*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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She knows the creature is dead the minute she returns. It's animal instinct, and she cuts the ties, flipping it over onto its mask as Lei, slow to all the things that have silently bypassed him, stumbles forward.
"Are you alright?" he asks.
"We need to cut it out," she answers instead, pulling out her metal balls, molding them into knives.
She spares him a glance when he still does not understand.
"Cut out the implant, Lei."
It's bloody work, and the air is sickly sweet with it. He asks as they saw through the worst of it, as they perform crude surgery on a body that has already endured enough:
"What happened?"
What happened.
Your sister talked about cutting off her face and burying people in the ground, she wants to snark, but she can't bring herself to pretend this is amusing, can't find a way to rid herself of the small tremor in her fingers. Her cold anger is gone, replaced by a jumble of feelings she can't quite reconcile.
"I first cut off what I thought I had enough of," Isati had said, and it feels like an arrow in the chest. "My dreams, my ambitions, my wants... my desires. All the things outside this rigid plan."
Young Isati is crying in a mirror, but what she became no longer seems so strange.
"My little fuck you, tied nicely in a pretty little bow..."
It doesn't matter, Allayria tells herself, ripping some of the creature's garments, using them as rags. It doesn't matter how it seems.
The pressure of fingers; a hesitant touch—Allayria looks up and realizes Lei's hand is on her shoulder.
"What did she do to you?" he asks quietly, and of course he does, because he, of all people, should know the games Isati plays.
"Nothing," she answers, and it feels like a lie, even if it is the truth. "She just talked."
Lei shifts, still crouched low over the body, but his eyes are fixed on her face.
"About what?"
I sometimes think that I might soon break free.
"Taunts," Allayria says, and she looks away. "The usual."
They work in silence a little while longer, until he says: "She'll twist anything you give her. It's better to not let anything show."
He won't look at her, but she looks at him, at the way his throat moves underneath his frozen face, the way his jaw is locked tight underneath his skin. And she thinks of the room awaiting them, narrow bed, and decides that tonight it won't be too small.
The knock on the door seems to reverberate through her spine; she actually teeters back, bloody hands held out in front of her, as she stumbles off her scrunched feet and back onto her rear, on the dusty floor.
