by Rance » Sun Oct 12, 2014 9:06 am
"There is only Never Again."
I pray you, merit the phrase its patience: it took me many minutes to listen to you and plant the words as a seed in my heart, Ariane. It was not the response I hoped I would get. For months I imagined you would return; I presumed you would wear stones in your eyes, grab me by the collar of my dress and drag me, a rotten scamp, a criminal, through the muddy streets. At the Marketplace, people would shout bitch, dog, foreigner, filth, coward, raper, Jerno, and all the weights would have their counterbalance inside me. It would hurt, but I would be so very thankful that it was made right, it was finished.
Instead, I watched you from that bed -- do you remember when I was fat and heavy with my child; hear, hear, she plays now out in the gardens and we're like little old crones with our tea and your sword here -- and you still trusted me; you did not shame me or judge me, you never doubted me in eyes or words, and--
"Death is not justice," said the pregnant girl, "but if justice cannot be had, then how is this hatred, this disgust I bear for myself -- how is it remedied? I avoid Cherny, my very brother, because since I discovered the child inside me, I fear I've broken everything we've ever had; Catch cowers, refuses to look me in the eye, cannot trust me for my skin, for my urges.
"And when this child comes to know the awful things her mother did, will she ever forgive me for ripping her out of the comfort of nothing? Will it alter her, to know she was not conceived in love, but like some divine castigation for my impulse?"
I felt it slipping, too, the veil, the rhetor; do you remember back then, when I was sixteen and trying to be something I wasn't, I would try and try to be composed, mature, but it would crumble down because I couldn't hold back the emotion any longer--
An imperfect vessel could only contain her instincts so long; her motion, her need, was sudden: gown-sleeved arm, with the only hand that remained, tightened itself into a fist with whitewashed knuckles, shaking, violently quivering.
Once, twice, she drove the spine of her fist against the heardboard, clap, clap, a hammer of flesh and bone wreaking havoc upon wood. Two tiny crescents of blood darkened the oak. A hoarse, guttural scream rattled from her throat, unanticipated and fearsome, hateful, spiteful, mad--
She closed her eyes.
"Help me," a Jerno asked a Dauntless, "to be tightly-controlled. Help me to -- to never be that woman who reaches too far ever again. Please. Else I fear I will decimate the world with my blatant disregard, with my mistakes, Ariane. Whether it's just my world, or that in which those I love choose to live. Catch. Cherny. You. Others.
"And -- and this child who will call me mother."