Penance
The propaganda around the church is almost as old as it is. Killers. Pan-melters. Spies. Liars. Deserving of deaths that wouldn’t send them to whatever beyond their creepy cult would allow them. Their rages, constant in some, like unruly animals attacking anything around them unbidden. Monsters. Pan-touchers.
)(IC is, of course, the leading source of propaganda. It’s her way of staying on top without having to tire herself out. She chases down hopeful, flushcrushing shitbloods and hopeful highbloods, and talks to them putting on a voice the heretic – the Signless’ own guardian would be proud to use. Or, something mimicking the kind tone she supposedly had, at the very least.
“You don’t wanna get with one of those fishes, guppy.” Her eyes aren’t as obvious when they glow. Of course, she wouldn’t see a power and leave it out. She had a clown compatible to her needs within a week of mentioning it, and GHB had handed them over with the same grim face he did anything involving her with; aware. Too aware. “They change ya pan up. Make you think whatever they want. Don’t let you out when you wanna leave.”
The shitbloods always believe her, because she has plenty of practice making slaves she stops liking into gibbering masses of flesh, plenty of experience in changing someone’s pan to fit her needs, even before she took on the mutations, the powers. The clowns stay to themselves, stooping, eyes down, trying to be both smaller and less-less purple, really. Less obvious with their paint. Less obviously examples of what the rumors say.
Kurloz sees it. The Highblood is no grub, not yet so old that he needs glasses. He sees the trend in paint, once glittery, or sharp, predatory and outstated, sees it become muted. Rounded edges around the eyes, dots here and there. Careful, as always, to not be noticed. For not the first nor the last time, he contemplates the deal he was given, his predecessor was given sweeps before him, wonders if now, now they could fight. Wonders it every time a fresh fleet of recruits comes back, their first concern changing their paint to be softer to look at.
But, again, trolls would die. Trolls would know that the church did kill en-masse. Does. Now, it would do nothing but prove the rumors right to attack. The cost would be lives, safety in their compounds, the far-reaching ones now too far for him to keep in his mind’s eye. Spread too thin, they would be destroyed by even a smattering of petty uprisings. Too much to risk, now.
And when he thinks this, the clouding indigo-pink he knows from her fills his pan. Even light-sweeps away. Even when he’s underground. She must have found more clowns, and had them sent to her without his knowledge. She must have taken more powers. He feels the cloud fill his pan, too much even for him to fight against. As ancient as he is, she’s moreso, thousands of sweeps even before she found his church a threat, ever found his power a threat.
Her mastery makes him sick, but only for an instant. Then, it’s gone, everything tinted indigo and cold and distant. Orders in his pan leave his lips with the exact cadence he would use anyway, he goes about his routines, and eventually he stops fighting the fog, the indigo, the cold weight of it settled heavily in his pan, because it’s easier, it’s better. They only kill shitbloods. The wars are fewer. He doesn’t have to remember the faces of the trolls who die. It’s better.
Waking up on the other side of reality, in an in-between space that isn’t supposed to exist, where he’s dead but not gone, where he sees trolls who died or were banished ages ago. The heretic (Kankri, he calls himself, somehow chipper and friendly), the deserter (Horuss, mumbled and stuttered until his name sounds like horse instead), the aberrant jade (she glares from some space away, eyes wary for the fish he’d seen with her once, the fish he’d sold her to, when she was branded, not wearing delicate silks like now), so many others. Children. Thousands of children.
Waking there is the worst part of it. Because she can’t reach him, can’t blanket fog over his pan to block out the memories he has; the heretic with a warm smile now, as he was, bleeding and charred, screaming at his mate to stay back, to please, please, Meulin, don’t. The mate, Meulin, leaping at him, to help, being left alive for then as the deserter was stripped of his title, sent away, ever obedient. Of olive blood on his pants legs and even more pained screaming than when they’d put the irons on.
It’s too much, all at once, and the strange kinship even the jade mother offers him, in the silent, distant way she sends along things he, logically, doesn’t need, after all of it, after they’d all died for no reason. The clowns who mill around and greet him with bright eyes and excited salutes make him nearly break down. Why them, why all of them? How much tragedy can one troll bring before he’s reprimanded by those in power?
His penance would have to be here. Not allowed to die, not allowed any more to float ignorant of his actions, of the stench of murder on his skin, under his nails. Here where he couldn’t keep the mutant, the heretic, the Kankri from visiting, from rambling about memories or his own boring night for an hour at a time, then leaving. His penance was remembering, would be remembering.
Each evening, or what substituted it, every amount of time that would, on Alternia, be a day, he comes, settling himself into a seat after walking in without knocking. Death no longer scares the dead, and the Highblood is no longer a threat. He lays, prone and shaking, on a pile of his own making, in the hive he built with his own hands and abandoned as he suddenly had responsibilities, had a block at the compound.
“Highblood, how are you?” Kankri asks, every time, his voice crisp and warm. Too kind. He doesn’t wait for a response. “I was thinking as I walked here about the time we were in a cave near a compound. We actually sneaked in for a carnival, it was so fun. Meulin won most of the games.”
He goes on, but the Highblood can’t listen. His head is heavy. Kankri’s voice is soothing, and he finds soon enough that he can’t sleep until he hears it. Hears the calm, patient way he talks. Unhurried. No gasping, final speeches to try and fix things. Like it’s better, now. Death fixes most ills. His pusher flips, his throat too tight. He doesn’t deserve the comfort of it, but he can’t tell him to leave. It never worked, anyway, when he still had fight in him. When he still tried.
A hand rests on his cheek, hot skin, sliding slickly over his paint. “Highblood, why are you crying?” He’s kneeling on the edge of the pile, unthreatening, but he shrinks anyway.
“Don’t.” He gasps, sobbing. Lurching back, like he’s been slapped. Burned. “Don’t. Please.”
His face softens more, somehow. The warm hand is back, too gentle, too soft, too kind, too much. “What’s your name?” The question is so out of his realm of thought that he actually blinks, the usual retribution on the back of his tongue as his body remembers before his pan.
“Kurloz.” He manages, breathing it against the searing fingers on his lips, his cheek, petting, papping all over his face. “Makara.” The word wrung out of him, sounding wretched and tight. It hurts to speak. It hurts more to be heard.
Kankri smiles, that blinding warm smile that makes his pusher beat too fast and makes him feel sick at himself, thinking about the warm body under his clothes, the soft skin and curve of his throat, of his body at all. The memories of the torture he was part of come back, the hosing, the way he was housed. He feels sicker, with how he desperately wants to touch him, not pail him, not take him, just hold him. Just be near a body that’s all warmth and giving and not half-fear like it had been until he stopped trying to have flings.
The hand brushes his hair back, rests over his temple. “Kurloz. I like that better than Highblood.” He sits in the pile, the first step forward he’d taken since he started the bizarre visits. His warmth radiates from him and Kurloz forces himself to back away. “Can I call you that?” Respectful in the way a friend would be.
It hurts. He feels sick, curls in tighter on his abdomen; he can’t starve, but he remembers what being hungry is. He remembers eating meals regularly, and that remembering makes him feel like he’s starving now. His stomach hurts, but he can’t tell what it is. Another penance.
Kankri leaves his sight and he tamps down his disappointment, turns his face against clothes that hadn’t fit him since he was a wriggler and pillows piled on a dirt floor. They smell like the sea and like being alone. Alone, for so long, and he realizes now it was pre-payment for his weakness later, for letting himself be dominated like he was, divine retribution before he’d even fucked it up that badly.
He doesn’t realize he’s asleep until he wakes up, warmth again radiating from a smaller, softer body next to him. “Kurloz, your stomach is growling.” Two fingers pull his mouth open like an impatient lusus, and a spoonful of something hot and liquid spills past his lips. “Come on. Swallow.”
Orders are easier. He does as told, over and over, the warmth within and without lulling him nearly to sleep, lulling him back into crying as Kankri steps around his execution, around watching his mate’s blood splatter over Kurloz’s front and cold, emotionless eyes meet his. He sobs, his chest tight, his pusher too fast, clutching pillows, remembering the days he was plagued with terrors and woke alone, remembering the tricks he knew to make himself calm.
None of them work, Kankri is there, running fingers through his hair, soothing, too soothing, like he’s with a friend he’s known since grubhood and not the reason he was killed. The dreams Kurloz has had of him, the heretic, echo in his pan, the screaming, the sobbing, the broken troll hanging by his wrists from a post while everyone he loved was destroyed in front of him. His guardian forced to her knees, a burning iron collar placed around her throat, set to bond to the skin. His mate, murdered. His friend, collared and unable to spark, to fight back.
The other dreams, he didn’t think about as a rule. The dreams of what he assumed it was like for them all. The dreams that made him jealous, that made him want. That made him want everything of them, their minds, their bodies, the way he imagined them talking to each other. He coveted his imaginings of them, clinging to the dreams he had as though he were drowning and they would keep him afloat.
He sobs harder, tears only still coming in because he never remembers crying himself out, and Kankri accepts it. Accepts him, sobbing, pulls at him when he refuses to pull himself, moves to make him cry into the warm give of his abdomen, the soft part, the part that would hurt worst. Breathes soothing nothings. Too much. He strokes a hand down his nearly nonexistent part, the back of his neck, gentle, and Kurloz finally speaks.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He sputters, clings harder, needy, the warmth unbearably right. “Should-should hate me.” He presses closer, curling around Kankri. “You should hate me.”
The hand in his hair never slows, but Kankri takes a long time to respond. “I did. For a long time. But I’m dead, Kurloz. I’ve been dead so long. It isn’t going to help me. It only made me bitter.” He allows his face to be lifted, looking into clear red eyes. “I forgave you a long time ago. I saw you, sometimes, in dreams. I know you deserve it. I know you’re sorry.”
“Didn’t apologize.” He doesn’t meet Kankri’s eyes. “Never, motherfucker, never apologized.”
His claws scrape the bases of his horns and he hates how much he wants it, how easily he relaxes into the touch, pressing his face again to the delicate space under Kankri’s ribs. “Death puts things in perspective. I don’t hate you.” He tries to say ‘you should’ but he’s silenced, pressed again to his thorax. “I never hated you. I hated what happened. I hated being dead. I hated what they did. What you did. But you weren’t you.” Like he would know, Kurloz can’t accept that. They had met only when Kankri was being tortured. “I don’t know how I knew, but I didn’t see you in yourself. And you’re not hurting me now. I’m not going to punish you.”
Kurloz shudders, tears finally stopping. It’s too much. He makes himself release Kankri, asks for him to please leave. Leave him to his thoughts and to shamefully curling into the pile deeper, into sleeping peacefully now that he can focus on Kankri’s soothing voice without missing anything he said. His personal purgatory, trying to be forgiven faster than he accrues misdeeds, like this one, like every time Kankri has come in and spoken at him, selfishly taking the calm tone and warm voice and the patience, the gentle eyes on him and using them to sleep easier.
He only wonders why Kankri was banished to limbo with him, or if he’s imagining Kankri’s presence entirely. He doesn’t know which would be more fitting for his own punishment, though he knows any punishment Kankri deserves should not be so severe as forgiving the troll who let him die. Who preferred to stay floating and somnambulant than face a threat he might lose to.
A threat he, in the end, in the giving in, in the floating, lost to anyway.
He drifts, in sleep, comfortably. Almost as though he weren’t a monster.
When he wakes, it’s to rough hands, hands that washed too many clothes, too many decks to be soft, dragging him from the pile with more strength in them than there should have been. He nearly flips the chair she throws him into.
But then, women were always stronger. He stares dumbly at the cold glare of the jade mother, who hasn’t given a name, who stays near but not close, watching. Her eyes flick to the doors, the windows, like she expects the fish (what was his name?) to break down a wall and take her back. As far as he knew, with the rivalry between the fish and that cerulean, it may have happened. The collar didn’t follow her into this unlife, at least.
She taps a foot. “Your hive is a mess.” She glares at the pile, misshapen and sad to look at, like a grub’s doing. “You’re a mess. I’m not as nice as Kankri, though. My son doesn’t know when people deserve what they get. I won’t forgive you for him. For Meulin, and Mituna, and for myself. You stood by and let it happen. A few tears won’t change that.”
Is he crying? It feels like relief, to finally have the response he deserves. She kicks the meager pile, scattering clothes, and he sees the twitch in her hands, the urge to clean it up. He wonders if it’s training or motherly instinct. Or both.
“Kankri can forgive you a million times over. You haven’t earned it. You didn’t change anything on Alternia.” He leans back as she stalks closer, disturbingly tall for a lowblood; not for a jade, though. Her breath hits his face as she speaks, lower, eyes burning into his. “I will never forgive you, you monster. If you even think of laying a finger on my son again, I will find a way to kill you again.” She steps back, still severe, still hateful in looking him over. “Do you understand, motherfucker?”
He does. He says so, meek, and nods when she leaves with another word to clean up. Himself, his hive, whatever. Just to do something. Kankri was telling her about him, and she was tired of hearing him upset over the disrepair his hive and self had fallen to. Her tone, though cold, is still edged with that same matronly concern she had when she had turned herself in, hoping to somehow sway the decisions about her son that had been made when he had hatched.
Just at the door, she pauses, calling over her shoulder with a softer voice. “Kurloz?” She turns, her face so tired, eyes full of a sadness he can’t even begin to fathom. “It’s too late to change it now.” She nods, as though that were some kind of comfort, and leaves with a soft swishing of silk on silk.
Kurloz sinks to the floor again, too exhausted to gather the pile back together, to move from that spot. The ceiling was never this tall when he was actually in this hive, looking up at the bare rafters and cobwebs is almost dizzying, but he realizes that laying on the floor can have that effect.
The pile, now destroyed, is just a mess on the floor, old shirts and pillows with patches sewn on. A cloth bag with wriggler mementos of his lusus, before his lusus vanished into the yawning sea where he knew Kurloz would never be able to follow. He stands, slowly, feeling older than he is, feeling his age the same way lowbloods would, and stoops to pick up the mementos, to stuff the shirts into a basket, to put the pillows back in their proper places, and sits, for the first time, on his sofa.
His pan aches, but he focuses, pulling up the powers he so rarely used after the fog had covered him, pulling up his voodoos and reaching out, into the unlife-space he and all the others are in, as far as he can. His face feels grimy, and he wonders how much he has to just remember and how much is up to personal grooming. In the edge of his mind, the farthest part where he can reach, he feels the searing warmth of Kankri, walking calmly but decidedly towards him. His pan is--
Kurloz stops, pulling himself back into his body. Kankri’s thoughts are, at the very least, the thing he wouldn’t disturb. It was too late to change the rest now. He would accept the attentions and the forgiveness, even though he doesn’t deserve it, because he’s selfish and needy and it has been so long since he could feel, actually feel the relief a pale partner could give him. But he won’t intrude on his pan.
He hates himself, but he hates being alone more; after all, isn’t that what lead to investigating the “church” he heard about, the being alone? Being left to himself in a hive too big for a wriggler and too small for an adult, being left to himself when he could barely feed himself? It’s a wonder he didn’t start his own cult, though it wouldn’t have been real.
He can’t think about that now.
Lurching, he makes his way to the strange, sizeless abulationsblock. He doesn’t remember enough of it to make it work in his eyes, but he can shower and apply his paint properly and sit on the couch again and even look up as Kankri walks in. He’s holding a loaf of peasant bread, and Kurloz’s mouth waters. He doesn’t know if smiling is the right thing to do, here.
“Oh! You’re up.” He smiles. Kurloz tries to smile back. “Are you feeling better? I used to get sick all the time when I was alive.”
He sits in the kitchen again, keeping his distance. Kurloz wonders if he should cry again, but stuffs it down, reminding himself that he should absolutely not be hoping for affection. That he doesn’t have that right, the right to want or ask. Not even if Kankri gave him permission, he wouldn’t initiate, wouldn’t ask. Couldn’t. How would he ask for more from someone he took everything from, after all? How could he be that selfish?
Even as he thinks this, he finds himself pressing to one side of the sofa, making space for Kankri, should he choose to join him. Feels himself compressing, trying to be smaller, less intimidating. Hope boils in his chest, hot and selfish, as Kankri stands again, leaving the basket on the table and settling at his own end of the couch. He’s still talking, and Kurloz feels worse knowing he hasn’t listened to more than his even tone.
“--Wasn’t as bad when I was an adult, but I still got colds a lot, and my voice was almost always shot.” He laughs, turned to face him with one leg to the side. A disgusting part of Kurloz’s pan wonders what he looks like under his clothes, but it’s silenced before it gets farther than that; curiosity is more than enough, more than it should be. “The colder parts of the sweep were annoying, my mother would always wrap me in scarves, even when I wasn’t cold. I guess highbloods get cold easier?”
And now that a question is directed at him, he has to force his pan to process what he hears. “Yes.” At length. “Blood ours is not heated.” He waves a hand tiredly, having exhausted his vocabulary in actually conversing.
“Oh.” Kankri looks concerned. No, interested. No, curious. “You don’t have a stove or heater here, though.” He looks around the room, aware that Kurloz likely cannot fit into the respiteblock of his wrigglerhood. “I wanted to ask, why here?”
Another long pause of thought. Words trip over themselves in his pan. “Compound never my home was.” Even after sweeps and sweeps there, he dreamed of a cold cabin, close to the sea and filled with memories.
Even now, in death, this is home. He meets Kankri’s eyes tentatively, waiting for him to expect more, trying to find a reason that he can word with his too-dry throat and the memories overlapping, tripping around each other. He doesn’t know if he can answer, if asked.
“Fair.” He just nods, looking around again, with more scrutiny. The silk bag on the end table is noted, but not touched. “It’s nice, though. Homey. Reminds me of my hive when I was a wriggler, before I had to go on the run with my mother, but we had a lot more green. You probably guessed that.”
He hadn’t, but he nods. Kankri continues, and Kurloz lets himself be lulled, watching him with half-lidded eyes. He’s nearly on top of Kankri before he realizes that he’s moving, but Kankri is, well, not unaware. Aware, turning and opening his stance (his sit?) to give him space, the column of his throat bared but not submissive, just showing that he won’t attack. It’s so near-feral that Kurloz almost laughs, almost.
His hindbrain pushes him forward, curls his arms around Kankri’s waist, his face against his stomach. Heat rolls off Kankri in waves, the calm heat of a lowblood, just near him. It’s better than being cold, being apart. He never realized how cold he was, and now he’s freezing, clinging to Kankri and feeling the vibrations of his voice, calm and deep like a riptide, through his sternum.
He shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be taking warmth, comfort even, from this lowblood, but even as he considers pulling away Kankri seems to ease into the couch. He becomes a pliant pillow more than a troll proper, still talking slow and soft, more soothing than the waves had been since the last time his lusus had left. His fingers rest tentative on Kurloz’s skull, then ease through the mess of his hair, down to his scalp, and he can’t focus anymore, can’t think past the bright spots of warmth on his scalp and the spreading calm that comes with them.
Kurloz moves himself to the floor, still pressing himself needy against Kankri’s abdomen, but he doesn’t stumble, just keeps talking, having started on what sounded like a recipe before Kurloz had returned to himself, decided to listen. This position, kneeling, reminds him of prayer, of the nights they remembered tragedy, begging forgiveness, begging retribution, begging anything that wasn’t nothing at all. He breathes in a ragged breath. Forgiveness.
“Are you still here, Kurloz?” He asks, voice low, fingers pausing long enough for his pan to reconstitute. “Are you with me?”
He blinks against the soft, washed wool of his cloak. “Yes.” He feels like he’s here, anyway.
“Okay. Keep listening to me.” He resumes the petting, the soothing motions that make Kurloz feel sick and calm at once. “I won’t leave when you aren’t here.”
His phrasing is hard to parse, but Kurloz pushes through the warm fog (better than the pinkish, the indigo that made everything feel distant and inconsequential, better than anything) to make his pan work. To stay present. Here. Wherever here was, he would stay. Would breathe in the warm wool smell of Kankri’s cloak and take soothing he shouldn’t have, let himself take this miniscule time to increase his punishment by needing of the troll he’d taken everything from.
Like prayer, he presses his forehead against Kankri, almost missing the hardness of the floor. Almost wanting to move back. He should recognize every night here as a tragedy, but he couldn’t move away, even now, upon his realizing of it. Couldn’t stop himself from wanting. There was a kind of divine punishment in losing against his body even now, in death, though that’s little comfort now. Even as he tries, he presses closer, breathing slower as he lets himself relax against this strange troll in his hive.
Kurloz never remembers being so tired. Like his bones themselves are in need of rest, like he’s been awake so long he’d have forgotten sleep. Even having been spending as much time as he had sleeping or near-sleeping hasn’t changed it, and now, even with his knees complaining about the floor and his pan buzzing with too many thoughts, he feels he could fall asleep, if he let himself.
In another time, he might be ashamed at it. Now, he’s just tired, dead and tired and pressing his forehead to the lap of a troll who forgave him without even asking if he deserved it. And, for at least right now, he can accept it. Kankri is soothing. For right now, he won’t fight it. Maybe guilt on guilt is a good enough penance to leave this in-between limbo, eventually.
Some small part of him wonders if he’d want to go, at that point. He already feels tight in the chest when he thinks about it. Nerves, probably. It’s been long enough that he might remember anxiety, or other previously forgotten emotions, maybe. The small part of him that dreads the eventual going wonders about the other emotions, the anger that simmered below his skin so long he feels scalded from the inside. The pull of intimacy, like now.
Selfish, even when not asking for it, he’s selfish.Leaning on Kankri now, and even before, taking on the numbness he was allowed without question, with almost no fight.
“.. But then again,” He sighs, seemingly at the end of his story. “I guess it worked out alright either way. We ended up on the coast for a little while, but I got to learn how to swim, so it was pretty nice. Even if we had to eat so much fish.”
He laughs, fingers twisting a knot out of Kurloz’s hair, eyes half-lidded and distant. Maybe, Kurloz thinks, maybe he’s remembering the night he died. Or wondering if he’d ever come across this hive. He doesn’t move, like a spell would be broken, but Kankri sighs again and pushes him away anyway.
“I need to go.” He stands, and Kurloz mirrors him, but moves away, all at once too big and too close and too intimate for the space. “I, I mean. Kurloz, I know my mother spoke to you. And she’s angry. She will be. She had to fight a lot more than I ever did, and she got less. Most trolls didn’t even know her, and I became some kind of cult, I guess.” He shakes his head, lips pulled back like he wants to spit something foul out. “But I’m not angry. I’m not happy with anything. I’m just no longer angry.”
His voice feels watery, and too loud. “Would be better if you were.” He doesn’t try to look away, but Kankri isn’t looking at him.
“Why?” He finally turns, looking exhausted and sad, but not angry, not full of rage or even annoyed. Nothing he can expect to know how to handle. A thousand sweeps on a bed of coals. “So you can keep feeling sorry for yourself? I’m dead, it doesn’t matter anymore. I just want to know that at least now, you can look at me as a troll, and not a.” He pauses, getting that look again, like he’s tasted something terrible. “A mutant. Or a heretic. I just want to be a troll. I don’t want to contribute to your pity-party.”
He’s leaving before Kurloz can respond, before the impotent rage that bubbles up instinctively can shroud his vision, before he’s tearing open that bag and looking at what’s in it for the first time in, what was it? Three, four hundred sweeps? Must have been more. Before he’s blaming a small blue crab’s shell for everything that happened in the intervening sweeps. Kankri doesn’t see any of it.
That same selfish, steadily stronger part of his pan is almost disappointed. There’s something to be said about being soothed from incomprehensible emotion. Whatever mixture of rage and desperation and sadness and being left behind he feels, he wishes to himself that Kankri had stayed to help, and feels terrible.
Still alone, still desperate and angry and sobbing so hard his stomach heaves, and guilty, accepting being one thing but initiating, expecting, even hoping being another entirely. Of course, that doesn’t stop that same want from coiling under his ribs, twisting around his lungs, but the guilt feels better. Focusing on guilt, on anything at all besides Kankri, besides wanting, is easier.
The shell slips back into the bag easily, placed back in the space spared for it between dried urchins and empty conch shells, saved specifically for it, and he settles for kneeling on the floor until he stops shaking. He ignores the voice in his pan telling him that the floor is what he deserves because, if nothing else, he knows he deserves whatever is in the hive; it’s his hive. He lived in it, at least part time, for longer than many trolls he knew. Still, he doesn’t move from his spot until the sun is creeping over the horizon and he’s too stiff to stand without using the wall and the sofa for balance.
Nothing moves when he ventures into his respiteblock. Unlike the ablutionsblock, he remembers this room clearly; small, nearly a closet, with a round window and a pile of towels on the floor that he never quite remembered to wash. Whatever proportions it was suited to, he can still walk in, still have to pull himself up to the edge. Maybe because he remembers it being outsized, it is now? He doesn’t bother with his clothes; there are others. The slime covers his head and he lets himself sleep, calmly, for the first time since dying.
No broken dreams of the ocean swallowing him or of blood pouring out of every cup at the main hall’s table (back before, when it was full of a scant hundred or so trolls, when he knew every clown by name and his face was mostly white, when he was shorter than most of the trolls he knew), nothing. Empty void, free from pained screams, from imagining himself where he would never be, settled in a small, tight hive with a warmer palemate settled against his side, laughing at some terrible joke.
For at least a moment, being able to forget killing the fish for telling the same terrible joke, as though that were any kind of justice. It was so easy to pretend then, he’s sure, for the Empress. No one expected less.
He climbs out of the slime before the sun sets. Did the jade know that he was dead? Would she care?
Slime splatters to the floor as he walks through his hive, grabbing the now-stale bread from the table. Would she even care to know how he died? When he’d seen her with him, she wasn’t in her own mind. Her eyes were blank, head down, following silently as the fish had shown her off like he did any work to have her. Called her his maid. At least he clothed her.
The slime is bitter against the back of his throat. Had she been in silk when he’d pulled her aside? He remembered she was wearing something, had longer hair, was standing tall before he took her aside. She wasn’t when she was taken off, dragged by the remnants of her hair by two clowns, a passing warning not to damage her from an onlooker, someone in the crowd. Someone whistled.
He sets the bread back on the table. She wouldn’t have an excuse to forget, an ability to forget, like he had. The sun sets, and he’s nearly glued to the floor from the drying slime, trying to force his pan to remember what he’d done, exactly, besides let it happen. He must have stripped her, cut her hair, knocked her to the ground. The memory escapes him, but there was no one else that close to the heretic, not by that point. The archer wouldn’t have been as involved.
The Empress would never have touched her.
Kurloz’s stomach turns, remembering suddenly the pure, unabashed loathing in her eyes, like she was looking at an insect, at less. He doesn’t puke, manages barely to keep his stomach from turning inside out, though he does lean heavily on the table, the bitterness of the slime burning at his sinuses. Of course he had done it all. Of course.
Even as Kankri’s words echo in his head, he wonders if he’ll come over. He wants to see him, the same part of his pan offended at having his penance called self-pitying wanting to earn the right to be forgiven.
[[whats up guys I wrote this in like... may and never posted it for some reason? idk. anyway I still like it so here it is: part one of a thing that I might update later, at some point, eventually. if you liked this, consider buying me a coffee?]]
