Zevran Arainai (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
antivanleather) wrote2012-07-14 08:26 pm
antivanleather) wrote2012-07-14 08:26 pm
Entry tags:
Voicemail / Appointments
Threads that don't fall into posts or logs, sneaky private gatherings or midnight rendezvous. Whatever your fancy.
Please indicate the type (Written, Voice, Action) and the Date.
Please indicate the type (Written, Voice, Action) and the Date.
action
Dracula had been right - that much he will give him.
He remembers Hector had known love once, and it too had doomed him. And yet sometimes, despite how devastating his loss, Isaac thinks his erstwhile companion has come away richer than he ever will be. How could he not burn with envy? How could he not burn with self-contempt for all he had become and all he could never be?
He blinks his eyes clear and from the corner he acknowledges the elf in a quiet farewell, too spent and dazed to say anything more. Then his hands finally remember to tug the hood of his cloak over his head, casting his sallow, tear-blotched face in deep shadow. The dark of night beckons him as it always has and into it he’ll soon steal away and fade unnoticed while Luceti sleeps, crawling into his glorified hole in the ground where he knows he won't be finding sleep. He could disappear forever and no one else would know, he muses. Dawn would break and the world would keep on turning with cruel indifference, but it’d be alright in the end. He’d be buried deep under a mountain of crumbled stone, at rest and beyond reach of what ifs and if onlys, freer than he had ever been in life. He can’t think of a place he would rather be.
There is no leaving with Zevran and slipping into a warm bed, nor can he go back to his hole. He won’t go back. Time’s slipping away too quickly and a stab of desperation pushes words from his mouth.]
Wait. [The urgency is absent from the hoarse murmur scarcely heard above the sputtering of the dying fire. But there’s a sudden sharpness and insistence to his gaze, some small, daring gleam of expectation, and it’s the most he can to do to regard him steadily.] There is one last thing I ask of you tonight.
action
[There wasn't much he could do at the moment. That much is painfully evident to the both of them. But if there is something Isaac needs him to do, to say, or to offer. That he can manage.
It is the least that he deserves.
At least in Zevran's eyes. Jack and Eugene would likely not agree- but they are from a different world. One not so kind, true, but they are not of the shadow. They are not murderers. They are not the forsaken, the forgotten, the used. They have use, they have hope, they have light in their lives. They'd never been sold or abused simply on a creature's whim.
Just one more reason why he wishes to protect them from the brunt of his background. From the things he can and has told Isaac without fear of censure or disgust. Some things they simply cannot understand or have the reference with which to accept it.
Isaac ever has, and ever would.]
Name it.
action
It’s selfish, but to need is what it means to be human. No; not only human. Any being with a sense of self-awareness and a heart that beats away. His is not so much a rock as it is a black hole. A vacuum that consumes all it can but finds nothing to fill the void.
He presses the pommel into the elf’s palm and gently closes his fingers around it, his own curled over them. There is a moment now, a moment of absentminded tenderness with which he strokes Zevran’s knuckles with his thumb before he slowly guides his hand up and up, pressing the blade’s tip into his chest. Not yet breaking the skin.
It’s all there’s left to ask for, and he feels no electric trill of fear, of adrenaline as he stands on the edge of the abyss, looking his salvation in the eyes.
Take what was yours.]
There has to be an end.
[He whispers around the joggling knot of his Adam’s Apple and a faint, lopsided smile tugs at the corners of his thinned lips. Tired amusement that never reaches his eyes. He keeps his hands framing his, reluctant to let go.]
action
No.
Whether it is due to dramatisim or reluctance of Isaac's part or his damnably keen senses, everything moves as though it is a fade's dream. Far too slow and far too sharp and far too clear and all he can think is No.
Not this. Not like this. There was no mercy in this. Isaac hasn't even finished unsheathing the blade yet and he already knows what it is he is about to ask and every way in which he has the right to say no. To tell him to live. To quit wallowing in it and stand up again and keep going because life was going to hurt, that's what living was. Spots of bright pleasure and joy amidst the muck of pain. Ending it early is cowardice.
And yet he'd jumped on a blade for Isaac. Set himself to die for Rinna.
He's an old had at death and still. No.
No.
One small syllable races around in his head and his heart until the sound ceases to have any meaning other than an endless litany of refusal. He cannot. He will not. No matter how keen Isaac's pain he simply cannot do this thing.
Yet he knows full well by the time there are fingers on his and the weight of the pommel is pressed into his stiff fingered hands made inelegant by every fiber of him screaming silently NO that he will do as Isaac asks.
Because it is in his power. Because in a macabre way, it will make them even.
Because it's redemption and forgiveness and apology bundled into one clean thrust of a blade he cannot manage with the usual cold demeanor he would offer anyone else.
Rinna he'd watched, never cut. He'd been spared that though he counted himself so very guilty. He does not love Isaac the way he loved Rinna. Does not love him the way he loves Jack and Eugene. Does not love him the way he loves Katniss- but he does love him all the same.
Here he stands, knife in hand, and Isaac's fingers are holding tight and not so tight at all and he cannot look him in the eye because he has done this. He has had this horror in his mind and walked through it not one week ago. Death at his hand.
Death he would enjoy.
He parts his lips to finally give voice to the thing screaming and scrabbling in his head. All that comes out is-]
Close your eyes, Rosso mio.
[Because he will do this thing. He will for Isaac and then they will be even. But he will not watch the life slip from him like so many others. He cannot.]
action
Yes.
It washes over him, hot water soothing tired flesh, and his shoulders sag, eyes sliding shut. And from the darkness behind his lids, Zevran slowly takes shape. His knowing, world-wearied gaze; full lips softly pressed thin; and every little crease in his brow, each telling a story. That he is a masterful assassin has no relevance here and now. This is a deed that demands not cold-blooded efficiency or steeled nerves, but an understanding he has found in no one else.
His only true friend.
This is the last thing he would see and remember -- and for the first time he has ever known in his life, it feels like all might be right with the world. His mind doesn’t know what to do with something so fragile and new, restlessly picking at it for imperfections until it finally gives up and finds rest, pain pushed aside to make room for it.]
You are all there is…
[The words are left to sink in deep, and he gives the barest hint of a nod before letting his hands slip away and fall reluctantly to his sides.]
action
[He'll not be able to take another. And the night's air is perfect. Crisp and cool and simmered in the smoke from the nearby fire, the wind just so that Isaac would get the warmth of it along with leather and oil from Zevran's kit. One last breath for them both and he does not want to do this.
Part of him, vicious and vindictive and petty, tells him to make it slow. To make Isaac feel every inch of the blade as it goes in. As recompense for nearly killing Jack. For frightening him. For things that were not under his control.
He squashes that voice, grits his teeth, and reaches up with his free hand to hold Isaac's shoulder.
It takes surprisingly little force to stab a man. He's been doing it for years. Even with the breastbone at this distance, with enough pressure a good shove would handle everything.
He barely feels it crack under the kneenly honed point of the knife. With little more than a quick shove, shoulder to bicep to wrist, reluctant, murderous intent blooms and twines and does it's bloody work.
It's less than the beat of a heart between the moment where Isaac is breathing and the moment that Zevran has the dagger hilt deep in his chest. The one time he is doing the impaling, and it's like this.
That skittering voice in the back of his mind is silenced. Revere the dead. Respect them. He does not look Isaac in the eye but he listens. Every rattle and sigh, every last twitch before the soul escaped that lean, intimately familiar body, he holds. Catalogs and filters away. Wraps up and tucks with every other memory of someone he had to kill that he did not want to see dead. As Isaac goes limp, they all go limp, Zevran steps in and embraces him one last time. Lowers him to the ground with all the respect he can offer a fallen comrade. He doesn't apologize. Isaac did not want any more apologies.
He simply lowers his friend. His first, true friend in this place to the ground, stares at the fire. And weeps.]
action (tw: graphic imagery)
He’s been told he ought to be burned alive at the stake. To have the Pear spring open inside his screaming mouth until he chokes on blood and broken teeth, and then thrust in again to tear through his insides, death coming not by the wounds gouged by brutal force but by the infection that would set in. Such is what witches and sodomites deserve.
And it’s what he knows he deserves. Not as a sodomite or a witch, but as a devil who has wreaked so much havoc. It’s selfish of him, too, to have chosen how he wishes to die. Each and every person he had killed, innocent or guilty, had hopes and dreams and ambitions of their own. Some had had loved ones; others had spent their days alone. He had never given them the luxury of choice, ending it all out of fear, out of the need to satisfy his thirst for bloody vengeance, out of the need to further his misguided, futile search for approval and favour and love from a master who hadn’t cared for such ideas, let alone for him.
Unlike the sharpened stake that had come at him so long ago, this does not miss its mark, and all he can think as the hilt slams into him, metal jamming into meat and bone, is that it’s too good for him. The air’s punched out of him and he manages a strangled croak, the pain bleaching his mind a blinding white. But there’s something keeping him from slumping back. A hand. Zevran’s hand moving from his shoulder to press up against his back, easing him down as his body trembles and chokes and dry-heaves all too briefly, struggling lungs denied the chance to snatch at air. It’s the easiest he’s ever had anything.
Zevran’s touch and the ground beneath him fade away, and as he’s falling into vast, empty silence, there’s a small flash of realization like a flare in the night.
this is
love]