There's still life in the Armageddon

Evie

I dreamt in the sound of your voice

and bathed in the color of your love

It’s unfair, but Evie can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the word gaslighting. She’s certainly not doing that right now, but it paints Mara’s vitriol in bright hues that Evie just…doesn’t have the energy or hurt to match. She has done her bleeding of the wound. Now she is just tired.

“I’m telling you my side, not excusing myself. The situation was too complicated and cruel and fucked up for it to be as simple as me hating you.” She frowns heavily, exhaling sharply through her nose in contrast to Maea’s bloodless knuckles and raised voice. “It wasn’t your fault. But that’s the point. Frankly Maea it wasn’t about you. Whether that makes you feel better or worse, everyone I hurt was so insignificant in the grand scheme of my suffering that so little of it was personal.” Shaking her head, she adjusts the way her dress sits on her skin for lack of anything else to do with her hands.

“I didn’t give you the chance because why would I? My life was on the line, Maea. If someone came after me, my parents wouldn’t protect me. Not like yours.” A safety in numbers and familial love that Evie had envied so badly it burned. “I thought about telling you constantly, though,” she confesses, far more softly and with eyes downturned. “But we were - all of us - so weak back then. Physically, magically. I didn’t think you could protect me against my family or the people who would hate me.” She bites her lip, remembering the terror she’d lived with everyday. It’s why she had hated Maea so much, why she had been so cruel. It had felt like the only revenge she could silently enact without giving away the truth of her emotions. “My parents knew, y’know? But even they demanded I pretend with them. I was taught from birth that I couldn’t trust anyone. My mom would slap me anytime I tried to mention it.” Her father had been too far above it to do more than leave the physical reprimands to her mother. It wasn’t like he’d cared for Evie’s mother much, given how Amalia came into the world. “How could I have broken that sort of mold on so many maybes? With such dire consequences?”

Evie hadn’t learned to trust anyone for many years more. Even Amalia had been lied to in so many ways, and in the end Amalia had returned the favor plentifully. They were both such damaged young women that Evie can’t blame her for it, but it helps that she’s gone. Just as it had been easier when Maea was presumed dead. You can’t ask for forgiveness from the dead, and Evie had been forced to do the rest of her growing on her own. “I was so bitter and lonely, surrounded by all these people who only knew and liked the fakest version of myself. You never pretended to be anything you weren’t, and it made me so jealous. So angry.” And she only expands upon it because it’s a compliment, really, to Maea’s dedication to her own sense of self. Proof that even back then, Evie hadn’t been blind to what made her special.

Shifting, Evie faces Maea fully, whether the Ancient turns to do the same or not. Her expression is open and deadly serious as she takes a long moment to collect herself, wanting to ensure Maea knows she’s not about to apologize on a whim. “I’m so sorry, Maea. For my cruelty all of our childhood, and how it continues to hurt you now.” Her voice wobbles slightly, and she has to take another deep breath before she can continue. “I can’t apologize for not trusting you, but I can tell you now that I believe you would have kept my secret if things had been different. I see your virtues, as I always have. And I’m sorry I didn’t praise them when you needed to hear it most.” And though it feels good to say instead of living with the words in her head for years, Evie can’t help but grieve too. Anyone who could possibly apologize to her the same way is dead and gone, and she’ll never know if they ever saw her kindly too. If she has amounted to anything in their eyes, though she has tried to stop caring about their approval given how terrible they’d been.

And The most beautiful thought
Is the fact that I have always loved you