What the #?*!

It was time to go. Time to run. Ashe’s fingers twitched and her leg feathered towards the door, but Kalt was standing that way. She didn’t look at him, but she could feel him there, all that crackling energy triggered by the sight of a mask. She wouldn’t have been in much better condition if it had been her to see it, she knew. ’Just because we aren’t in the Guild anymore doesn’t mean the Guild isn’t in us.’ Alistair and Dev and her mother knew the.. Generalized story. She carefully glossed over what her life truly was in Northwind whenever she told her story. She never spoke of the training, the punishments when she got rebellious, the way Master handled her, the things she was forced to do that stretched so far beyond killing the people she had been paid to kill.    How was she supposed to tell any of them about those things? Why would anyone want to hear those kinds of things about her? She had tortured people to their deaths, had done terrible things to even Kalt, things she wasn’t sure she would ever forgive herself for. What was she to say about the cellar and the atrocities that she commit down there - those chains in the walls and the knives that dragged so smoothly through skin and the way she smiled when she did it? How was she supposed to explain the way she had known what would happen when she opened her bedroom door that night with that masked demon on the other side? Just thirteen.. knowing what he wanted... and she had opened the door anyways. The way she followed every order, cast her eyes away from that mask until she was commanded otherwise. The way he never removed his gloves, or anything else, when he put his hands on her. The way she would spend her night retching when he had his fill of her, curled up on the floor, wishing more than anything she were brave enough to end herself. How was she supposed to explain that running had never been an option before? And that the moment it was, she just never stopped.    She had been condemned for her running. She had betrayed her husband for not being able to tell him why she was running. For not waking him to come with her. For running at all, for not letting him coax her back to sleep with him. She had been damned for not being able to face this with Alistair… and now he wore a mask. He wore gloves with it… but it wasn’t his fault. Nothing was, he did absolutely nothing wrong - she was the one that betrayed everyone with her running and mistrust.    She hadn’t heard the footsteps approaching her. She flinched harshly at the first touch of hands with a sharp gasp. Her spine locked up and she held her breath - but slowly she exhaled as fingers brushed through her hair, it was a violently shaking body that was pulled back into Kalt, head pressed to his chest. Her response was near instinctive, her arms clasping tightly around his middle and holding on like letting go would been a fall she wouldn’t come back from. Maybe it was true. She stared up at him with a raw gaze - he had stripped her down to a part of herself she had kept smothered for two years. Gods, but he wasn’t okay either, was he?    ’Do not hide anything from me. Can you promise me that?’    She stared up at him with a hollowed out gaze. She had been unable to do that with Alistair, with anyone. She never faced this even on her own. She didn’t want to open up like this at all, to show the twisted, broken, rotted parts of her. It would hurt and it would throw her over an edge she wasn’t sure she would come back from. Would it be wrong to surrender to this when she hadn’t before?    ”I promise,” she just barely managed, but her voice did not feel like her own. She thought suddenly of the leather cord around her throat. The rings looped on it. Her brow furrowed and she cast her eyes down, pale and bloodless lips pressed together. Every part of her was trembling harshly as she went on with hollow exhaustion. ”What do we do, Kalt?” She didn’t know what to do with herself, with her arms that still clung to Kalt, with her legs that were threatening to give way beneath her, with any part of herself. Breathing was becoming a struggle as something began to rear its head in her, and she had to do something, anything -    She looked down to his hand, the one that still steadily bled. ”Stitches,” she said distantly. ”Where are your supplies?” She could steady her hands for that, because gods, she had to focus on something. ashe Isn't it strange that love is in the way? It never goes away.