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Liem Talbott
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Liem's mindscape is dark; quiet; contemplative. Any feelings or sensations that Liem doesn't intentionally project himself seem distant, as though echoing from a far-off room. Following any given sense to its source is bafflingly difficult.
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Why does he answer her? (Why had he bothered looking for her?)
Normally, Hayame’s presence is intense in Communion, partially because she dislikes it as a medium so much that she forces herself as a baseline, and partially because… well, she’s inclined towards intensity in person, too. But the jinba Liem “meets” there today… is a shadow of that one. One that can barely stand to have “eyes” upon her, that doesn’t want to emerge from the shadows of the corner and be seen, even in this sort of spiritual space, that doesn’t want to admit that-]
Liem Talbott.
[“Dhampir”, inquisitor, former… former…]
… I am informed that you were inconvenienced yesterday.
[That’s all it was. An inconvenience. And inconvenience borne of a mistake, a weakness she hadn’t been able to keep to her fucking self once the pain became too great and her mind lashed out for anything, anyone, any place to run.]
It was not my intent.
[How to explain-]
Claude von Riegan-
[She starts to try and blame him just to save face, to say that he shouldn’t have involved anyone, that he worried over a simple missed appointment, but. No. Even to deflect from her own situation, even if just an excuse… she cannot besmirch him. Not when she had done the same thing when Set had vanished, for all that worry had been understood. Not when she’d spent the night oscillating between nightmares and bitter weeping cradled in his lap.
So what-]
… I am no longer indisposed. You are relieved of your search.
[He can go back to his… to his duties and his foul diet and-]
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Well… perhaps he should not be surprised. He cannot blame her for deciding that she has finally had enough from him. Even so, he delves a little into the shadowy corner of his mind where she now lurks, coming to her if she will not come to him.]
Is that… the only reason you contacted me? [Behind the courteous attention, there is a ghost of disappointment. She’d mentioned Claude; perhaps she is with him, then. Perhaps he already provided her what aid she needed, and she really does have no need for a second-rate friend like Liem.] To get me to forget that you needed help? Do you want me to pretend that I never received any contact from you at all?
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Before it had been poisoned by how betrayed she felt by the revelation of her ignorance. But even that poisoned well had been one she had run to, in her desperation, and now-
He comes closer, and she turns slightly away from him. Not truly away, she could just... she could just leave if she wanted to, she could shut him out. But it is like the subconscious flinch, the attempt to hide something disfigured and attempt to be subtle about it. (Don't look at her. Not even like this, in spirit and not in person. Don't look when a part of her body doesn't belong to her, when it's been forced inside of her to prove how weak she was, to shame her under the guise of charitable fairness.)
Liem has seen her almost like this once before. In the flower fields of Highstorm when they had been newly arrived, when she had refused to raise her head from the dirt and let him see the ruined, serum-stained bandages where an eye had once been. ... He'd been the only one who bothered to ask her, what happened? He'd forgiven her the broken vow. And she-]
I did not mean to contact anyone.
[She'd tried not to, because strapped to that table, her legs hobbled and her strong body rendered useless, unable to shut her ears to the demon whispering in them... she'd become all too aware that the few people she had grown to care for could be divided into two sorts of "friends". Those that could be ripped to shreds by a demon... and those that would hear what had happened to her and still gladly accept an invitation to delight in her torturer's company.
So what did that leave her? She should just cut Liem out, too, just rid herself of everyone. She almost disappears from his mind, right then, but somewhere outside of communion... fingers run tenderly over her mane and she eventually turns shamefully back.]
I do not know what you heard-
[Because genuinely, she hadn't intended to contact him, or anyone. She doesn't know if he heard... what Claude said he had, screaming, if he heard her words, or saw her tormentor's face, and not knowing is a new sort of torture. Asking directly would be another weakness.]
... So I cannot tell you what to do with it.
[But if he will not burn in anger for her, if he will not condemn what had been done... Then she wants him to forget.
She cannot stomach more.]
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[Perhaps she had cried out, in that tormented place that had blossomed in his mind when he opened it to admit her. Perhaps she had, but it was everything else he had seen, everything else he had felt, that had sent such a chill through Liem’s chest.]
When you reached out, it felt like you were in pain. Like you were tied down. And I saw… an eye.
[Her eye? There had seemed to be two, blending together one after the other, but the images had come in such a chaotic rush that he could not parse the meaning, at least not then, while the connection was active. It was only later, after he had already begun searching, that he began to piece together the relevance of the things he’d seen, and wonder if he shouldn’t turn his eyes far from Alenroux, to look instead somewhere one might more easily conduct butchery such as he feared she endured…]
Your eye. Light, and a blade. But all in a rush, mingled with other things: Myself. The demon, Sebastian. A child I’ve never seen before.
[Blood and fangs, fear and misery running throughout like stitches holding the whole thing together.]
I was worried for you. I’m still worried.
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The rest of it... is even worse. She saw him? Which him? The one she had called her friend, or the one who stood over a man's body dripping crimson down his chin as his eyes glowed blood moon red? The demon makes sense, but a child- ? What child? She doesn't know what to ask, what to ask first, and in her confusion she almost half-turns back towards him. On the left side of her face, there is the briefest hint of something sick and green, incongruous and Wrong.]
- Why?
[But in the end, her question of what to ask is answered for her with the almost accusatory-sounding word escapes a throat that sounds hoarse from screams in her mind, even though in person the demon had healed away any proof he had touched her and she hadn't wanted it.]
Why are you still worried about me?
[The whisper is dark and bitter... and scared, and hating that she hadn't felt she could cry out for him in her time of need, and doubly hating that the demon had whispered so many doubts about her bonds into her hearts.]
I called you a liar.
[She'd thought far worse than she'd even said. In the immediate, visceral reaction to the act she'd thought him no better than a demon, just as she had thought of that dark colt in the mountains when he revealed he had been eating human meat.]
A traitor.
[Again. Not to Meridian this time, but... to her. Again. And yet she... even she knew she was a woman who was so, so easy to betray. So why-]
You do not even trust me-
[Not with what he was, anyway. So why- ? Why had he reached out to her after they'd won the Exalt Oracle? Why did he bother worrying about her now? If he had cut her away, if he condemned her for her reaction to him and instead sought refuge with those people he'd flaunted to her who didn't care for depravity and whose bodies touched his lips...
She wouldn't have been able to claim she wouldn't do the same in his position. Yet he's here, in the borders of her mind. Waiting patiently again for her.]
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Because it seems clear that you must have suffered something terrible.
[At Sebastian’s hands, perhaps? Were those images just memories, or were they something more?]
Hayame, you didn’t call me anything that wasn’t well deserved. I was cruel to you because hurting you was easier than admitting that I… also felt betrayed.
[Because she had looked at him like a monster; because he had never wanted Hayame of all people to look at him that way. Even now, as he admits his own weakness to her, the words in his throat try to choke him, piling up and emerging begrudgingly from lips that want to crumple into a desolate frown.]
Because you have every right to look down on me, and yet I still resented it. And I flung what I was in your face rather than come crawling to you on my knees to confess.
[Around them, the sombre temple of his mind grows dark and close, the candles guttering, stone walls closing in like the heavy stone of a crypt. His body is rigid with unhappiness, but he refuses to cry again. Not this time. He won’t. He won’t.]
But you are still… the first friend I’ve known, in this place…
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... It was clear. (She knows... She knows he means because of this Communion she is supposed to have sent, but-)
Everything grows darker around them. Everything seems smaller, narrower, closing in on them claustrophobic and suffocating. She can still feel the bite of the leather straps that had held her upper body and arms down to the makeshift surgery table, the burning rub of the rope hobbles on all of her legs, the scent of blood in the air as she struggled and struggled and struggled until she'd rubbed all the dun coat away, rubbed her skin away-]
You were my-
[Liem had been the third person in her entire life to call her his "friend". At least, in a way that she was able to risk believing in. Some of the shard-bearers called anyone and everyone that, and what value then could there be then in the word? But even though he had not been the first to say it... she had always considered him-]
My first...
[How could she not? She had known him longer than anyone here, owed him longer, relied on him longer, trusted him longer than she had any shard-bearer here. When she had returned "home" from the Exalt Oracle's trial, the knowledge of his nature fresh and burning, she had resented walking through the doorway he had built for her. A few days later, when he had reached out for her, she had shut him out... because she did not want to be reminded of it. How he had trusted others and not her, told others an not her, that he drank blood from the vein. A few days before she had been injected with some sort of poison and kidnapped from the streets of Springstar... she had gone to the academic district and looked for a scholar to find her a book about vampires, putting down coin after coin to make them keep reading aloud.
Apparently, he had to drink blood. To survive. To live. It made him... less of a monster, ironically. Less of one than the colt that had cut the liver from a freshly butchered human corpse and offered it to her with a smile.
... But he hadn't told her as much. She'd had to find out like that, her reaction... even if she felt guilty for it, in some way, she still felt so justified in it. Just because they had seen horrors since coming to this world, just because some of the freaks among the shard-bearers didn't judge anyone for anything, gleefully encouraging debauchery and violence and indulgence... she was supposed to be magically alright with seeing a man she had known for over a year suddenly bite into another man's neck and drink the blood than ran from it?
She hadn't contacted him after hearing the contents of that book. She didn't know what to say yet. She hadn't found the right words, or wrestled her pride, or gotten over the remaining insult and sense of betrayal that finding out about dhampir nature could not erase. She had been thinking about it. ... What to say. If she could have accepted what Liem was if he ha come to her, like he says, on his knees in confession, or if she still would have recoiled in horror.
Now they'll never know. If she could have been a better, more understanding person... or not.
And she still hadn't prepared the words. What does she say? That she wished more than anything (no, more than anything she'd wished for the strength to fight the drugs and rip through her bindings and throttle the demon and shatter his shard, but she'd still wished-) when the demon was cutting into her eye socket that she could have at least cried out to Liem for aid, instead of feeling as if he belonged in the category of her other "friends" who might hold her close one minute and then laugh with the demon the next.
Her words stick in her sore throat as she turns to "face him" properly, her fingers clutching uselessly at her breast. Her eyes glisten with tears painful, bitter, shamed and angry.
Eyes. The dying light of the candles illuminates just enough of her face when she anxiously turns that it illuminates an eye in what was once a scarred and empty hole, the iris a sick, putrid green instead of stormy grey.]
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But it’s also worse, to know that he chose to hurt Hayame rather than risk her hurting him. Knowing that his mind was altered during those last few days of the Oracle trial doesn’t ease the guilt at having done it.
Especially when she looks at him like that, with that bitter, angry look in her eyes, confronting him with the reality of his choice.
Her eyes. Her two, whole and uncovered eyes.]
Hayame, will you let me come see you?
[To see… whatever this is. Whatever has been done to her.]
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... Maybe it is both. But one burns far brighter and far more violently than the other. As if becoming aware that the emotion is shining wet and hot in her eyes, she quickly averts her head again, her fingers curling into tight, impotent fists. (For half a second, it looks like her left eye's iris lingers on Liem's form longer than the right one does.)
There is a part of her still that wants to rail against him, to accuse him of gathering sick stories about how she has retreated into shame to relate to a demon over tea, or perhaps simply trying to assuage his own guilt for how dark and rude and lewd he had been when he spoke to her of his blood habits. But she cannot deny that... in that room in Kowloon, in the midst of all that pain...
She had still wanted Liem to come rescue her. Not that she thought it possible, not in that time frame and not against that opponent. But before reality set in, before the demon questioned who would bother noticing she was even gone, before the whispers that reminded her that everyone she cared might not care enough to even condemn the man who ripped her eye from her skull and was even in that moment cutting into the scars he'd left behind, she'd wished-]
...
[... Liem could use spells. Liem could possibly tell her if the thing in her head was cursed, or rotting, or designed to eat her from the inside out. It was just practical, to let him come see her. That's all. (That's not all. They must speak of the blood, she must admit what had been done to her in the first place-)
But it gives her just enough of an excuse to nod tightly, already beginning to fade away from the exposing connection of Communion.
He can come see her.]