[ 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
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.]