You Sweet Fool

Ashe didn’t flinch away when her mother’s hand brushed her cheek, holding her there. A shiver rippled through her small frame and her heart raced at those words. You can always choose better. Ashe pressed her trembling lips together and shut her eyes with the kiss to her forehead, and she had a powerful urge to tear herself away, to dash into the trees. Her fingers twitched, but the assassin breathed in Vervain and reminded herself that this was her mom. It was a love she never could fathom having before, had been so sure that had been a chance lost to her so long before she ever took her turn into a dark and bloody side of the world. ”I don’t think there’s anything better in me to choose,” she said quietly. Ashe tilted her head down as her brows knit together, and she shook her head. She looked away and stared at the pheasant on the ground, her eyes hard. Everything she’d done… gods, maybe she could live with that, but what she became to do those things? Everything she allowed to happen to her… She felt her eyes prickling, and she glared at that pheasant as if it were the culprit. She throttled down the swelling in her chest and took a heaving breath. ”I’m a pathetic fucking coward.” Every sacrifice she made in blood to keep her and her father off the streets, then to pay off her debts, and then… she had made her rank among the senior assassins, and there would be no leaving the Guild after that - the risk of any of Master’s elite being free of his control was too high. And the things she endured, being broken over and over again. Every time her fire flared, it was thoroughly smothered and crushed. The cellar, the pit, the whip, those leather gloves… And what she became to endure. The bloodlust. The shame. And then she had finally run, gotten to Northaven… She thought finally facing her Master would be enough, but she’d been too late, hadn’t she? He’d shattered her, and she’d been too late in destroying him to stop it. Now she was left with all these broken and jagged pieces, and she’d cut apart everyone around her too many times. ”I choose wrong. Every choice I’ve ever made, everything I’ve ever done has been wrong. I’ve hurt people that were never meant to be hurt, wouldn’t have been if they didn’t know me.” She looked back at Vai, and for a moment, she wondered what life would have been if she’d had her mother growing up. If they’d stayed on that horse farm tucked into the roots of the mountains, the sea crashing against the coast so near to them. She wondered what life would have been if her father had never brought her to the guild, frozen and in death’s icy hands. Would she have survived without her Master having her healed? Maybe.. Maybe it would have been better, if she had frozen solid in that snowdrift. ”I can’t keep hurting everyone,” she said. ”And I don’t know how to be anything else other than this twisted thing that I am that only knows how to hurt people. It’s better when I’m not there.” ashetta it's live or die my way.