FADE RIFT [INBOX]

[shri]

ＬＡＤＹ ＬＡＫＳＨＭＩ
( Lady Lakshmi, Bai Saheba, Rani Lakshmibai )

ＶＯＩＣＥ | ＡＣＴＩＯＮ | ＮＯＴＥＳ

Unavaliable To All:

• 30mins around dawn
  
  Only to Voice:
  
• Hour training morning and evening
  
• Any time she's gone riding.
  
• When she's in the field.
  
  Only to Book:
  
• When she's otherwise in a meeting, leave a message.
  
• Very late at night or early in the morning.
  
  Other:
  
• She usually takes her morning meals in the mess hall with everyone else.
  
• Her days are usually spent in Kirkwall seeing to either her personal business or Inquisition tasks.
  
• She has a bath twice a day, every day.
  

Comments

[esquive]

"I don't believe they found anyone at all." This said very gently, a soft sound as if the meaning might be quieted too.

[shri]

As if, as if there is ever a way to make those words less absolute. As if, if he said them quietly, the world might not hear it, and that means it could be undone. Like whispers could make things not true. But who did either of them think they were fooling?

Which she might even have asked him that if she could stop the wail of pain that comes out of her mouth. The building, choking up sound in the back of her throat. Might have stared him down if not for the way her legs give out underneath her, make her stumble between him and the door frame. Shoving him, but not letting him go, yanking him back as she falls against him. But she cannot hear herself, any more than she can form words for it. A strike in that helplessness, not to him, but to herself, for the red vermillion that she had placed upon her brow since she and Magni had placed upon each other's foreheads in the solemnity of make-do vows of fidelity. Smearing it away as all widows must do.

Hanging onto him, ugly, the grief as sudden as those same flames. Sudden, hot and engulfing. "Give them back - give them back." The words are pitched, mad with their pain, like she could rip the air apart if she but tried. But she never could, she never could.

[esquive]

There is no supporting her. She's a small woman, but her weight and the drag of it on him is very real and he finds himself clutching at her elbows in an insensible effort to keep her something resembling upright. She'd drag you down like this, he thinks blandly, if there was anywhere to go. The hollowness of the thought swallows every ounce of grief that belongs to him. It's a pit to poisonous things into, to set that disjointed piece somewhere else so that it doesn't stab him at some inopportune moment.

This is what is wrong with you: you've been holding all these sharp things against your belly with your bare hands. Of course they've cut. That's what they're designed for. Are you sorry for what you said to her last?, asks same razor edge too distant to hear over the sound of Lakshmi Bai's agony.

"Easy, easy," he doesn't say. But he does let her clutch him and he doesn't release her even if it means being dredged about to accommodate her grip and her need and the burden of her. It's fine. There's room for it.

[shri]

There is nowhere else to go, from here - and the worst, the worst of this knowledge is that it has already been hers. She has been in this room, on the floor, she has screamed herself empty in the pain of it until her voice no longer could be called her own. She has held this - these snatch of leather, beads and stone - so tightly it cuts her then and it does now. Slices her palms open, mingles her blood on his clothes as she weeps, drips it red onto his coat. A mindless, thoughtless thing, that goes on and on and on, and of course, it does, for there will not be a moment where her body will not remember it. One more room, with one more door she will have to shut when the smoke clears.

( It never will. She knows it, there is no breathing clearly. If this land has taken her from her Mother Ganga, if it has taken her from dry deserts and her Knight, her Tesla, her Devi, why not - )

"Why must they take my heart? I have arms, legs, eyes and ears. Why must my heart be taken from my chest?" Begging it, desperate, confused. That bloody hand beats against his shoulder, her forehead driven into his chest. Driving and holding, pushing and pulling. "How many husbands must I lose, how many children? How many- ?" But even the blows are weak, broken as her voice. "Please, I would give my body to ash, if it will give them back."

[esquive]

There's no answer for any of it out of him, but it isn't as if they're really questions meant for him. Instead Marcoulf waits, his grip on her arms careful and without much limitation. This part is happening to a different person. Someone else is in this doorway; someone else delivered the news; someone else is responsible for her grief.

Eventually that someone else says, softly as if talking to a child or a trembling animal: "Madame Bai, you should sit. Have you eaten today?"