[Closed]
Who: Priscilla (oneforthewar) and... her personal demon.
When: Forward-dated a little to... Monday morning.
Where: All over Anatole and Dismas.
Format: (Arguably pretentious) prose forever.
What: She thought she didn't have a Shadow. As it turns out, she did.
Warnings: It's basically a short story. And it's long, slightly disturbing and arguably depressing. Also: violence! Stabbing! Prostitutes! Corpses and mindfuckery! Italicized flashbacks! Bad poetry! Headcanon! Break the Cutie trope abuse! What isn't there to warn for?!
In Musha, the sun always seemed to be shining. It filtered through the green leaves, settled on the grass, and turned the air all gold and platinum and multicolored with the reflections of flowers and water and vines. The towns were small there, at least in her home region; her own town was been all dirt roads and humble houses, rarely more than one story.
And there were farmers, yes, of course, living in the nearly empty spaces between the village roads and the hills beyond, beside the twisting river that ran near her home, and Priscilla would watch them bring their goods into town - crates of cheese, pitchers of milk. There, in the marketplace, they mingled with the men carrying barrels of apples, or the women with their weaving. Bolts of cloth, pottery, and then... art, humble things. The craftwork of those with too much free time, like the wives, the unmarried daughters, the sons of the one wealthy family in town.
This, then, was home to her - a tiny town, thriving and self-sufficient but small nonetheless. She had lived there for all of her short years, spending most of her days at play, or doing chores around the house. She spent much of her time balanced on her father's shoulders as he went on various little errands, or as he did his work. He, himself, had been -- (what? No, why can't she remember?) -- and he liked to bring her with him on those days. Together, they walked - or he walked, with her riding on his shoulders, his hands holding her feet steady, singing.
Now goes the sun above the trees -rise
Now comes the moon, and sun sinks below
Now comes the tide to break on the shore
Now comes the stars that command the night ski--
(They walked like this, didn't they? Her hand in his-- no wait, he held her ankles so she wouldn't fall, and she watched the world turn from emerald to midnight green as the sun set behind the town from that elevated perch above even his head, and they returned from the river and they watched the lamps lit in the dirty streets.)
* * *
She was busy the day they found a cache of things hidden inside the ruins, at that site where Priscilla had worked for three days before wandering away.
It's hardly surprising. In point of fact, she is always busy - a million things to do, papers to sign and patrols to walk, and she had to put aside time for him too, so that he wouldn't forget that she loved him and so that she wouldn't forget it either. Responsibilities, both required and chosen. Responsibilities, personal and professional. Sometimes she wonders if she created more responsibilities so that she won't need to find something else to do with her time. It's nothing she minds, really.
Even so, finding out about those things, the cache of belongings connected to the Scorched before her - before even the first arrivals of their generation - via whispers from those who were there... ah, well. It's a little annoying. Even if she isn't sure why she cares.
...the walk from the headquarters to the square takes longer than she expected. She sets out at human speed, wrapped in her cloak (pale grey, heavy and fine, her metal boots clicking over the cobblestone roads. It's dewy out - that strange kind of weather suspended halfway between winter and spring, where the largest snowbanks still line the street, but the gutters are damp with water from the melting - and Priscilla can feel the seasons changing in her bones, the way she felt the death of summer, the slide into autumn. She can feel it like she feels the pebbles that crack and grind to dust under her feet. Like she can feel the weight of her sword on her back.
Like she can feel a jolt inside her body when she looks over that display, when she sees that painting, when she registers that familiar face staring at her from decades ago. And her yoki rises up inside her like a tidal wave, for a moment . It surges, crashes against her eyes, and her temples, and her fingers trace the edge of the frame (gold, like something fine, something cherished) and tremble, and if it weren't for the thought that he wouldn't want her to be swallowed, she might lose herself right here, or there, in the streets. Surrounded by thing she doesn't recognize, with the painted eyes of her father on her tear-streaked face.
It's nearly dawn before she moves away. Nearly dawn when she moves through the ruins under the light of the crimson-streaked sky, the red sun, the orange and gold clouds. The red settles in the mist that curls around her, all hazy scarlet, like bloody fog, and she reaches that site by the fountain... trembling. She moves through that uncovered door, still unsteady. That's where the rest would be - the bits of recovered everything that couldn't be sold, that couldn't be displayed. Things like--
Things like journals. Like writing.
Like the books she finds, hidden in the corner, obscured by piles of clothing and broken furniture. Under a dagger she knows well (didn't he carry it on his hip?) and under the shattered remains of a bookshelf.
And she remembers him writing, every day writing, when they came home from the riverside, and when dinner had been eaten, the dishes cleaned and left to dry. She remembers him in the common room - the one room they had aside from their bedrooms, hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling-- what? She doesn't know. But now she's holding a journal in his hand, and she knows that writing, even now, even ten years and two worlds later. She knows it like she knows her own breath, her own heartbeat. Like she knows the feeling of her yoki, and the weight of her blade.
His dagger. She presses her lips together, slips it under her cloak with trembling hands.
His books - three of them. She presses them close to her chest as she leaves, moving too quickly to be spotted. Leaving no witnesses, shaking when she stops.
...on the roof of her home, surrounded by the trickling sound of melting snow, the rising light of morning, she curls with her blades, and her cloak shielding her from the wind, and she reads until she falls asleep.
(The stories, they melt her and freeze her and turn her backwards, upside down, inside out. The memories - how he missed her, the way he writes her name or her sister's, her mother's, her brother's. He was a carpenter, wasn't he? Yes, she remembers now, because he talks about it here, and here, on this page, he says how work is harder to come by here than it was at home... with all the magic, with all the strange powers. Here, he says he's learned to hunt. Here, he says he misses home.)
She tries not to think about Gaskin, that murderer.
She tries not to think of how her father's story ends.
* * *
There's a corpse in the ruins, and it ruins her damn day. No pun intended.
A little girl, now freshly killed. Her blood is still running, spilling over the broken stones, and her hands are cold and white and clutching dead vines in the gutters by a chunk of collapsed wall. Her eyes are open too - brown, wide, staring at nothing. Priscilla presses her eyelids closed, and wishes she knew a prayer to... someone. Someone she could call to - some spirit to watch over the soul of this dead little girl. If she even has a soul. Priscilla rubs her face as she stands, and for a moment she's glad to be alone - that she isn't here with Isley. His lack of sympathy over these things would wear on her, she thinks. It would turn her grief to frustration, turn it to rage.
Then again, maybe those things would be better than sadness.
Priscilla takes a video, tells the public. Be careful, there's something wrong - someone killed this girl, she says, it was no animal - the killer used a knife. And she feels sick when she says it, feels the cold steel of a dagger blade in her chest for just a moment, till she chases away dark memories with the brush of her finger against the weapon at her side.
...she has her father's dagger with her, strapped to her hip where she normally keeps the ones she bought to spar with Senji. In a pouch with her money purse, with her smaller weapons, she has a journal, too. She doesn't know why, not exactly. Why she can't put them away, put them down. Why she's read over six months of entries twice in the day since she's known they existed. Why she cries whenever she stops to think about it - whenever she thinks of how she could have seen him again if she had just arrived sooner.
(But no, that's not true. She knows that it is because her heart is a heavy, aching thing - and because for all its weight, its gone empty, now. Because she can't stop staring back over the unbridgeable canyon of time.)
She has these things with her, and she reads as she walks back from the ruins, to the city. She'll go to Byakuya, then - tell him someone has been killed. These things are outside her jurisdiction, and outside her realm of concern. At least in theory they are - in the end, she can't stop that twist from appearing inside the hollow of her chest. That little girl's face, she thinks, it was so like her sister's.
And maybe it's because she's already thinking about her sister, and that day when she-- (stop. Don't.) --because she's already thinking about her sister that she feels his eyes on her, settling on her. It's an odd feeling, like tingles up and down her spine, spreading from her center to the edges of her fingertips and toes. And when she looks up, she sees him - that old, familiar face. But this time his eyes, his stare, it's not paint on canvas anymore. This time, it's real. And she can see that gleam in his eyes, the way the light twinkles there, and of all the moments for her to reach for words and find empty air, this is by far the worst.
It doesn't make sense. Her mind tells her this. Gaskin murdered them all, didn't he? They should all be gone. Except no - hadn't she heard of some of them, older generations of Scorched melding in with the city, living undercover? She had heard... yes. Something like that. And maybe he had been one of them, maybe he had been... oh. Her throat tightens when she thinks of it, but why wouldn't he contact her, why--
But doesn't she know? Her fingers raise, instinctively, unconsciously, to her hair - silver-white and blond, that unnatural platinum color. She was a silver-eyed witch. And oh... no, if he were still here... if he had his Forge, he might have seen her battle with Riful, the things people said about her. He might know what she is. He might know she is a monster.
Maybe something too monstrous for even a father to love.
Still, she tries to stand, and reaches for her words, and comes up with nothing long after he disappears back into the city.
It's only then, on her knees, hands covering her eyes, crying into her palms... that she remembers that she was a child the last time he saw her. That she doesn't know how long he was gone, replaced by that yoma. She could have been six years old, even five years old. She could have been even younger. Between her age and her hair, her eyes, he--
He may not even recognize her, now.
It's three hours later that he finds her, sitting in the park, clutching her knees to her chest, covered in the heavy grey of her cloak. And she can feel her insides tremble when she lifts her face, her silver eyes meeting his dark ones. The wind rips through the skeletal trees, whistles in her ears, stirs her hair, and once again she has nothing to say.
"I know you," he says. "You're a silver-eyed witch." The words sound strange in that voice (she remembers that voice, even now, and ohitsbeensolong), and they fall strangely from his tongue - as though he isn't used to saying them. As though he's uncomfortable with them. He turns, almost leaves. Another wind blows, and the puddles at his feet, near the bench, they ripple like tiny oceans, little lakes. A second later, he pauses, and his voice is soft when he says, "You remind me of my daughter."
One breath. She shakes, a tiny bit, starting at her core and filling her up until it overflows and her eyes are hot with tears. She calls his name (Daddy? The only name he's ever had, to her), and he says, "Priscilla?"
She nods. And her father stares at her, taking in her face, her features so unchanged despite the years, and her unnatural pallor. She watches him, watches every expression that flits over his face, and she can recognize the exact moment when he knows who she is.
He says, "Oh. Priscilla. Priscilla," and she clings to his jacket and cries against the flat of his stomach until she has no tears left in her whole body.
* * *
She hasn't thought about it in a long time, but as it happens, Priscilla's suite is rather large. It's larger, in fact, than her entire house had been when she was a child, in that tiny village by the river. This is something she would never have thought about, if her father hadn't mentioned it the very moment he stepped inside. One step - his feet sink into the rug in the center of her bedchamber, and she watches his eyes take in his surroundings. Priscilla stands, strangely nervous, at his side, lingering by the door with her fingers resting on the door frame.
Though it is beautiful enough, and well-lit during the day thanks to the groups of floor-length windows that line her walls, it isn't especially luxurious. There is the rug, yes, and the massive bed, bur those are her only indulgences. Mostly, this is because she doesn't buy things. Only a bed, nightstands, a desk. Teresa (the cat) asleep on her pillow and Irene (the cat) on the windowsill by her desk. It's not luxurious, but it is... spacious. Even the presence of certain things - a man's boots, his cloak, the stack of books on his side of the bed - don't make the room feel particularly lived in.
...and speaking of him. She had known he wouldn't be home, which was good. She wanted to explain her situation... as much as she could... in her own time. To both of them. Isley would be happy for her, wouldn't he? Hadn't he wished this for her all those months ago, when he said that maybe yes, here he could fulfill his promise to her at last?
It would be more difficult explaining to her father.
A deep breath. She steps away from the door, taking off her cloak as she walks.
"I know it's big," she says, "It's not that I think I deserve more space than everyone else, but... well, I have the armory, and the vault. And I need office space to work in, and..." her voice trails off, and she gives him a humble, quiet little look, searching for his approval in the face of her sudden insecurity. All at once, she feels as though she's been selfish, taking so much room for herself. Even with the animals, does she really need such a large chamber? Until only a year ago, she'd been happy enough sleeping on the stone ground in the ruins.
He smiles, that gentle smile she remembers so well. "You don't need to explain yourself," he says, with a shake of his head. "I'm glad to see you've done so well. But..." his head tips a little bit - just like hers. Her throat tightens, constricts. And her father picks up a boot between two fingers. It isn't hers. "...ah. I had thought your kind was not permitted to marry."
Priscilla glances just off to the side, away from her father, and the silvery glint of light that plays off the edge of Isley's boot.
She could explain everything now - say she isn't married, not at all, though she is committed. Say she is committed to someone more horrifying than any yoma, more horrifying than her. Someone so powerful and cruel that even she steps lightly around his moods, around his pride. And she could step back, and tell him about her other love, her first love. The human man with the dancing blood, who still haunts her dreams sometimes. The man who was all prickles on the outside, and so good on the inside that he nearly died defending strangers, and even then wouldn't accept his own beneficence.
But this isn't the right time. So she smiles, genuine but small, and shakes her head. "Things are different here, without the Organization. We can... do what we like."
He sets the boot down again, and steps toward her again. His clothes, she sees, are humble even now - a simple pair of brown trousers, a simple, loose shirt, a jacket. He looks the way she remembers him (remembers it - they did look the same way, after all, even in the end), and just for a moment she's fighting back tears again, her fingers digging into the center of her palm.
Her father says, "So, what is it that you like to do?"
And Priscilla says, "Protect everyone." It's vague, and it's huge, and it's endlessly honest and incomplete all at the same time.
"That's very big!" He smiles, wider this time. His eyes sparkle, and he looks so young. It's strange, really - when she was a little girl, he seemed ancient, in a way, despite the spring in his step and the dearth of grey hair. The perspective of the young. Now she sees he can't be more than 30. If that. "Are you in that Patrol, then? I've heard about it. Aren't they headquartered... in this area?"
The pride nearly bursts inside her, overfull and overflowing. She says, "I founded it." And now she's crying again - no, just a tiny bit, her tears flowing over her cheeks in tiny rivers, and she isn't sobbing, because she isn't sad. For the first time in her life, since the day she held that axe, she isn't sad.
(She has a million dreams, a billion hopes, and all her emotions swirl inside her, a storm breaking in her chest, in her gut, in her head. She wants to tell him everything, and she talks till the sun creeps over the horizon and spills into her room; he says he has to go and kisses her forehead and she walks him to the gate and watches him leave with her fingers twisted up on the iron bars there, watching the red dawn light bathe him and the street itself. Watching the shadows play across the folds in his jacket. Watching the dark spots that mark a scarlet stain at the bottom hem of his trouser leg.
* * *
Priscilla doesn't remember how old she was that day, at least... not exactly. She remembers seeing her own hands, small and still a little chubby, folded in her lap as she sat in the corner. She remembers watching her reflection in a rapidly spreading pool of blood that made its way across the kitchen flood, seeping into the wooden boards there, trickling between the gaps, and puddling in the nicks, the scratches, the depressions.
But no, wait. Go back.
She remembers her father, one night, leaning over her as she scrambles into bed. His fingers push the curls back from her face, and he kisses her forehead with those slightly scratchy lips - chapped from the elements, from the dry heat, from passing on water more often than not. There's been a drought, she thinks - she heard her mother say something about it to a neighbor, and they were speaking in low voices as though they were trying to protect her - which they may well have been.
But that was a few days ago. Tonight, he pulls her blanket up, tucks it under her chin, and she smiles when he moves away. His hair curls in light brown locks around his forehead, just like hers, and he says, "Good night. Good night." She asks him for a story, grabs his hand with hers, and she know she'll barely make it past the first few sentences, because sleep is tugging hard on her body, and harder on her mind, and his voice is so soothing, how could anyone stay awake?
Quietly, quietly, he weaves a little story.There is a young noble girl, he says, and she's fled her home to see the world. The next village isn't far from her home town, but she insists on stepping into the forest, off the road, in case her parents come to find her. It isn't that she doesn't love them, of course, but she's so tired of being overprotected. Still, she stays near the road, just in case she meets a wild animal, or something worse.
Just a few dozen yards off of the road, she meets a young man, and they walk together, and they talk together. She says she wants to marry an artist. He says he wants to be a poet. Her heart skips a beat, and she follows where he leads - to a shortcut, he says, through the forest to the next town. And she isn't sure she wants to go, as the sun is setting, and the woods are dangerous by night. But he tells her she'll be safe, and he brags of the yoma he's slain - even more than some of the silver-eyed - and he shows her how his blade can cut apart trees, and she feels less alone than she did.
It's only in the depths of the forest, when she can no longer see the road, that she notices the golden gleam to his eyes.
Oh. She sleeps. She awakens just for a second. Just long enough to know he's doused the lamp, and that he kisses her forehead one more time before he leaves her alone in the dark.
Go forward. She asks why it's okay to kill animals just to eat - why its okay to kill, just so she can live. And he tells her it's the way life works.
"It's a circle," he says, "You see? Everything feeds the next thing on the chain." She cries, wipes away tears. She says she doesn't want anything to die. And her father smiles, ruffles her hair and says, "I know it's hard. But even plants have life, too, you see? You have to learn to forgive yourself."
He lifts her on his shoulders, and sings that song again. They're walking to town. He has an axe strapped to his back, and--
--and she can hear them screaming before she realizes why, or what's happened. Her mother is dead by the time she opens her eyes. Priscilla can see that. She's motionless, after all, and her eyes are open, staring up at the ceiling, her hands--
Her father looks up and wipes her mother's blood from his mouth. In the dim lamplight, everyone looks pale, and there are shadows in the sunken sockets of her father's eyes, in the exaggerated hollows of his cheeks. There are shadows in every gap between every one of his pointed teeth. And his eyes are glowing, gold like firelight, but bright - brighter than candle flames, brighter than fireplace light, and Priscilla feels... she feels like she's being swallowed up by that light.
He says, "You'll never reach the door," and pulls a knotted string of intestines from her little brother's hollow corpse.
He says, "Just sit tight there, daughter." And the word, daughter, it sounds like an insult. It sounds like a curse.
He says, "I've been waiting for this," as he pulls her sister close.
Priscilla squeezes her eyes shut, and her feels blood, hot and wet, spray across her face, and she's not breathing now, she's not thinking, and her sister, her sister is--
* * *
It's been a strange few days - days full of shadows and twisted things. Maybe that's why she hasn't told anyone yet. He's like a little secret, something she keeps to herself in those long days when the world outside her room seems cold, and everything has gone mad, and she knows - she knows without even asking about it - that no one will believe it's really him.
It's the timing. She knows that, too. She had found him too close to the time when all of those people arrived - those ghosts, all twisted up and wrong inside, and she hasn't paid as much attention as she should have, but she's paid enough to know that he isn't anything like them. That he is everything she remembers, and more - a good man full of good stories, who lets her lie across his lap when it's cold and they meet in the park, and pushes her hair back, and tells her that her choices are human. And when he says it, she hears it. Hears it in a way she hasn't heard anyone else when they've told her, too, that she's still a person. That being part yoma doesn't make her a monster, too.
She almost believes it, when he says it.
The only trouble is, he's late. And so she sits in their spot in the park (their spot, she says - it's been less than a week, and already their spot), watching the people, watching the dead grass. In the winter, no one uses the park for sightseeing, only as a shortcut on their way to other parts of the city, which allows them at least some small measure of privacy. As much as one can have, in public. But she knows that Spring will come, and there will be people here, sitting in the grass and picnicking on blankets. There will be sun umbrellas, and children by the lake, and she wonders if he'll go with her, and let her show him the spot at the far end of the lake where she hides when she's sad, and she needs to be alone.
Her head, it's full of thoughts like that, these days. Too full to concentrate, even with the dead children, the dead women. Even when the shadows, and her frustration over Isley. So many things don't matter now, or at least don't matter as much.
With her head full of thoughts, she can barely hear the scream.
Barely. But she does. And it's instinct that lifts her from the bench, her silver eyes flashing in the dimming light, scanning the crowd, scanning the park. At the moment, she's barely at its edge - only a hundred or so yards away from the nearest block of buildings, and that's where the scream is coming from, she knows it, though it's short and clipped at the end. And Priscilla glances behind her, and she glances at the buildings, and the empty spaces between them, and then she's there - like there was no space between her and them to begin with. Like there was only a step, or a heartbeat there.
Her daggers are already in her hands, though it's unlikely she'll need them.
Priscilla feels herself grow cold, enveloped by the shade, and all around her, there's this dripping sound - melted snow, melting icicles. She feels droplets on her face, and tracks puddle water through the damp corridor-like alleyways, but she follows... something. A trace of heat, a lingering scent. The sound of breathing. Whoever screamed, they aren't screaming now, but they may still be alive. Unconscious, maybe, or--
Or.
(She looks down - sees the spreading scarlet pool just before she sees--)
And her thoughts stop, just like that. They collide with the wall that is the sight of her father, dagger in hand, tearing steel through the gut of a woman who lies, prone, a bloody red puddle beneath her.
It takes him approximately two seconds to realize she's there. It would have been sooner, she thinks, except that she can't breathe. Except that she can't move. And with her not breathing, and not moving, she isn't making any noise, so he doesn't notice her, not until he lifts his head and draws back his blood-stained knife. And in that instant, as he's moving to stand, Priscilla can hear the wind, howling and rattling through the alley. She can hear the trees protest and clink their bones together. She can hear the footsteps of the crowd just a few yards behind, clicking down those cobblestone streets, and the chatter of innocents, and her heart pounding, and her own breath all ragged and jagged and staggering through her throat, and out of her mouth.
All of this - all of this - means she can't move. She can barely process the fact that he's moved.
And she only understands that he's stabbed her when she feels the hot blood running over her hip and down her leg. When she hears him melt away behind her, and feels him disappear for the second (the third?) time.
Priscilla stumbles forward a few steps, and she feels a scream of her own now - she hears it, echoing against the brick walls, just like she feels the stone under her knees when she falls to them beside that corpse. Her fingers are cold as the air - colder than the dead woman's (dead so short a time, she feels... she feels alive, and she would be alive if her body weren't hollow now. If her organs weren't exposed to the air). Against Priscilla's skin, that woman's feels almost feverish.
Priscilla says, "I'm sorry." She says it again, and again, and her voice cracks and trips and tumbles over itself as she presses that hand against her cheek, lets her tears wet the dead girl's fingers, and dribble down her hand, down her wrist.
"I'm sorry," she says, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." But she doesn't promise to stop him.
She doesn't know if she can.
* * *
This is what she knows: she should have stopped him. Now there's another corpse and another, and another, and Priscilla feels sick every time she thinks of it. And every time she thinks of it, she remembers that night in her house, when she was only a little girl, when she picked up that axe. She was so weak then, so weak and yet even then she wasn't helpless. Through the pounding in her head, and the sickly sound of eating, the scent of blood, she had found her footing, found her way - but now?
This time she had failed. Failed to stop him, failed his victims, failed herself.
And sometimes, stepping through the pale evening light, she wonders if it's her father here at all. Maybe it's just that yoma again, that monster with his face. But no, she'd feel his yoki then. Something familiar, crawling under her skin - the feeling of false faces, the feeling of unnatural power and lies.
She wonders, too, if the bloodlust that drove the creature that impersonated him had come from its nature, or from the personality of the man it had incorporated into itself. And therein lies the question she has so often refused to ponder, refused to even acknowledge. How long was he a monster, when she was a little girl. Did she even know her true father? How much of that gentility she remembers so clearly came from the monster... and how much of its brutality came from the man?
Where did one begin and one end?
She tries not to think of it very much, and yet it's the only thing that's in her head. The only thing ever in her head. It's in her head when she wakes up, curled around the menagerie of pets that serve as her roommates, and when she tries to concentrate through her duties in the ruins, where every creature she slays, every battle she walks away from, reminds her of everything she couldn't do, and everyone she couldn't save.
She keeps her eyes toward the alleyways, and she walks the rooftops over Anatole, watching the paths between buildings, looking for a flash of steel. The trouble is, like any city, there's bound to be more than just one killer roaming loose, and she stops three violent crimes in progress and still comes up alone.
It's rather fortunate, she thinks, that she doesn't need to sleep much. Because the days pass, and she performs her duties as a warrior, as a leader, as a lover - she performs them perfunctorily, and she spends her free hours listening to the click of her metal boots on rock, and on roofs, and against stone in the dirty ruins. Inhale - there's the scent of city life, of roasting meat at street vendors and dinner wafting from beneath doorways. There's the scent of decaying vegetation, rotting in the swamps. The scent of burning opium, the scent of perfumes and candles. She sees the city now, through every alley and every inch of the park where she first met him, again.
It isn't until the reports come out of Dismas that she knows what to do next.
Knowing, it brings a kind of calm over her. Like an inmate headed to the gallows, suddenly at peace with the tragedy of life. Priscilla leaves her sword in her bedroom, resting beside the one she gave to Isley for that midwinter holiday. She wears dull clothes, today - a soft grey cloak and hood hiding her trousers and blouse. Something to meld with the crowd, to hide her shockingly platinum colored hair. Her daggers are strapped to her side now, another hidden inside the folds of her suede boots, and she feels like she's marching off to war. And she feels as though she'll never return.
* * *
Stop. Go back.
Her father tells her, "Priscilla, you're going to grow up to be such a pretty girl," and lifts her in his arms. He says, "You see that butterfly? It means you'll have a long life, a good life. It's a sign." She laughs, and holds out her finger to let the butterfly settle on her fingertip.
This was yesterday.
But now, her sister is screaming.
Priscilla stands up, and her eyes aren't on her father now. They aren't on the mangled corpses strewn in pieces across her floor. Her eyes are on that puddle of blood, thick and shiny, reflecting her dress, reflecting her face, and she tiptoes around the edges of the ocean as it spreads over the floor. Vaguely, she becomes aware that there are still dinner dishes on the table, still an empty cup that he used for his favorite mead beside his chair. That his chair is, itself, pulled away from the table, as though he'd only just stood up. As though he'll be right back.
It's in the blood that she sees his face, buried in her sister's belly.
And she tastes her own blood in her mouth from the sharp edge of her teeth biting down, biting down, keeping her from crying out. And she feels the heft of the axe, something she can barely lift, and it's so heavy and so big compared to her tiny hands. There's this pain, too - the ache of her body straining something too large, and too heavy, for her to handle on her own.
(He held her hands in place once, showed her hold to grip it. He said, " If something happens to me, you'll need to know how to survive." And she said nothing would happen to him. She made him promise to stay.)
Her toe touches the edge of that blood as she steps forward. And POUND, the sound of her heart battering itself against her ribs, fluttering like a caged thing. Crash, her breath in her lungs, struggling to break free.
And then a thick, sickly noise when she brings the axe down on his neck.
(No, she doesn't forgive herself.)
* * *
Take one step down into the stairwell of Dismas, and she feels it. Or maybe it's just her imagination - that strange leeching like something is draining the life out of her even as she moves, step by step, inch by inch. Three steps and she feels the weight of the cloak on her back. It isn't uncomfortable. It isn't heavy. But it's noticeable, and that alone is something to take note of. By the end of the steps, she is hungry, and she is thirsty, and she is tired in ways she has almost never felt - certainly not in years. Not since she left training.
Dismas is a dark city living inside a dark cave. The perfume scent is heavier here, especially near the district where the prostitutes ply their trade, and the opium scent is heavier too - everywhere. Walk near the arena and smell the blood - something so thick and everpresent that it can't simply be washed away. There's blood, it seems, inside the very foundations there - as fundamental to the place as the sound of laughter and bawdy singing from the taverns, or the clink of money inside the casino.
It's different, here, than it is in Anatole proper. Even the people seem different - all suspicious gazes, inspecting her as they speak, asking for bribes for even ultimately useless information. They keep to themselves, or so she's heard. It isn't as though she's spent much time here.
It doesn't matter. She asks questions, takes descriptions, follows leads. And the corpses continue - dead in the alleys, dead in some woman's apartment. One little boy, gutted with a knife. And then a woman, gutted too. Priscilla ties not to throw up when she sees the bodies, and she's never felt so helpless. Never. Not even in that house all that time ago. Not even at Teresa's feet.
...it's luck alone that leads her to him at last.
Well, maybe not luck. A few questions, a generous bribe. He has been seen in the finer districts of prostitution, she hears - and yes, they're sure. He's been seen there. He asked for information on how to take up the time of one girl in specific. A girl neither adult nor a child. She isn't even a brunette. This is, from a certain perspective, a good thing. If the girl does not fit the pattern, then-- well. She may not be a victim at all. Just a service provider. Still, Priscilla hugs her cloak closer to herself and asks if they're sure, because somehow the idea of her father frequenting prostitutes is just as problematic as the murders have been. The bias, she supposes, of the child.
Acceptance comes slowly, during her second or third block, just before she knocks on the courtesan's door. The lights are on - she sees the lamps flickering through the windows. But inside, there is no movement. No sound. Another knock.
She hears something moving. Softly. So softly that she might not have noticed, if she hadn't been trained - if she weren't always aware of her surroundings. Priscilla presses her lips tight together, and moves to the groundfloor window... just in time to see a shadow disappear into a door inside - past the grand furniture, past the fancy rug, past the mangled corpse of a man lying in the center of the room.
"No." Did she say that? Did hadn't meant to, not exactly, and yet... "No no no." Her fingers grab at the latch, push it down, and its slick with... she doesn't know. It might be blood, or it might be her own sweat - she hasn't the time or the mind to check. Only to push and stop breathing when the door swings open without protest, into a room that smells like the back room of a butchery.
The man wasn't the primary target. That much is evident from the way his throat's been cut and the callous way he's been tossed aside. Like... something irrelevant. Even so, his blood still soaks the carpet, and every time she takes a step, there is this squishy-sticky feeling, and a rush of blood racing to the surface, spilling around her feet. It's not unfamiliar - not for someone like her, who kills for her living and always has. Someone who has walked in on slaughters more than once, and took her blade to the yoma who started it. Except it isn't a yoma this time, is it? It's--
It's not an unfamiliar feeling, but every footstep makes her sick. Like the low music playing from the phonograph in the corner - instrumental, slightly skippy. Click. Pop. There are the strings. Priscilla draws her daggers and keeps her eyes on the shadows. She says, "...Daddy?"
When she speaks, the shadows answer.
"Priscilla. I wish you hadn't followed me here." Click. Click. The sound of his footsteps against the wood that runs around the edge of the room. Click. "You never did know how to leave well enough alone."
She presses her lips together. Firms her resolve. "No, I guess I didn't." She can hear her own breath, whistling in her ears.
"...You've already healed from that cut I gave you." Silence. Her fingers touch the smooth place where her skin was once broken and bleeding. Behind her, at the edge of the room, her father says, "I guess you really are a yoma."
"No. No, that's not fair." Her answer comes without her thinking about it, like the way she follows his voice with her every usable sense - notes click on the floor, the shift in the bloody scent, the way the floor reacts to changing weight. But she doesn't look at him. Not even when he steps out of the shadows, and she feels his breath on her from only inches away. "I became what I am so I could avenge... it's not fair to say I'm a yoma. I'm not a yoma, I... I'm here to stop them, and..." And what? Her voice trails off into breath, and she can't find a finishing thought any more than she can understand why she started explaining herself to begin with.
And then her father slides a dagger into her back, almost softly, like a caress. Priscilla doesn't even scream. She doesn't have the voice for it.
The funny thing about Dismas is, there's nothing she knows there. She reaches for her yoki, tries to heal her wound, and there's nothing there. And for the second time since she's been in Anatole, she feels the trickle of her blood on her skin, soaking through her clothes, and she is afraid.
He says, "How could you avenge me? You're not my child, Priscilla. You're nothing but a monster."
She sobs, and her knees hit the bloody floor, and it hurts. It hurts more than the wound in her back. More than the gouge in her side had. It hurts more than Irene's betrayal, or Zack's; more than Arthur disappearing, or Senji walking away from her, or all the little ways Isley always tears her heart out just to see how it beats.
Her father stands over her, and the cold liquid dripping on her face is her own blood this time. Red, like human blood. "So much waste. You became a silver-eyed witch to avenge me." He snorts, and rolls his eyes. "If you wanted to do well by me and your mother, and live for your sister and brother, you would have gotten away from there before you were caught. Move in with a neighboring village, make a friend, get married. Instead, you became this thing."
He leans closer - so close she can smell his sweat and her blood. "What are you, anyway? Are you even good at being a butcher?"
Priscilla sobs, curls over her knees. "Yes," she says with her broken voice. "I was... the second strongest one. Even with no experience I was... they said... they said I would be the strongest. One day." (Strange, how a mind dashes over old subject, irrelevant things. She sees a man's face, someone from the Organization, and he calls her close. In a moment, he'll tell her about her power, about how special she is. She sees Teresa's blade raised above her head, and then Teresa's eyes flashing in the ruins, that battle neither could win. Smiling friends, and first loves with dancing blood, and golden eyes framed with silver-white hair. It all takes place in an instant inside her head, as though no time passed between each moment.) She says, "They said I was sp-special. That's why... everyone's afraid..."
Her father stops, and she can see the glint of lantern light sparking on the edge of that bloody dagger. It's dripping precious rubies. "They're afraid. Of course?"
"Yes. Because..." She wipes bloody streaks across her face in her attempts to brush away her tears. "Because I'm the most dangerous one.
"...because I'm a monster."
He laughs a little, quiet and almost kind. He whispers, "Do you remember that story I told you once, sweetie? About the girl who wouldn't stay on her path? She meets a golden eyed stranger in the forest, but she doesn't see those eyes burn."
"I remember." Wait. When was...
"I don't think I ever finished it. No... you fell asleep." A little breath. "He was a yoma, honey. He eats her alive. Savors every organ, every drop of blood. She doesn't stop screaming until he's halfway through her innards." He laughs, just a little, quietly. And then... "You're a monster, my girl. Then they should be afraid." He says this, and then he raises that dagger again. And just for a moment, she can't bring herself to stop him.
But there's a tiny click somewhere, miles away, past the desert and fog that is Priscilla's mind; a little click like a key turning, or maybe a latch that-- she jerks her head up just as the courtesan appears. The courtesan who was, no doubt, her father's true target. And Priscilla forces herself to grip her daggers again, forces herself to stand on her blood-stained feet, scarlet streaks running down her knees, down her shins.
And there, across the space of that entry hall, she meets that woman's pale-grey eyes, notes her pale blond hair, her full cheeked and youthful face. In that instant it hits her weight the weight of a collapsing building: woman with brown hair, children, and this.
In that instant, she knows he's been killing her own family- his own family - again and again.
Priscilla lets out a sound somewhere between a scream and a sob, and starts to move. She moves despite the pain, despite the wound in her back. Because this is what she is - what she's made for, and she's always meant to die protecting humans so maybe this is -- It's just in time for her father to start moving, too. His knife flashes again, and he moves two steps toward the woman before Priscilla's blade finds his throat.
It was instinct. Or second-nature. Years of training, and then nearly two on the field.
It was instinct, but it's also who she is.
There is a strange, sickly thump - something she knows so well, has known since she was a little girl. His body falls to the ground, twitching as his blood runs out over the carpet. Just for a moment, she feels the horrible weight of that axe, pulling her down. Her knees buckle under that imaginary weight, and she's back on the floor again, one dagger falling from her fingers, all slick with blood. She holds the other, in case he moves again... but he doesn't.
And there's another sound, now - that woman screaming, and screaming. Or maybe it's just Priscilla herself screaming? She can't tell, not anymore.
The woman wraps her arms around Priscilla, pushes pressure down on that wound, sobs, thanks her. And she makes promises... promises. She makes so many promises.
And Priscilla, she can't stop screaming.
When: Forward-dated a little to... Monday morning.
Where: All over Anatole and Dismas.
Format: (Arguably pretentious) prose forever.
What: She thought she didn't have a Shadow. As it turns out, she did.
Warnings: It's basically a short story. And it's long, slightly disturbing and arguably depressing. Also: violence! Stabbing! Prostitutes! Corpses and mindfuckery! Italicized flashbacks! Bad poetry! Headcanon! Break the Cutie trope abuse! What isn't there to warn for?!
In Musha, the sun always seemed to be shining. It filtered through the green leaves, settled on the grass, and turned the air all gold and platinum and multicolored with the reflections of flowers and water and vines. The towns were small there, at least in her home region; her own town was been all dirt roads and humble houses, rarely more than one story.
And there were farmers, yes, of course, living in the nearly empty spaces between the village roads and the hills beyond, beside the twisting river that ran near her home, and Priscilla would watch them bring their goods into town - crates of cheese, pitchers of milk. There, in the marketplace, they mingled with the men carrying barrels of apples, or the women with their weaving. Bolts of cloth, pottery, and then... art, humble things. The craftwork of those with too much free time, like the wives, the unmarried daughters, the sons of the one wealthy family in town.
This, then, was home to her - a tiny town, thriving and self-sufficient but small nonetheless. She had lived there for all of her short years, spending most of her days at play, or doing chores around the house. She spent much of her time balanced on her father's shoulders as he went on various little errands, or as he did his work. He, himself, had been -- (what? No, why can't she remember?) -- and he liked to bring her with him on those days. Together, they walked - or he walked, with her riding on his shoulders, his hands holding her feet steady, singing.
Now goes the sun above the trees -rise
Now comes the moon, and sun sinks below
Now comes the tide to break on the shore
Now comes the stars that command the night ski--
(They walked like this, didn't they? Her hand in his-- no wait, he held her ankles so she wouldn't fall, and she watched the world turn from emerald to midnight green as the sun set behind the town from that elevated perch above even his head, and they returned from the river and they watched the lamps lit in the dirty streets.)
* * *
She was busy the day they found a cache of things hidden inside the ruins, at that site where Priscilla had worked for three days before wandering away.
It's hardly surprising. In point of fact, she is always busy - a million things to do, papers to sign and patrols to walk, and she had to put aside time for him too, so that he wouldn't forget that she loved him and so that she wouldn't forget it either. Responsibilities, both required and chosen. Responsibilities, personal and professional. Sometimes she wonders if she created more responsibilities so that she won't need to find something else to do with her time. It's nothing she minds, really.
Even so, finding out about those things, the cache of belongings connected to the Scorched before her - before even the first arrivals of their generation - via whispers from those who were there... ah, well. It's a little annoying. Even if she isn't sure why she cares.
...the walk from the headquarters to the square takes longer than she expected. She sets out at human speed, wrapped in her cloak (pale grey, heavy and fine, her metal boots clicking over the cobblestone roads. It's dewy out - that strange kind of weather suspended halfway between winter and spring, where the largest snowbanks still line the street, but the gutters are damp with water from the melting - and Priscilla can feel the seasons changing in her bones, the way she felt the death of summer, the slide into autumn. She can feel it like she feels the pebbles that crack and grind to dust under her feet. Like she can feel the weight of her sword on her back.
Like she can feel a jolt inside her body when she looks over that display, when she sees that painting, when she registers that familiar face staring at her from decades ago. And her yoki rises up inside her like a tidal wave, for a moment . It surges, crashes against her eyes, and her temples, and her fingers trace the edge of the frame (gold, like something fine, something cherished) and tremble, and if it weren't for the thought that he wouldn't want her to be swallowed, she might lose herself right here, or there, in the streets. Surrounded by thing she doesn't recognize, with the painted eyes of her father on her tear-streaked face.
It's nearly dawn before she moves away. Nearly dawn when she moves through the ruins under the light of the crimson-streaked sky, the red sun, the orange and gold clouds. The red settles in the mist that curls around her, all hazy scarlet, like bloody fog, and she reaches that site by the fountain... trembling. She moves through that uncovered door, still unsteady. That's where the rest would be - the bits of recovered everything that couldn't be sold, that couldn't be displayed. Things like--
Things like journals. Like writing.
Like the books she finds, hidden in the corner, obscured by piles of clothing and broken furniture. Under a dagger she knows well (didn't he carry it on his hip?) and under the shattered remains of a bookshelf.
And she remembers him writing, every day writing, when they came home from the riverside, and when dinner had been eaten, the dishes cleaned and left to dry. She remembers him in the common room - the one room they had aside from their bedrooms, hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling-- what? She doesn't know. But now she's holding a journal in his hand, and she knows that writing, even now, even ten years and two worlds later. She knows it like she knows her own breath, her own heartbeat. Like she knows the feeling of her yoki, and the weight of her blade.
His dagger. She presses her lips together, slips it under her cloak with trembling hands.
His books - three of them. She presses them close to her chest as she leaves, moving too quickly to be spotted. Leaving no witnesses, shaking when she stops.
...on the roof of her home, surrounded by the trickling sound of melting snow, the rising light of morning, she curls with her blades, and her cloak shielding her from the wind, and she reads until she falls asleep.
(The stories, they melt her and freeze her and turn her backwards, upside down, inside out. The memories - how he missed her, the way he writes her name or her sister's, her mother's, her brother's. He was a carpenter, wasn't he? Yes, she remembers now, because he talks about it here, and here, on this page, he says how work is harder to come by here than it was at home... with all the magic, with all the strange powers. Here, he says he's learned to hunt. Here, he says he misses home.)
She tries not to think about Gaskin, that murderer.
She tries not to think of how her father's story ends.
* * *
There's a corpse in the ruins, and it ruins her damn day. No pun intended.
A little girl, now freshly killed. Her blood is still running, spilling over the broken stones, and her hands are cold and white and clutching dead vines in the gutters by a chunk of collapsed wall. Her eyes are open too - brown, wide, staring at nothing. Priscilla presses her eyelids closed, and wishes she knew a prayer to... someone. Someone she could call to - some spirit to watch over the soul of this dead little girl. If she even has a soul. Priscilla rubs her face as she stands, and for a moment she's glad to be alone - that she isn't here with Isley. His lack of sympathy over these things would wear on her, she thinks. It would turn her grief to frustration, turn it to rage.
Then again, maybe those things would be better than sadness.
Priscilla takes a video, tells the public. Be careful, there's something wrong - someone killed this girl, she says, it was no animal - the killer used a knife. And she feels sick when she says it, feels the cold steel of a dagger blade in her chest for just a moment, till she chases away dark memories with the brush of her finger against the weapon at her side.
...she has her father's dagger with her, strapped to her hip where she normally keeps the ones she bought to spar with Senji. In a pouch with her money purse, with her smaller weapons, she has a journal, too. She doesn't know why, not exactly. Why she can't put them away, put them down. Why she's read over six months of entries twice in the day since she's known they existed. Why she cries whenever she stops to think about it - whenever she thinks of how she could have seen him again if she had just arrived sooner.
(But no, that's not true. She knows that it is because her heart is a heavy, aching thing - and because for all its weight, its gone empty, now. Because she can't stop staring back over the unbridgeable canyon of time.)
She has these things with her, and she reads as she walks back from the ruins, to the city. She'll go to Byakuya, then - tell him someone has been killed. These things are outside her jurisdiction, and outside her realm of concern. At least in theory they are - in the end, she can't stop that twist from appearing inside the hollow of her chest. That little girl's face, she thinks, it was so like her sister's.
And maybe it's because she's already thinking about her sister, and that day when she-- (stop. Don't.) --because she's already thinking about her sister that she feels his eyes on her, settling on her. It's an odd feeling, like tingles up and down her spine, spreading from her center to the edges of her fingertips and toes. And when she looks up, she sees him - that old, familiar face. But this time his eyes, his stare, it's not paint on canvas anymore. This time, it's real. And she can see that gleam in his eyes, the way the light twinkles there, and of all the moments for her to reach for words and find empty air, this is by far the worst.
It doesn't make sense. Her mind tells her this. Gaskin murdered them all, didn't he? They should all be gone. Except no - hadn't she heard of some of them, older generations of Scorched melding in with the city, living undercover? She had heard... yes. Something like that. And maybe he had been one of them, maybe he had been... oh. Her throat tightens when she thinks of it, but why wouldn't he contact her, why--
But doesn't she know? Her fingers raise, instinctively, unconsciously, to her hair - silver-white and blond, that unnatural platinum color. She was a silver-eyed witch. And oh... no, if he were still here... if he had his Forge, he might have seen her battle with Riful, the things people said about her. He might know what she is. He might know she is a monster.
Maybe something too monstrous for even a father to love.
Still, she tries to stand, and reaches for her words, and comes up with nothing long after he disappears back into the city.
It's only then, on her knees, hands covering her eyes, crying into her palms... that she remembers that she was a child the last time he saw her. That she doesn't know how long he was gone, replaced by that yoma. She could have been six years old, even five years old. She could have been even younger. Between her age and her hair, her eyes, he--
He may not even recognize her, now.
It's three hours later that he finds her, sitting in the park, clutching her knees to her chest, covered in the heavy grey of her cloak. And she can feel her insides tremble when she lifts her face, her silver eyes meeting his dark ones. The wind rips through the skeletal trees, whistles in her ears, stirs her hair, and once again she has nothing to say.
"I know you," he says. "You're a silver-eyed witch." The words sound strange in that voice (she remembers that voice, even now, and ohitsbeensolong), and they fall strangely from his tongue - as though he isn't used to saying them. As though he's uncomfortable with them. He turns, almost leaves. Another wind blows, and the puddles at his feet, near the bench, they ripple like tiny oceans, little lakes. A second later, he pauses, and his voice is soft when he says, "You remind me of my daughter."
One breath. She shakes, a tiny bit, starting at her core and filling her up until it overflows and her eyes are hot with tears. She calls his name (Daddy? The only name he's ever had, to her), and he says, "Priscilla?"
She nods. And her father stares at her, taking in her face, her features so unchanged despite the years, and her unnatural pallor. She watches him, watches every expression that flits over his face, and she can recognize the exact moment when he knows who she is.
He says, "Oh. Priscilla. Priscilla," and she clings to his jacket and cries against the flat of his stomach until she has no tears left in her whole body.
* * *
She hasn't thought about it in a long time, but as it happens, Priscilla's suite is rather large. It's larger, in fact, than her entire house had been when she was a child, in that tiny village by the river. This is something she would never have thought about, if her father hadn't mentioned it the very moment he stepped inside. One step - his feet sink into the rug in the center of her bedchamber, and she watches his eyes take in his surroundings. Priscilla stands, strangely nervous, at his side, lingering by the door with her fingers resting on the door frame.
Though it is beautiful enough, and well-lit during the day thanks to the groups of floor-length windows that line her walls, it isn't especially luxurious. There is the rug, yes, and the massive bed, bur those are her only indulgences. Mostly, this is because she doesn't buy things. Only a bed, nightstands, a desk. Teresa (the cat) asleep on her pillow and Irene (the cat) on the windowsill by her desk. It's not luxurious, but it is... spacious. Even the presence of certain things - a man's boots, his cloak, the stack of books on his side of the bed - don't make the room feel particularly lived in.
...and speaking of him. She had known he wouldn't be home, which was good. She wanted to explain her situation... as much as she could... in her own time. To both of them. Isley would be happy for her, wouldn't he? Hadn't he wished this for her all those months ago, when he said that maybe yes, here he could fulfill his promise to her at last?
It would be more difficult explaining to her father.
A deep breath. She steps away from the door, taking off her cloak as she walks.
"I know it's big," she says, "It's not that I think I deserve more space than everyone else, but... well, I have the armory, and the vault. And I need office space to work in, and..." her voice trails off, and she gives him a humble, quiet little look, searching for his approval in the face of her sudden insecurity. All at once, she feels as though she's been selfish, taking so much room for herself. Even with the animals, does she really need such a large chamber? Until only a year ago, she'd been happy enough sleeping on the stone ground in the ruins.
He smiles, that gentle smile she remembers so well. "You don't need to explain yourself," he says, with a shake of his head. "I'm glad to see you've done so well. But..." his head tips a little bit - just like hers. Her throat tightens, constricts. And her father picks up a boot between two fingers. It isn't hers. "...ah. I had thought your kind was not permitted to marry."
Priscilla glances just off to the side, away from her father, and the silvery glint of light that plays off the edge of Isley's boot.
She could explain everything now - say she isn't married, not at all, though she is committed. Say she is committed to someone more horrifying than any yoma, more horrifying than her. Someone so powerful and cruel that even she steps lightly around his moods, around his pride. And she could step back, and tell him about her other love, her first love. The human man with the dancing blood, who still haunts her dreams sometimes. The man who was all prickles on the outside, and so good on the inside that he nearly died defending strangers, and even then wouldn't accept his own beneficence.
But this isn't the right time. So she smiles, genuine but small, and shakes her head. "Things are different here, without the Organization. We can... do what we like."
He sets the boot down again, and steps toward her again. His clothes, she sees, are humble even now - a simple pair of brown trousers, a simple, loose shirt, a jacket. He looks the way she remembers him (remembers it - they did look the same way, after all, even in the end), and just for a moment she's fighting back tears again, her fingers digging into the center of her palm.
Her father says, "So, what is it that you like to do?"
And Priscilla says, "Protect everyone." It's vague, and it's huge, and it's endlessly honest and incomplete all at the same time.
"That's very big!" He smiles, wider this time. His eyes sparkle, and he looks so young. It's strange, really - when she was a little girl, he seemed ancient, in a way, despite the spring in his step and the dearth of grey hair. The perspective of the young. Now she sees he can't be more than 30. If that. "Are you in that Patrol, then? I've heard about it. Aren't they headquartered... in this area?"
The pride nearly bursts inside her, overfull and overflowing. She says, "I founded it." And now she's crying again - no, just a tiny bit, her tears flowing over her cheeks in tiny rivers, and she isn't sobbing, because she isn't sad. For the first time in her life, since the day she held that axe, she isn't sad.
(She has a million dreams, a billion hopes, and all her emotions swirl inside her, a storm breaking in her chest, in her gut, in her head. She wants to tell him everything, and she talks till the sun creeps over the horizon and spills into her room; he says he has to go and kisses her forehead and she walks him to the gate and watches him leave with her fingers twisted up on the iron bars there, watching the red dawn light bathe him and the street itself. Watching the shadows play across the folds in his jacket. Watching the dark spots that mark a scarlet stain at the bottom hem of his trouser leg.
* * *
Priscilla doesn't remember how old she was that day, at least... not exactly. She remembers seeing her own hands, small and still a little chubby, folded in her lap as she sat in the corner. She remembers watching her reflection in a rapidly spreading pool of blood that made its way across the kitchen flood, seeping into the wooden boards there, trickling between the gaps, and puddling in the nicks, the scratches, the depressions.
But no, wait. Go back.
She remembers her father, one night, leaning over her as she scrambles into bed. His fingers push the curls back from her face, and he kisses her forehead with those slightly scratchy lips - chapped from the elements, from the dry heat, from passing on water more often than not. There's been a drought, she thinks - she heard her mother say something about it to a neighbor, and they were speaking in low voices as though they were trying to protect her - which they may well have been.
But that was a few days ago. Tonight, he pulls her blanket up, tucks it under her chin, and she smiles when he moves away. His hair curls in light brown locks around his forehead, just like hers, and he says, "Good night. Good night." She asks him for a story, grabs his hand with hers, and she know she'll barely make it past the first few sentences, because sleep is tugging hard on her body, and harder on her mind, and his voice is so soothing, how could anyone stay awake?
Quietly, quietly, he weaves a little story.There is a young noble girl, he says, and she's fled her home to see the world. The next village isn't far from her home town, but she insists on stepping into the forest, off the road, in case her parents come to find her. It isn't that she doesn't love them, of course, but she's so tired of being overprotected. Still, she stays near the road, just in case she meets a wild animal, or something worse.
Just a few dozen yards off of the road, she meets a young man, and they walk together, and they talk together. She says she wants to marry an artist. He says he wants to be a poet. Her heart skips a beat, and she follows where he leads - to a shortcut, he says, through the forest to the next town. And she isn't sure she wants to go, as the sun is setting, and the woods are dangerous by night. But he tells her she'll be safe, and he brags of the yoma he's slain - even more than some of the silver-eyed - and he shows her how his blade can cut apart trees, and she feels less alone than she did.
It's only in the depths of the forest, when she can no longer see the road, that she notices the golden gleam to his eyes.
Oh. She sleeps. She awakens just for a second. Just long enough to know he's doused the lamp, and that he kisses her forehead one more time before he leaves her alone in the dark.
Go forward. She asks why it's okay to kill animals just to eat - why its okay to kill, just so she can live. And he tells her it's the way life works.
"It's a circle," he says, "You see? Everything feeds the next thing on the chain." She cries, wipes away tears. She says she doesn't want anything to die. And her father smiles, ruffles her hair and says, "I know it's hard. But even plants have life, too, you see? You have to learn to forgive yourself."
He lifts her on his shoulders, and sings that song again. They're walking to town. He has an axe strapped to his back, and--
--and she can hear them screaming before she realizes why, or what's happened. Her mother is dead by the time she opens her eyes. Priscilla can see that. She's motionless, after all, and her eyes are open, staring up at the ceiling, her hands--
Her father looks up and wipes her mother's blood from his mouth. In the dim lamplight, everyone looks pale, and there are shadows in the sunken sockets of her father's eyes, in the exaggerated hollows of his cheeks. There are shadows in every gap between every one of his pointed teeth. And his eyes are glowing, gold like firelight, but bright - brighter than candle flames, brighter than fireplace light, and Priscilla feels... she feels like she's being swallowed up by that light.
He says, "You'll never reach the door," and pulls a knotted string of intestines from her little brother's hollow corpse.
He says, "Just sit tight there, daughter." And the word, daughter, it sounds like an insult. It sounds like a curse.
He says, "I've been waiting for this," as he pulls her sister close.
Priscilla squeezes her eyes shut, and her feels blood, hot and wet, spray across her face, and she's not breathing now, she's not thinking, and her sister, her sister is--
* * *
It's been a strange few days - days full of shadows and twisted things. Maybe that's why she hasn't told anyone yet. He's like a little secret, something she keeps to herself in those long days when the world outside her room seems cold, and everything has gone mad, and she knows - she knows without even asking about it - that no one will believe it's really him.
It's the timing. She knows that, too. She had found him too close to the time when all of those people arrived - those ghosts, all twisted up and wrong inside, and she hasn't paid as much attention as she should have, but she's paid enough to know that he isn't anything like them. That he is everything she remembers, and more - a good man full of good stories, who lets her lie across his lap when it's cold and they meet in the park, and pushes her hair back, and tells her that her choices are human. And when he says it, she hears it. Hears it in a way she hasn't heard anyone else when they've told her, too, that she's still a person. That being part yoma doesn't make her a monster, too.
She almost believes it, when he says it.
The only trouble is, he's late. And so she sits in their spot in the park (their spot, she says - it's been less than a week, and already their spot), watching the people, watching the dead grass. In the winter, no one uses the park for sightseeing, only as a shortcut on their way to other parts of the city, which allows them at least some small measure of privacy. As much as one can have, in public. But she knows that Spring will come, and there will be people here, sitting in the grass and picnicking on blankets. There will be sun umbrellas, and children by the lake, and she wonders if he'll go with her, and let her show him the spot at the far end of the lake where she hides when she's sad, and she needs to be alone.
Her head, it's full of thoughts like that, these days. Too full to concentrate, even with the dead children, the dead women. Even when the shadows, and her frustration over Isley. So many things don't matter now, or at least don't matter as much.
With her head full of thoughts, she can barely hear the scream.
Barely. But she does. And it's instinct that lifts her from the bench, her silver eyes flashing in the dimming light, scanning the crowd, scanning the park. At the moment, she's barely at its edge - only a hundred or so yards away from the nearest block of buildings, and that's where the scream is coming from, she knows it, though it's short and clipped at the end. And Priscilla glances behind her, and she glances at the buildings, and the empty spaces between them, and then she's there - like there was no space between her and them to begin with. Like there was only a step, or a heartbeat there.
Her daggers are already in her hands, though it's unlikely she'll need them.
Priscilla feels herself grow cold, enveloped by the shade, and all around her, there's this dripping sound - melted snow, melting icicles. She feels droplets on her face, and tracks puddle water through the damp corridor-like alleyways, but she follows... something. A trace of heat, a lingering scent. The sound of breathing. Whoever screamed, they aren't screaming now, but they may still be alive. Unconscious, maybe, or--
Or.
(She looks down - sees the spreading scarlet pool just before she sees--)
And her thoughts stop, just like that. They collide with the wall that is the sight of her father, dagger in hand, tearing steel through the gut of a woman who lies, prone, a bloody red puddle beneath her.
It takes him approximately two seconds to realize she's there. It would have been sooner, she thinks, except that she can't breathe. Except that she can't move. And with her not breathing, and not moving, she isn't making any noise, so he doesn't notice her, not until he lifts his head and draws back his blood-stained knife. And in that instant, as he's moving to stand, Priscilla can hear the wind, howling and rattling through the alley. She can hear the trees protest and clink their bones together. She can hear the footsteps of the crowd just a few yards behind, clicking down those cobblestone streets, and the chatter of innocents, and her heart pounding, and her own breath all ragged and jagged and staggering through her throat, and out of her mouth.
All of this - all of this - means she can't move. She can barely process the fact that he's moved.
And she only understands that he's stabbed her when she feels the hot blood running over her hip and down her leg. When she hears him melt away behind her, and feels him disappear for the second (the third?) time.
Priscilla stumbles forward a few steps, and she feels a scream of her own now - she hears it, echoing against the brick walls, just like she feels the stone under her knees when she falls to them beside that corpse. Her fingers are cold as the air - colder than the dead woman's (dead so short a time, she feels... she feels alive, and she would be alive if her body weren't hollow now. If her organs weren't exposed to the air). Against Priscilla's skin, that woman's feels almost feverish.
Priscilla says, "I'm sorry." She says it again, and again, and her voice cracks and trips and tumbles over itself as she presses that hand against her cheek, lets her tears wet the dead girl's fingers, and dribble down her hand, down her wrist.
"I'm sorry," she says, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." But she doesn't promise to stop him.
She doesn't know if she can.
* * *
This is what she knows: she should have stopped him. Now there's another corpse and another, and another, and Priscilla feels sick every time she thinks of it. And every time she thinks of it, she remembers that night in her house, when she was only a little girl, when she picked up that axe. She was so weak then, so weak and yet even then she wasn't helpless. Through the pounding in her head, and the sickly sound of eating, the scent of blood, she had found her footing, found her way - but now?
This time she had failed. Failed to stop him, failed his victims, failed herself.
And sometimes, stepping through the pale evening light, she wonders if it's her father here at all. Maybe it's just that yoma again, that monster with his face. But no, she'd feel his yoki then. Something familiar, crawling under her skin - the feeling of false faces, the feeling of unnatural power and lies.
She wonders, too, if the bloodlust that drove the creature that impersonated him had come from its nature, or from the personality of the man it had incorporated into itself. And therein lies the question she has so often refused to ponder, refused to even acknowledge. How long was he a monster, when she was a little girl. Did she even know her true father? How much of that gentility she remembers so clearly came from the monster... and how much of its brutality came from the man?
Where did one begin and one end?
She tries not to think of it very much, and yet it's the only thing that's in her head. The only thing ever in her head. It's in her head when she wakes up, curled around the menagerie of pets that serve as her roommates, and when she tries to concentrate through her duties in the ruins, where every creature she slays, every battle she walks away from, reminds her of everything she couldn't do, and everyone she couldn't save.
She keeps her eyes toward the alleyways, and she walks the rooftops over Anatole, watching the paths between buildings, looking for a flash of steel. The trouble is, like any city, there's bound to be more than just one killer roaming loose, and she stops three violent crimes in progress and still comes up alone.
It's rather fortunate, she thinks, that she doesn't need to sleep much. Because the days pass, and she performs her duties as a warrior, as a leader, as a lover - she performs them perfunctorily, and she spends her free hours listening to the click of her metal boots on rock, and on roofs, and against stone in the dirty ruins. Inhale - there's the scent of city life, of roasting meat at street vendors and dinner wafting from beneath doorways. There's the scent of decaying vegetation, rotting in the swamps. The scent of burning opium, the scent of perfumes and candles. She sees the city now, through every alley and every inch of the park where she first met him, again.
It isn't until the reports come out of Dismas that she knows what to do next.
Knowing, it brings a kind of calm over her. Like an inmate headed to the gallows, suddenly at peace with the tragedy of life. Priscilla leaves her sword in her bedroom, resting beside the one she gave to Isley for that midwinter holiday. She wears dull clothes, today - a soft grey cloak and hood hiding her trousers and blouse. Something to meld with the crowd, to hide her shockingly platinum colored hair. Her daggers are strapped to her side now, another hidden inside the folds of her suede boots, and she feels like she's marching off to war. And she feels as though she'll never return.
* * *
Stop. Go back.
Her father tells her, "Priscilla, you're going to grow up to be such a pretty girl," and lifts her in his arms. He says, "You see that butterfly? It means you'll have a long life, a good life. It's a sign." She laughs, and holds out her finger to let the butterfly settle on her fingertip.
This was yesterday.
But now, her sister is screaming.
Priscilla stands up, and her eyes aren't on her father now. They aren't on the mangled corpses strewn in pieces across her floor. Her eyes are on that puddle of blood, thick and shiny, reflecting her dress, reflecting her face, and she tiptoes around the edges of the ocean as it spreads over the floor. Vaguely, she becomes aware that there are still dinner dishes on the table, still an empty cup that he used for his favorite mead beside his chair. That his chair is, itself, pulled away from the table, as though he'd only just stood up. As though he'll be right back.
It's in the blood that she sees his face, buried in her sister's belly.
And she tastes her own blood in her mouth from the sharp edge of her teeth biting down, biting down, keeping her from crying out. And she feels the heft of the axe, something she can barely lift, and it's so heavy and so big compared to her tiny hands. There's this pain, too - the ache of her body straining something too large, and too heavy, for her to handle on her own.
(He held her hands in place once, showed her hold to grip it. He said, " If something happens to me, you'll need to know how to survive." And she said nothing would happen to him. She made him promise to stay.)
Her toe touches the edge of that blood as she steps forward. And POUND, the sound of her heart battering itself against her ribs, fluttering like a caged thing. Crash, her breath in her lungs, struggling to break free.
And then a thick, sickly noise when she brings the axe down on his neck.
(No, she doesn't forgive herself.)
* * *
Take one step down into the stairwell of Dismas, and she feels it. Or maybe it's just her imagination - that strange leeching like something is draining the life out of her even as she moves, step by step, inch by inch. Three steps and she feels the weight of the cloak on her back. It isn't uncomfortable. It isn't heavy. But it's noticeable, and that alone is something to take note of. By the end of the steps, she is hungry, and she is thirsty, and she is tired in ways she has almost never felt - certainly not in years. Not since she left training.
Dismas is a dark city living inside a dark cave. The perfume scent is heavier here, especially near the district where the prostitutes ply their trade, and the opium scent is heavier too - everywhere. Walk near the arena and smell the blood - something so thick and everpresent that it can't simply be washed away. There's blood, it seems, inside the very foundations there - as fundamental to the place as the sound of laughter and bawdy singing from the taverns, or the clink of money inside the casino.
It's different, here, than it is in Anatole proper. Even the people seem different - all suspicious gazes, inspecting her as they speak, asking for bribes for even ultimately useless information. They keep to themselves, or so she's heard. It isn't as though she's spent much time here.
It doesn't matter. She asks questions, takes descriptions, follows leads. And the corpses continue - dead in the alleys, dead in some woman's apartment. One little boy, gutted with a knife. And then a woman, gutted too. Priscilla ties not to throw up when she sees the bodies, and she's never felt so helpless. Never. Not even in that house all that time ago. Not even at Teresa's feet.
...it's luck alone that leads her to him at last.
Well, maybe not luck. A few questions, a generous bribe. He has been seen in the finer districts of prostitution, she hears - and yes, they're sure. He's been seen there. He asked for information on how to take up the time of one girl in specific. A girl neither adult nor a child. She isn't even a brunette. This is, from a certain perspective, a good thing. If the girl does not fit the pattern, then-- well. She may not be a victim at all. Just a service provider. Still, Priscilla hugs her cloak closer to herself and asks if they're sure, because somehow the idea of her father frequenting prostitutes is just as problematic as the murders have been. The bias, she supposes, of the child.
Acceptance comes slowly, during her second or third block, just before she knocks on the courtesan's door. The lights are on - she sees the lamps flickering through the windows. But inside, there is no movement. No sound. Another knock.
She hears something moving. Softly. So softly that she might not have noticed, if she hadn't been trained - if she weren't always aware of her surroundings. Priscilla presses her lips tight together, and moves to the groundfloor window... just in time to see a shadow disappear into a door inside - past the grand furniture, past the fancy rug, past the mangled corpse of a man lying in the center of the room.
"No." Did she say that? Did hadn't meant to, not exactly, and yet... "No no no." Her fingers grab at the latch, push it down, and its slick with... she doesn't know. It might be blood, or it might be her own sweat - she hasn't the time or the mind to check. Only to push and stop breathing when the door swings open without protest, into a room that smells like the back room of a butchery.
The man wasn't the primary target. That much is evident from the way his throat's been cut and the callous way he's been tossed aside. Like... something irrelevant. Even so, his blood still soaks the carpet, and every time she takes a step, there is this squishy-sticky feeling, and a rush of blood racing to the surface, spilling around her feet. It's not unfamiliar - not for someone like her, who kills for her living and always has. Someone who has walked in on slaughters more than once, and took her blade to the yoma who started it. Except it isn't a yoma this time, is it? It's--
It's not an unfamiliar feeling, but every footstep makes her sick. Like the low music playing from the phonograph in the corner - instrumental, slightly skippy. Click. Pop. There are the strings. Priscilla draws her daggers and keeps her eyes on the shadows. She says, "...Daddy?"
When she speaks, the shadows answer.
"Priscilla. I wish you hadn't followed me here." Click. Click. The sound of his footsteps against the wood that runs around the edge of the room. Click. "You never did know how to leave well enough alone."
She presses her lips together. Firms her resolve. "No, I guess I didn't." She can hear her own breath, whistling in her ears.
"...You've already healed from that cut I gave you." Silence. Her fingers touch the smooth place where her skin was once broken and bleeding. Behind her, at the edge of the room, her father says, "I guess you really are a yoma."
"No. No, that's not fair." Her answer comes without her thinking about it, like the way she follows his voice with her every usable sense - notes click on the floor, the shift in the bloody scent, the way the floor reacts to changing weight. But she doesn't look at him. Not even when he steps out of the shadows, and she feels his breath on her from only inches away. "I became what I am so I could avenge... it's not fair to say I'm a yoma. I'm not a yoma, I... I'm here to stop them, and..." And what? Her voice trails off into breath, and she can't find a finishing thought any more than she can understand why she started explaining herself to begin with.
And then her father slides a dagger into her back, almost softly, like a caress. Priscilla doesn't even scream. She doesn't have the voice for it.
The funny thing about Dismas is, there's nothing she knows there. She reaches for her yoki, tries to heal her wound, and there's nothing there. And for the second time since she's been in Anatole, she feels the trickle of her blood on her skin, soaking through her clothes, and she is afraid.
He says, "How could you avenge me? You're not my child, Priscilla. You're nothing but a monster."
She sobs, and her knees hit the bloody floor, and it hurts. It hurts more than the wound in her back. More than the gouge in her side had. It hurts more than Irene's betrayal, or Zack's; more than Arthur disappearing, or Senji walking away from her, or all the little ways Isley always tears her heart out just to see how it beats.
Her father stands over her, and the cold liquid dripping on her face is her own blood this time. Red, like human blood. "So much waste. You became a silver-eyed witch to avenge me." He snorts, and rolls his eyes. "If you wanted to do well by me and your mother, and live for your sister and brother, you would have gotten away from there before you were caught. Move in with a neighboring village, make a friend, get married. Instead, you became this thing."
He leans closer - so close she can smell his sweat and her blood. "What are you, anyway? Are you even good at being a butcher?"
Priscilla sobs, curls over her knees. "Yes," she says with her broken voice. "I was... the second strongest one. Even with no experience I was... they said... they said I would be the strongest. One day." (Strange, how a mind dashes over old subject, irrelevant things. She sees a man's face, someone from the Organization, and he calls her close. In a moment, he'll tell her about her power, about how special she is. She sees Teresa's blade raised above her head, and then Teresa's eyes flashing in the ruins, that battle neither could win. Smiling friends, and first loves with dancing blood, and golden eyes framed with silver-white hair. It all takes place in an instant inside her head, as though no time passed between each moment.) She says, "They said I was sp-special. That's why... everyone's afraid..."
Her father stops, and she can see the glint of lantern light sparking on the edge of that bloody dagger. It's dripping precious rubies. "They're afraid. Of course?"
"Yes. Because..." She wipes bloody streaks across her face in her attempts to brush away her tears. "Because I'm the most dangerous one.
"...because I'm a monster."
He laughs a little, quiet and almost kind. He whispers, "Do you remember that story I told you once, sweetie? About the girl who wouldn't stay on her path? She meets a golden eyed stranger in the forest, but she doesn't see those eyes burn."
"I remember." Wait. When was...
"I don't think I ever finished it. No... you fell asleep." A little breath. "He was a yoma, honey. He eats her alive. Savors every organ, every drop of blood. She doesn't stop screaming until he's halfway through her innards." He laughs, just a little, quietly. And then... "You're a monster, my girl. Then they should be afraid." He says this, and then he raises that dagger again. And just for a moment, she can't bring herself to stop him.
But there's a tiny click somewhere, miles away, past the desert and fog that is Priscilla's mind; a little click like a key turning, or maybe a latch that-- she jerks her head up just as the courtesan appears. The courtesan who was, no doubt, her father's true target. And Priscilla forces herself to grip her daggers again, forces herself to stand on her blood-stained feet, scarlet streaks running down her knees, down her shins.
And there, across the space of that entry hall, she meets that woman's pale-grey eyes, notes her pale blond hair, her full cheeked and youthful face. In that instant it hits her weight the weight of a collapsing building: woman with brown hair, children, and this.
In that instant, she knows he's been killing her own family- his own family - again and again.
Priscilla lets out a sound somewhere between a scream and a sob, and starts to move. She moves despite the pain, despite the wound in her back. Because this is what she is - what she's made for, and she's always meant to die protecting humans so maybe this is -- It's just in time for her father to start moving, too. His knife flashes again, and he moves two steps toward the woman before Priscilla's blade finds his throat.
It was instinct. Or second-nature. Years of training, and then nearly two on the field.
It was instinct, but it's also who she is.
There is a strange, sickly thump - something she knows so well, has known since she was a little girl. His body falls to the ground, twitching as his blood runs out over the carpet. Just for a moment, she feels the horrible weight of that axe, pulling her down. Her knees buckle under that imaginary weight, and she's back on the floor again, one dagger falling from her fingers, all slick with blood. She holds the other, in case he moves again... but he doesn't.
And there's another sound, now - that woman screaming, and screaming. Or maybe it's just Priscilla herself screaming? She can't tell, not anymore.
The woman wraps her arms around Priscilla, pushes pressure down on that wound, sobs, thanks her. And she makes promises... promises. She makes so many promises.
And Priscilla, she can't stop screaming.