[SEASONAL EVENT] belladonna

ASHE some people survive chaos, and that is how they grow,    Ashe shook her head when her mother finished, slowly and deliberately expelling the air from her lungs. Old habits.. Like drinking and starting fights with anyone who looked at her the right way? Never sleeping and electrocuting herself to stay awake for weeks at a time? Getting arrested? Never eating and over-training? "My withdrawing.. Vanishing and leaving everyone behind? That started well before I even knew Kalt was here. It started before Alistair even left me, mom, none of it had anything to do with him - it was me."    Yes, in Northaven she had been so much more connected. She had been with her family and friends all the time.. but she had also been more reckless. Unhealthy. Obsessive. Full of nothing but self destruction and desperation. It had gotten so much worse... after.. "It was killing my Master that triggered it," she admit quietly. Each word seemed to sink like a stone in her as she looked back up to Vai, and she sat back in the dirt and let her hands fall limp in her lap. "I had won. I killed him, finally it was over. No more wondering when I would look up and see that mask tilted down at me or wonder which one of my friends he would kill next or if he'd give me an ultimatum. There was... no more war to fight."    Her throat tightened with these words that burned from her chest, and she had to look away, to the trees to breathe. "I should have felt free.. and I didn't. I was hollowed out. Numb. I wasn't supposed to survive that fight, mom. I never expected to live long enough to see the other side of it, I... I hadn't wanted to. So I just... let everything go. The night terrors got worse, I stopped seeing anyone, even my husband. He woke up alone night after night because I just kept... running. He never did grasp how deep my demons were, and he couldn't have known how to handle any of it. His way of handling it was sooth it away until I could ignore it again, and that just... it was eating me alive and I didn't even know it." Ashe knew better now. She knew Alistair had not done anything maliciously or selfishly, he had done the best he could, and he'd been hurt as a result. She had hurt a lot of people while she was hurting. But she would not be demonized any longer. Alistair took her pain that neither of them knew how to handle and threw it in her face, told her she was incapable of love, that her poor, wretched soul couldn't be saved. Fuck that.    She looked back at her mother with a tight-lipped, grim sort of smile. "When he left me.. that was it, I guess. I had made enough mistakes, hurt enough people, ruined enough lives, and my fight was over. You know how long I disappeared and.... I wasn't going to come back. I wasn't.. But Kalt is an assassin that knows how to find an assassin. He revealed himself to me before I could do something... permanent. He had nothing to do with me leaving everyone behind, he was just.. making sure someone was around. Righting a serious wrong that had happened between us and helping me figure some shit out." She knew part of the issue had been that Kalt didn't reach out to any of her family himself... but he had his own issues, didn't trust anyone.. anyone but her, really. As irritated as she'd been at him first approaching her mother, she'd been surprised. Appreciative now, for extending a hand he had never extended to anyone before. "I.. I know that I can be more.” She thought back to that enchanted mirror she had peered into in Northaven over two years ago, how she had promised herself just that: that she would be more. And how she had said much the same thing to Kalt at the beginning of deepfrost, for both of them. She gave her mom a small smile. ”Kalt and I are both growing into whatever we are beneath the Guild.” They would forever be monsters, true, but they could be more. and some people thrive in chaos because that is all they know.