* . ✧ SIX OF CROWS ✧ . * // accepting.
Oh, how she longs to do just so! There is little Claudia would like more than to trust him wholeheartedly and blindly as she had done before. If it had been mere weeks, it felt like years; mentally and physically and emotionally, there was not one part of her left untouched by recent happenings, not one part left unharmed.
If you have to choose, choose the egg. But how could she? Naivety perhaps, to think bonds more important than the fate of humankind, to place her brother above important mission, yet it was sole choice she was capable of doing. How could you even consider choosing differently? Accusative thoughts towards father shine through bright green eyes; hers had been an innocent question, naught but a joke. It could never be anything else, not to her, ridiculous as the notion of not choosing Soren had seemed, incapable as she was of choosing anything that wasn’t brother’s safety.
Not to father. Eyebrows pressed together in expression full of sorrow; it wounds her, what he did. To tell her to place mission before Soren, to tell her brother to kill own friends (Soren, brokenhearted and honest and glad for his sentence to never move again come to her mind, and Claudia wants to shed tears of her own, but fights it and holds it back, even if hurt is still evident enough for father to see).
Prison was hardly sole thing to blame for the marks upon his skin that hadn’t been there when she departed, it is easy enough to tell. Powerful magic was at play too, powerful even to him. He must have fought it. Of course he did! So absurd that her father would accept to be chained and imprisoned and forgotten, most of all when he seemed so consumed by this desire to save the human realms from war not yet initiated. No doubt he fought it, recurring to powers even stronger than usual — a wonder they had defeated him, truly. Father looks more tired she remembers ever seen, but determined eyes tell her enough that Claudia knows he is not yet defeated, not truly.
How could she not trust him? This was her father; blood, family, all she had left aside of Soren. Father had not abandoned them, in spite of everything — he would not, she knew it in her heart, knew he would not have chosen mission over his own son if forced to choose. Words were wind. Was father in her place, he would have done naught different from own choices.
Claudia has to believe that (she cannot bear to lose him too).
“——————- What if it doesn’t work?” Doubt drips from her question, spoken only after a long silence, and yet it does not matter; she does not question him, does not refuse his request either, even if full of hesitation. Words that follow are hushed, all the more reluctant and uncertain. “If it raises suspicions, I’ll be the first person everyone will think is trying to help you escape.”
