wolof: (Kneel)
š“š““š“¾š“Ŗ š“¢š“Ŗš“±š“®š“µš“²š“Ŗš“· ([personal profile] wolof) wrote2022-04-24 12:55 pm

Kenos IC Contact

Akua Sahelian
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warmare: (ē “ć‚Œ)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-11-02 02:48 pm (UTC)(link)
[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-

... Was it really so much to want?]
Edited 2023-11-02 14:53 (UTC)
warmare: (č£åˆ‡č€…)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-11-06 06:20 am (UTC)(link)
[Is that ā€œallā€ she has to do? She has to ask for everything, to beg for the things she had always thought would just… happen, if someone were to stumble into the strange and crippling bond that ā€œfriendshipā€? The respect, the loyalty, the understanding, the affection… she had never craved it, because to have a friend was never something she even dreamed as possible in the harsh world she had been raised in, clambering over the dead and better-off-dead bodies of her shamed kindred to try and reach for half of human dignity. But she had thought…

She doesn’t know anything in this world. Hadn’t she asked Akua a similar question the first time the other woman had used the word ā€œfriendā€ with her? And yet even now… Every time she thinks she might grasp it…

Even as part of Hayame’s soul claws at what she had become, this humiliated thing with two eyes who only knew rage and vengeance, she sags pitifully into the brush of Akua’s hand, longing for a friend and for comfort so much that she forced herself to accept what her pride would never be happy with. She wants to ask Akua to choose her fully, to condemn the demon who had done this to her, to hate him even a shade of how much she does-

But her pride is wounded, not broken. Their friendship… could not survive Hayame hearing ā€œnoā€ to that. Maybe Akua could even sense it, through the Iconoclast aspect they shared that had stopped her from locking the other woman from her mind in the first place, that she almost asks it if her, demanding and desperate. But what she actually lets out is-

Nothing.

Can she say that she trusts Akua fully? That she believes everything she does is truly for Meridian’s sake? How many times has she cursed what seemed like everyone else’s fickleness and disloyalty? When Akua had dabbled in Zenith, when Liem had let himself be corrupted, when Set allowed himself to take that Yima bitch’s flower into his heart…

… She wished she could. She wanted to believe she could trust.]


Never falter, Akua.

[She says it like a prayer, like a threat, like a vote of confidence, like a plea. Maybe it is just all of those things.]

I am asking you to come to me.

I am asking you not to breathe a word of what I tell you, and what you see.

I am asking you… to try and find out what that monster actually did to me…


[ā€œSebastianā€ wasn’t even its name. Just like Farnese wasn’t, just like Gabriel wasn’t. It was a writhing mass of shadows and eyes and too many mouths that ate souls.

And despite what he had promised her, as she was strapped helpless to the table and hobbled to the wall, a bit shoved into her mouth to prevent herself from trying again to bite off her own tongue and escape into death… she was going to eventually force it to either kill her or to perish. If she didn’t, if she couldn’t-

Akua might as well just leave her weeping on the floor.]
Edited 2023-11-06 06:20 (UTC)