angel of small death ★ potato vs. sonja

He bends backwards, blood dripping off of the end of the sword, dripping from the wound in his stomach that's now been opened at least three times. He wonders somewhere in the back of his head how many times he's going to be hit there until he is finally cut in half. The cut hurts, burning like ice and fire and vapor into the back of his stomach but at the same time it doesn't even matter. At the same time nothing ever really mattered as much as he thought it had. He wants to feel sick for what he's doing and maybe he does, in that little pocket in his head but outwardly his expression is cold, almost disdainful.

He straightens slowly, righting himself after the blow, wiping the blood off of his sword onto his pants. The sun beats down on his head, cooking it like an egg and maybe he's insane already or maybe he was never sane before. He knows this terrain, this sort of wasteland because he has lived in it for two years before now and he has watched so many people die that now he is nearly immune to the pain of watching a friend fall, or so he thinks. In reality, the pain of it never really goes away and he is not as numb to it as he thinks.

She talks a lot but he does not want to hear her pleading. It tries to chip away at his walls and he works hard to ignore it. It is a worse attack than the bite of her sword. Her bark should not sting so badly. He refuses to let it, tuning her out, shaking his head as if to clear all of her words from it. She's got a tone to her voice like a broken lower and it's not something he wants to think about because he was the type to fix a broken stem rather than to cut it down. He had never been the type to hurt others so easily until this week and the thought that it was so simple now was deafening.

He knew that he owed her an answer but he didn't know how to explain himself and still make sense. He didn't know if it was appropriate to love a person so much that you wanted to brutally murder them yourself instead of letting the dogs have them. He couldn't bear the idea of her dying cold and alone, torn apart by the sword of someone else. He couldn't bear the thought of him not being able to protect her like he had promised himself that he would. He struggled with it, the appropriate words and they would not come. How could he explain it, any of it?

"I do this..." he said, voice considering the correct way to speak as if it couldn't quite remember how, "I do this out of love." His voice was decisive, confident. He loved her so he would kill her and maybe the logic was not sound anywhere else but in here it was. In this slice of hell it was. He flicked the sword to the side in an effort to get the last few droplets of blood off of the blade and then pressed forward again, the gash in his stomach doing little to slow him down.

[potato attacks sonja]
bih0VKd1sword
[Stabbed in Back -- 9.0 damage]

His ear is trivial.

It falls to the ground with this odd sort of splatting sound but he doesn't mind the hot blood that gushes down his side. It is proper, it is right to feel this pain. He deserves it, this is how it will feel when he is in hell. This is a small pain in comparison to what he will feel everyday for eternity. His mother used to warn him all the time, telling him that if he was not good, if he was not kind, his skin would be torn and his teeth would be pulled. If he did not follow the rules and be a good boy then he would feel the fruit of his unholy labors in hell.

If this was hell then that made sense. Maybe this was the punishment, slowly, one by one his body parts would be torn off of his body until he was nothing but a beating heart in a rib cage and his blood painted the floors. Slowly, inch by inch he would forget what it was to be human, only knowing the eternity of pain until one day he was so tortured, so twisted that he might become a demon. He might be a demon now, he couldn't be certain. Maybe his life was simply hell.

He thinks about the last time he saw an angel. She had been a broken thing, laying on a makeshift cloud, eyes shut in slumber. Pieces of her were missing too, as if she were fabricated from broken ivory rather than flesh. Angels were genderless but she was one that had fallen down to earth. Her breath had come soft and sweet and in her sleep she had smiled softly. The blanket had been wrapped around her waist but had escaped her torso, baring all including the place in her back where her wings should have been, including the scars she held from when she fell. Her face was beautiful like an angel's should be and he had left her then in the pursuit of being deserving of her.

He only managed to push her away now.

A tear trickled from the corner of his cold gaze. It was not from pain but from the love that he felt for the girl he attacked now. It was not from agony but from horror and anger at the situation that he had put them both in. If he could still his sword now he might do so but it was too late, he had made his choice. Even if he stopped his attack Sonja would continue. She was no longer questioning him but was coming at him as well, the same ferocity in her arm that he held in his.

If they had met anywhere else they might have lived a happy life together as friends. A place like this was not built for friendship and she was foolish to believe that he would not be the one to hurt her, just as he was foolish for believing it as well. Despite his good intentions it always ended up like this, with the people nearest to him getting killed by his hand or the will of Ripred. Maybe it was Ripred's will that one of them would die this day, maybe it was his own. He was uncertain still of whether he wanted it to be Sonja's death or his.

Reaching up, he wiped the tear away and contemplated it, as if it were as foreign to him as he made it out to be. He wanted to say something, to tell her that he was sorry that it had to be this way. Words were useless, emotion was useless. The only way to speak was with a blade. He did not hold back as he lunged forward once more.

[potato attacks sonja]
oPteRdxqsword
[Shallow Cut on Right Thigh -- 3.5 damage]

It is a tremendous thing, to love.

It drives the soul to love another, it does. Without the thought of Opal waiting back in her room for him he would never be able to commit the reasons to his own religion that he is committing now. Without love there would be nothing worth living for.

People think that it is silly.

They say that love does not happen just like that, that love is a relationship formed over time, not something that happened between the blinks of the eyes one hot, summer's afternoon. They tell him that love doesn't happen all at once, it's a seed that you plant and it grows. He would have smiled and told them, "Maybe fer some people, Ma, but she's ther one, I know it an' I knows it down deep."

And it's not that he's blaming her, that he could ever poison the love that he has for her with feelings of blame towards her for anything. All the choices he makes are his own and at first he thought that he was doing it for Opal but he realized after that it wasn't even just for her. It was out of love. Every step he took every step he takes now, he continued to walk because of love of life, love of seasons and planting and children and smiling and the sun on his neck and the feeling of a hard day's work spent in the field and sitting around the fire late at night with friends and family and loved ones and her. Just her. That's all he needed.

If he could hold onto his love for her, he could make it.

But he isn't greedy.

He knows that what he's had with Opal is something special, something important and it was gifted to him, that moment that he first saw her grin and knew that she was everything he ever wanted in life. He isn't greedy and just to have held her within his grasp even for a moment, he counts himself lucky. If he never sees her again, then so be it.

He loved her with every fluid ounce of his being and he would continue to do so even into death even past the stars burning out and the universe ending he would love her. He would watch her from hell and love her from there and her scent would be on the 'O' etched into his sword and he would love her.

He loved her more than Sonja and that was why he did this. A choice had to be made and the scales did not tip in a generous manner for the beautiful friend he had found in her. This was why he attacked, why he refused to lay down his sword. He did it out of love, yes.

But for love of somebody else.

He can feel himself weakening as her blows grow more fatal but that is his secret weapon that he holds dear to his heart, nearly climbing inside of it. He could continue fighting, he could continue walking and breathing. Nothing now would sway him, not even the look in her eye or the blood that marked her slender frame, that he had caused himself. IF he was going to Hell then he would go down swinging.

So, he swung.

[potato attacks sonja]
EwkDoZoesword
[Shallow Cut on Left Shoulder -- 3.5 damage]

And he is fearful of the night, he would be a liar to say that he was willing to walk bravely into it. For all the strength that he did carry, he wasn't sure if it was enough to truly go gladly into death. He was certain that he was allowed to feel fear. In church he'd learned that one who is loved by Ripred and accepts Ripred into his heart does not have to feel it but he is uncertain if Ripred could dare love him now, who ever could. He had become a fierce thing, a monster rather than a man. Could Ripred still love him after this betrayal, this thing he did. Was it truly kinder to kill her himself rather than let her have a go against the wolves that barked at their backs?

He considered it further, halfhearted. He had made his decision the moment he had first swung his sword at her, there was no going back, not for him. He would never see the fields he had grown up in again, nor Nightshade, nor Opal. They were unattainable, sweet far things beyond his reach now. The only way to see them again was to kill with certainty and there was no time for the doubts he now had. He felt he was floundering as his attacks became weaker and weaker.

He was not strong enough to go through with this and kill one of the four people he had left to him in this world. The women in his life were important, the ones he had sworn to protect. Even to look at it like this and declare this a form of protection was a crude thing, a poorly drawn loophole in the contract. He was a second-rate friend, a second-rate husband and a third-rate man. With every step he took towards Sonja he could feel his parent's approval and love diminishing. They would not find any pride in his actions now.

Ripred must have turned her eyes away from this days ago.

Her cut on his leg was in unison to the sound of a cannon, close by. For a moment he thought that it was for him and he stumbled slightly forwards, a grin forming on his otherwise emotionless face, but he was still standing and blinking and sweating and seeing and doing.

Was Ingrid?

Was she still breathing?

He couldn't know.

He didn't want to to be alone and he didn't want to know more about Sonja. He didn't want to care so deeply for people anymore he wanted to figure out how to be like the careers, how to be cold. He wanted to be cold and wise and numb. He wanted to be so numb that even the touch of Opal would never make it through to him but for a hundred years wait. He didn't want to feel hatred or love or anything at all. He wanted to hold his wife in his arms again and cup her face in his hands and kiss her on the lips. He wanted to sleep with her.

Not sleep with her.

He just wanted to watch her breath and touch her skin and know that this time she really was beside him, that this time he wasn't just dreaming her up. He wanted to go home to her so badly that it made blood seek out his blade in eagerness, as if the bodies he fought somehow knew exactly what he was.

He was a killer, cold-blooded and unfeeling.

He would do this thing, he would assign himself a spot in the deepest pits of hell.

He would do it for her.

[potato attacks sonja]
iWUX8Ldasword
[Block -- 0.0 damage]