God i wish my brain could remember things clearly and in the right order so i could stop making mortifying verbal mistakes that make me feel like im abt to get crucified
aconite remembers this clear as day, for it was the first time in her then short life that a guardian had ever hurt her- which is why it burns so terribly that onyx doesn't recall. he denies any knowledge of it, to this day, and it eats at her nerves, the ease with which he lies- or the ease with which he forgets. for her it had been formative, for him- an afterthought.
she was…. smaller then. she had not yet abandoned the concepts of love and companionship, fragile ideals that clung to her like old snakeskin yet to be shed. she asked onyx what his real name was.
she did not understand then that the widening of his eyes was a wild, paranoid anger that he rarely indulged, festering with fire instead of his usual flippant indifference. one moment she was looking up at him, and the next she was horizontal, half of her face burning. she remembers a stack of books that she had been reading being knocked over- did he do it, or did she knock into them? the details escaped her.
she thinks perhaps this memory was colored over with the haze of her childish panic, but she swears that everything had been tinged a bright red, her pulse a thundering roar in her chest. she didn't even see the hand that had hit her to the ground- her vision just blurred. her heart was in her throat. it felt like she was choking on it, and it was hard to breathe around, her ears ringing.
"don't ever ask that again, you hear me? for both your sake and mine, the man I used to be is dead. forgotten."
he gripped her throat, fury and what she later understood to be fear, or perhaps.. grief? in every line of his body. it was already so hard to breathe, and she didn't know if the tears beading up in her eyes were from lack of air or just plain terror. he gave her a shake that made her dizzy. she was such a weakling, then. she could take harder hits than that, now; her dear mentor had seen to it.
"I am onyx, have always been onyx, and don't owe you anything more than that. understand?"
she nodded, frantic, and staggered back coughing when he had finally let go. her throat ached. her chest hurt. she couldn't breathe she couldn't breathe she couldn't breathe she-
his face had closed off, any trace of anger gone, and he looked at her impassively, for just a blank, empty moment, then turned on his heel and left her there, gasping for breath and trying so hard to understand why he had done what he'd done. he was her savior, wasn't he? it was because of him she was still alive. he took her in. she couldn't blame him, could she? she had to do better. she had to be better, and then he would only be his good parts.
it was all her fault, and she would fix it! it was a child's selfish logic. that the world revolved around her actions. that she could ever decide what life would put her through, prevent it's many pointless tragedies.
what a foolish, foolish child she was. now she considers it all, turning the situation around in her head like gemstone, studying it's many facets. she knows now that onyx's many reactions, his cruel and callous impulses, had been borne from immaturity- a careless, arrogant kind. a lack of control that she was never allowed to have but he could flaunt freely.
it grated on her. it grated to this day like the two ends of a snapped bone scraping together, raw and painful even decades later. she had been around eight. even now, as steeped in atrocity and sin as she was, she would never beat a child. if she ever had to kill one, it was always quick and painless- the most mercy she could offer. she digresses- this bar was so low that it was in hell. she was no moral paragon.
again and again she studied her childhood and it's reflections, it's refractions, the strange shadows this dark, multifaceted gem had cast on every corner of her soul. she found no answers. all that was there was a bitterness she couldn't fight, all tangled up with a sense of.. of care, of fondness, that she could not separate despite her greatest efforts. he was indeed something like family to her, and that only made it hurt worse.
it did not absolve her, she knew. she could not abscond responsibility for all her horrible actions just because she grew up under a cruel hand. there was no justifying to any sane being the blood that soaked her hands all the way up to the shoulder, the madness she had wrought in a desperate need to have control over her own fate, to never be the servile, spineless, enslaved weakling she once was. she knows now she had never been in control. she had been a slave to her desperation all along.
that grated too. that all she had to show for such a long, soul-killing road was… unnecessary, wasted suffering, both her own and others, and nothing more. it never meant anything. she was never free. she had merely built her own chains instead of being chained to someone else.
not for the first time, she wondered if the only true freedom she'd ever feel was when her soul left the mortal coil. a pointless thought, since psuedo-immortality was part of her punishment.
she wished it would all cease. that she didn't have to look at the face of the only person she she loved and hated in equal measure every day, across from her in a glass cell just like hers, that the accusing, terrified eyes of every other prisoner did not dart at her so keenly, make her LV crawl with a need to make them still forever. that the instability that she could feel under her skin did not make her feel so unmoored- that the aching absence of where her magic once was did not hurt so much.
here she was, with nothing to do but think, weigh every choice she had ever made on a broken scale, judge what remained of her soul and ask the indifferent world if any of it mattered. she once heard the universe was not uncaring, for sentient life was the organ it used to care, to love, to dream- but if she was part of that, she felt perhaps that she was a cancer. a sick, broken cell, consuming madly and unable to do it's function and care for anything else but survival. she was a malignant blight upon the world. could she blame the surgeon's hand of fate, for cutting her away, starving her of resources, discarding her to rot?
