[SEASONAL EVENT] belladonna

ASHE some people survive chaos, and that is how they grow,    Ashe, too, heard her mother out in silence. Her lips were set into a grim line, but she heard her out. She had to remind herself again and again that she hadn’t given her mother a chance to understand, all she had to go on was assumptions and guesses on what little Ashe had given her to work with. Of course, she was right that Kalt was arrogant.. but he wore that arrogance like armor. She knew better than anyone the man underneath it. She didn’t look away from Vai, kept her gaze steady and in silence until she glanced down to the ring once again upon her finger.    She remained silent for breath before she looked back up at her mother. "It's like you want him to be evil. I have known and trusted Kalt since I was five years old," she replied, words hard. "Quite the leap from the single month I knew Alistair before I handed my soul off to him and agreed to marry him." Had her mother even known that Ashe had impulsively agreed to marry a man she barely knew? Because she was so desperate to mend the cracks in her soul, as if anyone but herself could fill in the missing pieces. She hadn't understood back then why she still felt so alone when she had been trying to fill up the empty space with all the wrong things. She shook her head and looked out into the trees. "I had tried to give it to him once in the Guild, and he refused. He'd said not unless we were free. So yes, I bonded myself to him." Until they could freely walk hand in hand, he'd said.    She sighed deeply and looked back at her mother with her brows pulled upwards and together. "Mom I haven't told you about the Guild," she pressed quietly. "The story I gave you was... mild. You say it takes a dark heart to find things to smile about in the life we lived but... Gods, should we have never found reason to smile at all? The kind of monster I'd be without what little good we made for ourselves..."    Her chest burned as she tried to consider what life could have been without those flares of light in the endless dark. "When I was seven, after I made my first kill, it was Kalt that got to my rooms for my night terrors before Master did. He helped me handle them so Master wouldn't have me beaten for such weakness." Her voice stayed quiet, and steady, but it was.. strange.. to say these things out loud, to encompass these things into actual words and not memories. "He and I used to sneak all over the Keep and play pranks on the other senior assassins, on each other just for a chance to laugh at something that wasn't bloody. There were nights when we were older and we'd sit by the fireplace in my room, and I'd read stupid poems out loud to him, or he'd play his guitar. Sometimes after one of us had a night terror, we'd sneak down into the kitchens in the middle of the night and he'd cook something for me. When I fell in love with music from a new play at the theater, he stole the sheet music for me. He was the one to help me put all my pieces back every time I broke."    The assassin finally glanced away from her mother, her throat tight. Gods, how could she possibly, truly explain? "We were made to do such terrible things... terrible things to each other. Beyond just assassinating our targets, you couldn't understand what life was like in the guild. Our lives were dark, full of pain and training and abuse and more training and more abuse, manipulated every moment of every day by our Master, all of us were. We became what we had to become to survive, to stay sane. We found ways to enjoy what we did or we would have never come out on the other side." Her lip trembled for a second before she bit the inside of her lip, throttled down the emotion. Talking about this out loud.. "The things Master did to me, to us.. Our hearts are dark, but are we so terrible for finding ways to smile at.. innocent things through all of that?"    Ashe had to look down, and she fell silent. She felt quite out of breath after speaking so much. When had she started talking like that, opening up like this? She gathered herself enough to look back up at Vai with searching eyes. "Ask me what you want to know, and I'll tell you," she said quietly. "But he is not the kind of monster you have painted him so badly to be." and some people thrive in chaos because that is all they know.