What the #?*!

Kalt stepped away from her, out of her reach, and she didn't move. She felt his absence with startling clarity,  though the rest of the world felt so... distant. Muted. Ashe blinked and followed Kalt's movements to the liquor bottle again, watching him, listening as he explained that he was aparently fine. Unusual that it would be undeserving of stitches - his knives were his pride. Something in her reacted to watching him drink from the bottle again, reacted without any real thought. She reached for a rag sitting on the counter, pristine and white, and her shaking hand fumbled for it before had a real grip on it. Stop, she tried to command herself, but she kept shaking. Fine, she was fine, she was fine. She tried not to look up at anything, kept her eyes on the floor until she reached Kalt. She first took his hand, somehow managing to find it with her light limbs, her numb fingers, pressing the dry cloth over his palm without a word. She wasn't sure where her voice had gone.    She reached for the bottle then, pulling it from his hands swiftly and then.. she had thought she was just going to take it away, but her numb chest was on fire all of a sudden as she drank deeply from what was left in the bottle. She didn't finish it, her eyes and nose suddenly burning as she was forced to lower the bottle with clenched teeth. Her head spun briefly, but then she did what she had aparently been intending. The bottle slipped from trembling fingers, shattering on the floor, and she flinched at the sound that felt too loud in her ears.    Wearing a mask. How similiar was it to Master's? Did it have to be, was that even the point here? Alistair was not the Master of Assassins, demon and tormentor. They had nothing to fear from him. Just the.. the constant reminder. Would have raped you. Nausea rose terrifyingly face all of a sudden, face draining of color as she had to make herself breath very slowly, to keep her churning stomach from emptying itself. She withdrew further, started diving down and down and down, and she finally blinked up at Kalt.    For a sharp second, Ashe considered the glass on the ground, thought of how glass felt when it was ground and pushed into skin, deeply into muscle and tearing through shins and knees. The impulse passed almost as soon as it flickered through her head, her body not quite reacting fast enough as she braced and hand on the counter. "Your back, you.. you did that... all those times," she rasped, her voice barely there. The scars that matched hers. He collected his over fourteen months until ... until ...    She was thirteen. Just thirteen the first time it had happened. And would have been sooner if he hadn't... Her shoulders curved inwards as her entire body shuddered, and she kept her eyes firmly on the ground as everything dimmed and pulsed. She had felt the propriety in Master's touch that day, she had known exaclty what would happen when he knocked on the door. When she had opened it for that masked figure. She'd let him in knowing what would happen when she did... knowing what would happen if she didn't. Waited for rough, unkind hands clad in leather gloves.    Her foot moved back to maintain her balance, and her heel moved glass together - she flinched even at that sound, and she dug her fingernails into her palm. "I'm sorry," she mumbled, her words not quite clear as she looked down at the glass and puddle at their feet. She kneeled down with a spinning head, but she didn't pause as her unsteady hands began picking up shards of glass, placing them into her other palm. She wasn't sure if she'd cut herself or if the blood was still Kalt's - she couldn't feel her hands anyways. "I don't want Theea to step on any," she explained in a voice that just wasn't hers - it belonged to someone else, whatever body this was she was stuck in - and the words felt so distant. ashe Isn't it strange that love is in the way? It never goes away.