[ grits teeth because i want to give karlach a nice answer ]
No. [ his emotions are largely nothing, like the hollow of a tree. an old and tired resignation. some fresher guilt. ] I'm just going along with time and seeing where it takes me. ...Not a lifestyle I'm recommending, of course.
[ they barely have any time at all. and here she is, challenged. he runs a fingertip over the rim of his glass absently: the feelings are something like confusion, appreciation—then resentment, then guilt. it's ugly in there. ]
I'd have preferred you just stayed on that side.
[ ... ]
Even if you survive, we're not going to see each other again after this. I'll probably die when I go back, sooner or later, and it'll be a hundred worlds away from you.
You're not going anywhere? We're all going places. [ it's all goodbyes from here, baby ]
[ HE'S AN EDGELORD he tries so fucking hard and for WHAT, she just sits here and is like haha you silly little nerd have a juicebox
all the bad feelings are still there, but also like. EXASPERATION. have you ever seen a hognose snake violently pretending to be dead but it's kind of funny so people end up bothering them repeatedly anyway. this thing. that's him. ]
...It's incredible how frustrating you are. [ he sounds very calm, maybe mildly annoyed, though the emotions are more like AHHHHHHHHH ] All these weeks, and it's like you haven't changed. New heart, same person.
[ week 0, they had this same nightmarish kind of exchange. even the grief and sadness she brought into this bar hasn't ultimately ruined anything. oh yeah it's w5 i am no longer asking, give me a memshare at some point ]
[you cannot dissuade her in a way that matters she loves astarion and he's the nastiest little bitch in the world
ALSO I'M CRYING HE REALLY IS THIS SNAKE AAAAAAA. she does think it's funny. nehan the hognose snake... when he calls her frustrating, she just grins a little. not the first time, not the last time.]
My heart's my best feature, I think. Honestly, it's just that I haven't ever really wanted to be the me that's bitter. What a waste of my life that'd be.
[which, by the way, he can see the bitter part of her! yay!]
[ haha! yay! sometimes the best person you know feels bitterness too.
unfortunately, this hits a lot of very familiar buttons in quick succession. and for having a decent pokerface, emotionshare is his personal nightmare week; he's a little hatched-together house of twigs with no constitution, so he has to brace himself for a moment against the bar in the emotional reverb, hands shaking slightly from the full brunt of it all, the intensity. desperation, fury, anguish. the fear of dying, the inevitability, the stunned silence of beloved companions in the unadulterated face of emotion. revenge that feels like nothing. love, loss, bitterness.
he struggles to find a response as the fog recedes. so he just reaches across the bar to do—something. touch her arm, maybe. it's cautious, but the feelings behind it are of genuine sorrow, a reciprocated aching. ]
this is a rough one, and she comes out of it feeling rough. it's not a danger anymore - she's not going to die, or. well, not from her heart. not from the engine that was there. but it doesn't change how real those emotions were, and how real they sometimes still are. how she's still reeling about someone she trusted more than anything throwing her to the wolves.
nehan reaches across the bar, and she feels what he does, and relaxes, slightly. looks up at him.]
Thanks.
[soft, genuine.]
I fixed it. [the feelings still come and go, though.]
[ betrayal stings, and it morphs into something even more painful and monstrous when the aftermath of it is as horrible as this was. his own nerves are buzzing and uncomfortable, but quiet down a little when she looks at him, nodding tightly. eventually, ]
...So you did.
[ he gets npc rights of knowing more of what's going on, at least, even if he's not on the living side. ]
...You seemed to have reservations before, back when we spoke. [ eons ago, it feels like. ] What changed your mind?
Liked my partner, wanted to give him a chance. [knowing that geto could maybe be free of his obligations if she partnered with him made it easier.] And then everybody kept asking me to use their wishes on me. I didn't want them to waste it.
... Plus, I was going to die. I wanted to have it for a bit, just in case this didn't exist.
[ he rolls his eye, though the emotion here is faintly amused rather than genuinely derogatory. ]
Why did I even ask?
[ even if she's carrying around these heavy emotions, even if she experiences them in earnest, same as he does, she is predictably very different. ]
You don't have to hold back the ugly emotions when you have them, not for my sake. [ he doesn't care about people putting on a strong face. ] ...Still, you're good at moving past it. I'm envious.
the last part, though, makes her tail swish back and forth.]
... It's just taken practice, is all. I'm not always very good at it, like you saw. I was getting to that point again, before I died. [being here with people who don't let her shove all her negative emotions down into the dark has done good work.]
I haven't got any idea what's happened to you, but it seems like whatever it is has got a rock and a rope tied to your ankle and a push into the ocean. I wish I could share some of the - swimming lessons, so to speak, with you.
[ he huffs gently, topping off their drinks again. practice and fortitude... it sounds easy, but he's aware that it can't be. ]
...I think at some point, you ought to just let people drown, Karlach. [ he doesn't say this with any resentment, stating it like a fact. ] Only so many people in the world that you can save, and you adopt plenty of strays already.
[ his feelings on it are dim and resigned. but since it's w6 now MY GOD i will just hand you the context as the fog seeps low to the ground again.
cw: child abuse, slavery, drugs Fighting back is easy, at first.
You still remember freedom—nights by a fire with your older sister, shelling roasted chestnuts, burning your fingertips when they get too hot. Having to throw out a batch of medicine because you used the wrong ratio of ingredients, and being scolded gently by your parents as they teach you how to properly grind the herbs and not pour in too much reagent.
So when it comes to your masters, you don't spare your venom. You hate them, and you tell them so. They beat you, of course, but there is a little pride in smearing the blood off your lip and not folding immediately. Your life, as devastated as it was, still doesn't feel so impossibly distant. Maybe you can hold out long enough until someone comes and pummels all the evil people here and saves you—maybe you can be strong enough to last.
It's only after your owners discover that you're worth more than the average, skinny little urchin that you realize a few fundamental truths: one, they treated you like nothing, because you were nothing. Now that they can squeeze value out of you, they bear down harder.
And two, you watch another slave die, and know they really will kill you if you don't give in.
Surviving, then, takes tremendous effort. You favor whatever side they don't beat that day, and you huddle with your cellmates for warmth when you have them. You patch up the bloody ruts in your skin yourself where they've taken to hurting you. You mix your own antidotes when they poison what food you do get, even if the pain and panic make it hard to do anything but curl up on the ground and shake. Sometimes all you can do is wait it out, and they toe your side to see you flinch, and you realize they think it's funny.
And what's baffling is—despite it all, you can't bring yourself to give up and die. No matter how much pain it is, how humiliating and hopeless these days are, you always end up struggling to live. Because dying—it's scarier? Somehow, death is always scarier. You miss your sister, you're clutching the legacy of a dead clan, and you're a child, you are terrified to die thinking that this is all you'll get, that being someone else's property is all you amount to now. There must be more to it. There was, once.
But the pain wins eventually, in other ways. It becomes a fight just to survive, to avoid hurt, and you make concessions: as the years pass, you stop letting yourself remember your family. You quit dreaming of rescue, and instead wonder idly—maybe life would've been easier, if you'd been bought by someone else? You forget the shape of freedom. You settle. You don't give your masters any lip, you don't bother blocking a hit because it'll be returned twice as badly; eventually, you hand them the things they want. The secrets your clan so closely guarded: you reveal them in little pieces in the lab that they make for you, where you can mix up concoctions to your heart's content. You use all that forbidden knowledge and eventually manufacture a drug so sweet and so addictive that it floods the criminal underbelly, makes it swollen with activity, fills treatment centers with withdrawal patients too poor to afford their next dose, taints lives all across the skies, and—most crucially—turns your masters into very, very rich men.
And then they treat you kindly.
You get a bed, instead of a cell. Your wounds have time to heal over into ropes of scars. They give you expensive clothes and call you an officer in their ranks, they let you travel for research because they know you won't run out of your cage even if they extend the bars. They laugh and smack your back as though they're your old friends—they praise the way they raised you. They accept you as one of their own without ever quite relinquishing you as their property.
It repulses you. Your surface is still, but it makes everything inside you churn and retch. You hate them and their kindness from your very core, extending through all your matter, stretching through your nerve endings—the entirety of your existence is dedicated to rage and fury and sorrow. You hate Xing for doing this to you. You hate the whole premise of the world for allowing this to happen, for deciding that some people can be turned into instruments and others get to live blissfully unaware. You hate that children can be traded off and no one seems to care where they go. You hate living, you hate how you've sold your clan's dignity, you hate yourself, you hate yourself, your hate extends beyond boundary and limit and it still doesn't make an ounce of difference, it doesn't make a single sound. Because you finally, finally have a shred of freedom, a life you've protected and scraped for, and yet you don't feel safe or happy and probably never will.
It's here, surrounded by creature comforts and guilt, that you wonder why, if this is life, you were ever so scared to die. ]
WELL. there's silence, as they come out of it, because it's a lot to deal with. it's probably not surprising that her emotions are all over the fucking place when the fog recedes - sad, mostly, but furious, too. it's like every kid she's held out her hand to, here. some adults, even. you're too young, to have to go through these things. you shouldn't had to. every adult in your life has failed you, has made it so you couldn't grow up safe, and it makes her so, so angry.
she sees the injustice here. she sees that this could have been what gortash would've done, if he'd continued to be alive. it's a little what he did as is. sold. killing people, directly or indirectly, to stay alive, to continue on, because death is scary. because there's still hope, even if it's dim, that something else could be coming.
karlach brings a hand up, a palm at her eyes, brushing away empathetic tears.]
Nehan...
[she starts, and she hesitates. waits to see how he reacts, first.]
[ the biggest reaction he has is actually to her tears, which gives him a moment's pause, a beat of hesitation in his feelings. he's been programmed against kindness for years, but he tries to settle the kneejerk frustration and shame before it kicks up. instead, he watches her a second before looking at his drink, swirling liquor in its glass. it's easier processing his own memories than the ones that people show him; he's resigned these days, speaking indifferently. ]
It's in the past. [ even if it stays as that metaphorical rock and rope. at the very least, he empathizes with plenty that she's gone through. ] Don't let it bother you. The point is—I have a lot of victims. You don't have to worry about whether I'm staying afloat.
[don't let it bother you, he says, like that's going to happen.
she rubs at her eyes again.]
... Past still hurts, even so. [frowning.] Don't be stupid. After all that - you're not going to let me be nice to you, but I'm going to keep trying. You deserve that from someone who means it. Who doesn't like you just for what you can give.
[ the number of people in this game who were once the control of someone else is kind of insane; even from the conversation before he died, he knows why karlach would find this more emotionally affecting. maybe it's the shared circumstances and fears that are why he doesn't reject what she says outright. his feelings are mostly confused, grateful but not really sure what to do with it.
still, he waves off the condolences. ]
I don't deserve anything. [ unfortunately he is cheese sasuke though he just says this with as flat an intonation as possible. he may have been a teenager but he still invented fantasy heroin so he can die as a favor to the universe. ] ...You say it took practice. What do you mean?
[just noogies the absolute shit out of him but lovingly
no, she doesn't do that, but she leans on the bar, watching him.]
When I got thrown down into the Hells, they tore my heart out. [imagine i give you that memshare too] It took years for me to not be a bitter mess of a person. I was there for ten years, Nehan, and I wasn't always like the way I am now.
It got so miserable. I couldn't die, Zariel would just drag me back up again, so it was just endless killing my way through hoards, and there was nothing to look forward to, but then just - I don't know. One day I got up and decided that I needed to find some sort of happiness to hold onto, or I wasn't going to be a person anymore.
So I just tried to find one good thing a day. Sometimes the only good thing was that I woke up at all, but - that's the reason I looked up when the ship that I escaped on came through.
ten years. and she's still young, so... it's a huge swathe of life to just be someone else's wrecking ball; he'd have found death a mercy after that long. but maybe that's the whole point. she'd dug up a reason to want to be alive, day by day, even if it meant being afraid to lose it all. he hasn't been scared in a while, but that comes with its own issues.
he drums his fingers before raising his gaze from the sticky bartop to her. ]
Seems like you've managed to come out the other side relatively intact. Congratulations on still being a person.
[ his voice is always soft and dry, but in this case, it's sincere. it takes a lot to make it out of so much hardship and still be yourself. ]
I assume you have more than just one good thing a day now, as well.
[gives you it in the other thread to just absolutely ruin jamba juice
anyway, she smiles a little at that, the sincerity.]
Thanks. And yeah. I've got a lot of good things, most of which are people, but - other things, too. Music, good food. Comfy clothes, a warm bed to sleep in. I've only been here a day and it's improved.
[genuinely. but also:]
Never too late to find yourself again. I mean that - I know you don't believe me, but you've still got plenty of chances.
[she's still young, and so is he. arguably he has even more time than she does.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
No. [ his emotions are largely nothing, like the hollow of a tree. an old and tired resignation. some fresher guilt. ] I'm just going along with time and seeing where it takes me. ...Not a lifestyle I'm recommending, of course.
no subject
Okay, Daan. [jesus] You ought to make some goals. Or I'll make them for you, and you won't like that very much, I bet.
no subject
he rolls his eye, drinking from his cup. there's no mirth there, but no disdain either. a carefully balanced neutrality. ]
You're welcome to try.
no subject
[she says, amused.]
Haven't got as much time as I did with the others, with you. But I'm not going anywhere.
[silence, for a moment, then:]
I really am glad to see you again, you know. Without the mask, even.
no subject
I'd have preferred you just stayed on that side.
[ ... ]
Even if you survive, we're not going to see each other again after this. I'll probably die when I go back, sooner or later, and it'll be a hundred worlds away from you.
You're not going anywhere? We're all going places. [ it's all goodbyes from here, baby ]
no subject
[well. yet, anyway,]
Don't be so fucking dramatic. [she says, but the emotions are fond.] You can't take away my hope that I'll see everybody again, including you.
no subject
all the bad feelings are still there, but also like. EXASPERATION. have you ever seen a hognose snake violently pretending to be dead but it's kind of funny so people end up bothering them repeatedly anyway. this thing. that's him. ]
...It's incredible how frustrating you are. [ he sounds very calm, maybe mildly annoyed, though the emotions are more like AHHHHHHHHH ] All these weeks, and it's like you haven't changed. New heart, same person.
[ week 0, they had this same nightmarish kind of exchange. even the grief and sadness she brought into this bar hasn't ultimately ruined anything. oh yeah it's w5 i am no longer asking, give me a memshare at some point ]
no subject
ALSO I'M CRYING HE REALLY IS THIS SNAKE AAAAAAA. she does think it's funny. nehan the hognose snake... when he calls her frustrating, she just grins a little. not the first time, not the last time.]
My heart's my best feature, I think. Honestly, it's just that I haven't ever really wanted to be the me that's bitter. What a waste of my life that'd be.
[which, by the way, he can see the bitter part of her! yay!]
no subject
unfortunately, this hits a lot of very familiar buttons in quick succession. and for having a decent pokerface, emotionshare is his personal nightmare week; he's a little hatched-together house of twigs with no constitution, so he has to brace himself for a moment against the bar in the emotional reverb, hands shaking slightly from the full brunt of it all, the intensity. desperation, fury, anguish. the fear of dying, the inevitability, the stunned silence of beloved companions in the unadulterated face of emotion. revenge that feels like nothing. love, loss, bitterness.
he struggles to find a response as the fog recedes. so he just reaches across the bar to do—something. touch her arm, maybe. it's cautious, but the feelings behind it are of genuine sorrow, a reciprocated aching. ]
no subject
this is a rough one, and she comes out of it feeling rough. it's not a danger anymore - she's not going to die, or. well, not from her heart. not from the engine that was there. but it doesn't change how real those emotions were, and how real they sometimes still are. how she's still reeling about someone she trusted more than anything throwing her to the wolves.
nehan reaches across the bar, and she feels what he does, and relaxes, slightly. looks up at him.]
Thanks.
[soft, genuine.]
I fixed it. [the feelings still come and go, though.]
no subject
...So you did.
[ he gets npc rights of knowing more of what's going on, at least, even if he's not on the living side. ]
...You seemed to have reservations before, back when we spoke. [ eons ago, it feels like. ] What changed your mind?
no subject
Liked my partner, wanted to give him a chance. [knowing that geto could maybe be free of his obligations if she partnered with him made it easier.] And then everybody kept asking me to use their wishes on me. I didn't want them to waste it.
... Plus, I was going to die. I wanted to have it for a bit, just in case this didn't exist.
no subject
[ especially when he's seen how afraid she was, now. he tips his drink back, downing the rest in one go. ]
Was it worth it? Has this been worth it?
no subject
[but - the question gets her to think. briefly, it doesn't take very long, because:]
Yeah. Of course it has. All of this has been worth it. Every single one of you that I've met has been.
[honestly, were you expecting any other answer?]
no subject
Why did I even ask?
[ even if she's carrying around these heavy emotions, even if she experiences them in earnest, same as he does, she is predictably very different. ]
You don't have to hold back the ugly emotions when you have them, not for my sake. [ he doesn't care about people putting on a strong face. ] ...Still, you're good at moving past it. I'm envious.
no subject
the last part, though, makes her tail swish back and forth.]
... It's just taken practice, is all. I'm not always very good at it, like you saw. I was getting to that point again, before I died. [being here with people who don't let her shove all her negative emotions down into the dark has done good work.]
I haven't got any idea what's happened to you, but it seems like whatever it is has got a rock and a rope tied to your ankle and a push into the ocean. I wish I could share some of the - swimming lessons, so to speak, with you.
no subject
...I think at some point, you ought to just let people drown, Karlach. [ he doesn't say this with any resentment, stating it like a fact. ] Only so many people in the world that you can save, and you adopt plenty of strays already.
[ his feelings on it are dim and resigned. but since it's w6 now MY GOD i will just hand you the context as the fog seeps low to the ground again.
cw: child abuse, slavery, drugs
Fighting back is easy, at first.
You still remember freedom—nights by a fire with your older sister, shelling roasted chestnuts, burning your fingertips when they get too hot. Having to throw out a batch of medicine because you used the wrong ratio of ingredients, and being scolded gently by your parents as they teach you how to properly grind the herbs and not pour in too much reagent.
So when it comes to your masters, you don't spare your venom. You hate them, and you tell them so. They beat you, of course, but there is a little pride in smearing the blood off your lip and not folding immediately. Your life, as devastated as it was, still doesn't feel so impossibly distant. Maybe you can hold out long enough until someone comes and pummels all the evil people here and saves you—maybe you can be strong enough to last.
It's only after your owners discover that you're worth more than the average, skinny little urchin that you realize a few fundamental truths: one, they treated you like nothing, because you were nothing. Now that they can squeeze value out of you, they bear down harder.
And two, you watch another slave die, and know they really will kill you if you don't give in.
Surviving, then, takes tremendous effort. You favor whatever side they don't beat that day, and you huddle with your cellmates for warmth when you have them. You patch up the bloody ruts in your skin yourself where they've taken to hurting you. You mix your own antidotes when they poison what food you do get, even if the pain and panic make it hard to do anything but curl up on the ground and shake. Sometimes all you can do is wait it out, and they toe your side to see you flinch, and you realize they think it's funny.
And what's baffling is—despite it all, you can't bring yourself to give up and die. No matter how much pain it is, how humiliating and hopeless these days are, you always end up struggling to live. Because dying—it's scarier? Somehow, death is always scarier. You miss your sister, you're clutching the legacy of a dead clan, and you're a child, you are terrified to die thinking that this is all you'll get, that being someone else's property is all you amount to now. There must be more to it. There was, once.
But the pain wins eventually, in other ways. It becomes a fight just to survive, to avoid hurt, and you make concessions: as the years pass, you stop letting yourself remember your family. You quit dreaming of rescue, and instead wonder idly—maybe life would've been easier, if you'd been bought by someone else? You forget the shape of freedom. You settle. You don't give your masters any lip, you don't bother blocking a hit because it'll be returned twice as badly; eventually, you hand them the things they want. The secrets your clan so closely guarded: you reveal them in little pieces in the lab that they make for you, where you can mix up concoctions to your heart's content. You use all that forbidden knowledge and eventually manufacture a drug so sweet and so addictive that it floods the criminal underbelly, makes it swollen with activity, fills treatment centers with withdrawal patients too poor to afford their next dose, taints lives all across the skies, and—most crucially—turns your masters into very, very rich men.
And then they treat you kindly.
You get a bed, instead of a cell. Your wounds have time to heal over into ropes of scars. They give you expensive clothes and call you an officer in their ranks, they let you travel for research because they know you won't run out of your cage even if they extend the bars. They laugh and smack your back as though they're your old friends—they praise the way they raised you. They accept you as one of their own without ever quite relinquishing you as their property.
It repulses you. Your surface is still, but it makes everything inside you churn and retch. You hate them and their kindness from your very core, extending through all your matter, stretching through your nerve endings—the entirety of your existence is dedicated to rage and fury and sorrow. You hate Xing for doing this to you. You hate the whole premise of the world for allowing this to happen, for deciding that some people can be turned into instruments and others get to live blissfully unaware. You hate that children can be traded off and no one seems to care where they go. You hate living, you hate how you've sold your clan's dignity, you hate yourself, you hate yourself, your hate extends beyond boundary and limit and it still doesn't make an ounce of difference, it doesn't make a single sound. Because you finally, finally have a shred of freedom, a life you've protected and scraped for, and yet you don't feel safe or happy and probably never will.
It's here, surrounded by creature comforts and guilt, that you wonder why, if this is life, you were ever so scared to die. ]
no subject
WELL. there's silence, as they come out of it, because it's a lot to deal with. it's probably not surprising that her emotions are all over the fucking place when the fog recedes - sad, mostly, but furious, too. it's like every kid she's held out her hand to, here. some adults, even. you're too young, to have to go through these things. you shouldn't had to. every adult in your life has failed you, has made it so you couldn't grow up safe, and it makes her so, so angry.
she sees the injustice here. she sees that this could have been what gortash would've done, if he'd continued to be alive. it's a little what he did as is. sold. killing people, directly or indirectly, to stay alive, to continue on, because death is scary. because there's still hope, even if it's dim, that something else could be coming.
karlach brings a hand up, a palm at her eyes, brushing away empathetic tears.]
Nehan...
[she starts, and she hesitates. waits to see how he reacts, first.]
no subject
It's in the past. [ even if it stays as that metaphorical rock and rope. at the very least, he empathizes with plenty that she's gone through. ] Don't let it bother you. The point is—I have a lot of victims. You don't have to worry about whether I'm staying afloat.
no subject
she rubs at her eyes again.]
... Past still hurts, even so. [frowning.] Don't be stupid. After all that - you're not going to let me be nice to you, but I'm going to keep trying. You deserve that from someone who means it. Who doesn't like you just for what you can give.
[a little sniff.]
I'm sorry.
no subject
still, he waves off the condolences. ]
I don't deserve anything. [ unfortunately he is cheese sasuke though he just says this with as flat an intonation as possible. he may have been a teenager but he still invented fantasy heroin so he can die as a favor to the universe. ] ...You say it took practice. What do you mean?
no subject
no, she doesn't do that, but she leans on the bar, watching him.]
When I got thrown down into the Hells, they tore my heart out. [imagine i give you that memshare too] It took years for me to not be a bitter mess of a person. I was there for ten years, Nehan, and I wasn't always like the way I am now.
It got so miserable. I couldn't die, Zariel would just drag me back up again, so it was just endless killing my way through hoards, and there was nothing to look forward to, but then just - I don't know. One day I got up and decided that I needed to find some sort of happiness to hold onto, or I wasn't going to be a person anymore.
So I just tried to find one good thing a day. Sometimes the only good thing was that I woke up at all, but - that's the reason I looked up when the ship that I escaped on came through.
no subject
ten years. and she's still young, so... it's a huge swathe of life to just be someone else's wrecking ball; he'd have found death a mercy after that long. but maybe that's the whole point. she'd dug up a reason to want to be alive, day by day, even if it meant being afraid to lose it all. he hasn't been scared in a while, but that comes with its own issues.
he drums his fingers before raising his gaze from the sticky bartop to her. ]
Seems like you've managed to come out the other side relatively intact. Congratulations on still being a person.
[ his voice is always soft and dry, but in this case, it's sincere. it takes a lot to make it out of so much hardship and still be yourself. ]
I assume you have more than just one good thing a day now, as well.
no subject
anyway, she smiles a little at that, the sincerity.]
Thanks. And yeah. I've got a lot of good things, most of which are people, but - other things, too. Music, good food. Comfy clothes, a warm bed to sleep in. I've only been here a day and it's improved.
[genuinely. but also:]
Never too late to find yourself again. I mean that - I know you don't believe me, but you've still got plenty of chances.
[she's still young, and so is he. arguably he has even more time than she does.]