MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: Some dreams
WHEN: Harvestmere 9:45–Wintersend 9:46
WHERE: The Fade
NOTES: OOC post!

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[justashotaway]

The candleholder cracks hard against X-23's head, her vision spotting with the impact. She sways. The weight of her body eases up against the target's throat as she tries to keep conscious.

"Stop," she hisses, grabbing at the target's hand in hopes of wrenching the candleholder away from him. "It will be harder if you struggle."

She is not sure why she is telling him this. She does not speak to targets--she rarely speaks to anyone. But Matthias (why does she know his name is Matthias?) needs to hear it. He needs to know the truth: death is only difficult when you fight it. It does not have to be like this. She can make it so smooth that all he has to do is close his eyes.

[inkindled]

Instinct pushes at him when her weight shifts, something from way down deep. He tries to heave her off, or at least to sit up. If he can sit up, he'll have a better chance. Matthias has only ever been in scraps--split lips, black eyes, thought he might have to defend against a highway man once, then never did. But no, that's not right. Like a haze come these other memories, or at least shapes, vague like he's looking at them through smoke. Fields and mud and a din of battle. Living, surviving, always the most urgent, the most important, and it's that which courses through him, a spike of adrenaline, stop, and the grip of her hand on his is familiar, and it isn't, like something he should know but rendered wrong, inside-out, backwards. She's wrenched the candleholder out of his hand by now, a clank and thud on the hardpacked dirt of the floor--or maybe he only dropped it--because now he twists his hand to grip at hers, grabs at nothing, and then finds her fingers.

And he feels it again, that haze that lays over his vision like a smoke. Maybe this is only what dying feels like. Laura: her name comes to him quick, and the taste of oranges. Sunlight in her dark hair. A courtyard, a city street, a hall, a camp in a wood. Silver. He doesn't understand.

"Laura--" He chokes on it--the crush at his throat and chest is less, a crush, heat in his face, where is this coming from, "I don't," and how he would finish that, he couldn't say, don't want this don't know don't, please, and her name comes to him again, "Laura," wielded like a talisman, like a word that means something. It does mean something. It is her name. Somewhere, somehow.

[justashotaway]

"X-23," she corrects, without so much as a thought to it.  She is X-23.  She is called X-23. 

And yet Laura sounds so painfully correct that she finds herself staring  at the hand wrapped  around hers.  In the darkness, she can hardly see it, but it feels strange and known all at once, an itch someplace she can't reach.  She has never held anyone's hand before, outside the rare occasion on which she's been pulled up after hitting the floor during training. That did not feel the way this does, like sparks might shoot from her fingertips.

"Lie down," she tells him, even though she knows he will not follow the order.  He knows she will only kill her--of course he will not listen.  And some part of her doesn't want him to.  Lie down, and I will make this easy, she wants to say, even though she knows that  in itself makes no sense; she is supposed to kill him without caring about ease. The mission is not to reassure the dying. That she wants to--that she wants anything--is in itself deeply confusing. And in the midst of that strangeness, the excruciating realization that she is not following an objective, she says something entirely different. "Who are you?"

And why does it feel as though she should already know the answer?  You should already have killed him, she tells herself, baffled by the words that have come from her mouth. This is not the objective.  And still she does not move.

[inkindled]

He's shaking his head before she finishes her order--before she finishes correcting him, Laura, X-23 are numbers and letters and if he looks in her face he knows who she is. It's the Maker, maybe, putting that in his head to save his life. In the Chantry it's cold and the benches are hard but the songs are good and full of light and Matthias tastes something bitter in the back of his throat now, when he thinks of it; he swallows it down and grips at Laura's fingers.

"Matthias," he says, "I'm Matthias," a farmer, a man grown, still no one and nothing, the Maker never thinks of him and Andraste wouldn't notice him and if he dies in this cottage then he dies alone, and some hungry dog will come and eat his face before they can find his body and burn him. "Please. I know you," and there's more now, that memory that flickers over memories, heat in his fingers and a smell, some sharp acrid silver smell. Lyrium. He tightens his fingers in their grip around hers. "We know each other. I know we do, somehow, I don't know how, I don't-- You can't kill me. You won't, I know you won't."

[justashotaway]

He does not obey, which is in itself distressing. This is not a situation she's needed to manage before, having to cajole someone into allowing a murder to occur. If a target does not wish to die, she does not argue with them; she simply makes them see reason in the form of a swift death. But she cannot bring herself to tear into his throat or stab at his chest the way she normally does.  There is something in the way he looks pleadingly at her, something about the name Laura, and the name Matthias, and the feeling of his hand gripping hers--something in her recognizes these things, unfamiliar as they feel, and says no.  

You do not have to do this. You do not have to be this.

"I--" she starts, then swallows.  His name is Matthias, and that does not mean farmer sleeping alone in a hut to her.  What does it mean?  The smell of wet wool comes to her, and eating stew out of trenchers side by side in a room that must be as large as this entire village.  Her voice drops low, her gaze falling to their hands again. (His is too hard, callused in the wrong places, and she doesn't know why she thinks that.  It is possible she is slowly going mad--minutes have passed and she has not completed her objective.)  "I do not want to kill you. I do not want to kill anyone."