who: helena and open. what: getting back to normal, shapeshifting into a bunny, apology tour, etc. when: all of may, some bonus june. where: across the boat. warnings: discussions of repeated murder in various threads.
"My father and mother were Lord and Lady de Rolo, and they ruled Whitestone. I was the youngest of their seven children."
It begins so like a fairytale. She could continue in that tone; she finds she doesn't want to.
"When I was twelve, we received a pair of visiting nobles who turned out to be planning a coup. They had suborned one of my father's men to assist them from within, and in one night they killed or took prisoner all of my family and those who remained loyal to us. My brother Percival and I were the only survivors, and for five years each of us thought the other dead."
Though it's long since happened, Helena still is visibly unsettled by the fact that it happened at all, a chill down her spine. Such monstrousness is possible in the world, she knows, but it doesn't make it more palatable to hear, nor can it be justified.
"I'm so sorry."
Her voice is soft - she knows the words can hardly cover the gaping wounds there. Cassandra was a child. And left to feel like she had no one in the world left for her.
Cassandra barely hears it. She's nowhere near finished.
"I spent two years in hiding in the city, while the two who murdered my family took over as the new Lord and Lady. The Briarwoods. They killed any of the lower nobles who opposed them, and installed their own creatures in their places. They wouldn't let anyone leave, to keep word of what they'd done from spreading. To maintain their legitimacy," and for the first time there's an emotion in her voice, a deep bitter scorn, "as Whitestone's new rulers. The townspeople started a resistance, in hiding. I was ... their figurehead, I suppose. Their banner. The last living de Rolo. I worked with them to make a plan, to enter the castle in secret and kill the usurpers."
A pause, as she gathers herself for the next part.
She has a cold, cold feeling that this links to what Cassandra had so bitterly spat on the bridge. That this is no bright shining overthrow of the invaders.
"They took us apart." Her voice is back to a level calm. "Killed my entire strike team, and took me alive. And they kept me, as something between a prisoner, a guest, and a family member. For over three years. And I fought them, at every turn, until I didn't. Until defying them outright turned into keeping my head down, and then that turned into doing their dirty work for them. I lived in my childhood home with the people who murdered my family and crushed my country, and I did their bidding."
The misery of it. There's genuine sorrow in her face for what Cassandra's gone through, how much that must have twisted around her mind like so many rotting vines. Living with butchers and constantly dancing that knife's edge. Helena was right - she couldn't have guessed at these wounds or the pain they must cause. There are no words for the extent of it.
All she can do is unfold her hands, reach one out halfway across the table with her palm up. An offer to hold, if Cassandra needs contact to keep herself steady. If not, no harm done, no offense taken.
"I never did turn against them on my own. They learned that my brother was still alive, and planning to return with his friends to take back Whitestone. We set a scene for them, to convince him that I was still only the Briarwoods' prisoner and not their ally, and plant me in their midst. It didn't quite alleviate all of Percy's suspicions, but ... it worked for long enough. I did my best to play both sides, as long as I could. So that whoever won would believe I'd been on their side all along."
A sigh. "Someone asked me, a little while ago, if I ever thought of doing that here."
Did you? is the question in her mind, but is that terribly relevant now? After the results of people bickering back and forth, "winning" and "losing" and those who simply just wanted to try to live in a better world and those who wanted to live in the worlds they knew. There's no simple answer. She's known there's been a second group for a little while, since Ava informed her.
But instead, her words are different. her question is different.
"...You did it to survive, didn't you?"
There is the absence of a judgement there. A fact, not an accusation. There are things one does to survive that in a calmer time will become saturated with shame. But it keeps one breathing.
"There," she says wearily, "yes. Not here. I don't know if he believed me, when I told him so. I don't know if you believe me either. It hardly matters. But of course I thought of it. One can't ... keep playing the same game, every waking moment, for years on end, and then just choose to stop seeing the gameboard."
Because at a different angle, it's the same. Games that never, ever ended.
"You can't deal with something like that and then instantly fall to peace. You can't just shed everything you're used to, everything that your heart and mind know, because someone tells you it's not needed anymore, that we don't do that here. It's...you come out of it changed."
There's a subtle twitch in her features. Perhaps it wasn't intended, but Helena remembers her own words strongly, still enough to wonder if that was the word that had sent it tumbling down on the bridge. But - no. No. To entertain that further is impossibly selfish, and she won't.
"It's difficult for people to grasp the extent of it."
Other people, she means. Those who haven't had to preserve their own identity under crisis, under things that would ruin lesser souls.
"The Briarwoods?" Her mouth crooks slightly, joylessly. "That should be a much simpler question than it is. He was a vampire, she was a necromancer; they served an ancient lich who was trying to attain godhood. I saw them both killed and their bodies destroyed, and they came back about a year and a half later. They were killed again in battle against that lich, or so I've been told."
Her voice stays calm, distantly reflective. "I don't know if I'll ever believe they're gone for good."
It's a helpless sort of sound, because in all her time of comforting people, how to properly console someone whose family slaying captors have a habit of resurrecting isn't really in her wheelhouse.
"May this time they have the decency to stay dead."
It feels better to say than you're welcome. It's more of a given, instead of some great act of will. She lets the words die down before she proceeds, hoping that the words don't get stuck in her throat.
"...You've heard part of my story. The broad strokes, but...the details that couldn't be handed out, I'll tell you them."
"I lost my vision as an infant. Therefore, as I was growing up, I was tutored at home so that I might have an education. Traditional school would have been impossible for me. All that is to say, I stayed in generally the same area as I got older, though I did want to go forth and have my own encounters in life, particularly as I started to write and send out works."
She had such dreams of what they would be.
"When I got a letter inviting me to take a trip, to discuss my college education with a benefactor, I was ecstatic. It seemed like a dream come true, and I was eager to set out and attend this seminar. So, I asked my father not to worry, and left home to answer it." A pause there, and while this hurts, it is also recalling memories that have become oddly shaped, something she can only attribute to the deaths. "It was the wrong decision to make. I and the others there became embroiled in a living nightmare."
"Other people, who had received letters speaking of different things. A doctor and a young man who were almost never apart, a mystery novelist, a sculptor...we all had different reasons for heeding the letter, but it was no real seminar at all." A frown crosses her face, sorrow cast on her face. "We were being set up in a twisted kind of game, to hunt or be hunted, with the real gift being that we were allowed to keep living."
And yet. Even that prize was false.
"I died there, and I came back. And I began to realize that by coming to that manor, I'd crossed over to a place that wasn't my realm at all. There were others, beyond our group. Ones marked to fight to survive, ones marked to kill us however they saw fit. A game with no end, where success on our side only bought you more time before your next death. A place where the idea of fighting back was utterly pointless, because they could not be killed, not hurt like us. Only out-thought, evaded for a little while. Where they walked the same grounds as us, and there was nothing we could do about it."
Cassandra's face has gone pale again, all but completely without expression. It's become second nature to her by now, to shut down her own reaction when she can, to be unreadable; less than useless here and now, when there is only one other present and she can't see her.
"Was it ... all the time, that you were hunted? Or intermittently, or ...?"
"Matches would be arranged frequently. One of them, four of us, and there was no refusal if you were chosen that time. To find the way out, or be killed. Bound either to run or to kill. We had our roles, and mine, so often, ended up being to die."
Again, and again, and again. Again, and again. Again.
"If you ask me why, what purpose this all served, I cannot tell you. My memory in places is fragmented or faded or ill-shaped, and I can only attribute that to dying so many times that it doesn't want to hold any more than it does. All I know is that in that place, there was so much pain. So much blood, so much to fear, and to know was inevitable. So much that couldn't be done, however much we tried."
The scars etched into her upper arms didn't come there overnight, or even after a week. They were torn open, again and again.
Perhaps some of what she said makes more sense now. About torture, and one's willpower being worn down, and that she prays no one else knows that life like she does. Whatever questions Cassandra has, she'll do her best to answer, but none of them make the situation better.
A shudder goes through her, helpless revulsion and wrenching pity blended together. "How," she half-whispers, and doesn't finish any of the possible questions caught in her throat: How could you bear it? How can you bear it here, after that?
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It begins so like a fairytale. She could continue in that tone; she finds she doesn't want to.
"When I was twelve, we received a pair of visiting nobles who turned out to be planning a coup. They had suborned one of my father's men to assist them from within, and in one night they killed or took prisoner all of my family and those who remained loyal to us. My brother Percival and I were the only survivors, and for five years each of us thought the other dead."
no subject
"I'm so sorry."
Her voice is soft - she knows the words can hardly cover the gaping wounds there. Cassandra was a child. And left to feel like she had no one in the world left for her.
no subject
"I spent two years in hiding in the city, while the two who murdered my family took over as the new Lord and Lady. The Briarwoods. They killed any of the lower nobles who opposed them, and installed their own creatures in their places. They wouldn't let anyone leave, to keep word of what they'd done from spreading. To maintain their legitimacy," and for the first time there's an emotion in her voice, a deep bitter scorn, "as Whitestone's new rulers. The townspeople started a resistance, in hiding. I was ... their figurehead, I suppose. Their banner. The last living de Rolo. I worked with them to make a plan, to enter the castle in secret and kill the usurpers."
A pause, as she gathers herself for the next part.
no subject
She has a cold, cold feeling that this links to what Cassandra had so bitterly spat on the bridge. That this is no bright shining overthrow of the invaders.
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She lifts her head and regards Helena, bleakly.
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All she can do is unfold her hands, reach one out halfway across the table with her palm up. An offer to hold, if Cassandra needs contact to keep herself steady. If not, no harm done, no offense taken.
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"I never did turn against them on my own. They learned that my brother was still alive, and planning to return with his friends to take back Whitestone. We set a scene for them, to convince him that I was still only the Briarwoods' prisoner and not their ally, and plant me in their midst. It didn't quite alleviate all of Percy's suspicions, but ... it worked for long enough. I did my best to play both sides, as long as I could. So that whoever won would believe I'd been on their side all along."
A sigh. "Someone asked me, a little while ago, if I ever thought of doing that here."
no subject
But instead, her words are different. her question is different.
"...You did it to survive, didn't you?"
There is the absence of a judgement there. A fact, not an accusation. There are things one does to survive that in a calmer time will become saturated with shame. But it keeps one breathing.
no subject
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Because at a different angle, it's the same. Games that never, ever ended.
"You can't deal with something like that and then instantly fall to peace. You can't just shed everything you're used to, everything that your heart and mind know, because someone tells you it's not needed anymore, that we don't do that here. It's...you come out of it changed."
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Her hands tighten on each other.
"A shell, if that's all that survives."
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"It's difficult for people to grasp the extent of it."
Other people, she means. Those who haven't had to preserve their own identity under crisis, under things that would ruin lesser souls.
"...Are they dead now?"
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Her voice stays calm, distantly reflective. "I don't know if I'll ever believe they're gone for good."
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It's a helpless sort of sound, because in all her time of comforting people, how to properly console someone whose family slaying captors have a habit of resurrecting isn't really in her wheelhouse.
"May this time they have the decency to stay dead."
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And then, quietly: "Thank you for hearing me."
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It feels better to say than you're welcome. It's more of a given, instead of some great act of will. She lets the words die down before she proceeds, hoping that the words don't get stuck in her throat.
"...You've heard part of my story. The broad strokes, but...the details that couldn't be handed out, I'll tell you them."
no subject
no subject
"I lost my vision as an infant. Therefore, as I was growing up, I was tutored at home so that I might have an education. Traditional school would have been impossible for me. All that is to say, I stayed in generally the same area as I got older, though I did want to go forth and have my own encounters in life, particularly as I started to write and send out works."
She had such dreams of what they would be.
"When I got a letter inviting me to take a trip, to discuss my college education with a benefactor, I was ecstatic. It seemed like a dream come true, and I was eager to set out and attend this seminar. So, I asked my father not to worry, and left home to answer it." A pause there, and while this hurts, it is also recalling memories that have become oddly shaped, something she can only attribute to the deaths. "It was the wrong decision to make. I and the others there became embroiled in a living nightmare."
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"The others," she says, low, "attending the seminar? Other scholars?"
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And yet. Even that prize was false.
"I died there, and I came back. And I began to realize that by coming to that manor, I'd crossed over to a place that wasn't my realm at all. There were others, beyond our group. Ones marked to fight to survive, ones marked to kill us however they saw fit. A game with no end, where success on our side only bought you more time before your next death. A place where the idea of fighting back was utterly pointless, because they could not be killed, not hurt like us. Only out-thought, evaded for a little while. Where they walked the same grounds as us, and there was nothing we could do about it."
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"Was it ... all the time, that you were hunted? Or intermittently, or ...?"
no subject
Again, and again, and again. Again, and again. Again.
"If you ask me why, what purpose this all served, I cannot tell you. My memory in places is fragmented or faded or ill-shaped, and I can only attribute that to dying so many times that it doesn't want to hold any more than it does. All I know is that in that place, there was so much pain. So much blood, so much to fear, and to know was inevitable. So much that couldn't be done, however much we tried."
The scars etched into her upper arms didn't come there overnight, or even after a week. They were torn open, again and again.
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What does survival even mean under those circumstances?
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Perhaps some of what she said makes more sense now. About torture, and one's willpower being worn down, and that she prays no one else knows that life like she does. Whatever questions Cassandra has, she'll do her best to answer, but none of them make the situation better.
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How can you possibly be this kind, after that?
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