What the #?*!

She was forcing controlled breaths through her nose, teeth grinding together as she fought against the blackness pulsing in her vision. Don’t faint, she told herself dimly. Don’t faint. It was worse to wake up hurting and not know what had been done to her than it was to be aware. Ashe didn't have a choice but to follow the tug on her hand, the sensation tilting her world until she found herself sitting in Kalt's lap, leaning against his bare chest as she stared with unfocused eyes at the table.    ’He's dead.’ The words didn’t make sense, not at first. It didn't seem real, that it was even possible for her to have killed Master. He might as well have been a god himself for how all powerful he had been. He was the masked demon that haunted every breath, every thought, every moment, the shadow that loomed over the two of them for the majority of their lives. He was the monster that tasted her and took from her and kept her pinned down under him, the demon who's leather-gloved hands were burned into her skin. She wasn't entirely aware of the way she white-knuckled Kalt's hand. He's not a threat anymore.    Ashe was shaking like she was hypothermic with bloodless lips, but she dimly registered that Kalt was warm. Her arms drew inwards, and she felt the pull of muscles in her legs as they tried to curl inwards too, but they didn't seem to work. Shaking, shaking, she couldn't stop shaking. She glanced down to her hand, and her entire body jolted with a flinch at the sight of her bright red hand, covered in Kalt's blood, and she could feel those gloves - ’Steady blade, blue. Come on. I need you with me here.’    She squeezed her eyes shut against the memory with a sound that might have been a whimpered no, before she held her breath. Kalt had been chained to the wall, the knife in her hands, Master just behind her, his voice in her ear telling her to continue to filet Silver Wing, the thing she did to him -    ”He's dead,” she repeated out loud, making herself say it. She kept her eyes squeezed shut as she breathed through the rolling waves of nausea that had her stomach tensing. She was silent again for a time, trying to pull herself back from that night. She still held painfully tight to Kalt's uninjured hand until she finally opened her eyes. ”After I ripped him open,” she said quietly, her voice feeling muffled and shaky in her ears. ”I didn't change back to an original. I didn't wash the blood from my teeth or my fur. I went home, and I slept.”    She tried not to think too hard about that night. She had discovered Master that morning, told her family about him.. and that night? She had slipped out of her home, gone to him in her furs. She hadn't shown her face to the man that ruined her, had ripped his chest open with feral eyes and let him tremble and wonder who she was. She had been tormented with never knowing his face until right then, and he hadn't deserved to know who finally killed him. Right until her jaws snapped shut around his heart.    ”I slept for thirteen hours,” she went on, and her voice still shook. ”And I thought when I woke up, I would feel relieved, or rested. Instead I woke up feeling…. Hollow.” She didn't know where the words were coming from, where her voice was coming from. But she could feel his hand. His bare chest under her head. His skin. ”I went to the river and washed my fur. I laid in the sun. I waited to feel it, but it never came. I told my family what happened, that it was finally over. And.. the world kept going.” She paused, her voice getting thick, but she had let the words out. As if opening a floodgate, she couldn't seem to stop them now.    ”But my whole world had just… stopped. I thought that when he was finally dead I could be free, I thought I could finally live this life I had been allowed to step into, but the relief never came. The night terrors did, so much worse... and time."  Ashe paused again. Nothing but time to live with the lonely, wretched beast she had become. "Suddenly all this time, and all I could ever see was the mask the blood and the fear and.. There was no demon to hunt, no war to fight. I couldn't sleep, wouldn't, I couldn't stay in bed with him, or stay still with the emptiness, so just.. ran. Hunted. Trained. Fought. Anything, anything so I didn't have to look at the emptiness where happiness and trust should have finally been. That was all Alistair wanted, was for me to be happy and to trust him. And I couldn't give it to him, even before I killed Master, I couldn't.. He looked at my soul and the horrors in it and never seemed to see that I was drowning, or thought just by loving me and saying I was getting better he could save me...” Now he wears a mask. "I looked at him and hated myself for feeling so alone when all he wanted was trust." But when she looked at Kalt, even without the rings...    Her voice was quiet and broke on some words, but gods, she was talking, and she couldn’t stop now. Even as her eyes filled, even as she swore she could still feel those gloves and see that mask tilted down at her. She suddenly wished she felt nothing at all, that she had some heart of stone. Instead of the shredded bit of blackness it now was, bleeding it's ichor into her. Still unmoving, still shaking violently, she squeezed her eyes shut again.    ”I thought that killing him would fix everything,” she whispered. ”But I think I killed a part of myself.” ashe When all the days go by in the firelight We'll never fade out in the night