Mirtul 18 1370 dr

[child_of_bhaal]

Who: Syeira and YOU
Broadcast: Nope
Action: Varric's bar on the Iskaulit mostly
When: Directly after the shuffle.



She has been checking on the roster listing nearly compulsively lately. Things have just been rough for her. Losses upon losses. Regaining Anders, only for her friend to not know her. It piles up on top of everything else.

Everything else being Sam falling into a sleep only to wake and nearly do something horrible to Cas. And she got to take a lovely swim in Sam's blood for that, a delightful bonus to her kill deprived self. And then Sam is hurt, again, on her watch. Cas fell into a sleep immediately after. She's been ill from the planet nearly all the time. Coil had a melt down. Arthur turned into a tiny teenager. And of course, Robin revealed to her she not only had a Calibration, but when he was in it, he saw her murder her own mother.

She had asked Robin not to shut her out again. That was the mistake. She'd admitted her fragility out loud where Atroma could over hear it. She'd told him she couldn't stand to lose any more friends. And now he's just gone. Removed, like so many others. And she quite simply cannot take one more bit of horrible without doing something about it. But there's nothing to fight. She's not going to trash her room. The thing that's left is rather obvious.

She goes to the Iskaulit, to the tavern that feels like one from home. She has a small pouch full of credits. She managed to pull out enough that the pouch weighs at least five pound. There's a hefty amount of money in it. This she takes directly to whoever is tending the bar, places it purposefully down on the counter, and gives them a dead serious, almost empty look.

"I would like to drink, until I physically cannot anymore, or the money runs out. Whichever comes first." And by the look of things, the money won't be what runs out first. "If it's the former, please feel free to keep whatever is left over for your troubles." Because she imagines it will be annoying to shove her out into the hall when she's fall down drunk.

And with that, she will start drinking. There's dedication in it, because she wants to obliterate everything in her head. Blot it all out until all that's left is alcohol poisoning.

[ooc: Feel free to tag her at any time during this. And please note, she did not notice Zhas has returned to the fleet, and I request that no one tells her. Thank you!]

Comments

[child_of_bhaal]

You sounded like a dad, Maglor. But she'll drop it because her attention span is very short at the moment.

"How many siblings do you have?"

[bythewaves]

"Six." Maglor says with wistful fondness. "All boys. I am the second of seven - above me was my elder brother Maedhros, and then in order was Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, and the twins, the Ambarussa - Amrod & Amras."

[child_of_bhaal]

She props her face in both hands and gives him a dreamy, drunk person smile. "You have a good relationship with them?"

She makes it a question, to get him to go on. Tell her all about your brothers please, Mags.

[bythewaves]

"I loved them fiercely, and I hated them equally so." Maglor says softly, voice dropping into the sing song tones of a storyteller, conjuring the images for her as he describes them.

"I grieved for them and I was glad when they passed into the peace of death, and I envied them the silence even as I feared for their souls. I love them. They were my stars, my joy, the complimenting notes of my song. Maedhros was my rock, bold Maitimo, with mother's hair and grandfather's canny political bent. He was the tallest of us all, and so protective of us. I remember him singing me lullabies when our parents were too busy as well as I remember his ferocity in battle, the way the orcs fled from his gaze. He could command and sway opinions with the sheer force of his presence, and even until the end, I would have followed him but that he forbade me.

Celegorm was wild, our little brother with our grandmother's fair hair. He seemed to have inexhaustible energy as a child, and from the beginning he got along better with bird and beast than he did with humans. Lord Orome took him in, taught him to hunt. It must have hurt so badly when my brother took those skills and twisted them. In Middle-earth he was feral. Always so very loyal to us, but wild, wild, so very wild and lethal.

Dark Caranthir was the middle child. Quite and many folk thought him sullen, with his explosive temper, but it hid a heart that cared so greatly that emotions simply erupted from him. He had our grandmother's skill with the needle, and if we had stayed, who knows what tapestries he might have created? Instead that skill went to weaving banners and clothes for war, and the sharp mind and stubborn will he had made him an excellent business partner for the dwarves, who appreciated his bluntness, I think.

Curufin! Oh Curufin. He was the very image of father in his youth, but Curufin had something that father never had, for all his madness. Father was blunt, like Caranthir, a fact people often forget. Oh he could convince and inflame, but father never cared for politics. Not like Curufin, who could argue you around in circles until you no longer remembered where you started. He was so clever, was Curufin, in the forge things of immense beauty and terrifying practicality seemed to form under his hands with barely any effort. But all everyone ever saw was father's copy, and that made him cruel.

The Ambarussa were the babies, twins as alike as they were different. The only other of father's sons born with mother's hair. They were hunters, but where Celegorm hunted for the thrill as well as to feed his family, for them it was ... a game. They looked at life and rejoiced in it. Until... after...."

[child_of_bhaal]

She listens, drunk as she is, with a rapt attention. As if she's trying to focus harder, so the drink doesn't wipe away the details. Questions form. How tall is 'the tallest'? What does Martimo mean? Who is Lord Promo? Caranthir? What was his grandmother like? And on and on. But the story is tinged with sadness, regret, and she's reminded that his father wronged him and his brothers with his selfishness. That's why Maglor lost them.

"I'm sorry you lost them." It's so little to offer, but there's not much else she can say that wouldn't be worse. She wants to know so much, all of his story, all of theirs, but not at the price of making him relive painful times.

[bythewaves]

He smiles at her, and if it is a little tinged in sadness, his voice never reflects it.

"Thank you for saying so - but they have been gone a long time now, and probably our world is better for it."

But you miss us all the same, eh, Makalaure?

[child_of_bhaal]

"Your world isn't. That's what matters. My world would be so much better off without my family in it. But I still miss my sister. I'd still do anything for her. Turn the world inside out if I had to."

Family.

[bythewaves]

"It is." He says softly. "Better without me too, I should imagine, the last of our madness cleansed."

A quiet smile. "Family is like that. I would have killed for any of my brothers. I did. And they for me."

[child_of_bhaal]

She makes a soft, humorless chuckle. "I would kill for her, but what does that mean for a bhaalspawn? I kill because it's what I do. What I was born to do. Family. Friends. It's just a justification so I can sleep at night."

She smiles, just the corner of her mouth ticking up. It's more of a smirk, derisive and directed utterly at herself. "Except I don't do that either."

[bythewaves]

"And if you do not, then I think your earlier statement is false." Maglor points out mildly. "For it is clearly not what you are born to do, if you chose another road."

[child_of_bhaal]

"I didn't." There is not enough alcohol in the universe for how drunk she wants to get right at this moment. What's in her cup will have to do.

"I walked right on the path set out for me. And I'm very adept, very talented. Everything else is just window dressing."

[bythewaves]

"Are you, little fire-hair?" He murmurs softly. "You seem quite content to be other, right now."

[child_of_bhaal]

"Respectfully, you have no idea what you're talking about." She's working into an angry, bitter sulk. "You don't know what I am, what I've done. Neither do I. I've been lied to for so long, my memory so black in places, who knows what other terrible deeds can be laid at my feet."

[bythewaves]

"No." He agrees. "I do not know your past. But I know that the you I see before me now is a youngling who has been forced to grow up too fast, forced to make choices that might have slain a lesser heart. I know that you worry about the self that might have been, and the self that might yet be. But Syeira - neither you nor I can do anything about what is unknown, and tomorrow has yet to happen. The you I see now is someone who has lost much, and who fears that she will lose more. But do not take on that burden to yourself - you cannot be held responsible for what you do not know - nor can you be held responsible for what is not yet. You have a clean slate, little fire-hair. That may seem a curse, but it can be a blessing, also."

[child_of_bhaal]

Something in that kind, generous, giving speech, -that one meant to make her feel better, feel valued- sparks something in her turmoiled heart. It lights her up with anger, abrupt and bursting out of her.

"Clean? There's nothing clean about me! My fate was written and plotted and no matter how nice I am, no matter how well intentioned, no matter how hard I fight it, my markedly short life will only end one of two ways. Both of them are bloody, and leave me damned and alone. Everything I ever thought about myself is a lie. I am a thing, a monster, born and bred."

She's so angry. At her parents, her life, herself, and now at Maglor for not understanding what he has absolutely no frame of reference for. But she still cares enough to know she's being unfair, and that she needs to walk away before she does something she'll regret. She shoves up from her seat and turns away from him with harsh, jerky movements.

[bythewaves]

Like the sea that holds his heart, Maglor accepts her fury, letting her spend her rage on him, the tempest sinking into the deeps, his voice staying calm. But beneath the calm is all the unyielding steel of his family.

"Then I turn your own words back to you, Syeira, and truly I say to you, no monster would have reached out to comfort those who grieve, nor mourn actions that brought grief to others. You are no monster, Syeira, no matter your blood - for if you were, you would not fight so hard against it."

Wryly he adds as she goes to stand. "Also you may not want to storm off when you are wobbling like that, as I assume you do not wish to be carried."

[child_of_bhaal]

"We can resist truth, but it doesn't make it less of a truth. And my blood is what makes it so." She is furious. It's not loud, shouting fury, but still intense, and so much of it is being held inside. He has no idea. None. There is such rage, she has to close her eyes against it for a moment, to keep it down.

I am your Rage. I am your Instinct.

"I've walked with my Evil my whole life. I just didn't know it for a while. Everything I thought I was, is a lie. I cling to it, because I want it to be true, but it's not. I know you're trying to help, but the harder you try to push the lie, the more it hurts." Finally she looks back at him, tired, worn, so sad and lost she's practically sick with it. "And I can walk just fine."

[bythewaves]

"If you did not know it, I can hardly see how you could have known it." Maglor points out logically, as calm and unruffled as a lake - he is used to brothers with tempers - and she needs this. He makes for a good scapegoat, he knows, the stranger she does not know well. Better she purges the poison this way on one who can take it.

"Blood is not all of you, Syeira. It sets your beginning - but only you can determine what to do with it. And all I see, even now, is one trying desperately to escape. No monster does that, Syeira. A monster would only embrace it."

[child_of_bhaal]

He's wrong. And he has no idea that he is, that he could be. His insistence is only making things worse, ratcheting up her anger. She clenches her hand hard around her cup, going very still to keep from doing something she'd regret. She doesn't want to hurt anyone, and she doesn't want to be thrown out.

"Shut up, Maglor. Just shut up." She has to move away now, sit somewhere else. She can't stay by him, out she'll run the risk of losing her temper.

[bythewaves]

"I will not." He says quietly, "For I can see how you are hurting."