyone else seems to suffer for. But the shadow of it follows me everywhere.
( it should be me, she doesn't say, but the truth remains: there isn't a single soul that hasn't met their punishment for following her. genya, marred. nikolai, monstrous. mal, fated for death. every fallen grisha crumpled under rubble, every soldier she couldn't save from the darkling's slaughter. wetly, she exhales. )
Thinking I could be anyone but who I am — it's never worked. I don't know why I thought it would be different for me, this time.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
it feels like minutes stretched to hours by the time alicent's knock comes, each second prolonged by the pervasive grief living in her chest. she refuses to ask the existential question of how a year might feel, a decade, a century of loves lost and friends forgotten — whether she might withstand digging each grave, or if aleksander had truly known what she risked burying with them. alina rises, instead. goes through the motions of living as she peels open the door, creaking like the voice in her throat. )
You shouldn't be wandering alone.
( light-footed, she steps away to invite alicent inside. the scant bit of sunlight peeking through the drawn curtains does little but shadow the tired, swollen cavities of her eyes. spotlights the waning, waxing paleness of alina's complexion, and snow-white strands that melt through the dark fall of her hair, more severe for how it's been haphazardly pinned to the back of her head. a hundred tiny details that age her beyond her years, in a universe that has made her fragilely eternal, an immortal contradiction of frailness and power. )
no subject
[ first, she scoffs, unstifled. then, her tone drops, bone-dry by choice and coarse by cost, ] My goodbrother has deigned to seek his ruin and left me untended, fool that he is. [ a roll of her eyes, any thought for decorum gone with the latest round of revivals and attacks. ]
Better his sword meet another’s flesh and not Alia’s, when it looks like to crumble.
[ her word kept, albeit not by her hand. she did not seek to dissuade him from his end, only learn why he sought the man he named. perhaps predictably, he and aemond both lack the sense to interrogate their findings. the folly of men, ever-troublesome.
as she steps within the room, alicent assesses the damage to alia’s person, expecting crusted red upon her skin, not icy white threaded through her hair. guided by impulse, she hooks an unbandaged finger under a snowspun wave, stepping closer to examine it in the low light. ]
no subject
mal. aleksander. now alicent. moth-eaten and riddled with holes, like keramzin's blankets, but still hers. in his death, she doubts paul's heart would begrudge her that. )
Men should have never made you a queen. ( this, she offers like an apology, for the barbs she had made on alicent's cleverness. men should have never made alina a queen, either, when she was always meant to be a reckoning. ) You should have been on a council, running circles around strategists.
( she holds still, for all that there's a small tense flinch in her shoulders, wanting to shy from inspection, the questions alicent must be shrewd enough to ask. you said i knew nothing of sacrifices, alina wants to say, still half-resigned to her bitterness. but i've never known how to stop paying the price for what i am. eyes drifting, she silently watches the strand loop around alicent's finger like a white-spun thread, instead. )
Perhaps he'll get lucky, ( he'll, she says, when it's we'll she means. bone-dry and flat, as if she's already coming to expect otherwise from such a rash choice. one she can't condemn, regardless, with baela taken from him. ) And he'll put down one wolf, by some ill-advised miracle, but I'm not wagering my life on it.
no subject
the compliment (and she sees it as such) finds her wounded flesh, a balm to the deepest and oldest ache inside her. ]
They give us roles to imprison us. [ agreement, almost warm, on her tongue. roles within and outwith the game, for how different is a wolf from a pawn, or a mayor from a queen? ] I was not clever enough to see it as a girl, but now.
[ a shake of her head, a tousle of her hair, attempting to rid herself of lingering weakness. now alicent knows she did not lose her way. it was taken from her. she will not allow that again. ]
Nor should you. [ you meaning we. ] It shall remove one uncontrollable piece from the board, regardless. [ daemon, a known danger, or david, an unknown threat. it matters not. she releases the white strand only to slide her hand under alina’s sharp jaw, meeting her gaze. ]
And leave the wolves for us to claim.
[ like a prized kill or a cursed throne. they’ve three shots in the game and an endless number outwith it. better odds than the last round, if they aim wisely. ]
no subject
a harsh swallow bobs her throat, the ragged line of scar tissue at her throat pulling taut. the soreness lingers, but it's a pleasant pain — secondary to the hole in her chest, keeping paul close to the chest, like a burial plot. )
Aemond wants to know who I've slighted. ( the corners of her eyes crinkle, but there's no spark of warmth in her eyes. just something vacuously tired, grimly resigned to the reality they live in. her fingers reach out, cuffing alicent's wrist, a ghostly light touch. ) I think it would be easier to list who I haven't insulted, lately.
( a breath billows out of her, though there's no sign of alina deflating, held taut to attention. rest, so many had said before. you should be resting. as if there's any peace in hiding away under the covers, and pretending the monster in the corner away. as if she can trust them with paul's justice. as if she isn't the voice who speaks for him, when his own can't. )
He views it from a place of pride. ( no insult meant to aemond, but it's what's to be expected of princes, upheld by their titles. nikolai would take it much the same — another point in favor of his vanity. she strokes, idly, over alicent's pulse point. ) But the only men who have ever hunted me were sick with obsession.
cw: sexual assault
there is something to be said for the undeniable, irrefutable brutality of alina’s harm. none can deny her. none can say she did not suffer — though men have tried, alicent grants. she may wear her pain as armour and reflect it back on those who would question it. ]
That is the way of it. [ men. ] They want for power — possession. They will take what would threaten them and think they might keep it. [ didn’t daemon ruin rhaenyra to buckle her claim? hadn’t larys sampled her flesh so she might be cowed by him? once cole had her, he thought he could command her. name her alicent, not your grace. ] Or they will cast it aside, as if that might lessen their weakness for it.
[ she thinks of aemond’s repeated dismissal of her and fails to keep the sourness from her pert mouth. ]
Let us take from them instead. [ with unmasked venom, she clarifies, ] Someone gave Daemon the name David Collins. I know him not, but I know Daemon as well as if he were mine own wretched brother, for all my husband loved and resented him — he is a Targaryen, forged in blood and fire. He trusts dragon dreams above all. If he has not seen it, someone else has and told him thusly. [ a necromancer, a seer. ] A tall man with a mask of pink, red or orange.
[ he could very well be her first attacker. ]
cw: references to xenophobia
a hard-learned reminder that there is no safety, for creatures like her. morozova's stag, meant to be mounted as a trophy on a collector's wall, for the prize of it. for the power of it. anxiously, she spins the loosened band of leto's ring where it dangles from a finger, rotating with the gears in her mind. )
I've never spoken with him. I couldn't tell you what he even looks like. ( her gaze drifts to a distant corner of the room, looking more like a memoriam for the dead than a space for the living, with the relics of paul's books stacked high. alina's expression pinches, like a screw being tightened, to keep from what wants to spill free from her. ) But I've suffered the hatred of strangers all my life for what I am. Perhaps he didn't need much more of a reason to wish me dead.
( her mother's daughter, first. grisha, second. a misfit among misfits. the glassiness of her eyes wipe themselves clear with her next blink, more alive than ever, with alicent's venom seeping beneath her skin, her insides corroded by a fresh burst of grief. )
Whoever came for us didn't come alone. They wanted the comfort of knowing I wouldn't survive. Or — ( they had wanted paul gone, punishment for the life he had spared. one death, traded for another. alina's mouth pinches, steels itself from its wobble, as her eyelashes flutter. a rapid shuttering, against the moisture that swells. coward would be too kind a name for it. ) Does David Collins have allies among us? Friends? Family? A lover? Enemies he might convince, even.
no subject
A fair point. [ quiet and thoughtful, a conflicted look crossing her face. ] He is a recent arrival, unlikely to be allied with others.
[ she swallows hard, then. for the first time since she entered the room, her eyes drift from alina, fixing elsewhere. ]
There is another, of course. [ spoken from faraway, in the depths of her memory or the halls of her grief. ] Hawkins Fuller has kept the details of Embry's death to himself until this day. [ a hesitant look back. ] He believes Danny Johnson to be responsible, the same man Ash named. The circumstances of his death were — [ she falters, features crumpling at the thought of embry laid out in the chapel as alina was in the maze. ] Similar to your attack.
[ an almost pleading look in her eyes. do not make me speak the violence into reality again. ]
cw for violent/gory imagery
as alina's had. as embry's must have. her mind fills in the details of a blank canvas for her, in shades of gore and viscera — embry, shattered like a stained glass window. embry, bleeding into the basin of an altar. embry, made into a sacrilegious carving, at home in the vicious pages of the book of saints. her throat bobs, choking on nothing but air and frothy bile. scoffs through it, like the saliva clogging her mouth doesn't taste like sputtering up blood, the unforgettable stain of copper on her teeth, on her tongue, on the knife that kissed her that night. )
And I thought Nikolai held the title for most seasoned liar I've met.
( for days, the blood in her veins has coagulated into thick sludge. now, she can hear the rush of it in her ears, feel new rage revive the clamminess of her pulse. it kicks to life beneath the trap of alicent's thumb, thundering like a drum. it's hardly the first time a man has set her on fire to keep himself warm — revolting, still, is the reminder that this is all she'll ever be. the lamb you lead to the altar in offering to please an angry god. the sacrifice that needs to be made.
alina's mouth twists into an angry, snarled knot. for all that she tries to restrain it, her temper has always burned bright and incandescent. )
And he said nothing? ( her fingers blanch into fists, tight enough she can feel the bone creak. ) So it was my head under the executioner's axe, and not his?
no subject
[ she still harbours softness in her heart for him — for the one who tim loves best — but it seems a tainted thing, shaded by the knowledge that his duty is only to his his own. alicent doubts he would count her among that number. and she cannot have faith in his judgment now, besides. ]
One who thinks nothing of women is as dangerous as an obsessive.
[ for their carelessness will always cost the most innocent among them. hawk watched alina turn and turn in search of her attacker; tim listened to her draw the parallel between alina and embry. cruel, fanatical precision ended them both. ]
Tim will accuse him this night and another will name David. One of them is responsible, I know it. [ venom on her tongue. ] Your suffering in this game will end, Alina.
[ alicent doubts there is anything to be done about the suffering that will continue beyond it, but she can do this — support the accusations and spread the votes. like a politician. like hawk. ]
no subject
( self-loathing bleeds her more than the sharp curve of a knife ever had. the darkling. hawkins fuller. david collins. danny johnson. every man she hadn't taken for a wolf until it was too late to ignore the glint of canines in the dark, oblivious to an obvious threat. she shakes her head, like it might shake free the wool from her eyes, her permanent blindness to their intentions.
her fingers drift from alicent, a slow fall — like even that small uptick in energy exsanginuates what's left of her strength. when the rage empties, all she has is — this. too much space to fill inside of her. the invading grief that follows like an overgrowth of weeds, strangling anything else that tries to grow. the feeble cold that tries to seep into her bones, her warmth smothered under the thin layer of merzost lingering in her soul.
she drifts to the window, sifting her fingers beneath the straining october sunlight, just to feel its kiss on her skin. just to watch the light refract from paul's father's ring, turning metal-warm, as she spins it around her finger )
You were wrong to say I haven't sacrificed. ( numbly matter-of-fact, resigned to the truth wedged between them like a double-edged sword. alina can't move forward without impaling herself on it, without thinking of alicent's cutting condemnation. ) I thought I could escape it here. I thought ...
( her voice trails off, a pensive heartbeat of thought. )
I thought I could be free from making the hard choices, the decisions everyone else seems to suffer for. But the shadow of it follows me everywhere.
( it should be me, she doesn't say, but the truth remains: there isn't a single soul that hasn't met their punishment for following her. genya, marred. nikolai, monstrous. mal, fated for death. every fallen grisha crumpled under rubble, every soldier she couldn't save from the darkling's slaughter. wetly, she exhales. )
Thinking I could be anyone but who I am — it's never worked. I don't know why I thought it would be different for me, this time.