[ Rudbeckia wakes in a bed of feathers and fur, but her first thought is: Ah, I don't want to do this again. she doesn't want to go about living for another pointless day. how can she go out there and sit beside Cesare, as though he didn't just take everything good she had managed to hold in her hands and turn it to poison all at once? how can Iske possibly look at her without drawing his sword to kill her? he's going to kill her. he should kill her. she should never have—
there's no feeling of relief once the realisation trickles in that this is Kenos, not Arundel. it doesn't matter. those things that she once thought she could leave behind her have now rotted her from the inside out, and no amount of distance can change that. no, worse than that – this is a curse that follows her. it must be. something about her is so fundamentally awful and wrong that it corrupts all she comes in contact with. she was a fool all along to have even tried.
and because she is a wretched, selfish, cruel thing, her mind reaches out. ]
Set?
[ even at the first brush of her mind against his, Rudbeckia hardly resembles her old self. she is more lost ghost than girl. so many vital pieces of her are missing: her fear, her warmth, her burning desire to survive, even the deep lake of her sorrows. everything has been scraped out of her, leaving behind something hollow and cavernous, pitted and ugly. nothing can take root in the barrenness of her heart. every emotion passes through her without leaving a mark at all.
her love for him remains. the red desert sands still cover her bare feet. but the sands are cold, now, and she cannot bring herself to touch them. ]
immediately post-timeskip; cw for suicidal ideation + pseudo-incest this whole thread
there's no feeling of relief once the realisation trickles in that this is Kenos, not Arundel. it doesn't matter. those things that she once thought she could leave behind her have now rotted her from the inside out, and no amount of distance can change that. no, worse than that – this is a curse that follows her. it must be. something about her is so fundamentally awful and wrong that it corrupts all she comes in contact with. she was a fool all along to have even tried.
and because she is a wretched, selfish, cruel thing, her mind reaches out. ]
Set?
[ even at the first brush of her mind against his, Rudbeckia hardly resembles her old self. she is more lost ghost than girl. so many vital pieces of her are missing: her fear, her warmth, her burning desire to survive, even the deep lake of her sorrows. everything has been scraped out of her, leaving behind something hollow and cavernous, pitted and ugly. nothing can take root in the barrenness of her heart. every emotion passes through her without leaving a mark at all.
her love for him remains. the red desert sands still cover her bare feet. but the sands are cold, now, and she cannot bring herself to touch them. ]
I'm here. I'm sorry I went away.