A Most Faithful Heart

Antioch played by thatwickedkitty

cursing beneath his breath in his mother tongue, antioch shoves his way past scrambling civilians and mages alike as he exits the tavern where he's instructed malmr to stay. the monster they'd encountered in the jungle is dead - of this, he is sure. the fate of his tracker, however, remains uncertain. 

the poison antioch had given him is working, of course it is, but ... they still haven't found medea, and the antidote he'd been carrying dutifully in his breast pocket as a reward for malmr's haste in finding her has mysteriously disappeared. he presumes this must have happened during the chaos of their escape from the ravenous beast, but but it only frustrates him to be left guessing. to think that he'd been foolish enough to lose it frustrates him. he curses himself first, and then curses lasair for encouraging the use of the foul stuff in the first place. 

the only hope for malmr now is a healer.

he finds himself checking the doors of every hovel he passes in the street, desperate to find a healer's symbol, but he finds nothing until - there! oh thank grace - he rushes for the door, hauling on the handle with fervor, but it won't budge. upon second inspection, the windows have been boarded up, and there seems no life inside at all. 

damn it all! is there no such thing as luck? 

he huffs, steeling himself. luck be damned, he thinks. there must be something in there that can help malmr, and he's going to get through this door if it's the last thing he does! 

and ... it very well might be. 

the door yields only to under the full force of his boot, and he loses his balance momentarily, closing his eyes as he prepares to fall - but he doesn't. when he opens his eyes, he's no longer in a boarded up shop, but standing in a long, dark hallway, lit only by an eerie light that seems to pulse around from around the corner. 

before he has time to question his whereabouts, a soul in his vicinity pulls his attention so hard he turns around, fear driving him to draw his dagger from its sheath and slipping into defensive posture. only someone - or something - with great power could draw his attention in such a way, and yet ... the tugging at his chest, it - it's somehow familiar, reminiscent of something - someone - he once cherished, lost to him now for centuries. 

when finally the figure hosting the soul comes into view, outlined in the muddy, pulsing green of the dim light behind him, he staggers back in shock. his dagger clatters to the floor, echoing down the hall, and all breath is stolen from his lungs. 

anguish grips him, for he knows now he must be dead - he must be. there's no other way she could be here.  

his voice is a pitiful croak when it finally leaves him, his pain practically palpable. 

"missy ..."

Misericorde played by tiyre

She was free. It had been a few years, but it was true. After years, decades, centuries.... it still didn't always feel real. Sometimes she worried that she'd wake up and she'd still be in that dark box, only really surviving from devouring her own soul. 

It's okay, she wasn't using it. 

She had felt her magic growing, changing, shaping. So many new applications! It was unfortunate she was unemployed - someone worthwhile would likely have use of her talents, but the only people she'd talked to for work had been only interested in half her story. Torture-heal, kill, torture-heal, kill. "It's a waste of a body!" some exclaimed when she laid out her plan. "I'll have use for them later!" complained the ones who didn't realize they were children. "They're not all that bad!" said others who found death just a little too harsh. 

Death was a release, one she craved, one she longed for - and one she had been denied for so many years.  

She walked through the street, eyes vacant with her internal conversations. Some approached her, most hesitating when they caught the flash of her blade. A single knife... she had other sharp objects hidden on her, but she'd only been able to find one of her gifted knives. She'd taken it to a bladesmith, to bring the centuries old blade back to life, a resurrection as sorts just as she'd been resurrected from the tomb that was her prison cell. She'd taken a bone from one of the guards and tried to have it used as a new hilt, but she was advised it would splinter in her hand and, instead, had a blade made from it. 

Someone pushed her then rushed away, that person now bleeding, but she awoke to herself falling through a door that led to..... somewhere different. Somewhere that smelled... like him. How? Why? She felt a sudden yearning flavored with rank bitterness. She had come to this land to find him, and instead, she was to be teased? She looked around, mirrors on every way, reflecting back the young woman she hadn't truly been so many years. She moved through, surprised to find it was a maze but seeing glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye. He said her name, voice almost sounding like he hadn't abandoned her, hadn't left her to rot for eternities. 

It hurt how much she still loved him. 

"I am here," she whispered in response, hesitant to speak louder and allow him to hear her crack. She had dreamed of this for all of time, and now that it was here.... she was overjoyed. Estatic. Furious. 

Anti

her whisper fills him with sorrow, regret burning in his throat for all the things he never had the chance to say to her. he doesn’t recover from this. 

through the maze he goes, tricked often by the mirrors - thinking she is closer than she is, reaching for her in the darkest of corners when he swears he hears the breath of her sigh. he hears the tell-tale clicking of her heels, but how far from him? the backs of his eyes are burning.  

do the dead cry?  

“where?!” he wails, his boots scuffing to a halt. his heart hammers, his stomach somersaulting. 

Missy

Where? As though he hadn't sent her away, hadn't told her to stay until an impossible job was done, hadn't left her there to die. 

Except she hadn't died. Whenever she would find herself sinking towards oblivion, something would tug her back, a piece of herself that she could still claim. How many times did she heal herself to try to come back to someone who never came for her? How many times did she sacrifice her humanity in order to hope her given sanity would return? 

It didn't matter.

 It didn't matter, but it did lead to this, a spiraling of the mind until she was confronted with all her greatest feelings. She hadn't thought she had any, not anymore. 

"I might as well be where you abandoned me."

Anti

"if you had called for me, i would have come," he whispers back fiercely, his voice laced with centuries of hurt and frustration. "all else would have ceased to matter and i would have been at your side!" 

 he shakes his head, balling his fists at his side. 

"i swear it to you now as i swore it to you then." 

but it doesn't matter, does it? his pretty words mean nothing now: she is dead, dead because of him. he had left her in siregal centuries ago, thinking that she would be safe there, that she would protect his interests at home. most of all, he trusted she would be able to handle any threat that came her way ... 

the hurt in his heart feels as fresh as when he received the letter from his father, detailing her death. 

Missy

Call for him? Call for him? As though she hadn't spent days, weeks, years pleading with every deity she never believed in that someone - that Antioch - would show up and save her. She'd even bargained with the Anti that lived in her mind, hoping against hope that he would feel her needing him. 

Had he ever actually wanted her, or had she just clung to someone who was powerful and not-just-cruel? She'd never needed someone to save her, but when he hadn't turned her in and destroyed her.... had she put too much faith in a single gesture of kindness, the first one she could ever remember? Had she wasted her love, her life, her gifts? 

No. This was her Antioch, after all. 

The construct in front of her wasn't, though. Just a figment of a dream. Maybe she was getting close and had heard someone else mention his name.

 She steeled herself, face going carefully blank. It wasn't - hadn't been - an expression she used around him. "I called, but you were busy bringing about your glory. Who am I to get in the way of godhood?"

Anti

the expression he catches in her when he lays his eyes upon her - a dream, a ghost, an angel - oh, it tortures him. she is closed to him, after all this time, but he is beyond this. too many years he has hid himself from the ones he loves, too many years he has masqueraded behind charming smiles and winks and metaphors.  

he reaches for her hands, but hesitates, unsure if he's going to touch solid flesh or pass right through - he wants to hold them, wants to connect to her the way he had that first time, when she had pierced him unapologetically and refused to leave his chest since.  

gods they were so young then ... "my friend," he whispers. 

he undresses all his metaphors for her, and lays himself bare before her, unable to look at her under the burden of his truth. 

"you are my friend ... and i failed you." 

Missy

She watches him, eyes hooded, judging, full of pain if one just looked a little farther. She had come to rely on him being there, though she hardly ever truly needed "help." She was a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen. Had she ever needed him? Of course, she had, this was Antioch. Even if she never needed "help," she'd never had a friend before him. Never one since, either. They'd talked, bickered, slept in each other's arms. He'd complained of his father, her jealousy at him knowing his parents morphing into a dismissal of some of the things he said of Cirocco. 

She didn't know that she'd dismissed too much and blinded herself to his reality. 

Missy watched him reach for his hands, their retreat feeling like a slap of rejection. She stepped back, for a moment, but she was done, done being ignored, done coming second. She lunged forward, quick as a blade, and grabbed for him, this ghost of a man. "Then don't leave me now." She didn't deny the failure, but they were together, somehow, in this place of unreality - she could at least have this moment before she woke up and found herself alone again. 

Anti

a shock passes through him as they touch - like a jolt of electricity, the command within her grasp ignites something within him. what it is, he doesn't know, cannot put a name to it, but he it makes his breath stutter, makes him whine. he hasn't been touched in months and it nearly shatters him now, to feel and be felt by this spirit. 

he presses his face into the crook of her neck, hiding his expression, ashamed of coming undone and clutching her as he had when they were children - with desperate, lonely hands, charred and clawed as they are now from corruption. 

"i can't stay here," he whispers back brokenly, but his hands flex instinctively, unwilling to let her go. "but you could come with me." he pulls back only a little bit, enough to let her see his wet eyelashes as he looks up at her, brows drawn together in supplication. 

"whatever this place is, let us leave it - please, missy ..." 

Missy

They touch, and her breath rushes out of her in a moment. How can she be angry at him, when he obviously wanted her so? When he wasn't trying to bring her pain, to keep her living on in agony. She wasn't the same as she was when they'd parted, or even the same when she'd received his last letter. "You will stay there until I come for you, or until the job is completed. Then there will be a home for you." She had agonized over it's implications, debating his meanings until the words lost any kind of sense. If she returned early, she would have no home? Had he moved the headquarters permanently, moved the Vow from Siregal and he wasn't sure she'd find her way in a foreign country (or, sweeter still, he didn't want her to experience the new country without being their to show its wonders)? Had his love waned even as hers waxed by time separated, and he had found another to take her place? Perhaps he was easing her away, to try to be gentle with his feelings of disinterest. 

If he was no longer her home, was she alone again? 

With his face in her neck, she couldn't imagine that he hated her. 

Her heart lurches at his face, his expression, his plea. But was this his reality, or was she merely talking to a construct again? In a rush, she decided she didn't care. 

"I rotted in prison for over two hundred years, waiting to hear you say that." Her voice was soft, sad. "And I am so glad to hear it, finally, now. Please, take me with you." Her own eyes were dry, burning as though she was trying to keep the tears in.