new faces

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WHO: Flint
WHAT: A problem to be solved.
WHEN: Now
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Gross Bloodborne themes.

Despite how much he had betrayed her, she still considered Gehrman her superior, even now. He had been betrayed and used, just as she had. The head dog in a pack of snapping dogs, all used to Hunt under pretenses that were not true. Cleaning up a mess that should not have been made. He had known first, and he should have confessed. He should have let them make up their own minds instead of letting them die on the swords of Yharnam. Maybe so many of them-- Maria --wouldn't have killed themselves upon finding the knowledge on their own. Then again, he would suffer the most out of any of them. He was the one in the Dream, waiting and waiting and waiting.

He could free any of them, whenever they were ready for it. He had offered Anna his scythe while she had been there, again and still and again and still. She could join all the others. But she would not die for the Church's crimes, whatever that stubbornness meant. There was no reason to force her, though he well could. She didn't have the true insights to replace him, had not gazed upon the babe and refused to. Her death would just be her death, and there was no reason she couldn't wander Yharnam's bloody streets alone if that was her only aspiration. He had stopped appearing in her Dream then. They would speak no more, and the doll had nothing left to give her either. Only vague rumination on the nature of love and religion.

James Flint will never be her superior, just as Luwenna Coupe was never her superior before him. Anna had never taken the vials to Coupe, despite being instructed to do so by Lakshmi Bai. Lakshmi Bai is not here; and she had never been Anna's authority either. For a moment, a compatriot, and then gone; leaving Anna angry in her wake.

Anna was willing to kill for these people, to earn her keep and find her way. But they would never win over her spirit. She was not interested in loyalty or devotion to their institutions. She had no stake in their world. Just a visiting dreamer, not a player in their war games.

She does not make an appointment. She breaks in to the office and waits for him, has heard enough gossip to know he is the replacement. In a way, that makes things easier. A new start. A new face. She would try again, as she always tried again. The vials of blood are in plain sight on his desk, as is her hideous coat over the back of a chair. A friendly gesture, to know that someone is waiting but not really trying to jump him. Still, someone who did not care for the bureaucracy of waiting their turn to be acknowledged.

Comments

[notched]

"I entrusted Lakshmi to hunt me, should I turn," a corrective, flat affect. Whatever else they had in common, she didn't know. She didn't ask. What she had seen was a hunter chasing down a lycanthrope, and that was all she had needed to know.

"That was my first concern. I did not trust myself to retain my mind... but Thedas is different." What was once flat acquires a wistfulness for the wind in her face. The sun rising. She licks the corner of her mouth, brows furrowing.

"I would not trust a single drop."

[katabasis]

"Different how?"

Is that a complicated question? He senses it must be, but there is a demand to ask. What good is a decision made divorced of what makes it difficult.

[notched]

She can taste the words in her mouth. Rotten like Yharnam's foul air, and she purses her lips against the sourness of it.

"The city is doomed, but it dreams of its final hours over and over again. In Yharnam, I never see the sun. It is always the Night of the Hunt. There are always beasts to run through, there is always more blood."

She refuses the rising burn to emote, dark eyes bleak.

"I've died many times in that dream, only to awaken in another where my old master waits to remind me that a Hunter must hunt. So I go out again, and I kill what I've killed before, or maybe it kills me, and I go out again until I've memorized every one of its breaths."

That was how it crept upon you, the turning. The line between your breath and their breath, their heartbeats, blurring until eventually--

"I could die here. Thedas could kill me."

She brushes her gloved fingertips over the row of vials fondly.

[katabasis]

Maybe she is mad. It sounds like a kind of a fever, the kind that's meant to be sweat from the body and burns off everything poured down the throat. He wants to think Who hasn't died once or twice?, but refuses to. It feels somehow like a dangerous moment to indulge in poetry.

Instead, he regards her. It's a study of the woman more than it is the glinting glass shapes on the desk between them; the back of his knuckles stray as if by habit to the underside of his chin, scuffing lightly there at the bristle of his beard as if the scrape might clarify whatever there is to see in her.

"At the very least, they should be divided." Said without looking away from her. "Hidden or buried somewhere no one would think to look for anything."

[notched]

She nods, glad he's taking her seriously but also... distracted as the reality of saying goodbye to the blood comes closer. She'll never taste it again. She'll never feel it burning inside of her, healing her body like a fire.

"I can't know."