[How it burns her, to hear Akua dismiss her hatred with excuses of race, equating the behavior of a demon with the behavior of her own kind, seemingly claiming them unworthy of judgement or anything but acceptance as simple nature. Just because it was nature did not mean it was not wrong, or that some things were not better. She was not some god or immortal being or wise mage able to so easily separate emotion and sever connections between beings to judge them all as individuals independent of context. She isn't like Set. She isn't like Akua. So why-]
I am not telling you to change yourself!
[.... Is she? So what if the shape of their redemption was different? It did not need to be the same shape, as long as it ran parallel. Akua's level of "villainy", surely she could tolerate it for the sake of her goals, for the sake of how much the other woman brought to Meridian, for... for what she had done for her personally. But-]
I am telling you-
[What? Everything is so raw and fresh in her mind that it clatters around in her shattered sense of storm-wrought communion in a jumble of chaotic rage and bitterness and despair, and all she wants is-]
I am begging you-
[When she had refused to beg the demon for mercy, for relief from pain, for even death... Her rage flares, remembering Akua's words that she had foolishly let stop her from killing "Sebastian Michaelis" beneath the Great Tree, the disgusting, flirtatious phrases she had heard them exchange on communion. How is she supposed to stomach it? (Why should she have to stomach it-)]
Do not flaunt before me what I cannot forgive.
[She screams and she cries and she snarls and she rails, but a part of her... also clutches at Akua's hand. Even if the demon's insinuations were right, and no one would ever choose her over him, if she could never experience the type of loyalty her betrayed hearts had always craved... She did not want to see or hear something that would force her to either snap her principles over her own foreleg or abandon the first woman who had almost made her believe they were friends.
She wants to ask Akua to come to her. She wants to tell her what happened and feel her warm hand caress her cheek, brushing over the skin that had been healed to make her look like a liar if she claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured in a room that smelled of filth and chemicals. She wants the other woman to examine the eye that had been forced into her skull and tell her that she could do something about it. She wanted-
no subject
I am not telling you to change yourself!
[.... Is she? So what if the shape of their redemption was different? It did not need to be the same shape, as long as it ran parallel. Akua's level of "villainy", surely she could tolerate it for the sake of her goals, for the sake of how much the other woman brought to Meridian, for... for what she had done for her personally. But-]
I am telling you-
[What? Everything is so raw and fresh in her mind that it clatters around in her shattered sense of storm-wrought communion in a jumble of chaotic rage and bitterness and despair, and all she wants is-]
I am begging you-
[When she had refused to beg the demon for mercy, for relief from pain, for even death... Her rage flares, remembering Akua's words that she had foolishly let stop her from killing "Sebastian Michaelis" beneath the Great Tree, the disgusting, flirtatious phrases she had heard them exchange on communion. How is she supposed to stomach it? (Why should she have to stomach it-)]
Do not flaunt before me what I cannot forgive.
[She screams and she cries and she snarls and she rails, but a part of her... also clutches at Akua's hand. Even if the demon's insinuations were right, and no one would ever choose her over him, if she could never experience the type of loyalty her betrayed hearts had always craved... She did not want to see or hear something that would force her to either snap her principles over her own foreleg or abandon the first woman who had almost made her believe they were friends.
She wants to ask Akua to come to her. She wants to tell her what happened and feel her warm hand caress her cheek, brushing over the skin that had been healed to make her look like a liar if she claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured in a room that smelled of filth and chemicals. She wants the other woman to examine the eye that had been forced into her skull and tell her that she could do something about it. She wanted-
... Was it really so much to want?]