04-30-2018, 12:24 AM
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Bastille could see it happening. He didn't need her expression to tell him, because he could see it in her aura, the swirling chaos of emotion and final flame of anger as she realized and she remembered. She remembered her hatred and her fury and the reason that she had left in the first place. There had been a second there where Bastille had not been certain of what she was going to do, how she would react -- there had been a brief, tiny flame of hope, as if she might not hate him entirely, as if she might actually have missed him even a fraction of how much he had missed her. As if their past meant anything to her.
And then he could see the anger leaping for, a raging flame in those golden eyes, and he died all over again. He silently chastised himself for expecting anything else, furious that he'd let her get under his skin already, something vicious and bitter and dark twisting angrily in his chest at the mere notion that he'd fucked himself over with even hoping. Of fucking course she still hated him. Of fucking course. Was he really stupid enough to believe anything else? No, so why the hell had he considered it for even a moment?
(He swore there had been more there, at first -- could swear that her aura had told him a story of so much more than just anger, but now that was all there was there. That was all that she felt for him, when it came down to picking a side. And she'd picked the anger.)
There was a brief moment of complete stillness in which Bastille could just look at her. Look at he and wonder where he had gone wrong, how he'd managed to push her away so thoroughly, how he had managed to make her so angry. He had pissed her off before, sure, but never like this -- never to the extent that she couldn't forgive him. And now she just... She just hated him. And he knew that even if he couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when he'd fucked it all up, that it was still his fault. It was always ever going to be his fault. It was always going to go up in flames, and it was always going to be him on his own, looking back on the wreckage knowing that he did this. Somehow, he did this. It was simply who he was.
He was, briefly, surprised when she came at him. He shouldn't have been; no, he should have been ready for that, been ready for Hazel to look at him with such anger, such hatred. But somehow even now, he couldn't believe that she would actually kill him if given the chance; something about the knowledge, the quick flickering second of realization, struck him so deeply that it didn't even matter what she said or did to him. Bastille had already shut down, his systems going offline as he simply stared at her blankly, his chin tilted up slightly. It was either an offering or defiance. As she charged him, however, he didn't move.
Bastilleprisoner just stood there, accepting that if Hazel wanted to kill him, he wasn't going to be the one to stop her.
Not when it was Hazel. Not when she was the one person who had ever given him any semblance of hope, who had ever looked at him and seen straight into his soul and decided to stick around. Hazel was singularly the only true, radiant light that he had ever had in his life. Bastille had developed a sense of loyalty to a lot of people, but there was only one person that he would, without a doubt, do absolutely anything and everything for. She was the only one who had claimed him so entirely and so completely that he wasn't sure that there was a Bastille who existed without some stamp of Hazel on him. Even when he tried to forget her, tried to push her away, he was still forced to acknowledge that she owned him in a way that no one else would ever be capable of, would never be allowed to. There was only Hazel. And if Hazel hated him that much, then he didn't care to stop her.
There was the sharp sting as her sword slashed across his chest, but Bastille merely winced at the impact, his stance tightening as he held his ground in the face of her fury. Her words were just a tirade of sound at this point, a continuous flow of her anger, her blame, her hatred; he stared straight back at her with little regard for the blood seeping through his clothes or for the immediate follow up, the quick follow up that struck him in the ribs and dug in deep. He just didn't care. He already knew how she felt, accepted her words without protest, without concern; he didn't fucking care how many times she swung at him or how badly it burned, because he deserved it. He'd broken the only person in the world that he could not stand to break, and that alone cut him deeper than her sword ever could.
Another slash; she was going to kill him, and he didn't care, but suddenly there was the brief, flashing pulse of thought, of Oh, you motherfucking idiot, exploding through his thoughts. There was the agonizing coldness of her sword cutting him once more, the prickling sensation of fresh blood, and then there was a subtle shift in his aura, his eyes, his thoughts. Before he could fully process it, it was already done; in a quick slide Bastille was gone.
His eyes had always been icy. Even on his best days, in his best moods, the blue was simply cold in the manner that it was so light. However, the color of his eyes had always been in the slightest way discernible from any of his souls; even when it came to Echo, who also had blue eyes, Bastille's weren't that cold. Echo's eyes were several shades lighter than his own, so much icier in a way that was difficult to describe in any concrete terms. Only comparison could do it justice, and the brief flicker of Bastille's eyes suddenly shifting in color offered for a great example of their differences to the careful observer.
Echo caught her next swing with his hands, because Bastille was a fucking moron and had not really left him with much to work with, here. There was little room to navigate with a fucking maniac swinging a sword at him, and the sharp burn of the edge hurt like fuck, but he'd had worse. It cut deep but it also stopped moving, accepting the force of his palms pushing against it as the end of its arch; with a quick jerk, Echo shoved hard against the blade, ignoring the way it pushed in deeper and sending her sprawling backwards with a burst of wind.
"Damn, boo," he huffed, shaking out his hands as if splattering blood everywhere was actually going to do him any good. His shirt was tattered, three vicious cuts standing out against the exposed flesh, and there was fucking blood everywhere. Like, what the fucking hell, Jesus. "I knew there was a reason I didn't like you much, like fuck."
As fluid as the transition to Echo was -- there was no tension, no turmoil, no passing out or ominous glowing -- he knew damned well that he wasn't going to be able to hold onto control for long. Even if he wanted to, and even if Bastille had wanted to stay away from her, the pull of her aura was too strong; it dragged Bastille out of him, latched on and yanked until Echo was clearly wavering, struggling to hold on and prevent that idiot from getting them all killed. It was no use, though, and as quickly as Echo had emerged, he was gone.
Bastille staggered slightly, the ground around him splintering with brief cracks; the sudden slip in control came from many things, but the jarring impact of switching back and forth so quickly and from the sudden overwhelming pain everywhere as the force of his injuries hit him once more threw him briefly off balance. He looked down, as if assessing the damage his powers had done, but there was nothing but blood and more blood; no point in trying to focus on the ground below him when he could feel himself going just a bit light headed. Not enough so to be any cause of concern -- what did he care, anyway? -- but enough to prompt him to look back up, back to Hazel, as if looking at her might ground him in the face of brief dizziness.
For a moment, he simply stared at her. There was no sense of apology, nothing to indicate the sort of regret that he might have shown in the past over Echo slipping out; he had no shame left, not in his souls, not in who he was. Bastille had given up a while ago on trying to pretend he was something he was not, in feeling guilty about being such a fuckup. He'd warned them. He'd told them fair and square, and it could not possibly be his fault that they failed to listen.
Echo's interruption had not really changed anything, though. He didn't care if they felt so passionately they would try to save him; he didn't care about anything. He simply stared at Hazel, feeling vaguely faint with the reality of it, with the blood dripping down his chest and from his palms, and memorized the look on her face. He prayed to whatever gods there were that they wouldn't force him to come back, wouldn't trap him into the vicious cycle that his souls had been stuck in with him. He didn't want to live a life being forced to remember this, remember her, remember the anger behind her sword. He didn't want to live a life at all.
"You're right," he said flatly, devoid of anything at all, "You did leave. You left Eden, and you left me. You left me to fail on my own, and deal with Eden on my own, and to watch it all burn to the ground no matter how hard I tried to save it. You left me, Hazel. Our home is gone now, you know? I bet you never bothered to check in, see what became of them, of Eden, but it's gone. It's all gone. The plague wiped it out." He simply spoke without pausing to think, no filter, just a stream of words he had never gotten to say, things he had never gotten to tell anyone. His eyes were dead and his voice was dead and he was going to bleed out sooner or later, so who the fuck cared if he let her know everything that he'd been thinking for a year and a half?
"You think everything was so hard because you were confused and you cared about Dahlia and it wasn't fair, but guess what, Hazel? I was confused and I cared about Dahlia and it wasn't fucking fair that she turned on me. She played me, Hazel, she played both of us and you did exactly what she expected you to do. You did exactly what you needed to do in order to make sure Dahlia won and that Eden would inevitably fall." Bastille spoke as if it didn't matter, none of it, and it didn't. It was all over any way.
"And I get it, Hazel. I do. It was my fault. It was always going to be my fault. I knew that the day I joined you, I knew that every fucking day that I spent in Eden. I knew I would fuck something up eventually, and I just know that somehow, it was my fault. Dahlia wouldn't have snapped if not for me. She wouldn't have left, and you wouldn't have left, but I don't know what to fucking tell you, Hazel. It wouldn't matter if I told you I'm sorry, or that I tried, or that I needed you. It doesn't fucking matter. Eden's already dead, and if you want to kill me for that, I don't really care any more."
It was nice of her to take that damned bandana off so that he could actually see her face when he bled the fuck out.
Bastille could see it happening. He didn't need her expression to tell him, because he could see it in her aura, the swirling chaos of emotion and final flame of anger as she realized and she remembered. She remembered her hatred and her fury and the reason that she had left in the first place. There had been a second there where Bastille had not been certain of what she was going to do, how she would react -- there had been a brief, tiny flame of hope, as if she might not hate him entirely, as if she might actually have missed him even a fraction of how much he had missed her. As if their past meant anything to her.
And then he could see the anger leaping for, a raging flame in those golden eyes, and he died all over again. He silently chastised himself for expecting anything else, furious that he'd let her get under his skin already, something vicious and bitter and dark twisting angrily in his chest at the mere notion that he'd fucked himself over with even hoping. Of fucking course she still hated him. Of fucking course. Was he really stupid enough to believe anything else? No, so why the hell had he considered it for even a moment?
(He swore there had been more there, at first -- could swear that her aura had told him a story of so much more than just anger, but now that was all there was there. That was all that she felt for him, when it came down to picking a side. And she'd picked the anger.)
There was a brief moment of complete stillness in which Bastille could just look at her. Look at he and wonder where he had gone wrong, how he'd managed to push her away so thoroughly, how he had managed to make her so angry. He had pissed her off before, sure, but never like this -- never to the extent that she couldn't forgive him. And now she just... She just hated him. And he knew that even if he couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when he'd fucked it all up, that it was still his fault. It was always ever going to be his fault. It was always going to go up in flames, and it was always going to be him on his own, looking back on the wreckage knowing that he did this. Somehow, he did this. It was simply who he was.
He was, briefly, surprised when she came at him. He shouldn't have been; no, he should have been ready for that, been ready for Hazel to look at him with such anger, such hatred. But somehow even now, he couldn't believe that she would actually kill him if given the chance; something about the knowledge, the quick flickering second of realization, struck him so deeply that it didn't even matter what she said or did to him. Bastille had already shut down, his systems going offline as he simply stared at her blankly, his chin tilted up slightly. It was either an offering or defiance. As she charged him, however, he didn't move.
Bastilleprisoner just stood there, accepting that if Hazel wanted to kill him, he wasn't going to be the one to stop her.
Not when it was Hazel. Not when she was the one person who had ever given him any semblance of hope, who had ever looked at him and seen straight into his soul and decided to stick around. Hazel was singularly the only true, radiant light that he had ever had in his life. Bastille had developed a sense of loyalty to a lot of people, but there was only one person that he would, without a doubt, do absolutely anything and everything for. She was the only one who had claimed him so entirely and so completely that he wasn't sure that there was a Bastille who existed without some stamp of Hazel on him. Even when he tried to forget her, tried to push her away, he was still forced to acknowledge that she owned him in a way that no one else would ever be capable of, would never be allowed to. There was only Hazel. And if Hazel hated him that much, then he didn't care to stop her.
There was the sharp sting as her sword slashed across his chest, but Bastille merely winced at the impact, his stance tightening as he held his ground in the face of her fury. Her words were just a tirade of sound at this point, a continuous flow of her anger, her blame, her hatred; he stared straight back at her with little regard for the blood seeping through his clothes or for the immediate follow up, the quick follow up that struck him in the ribs and dug in deep. He just didn't care. He already knew how she felt, accepted her words without protest, without concern; he didn't fucking care how many times she swung at him or how badly it burned, because he deserved it. He'd broken the only person in the world that he could not stand to break, and that alone cut him deeper than her sword ever could.
Another slash; she was going to kill him, and he didn't care, but suddenly there was the brief, flashing pulse of thought, of Oh, you motherfucking idiot, exploding through his thoughts. There was the agonizing coldness of her sword cutting him once more, the prickling sensation of fresh blood, and then there was a subtle shift in his aura, his eyes, his thoughts. Before he could fully process it, it was already done; in a quick slide Bastille was gone.
His eyes had always been icy. Even on his best days, in his best moods, the blue was simply cold in the manner that it was so light. However, the color of his eyes had always been in the slightest way discernible from any of his souls; even when it came to Echo, who also had blue eyes, Bastille's weren't that cold. Echo's eyes were several shades lighter than his own, so much icier in a way that was difficult to describe in any concrete terms. Only comparison could do it justice, and the brief flicker of Bastille's eyes suddenly shifting in color offered for a great example of their differences to the careful observer.
Echo caught her next swing with his hands, because Bastille was a fucking moron and had not really left him with much to work with, here. There was little room to navigate with a fucking maniac swinging a sword at him, and the sharp burn of the edge hurt like fuck, but he'd had worse. It cut deep but it also stopped moving, accepting the force of his palms pushing against it as the end of its arch; with a quick jerk, Echo shoved hard against the blade, ignoring the way it pushed in deeper and sending her sprawling backwards with a burst of wind.
"Damn, boo," he huffed, shaking out his hands as if splattering blood everywhere was actually going to do him any good. His shirt was tattered, three vicious cuts standing out against the exposed flesh, and there was fucking blood everywhere. Like, what the fucking hell, Jesus. "I knew there was a reason I didn't like you much, like fuck."
As fluid as the transition to Echo was -- there was no tension, no turmoil, no passing out or ominous glowing -- he knew damned well that he wasn't going to be able to hold onto control for long. Even if he wanted to, and even if Bastille had wanted to stay away from her, the pull of her aura was too strong; it dragged Bastille out of him, latched on and yanked until Echo was clearly wavering, struggling to hold on and prevent that idiot from getting them all killed. It was no use, though, and as quickly as Echo had emerged, he was gone.
Bastille staggered slightly, the ground around him splintering with brief cracks; the sudden slip in control came from many things, but the jarring impact of switching back and forth so quickly and from the sudden overwhelming pain everywhere as the force of his injuries hit him once more threw him briefly off balance. He looked down, as if assessing the damage his powers had done, but there was nothing but blood and more blood; no point in trying to focus on the ground below him when he could feel himself going just a bit light headed. Not enough so to be any cause of concern -- what did he care, anyway? -- but enough to prompt him to look back up, back to Hazel, as if looking at her might ground him in the face of brief dizziness.
For a moment, he simply stared at her. There was no sense of apology, nothing to indicate the sort of regret that he might have shown in the past over Echo slipping out; he had no shame left, not in his souls, not in who he was. Bastille had given up a while ago on trying to pretend he was something he was not, in feeling guilty about being such a fuckup. He'd warned them. He'd told them fair and square, and it could not possibly be his fault that they failed to listen.
Echo's interruption had not really changed anything, though. He didn't care if they felt so passionately they would try to save him; he didn't care about anything. He simply stared at Hazel, feeling vaguely faint with the reality of it, with the blood dripping down his chest and from his palms, and memorized the look on her face. He prayed to whatever gods there were that they wouldn't force him to come back, wouldn't trap him into the vicious cycle that his souls had been stuck in with him. He didn't want to live a life being forced to remember this, remember her, remember the anger behind her sword. He didn't want to live a life at all.
"You're right," he said flatly, devoid of anything at all, "You did leave. You left Eden, and you left me. You left me to fail on my own, and deal with Eden on my own, and to watch it all burn to the ground no matter how hard I tried to save it. You left me, Hazel. Our home is gone now, you know? I bet you never bothered to check in, see what became of them, of Eden, but it's gone. It's all gone. The plague wiped it out." He simply spoke without pausing to think, no filter, just a stream of words he had never gotten to say, things he had never gotten to tell anyone. His eyes were dead and his voice was dead and he was going to bleed out sooner or later, so who the fuck cared if he let her know everything that he'd been thinking for a year and a half?
"You think everything was so hard because you were confused and you cared about Dahlia and it wasn't fair, but guess what, Hazel? I was confused and I cared about Dahlia and it wasn't fucking fair that she turned on me. She played me, Hazel, she played both of us and you did exactly what she expected you to do. You did exactly what you needed to do in order to make sure Dahlia won and that Eden would inevitably fall." Bastille spoke as if it didn't matter, none of it, and it didn't. It was all over any way.
"And I get it, Hazel. I do. It was my fault. It was always going to be my fault. I knew that the day I joined you, I knew that every fucking day that I spent in Eden. I knew I would fuck something up eventually, and I just know that somehow, it was my fault. Dahlia wouldn't have snapped if not for me. She wouldn't have left, and you wouldn't have left, but I don't know what to fucking tell you, Hazel. It wouldn't matter if I told you I'm sorry, or that I tried, or that I needed you. It doesn't fucking matter. Eden's already dead, and if you want to kill me for that, I don't really care any more."
It was nice of her to take that damned bandana off so that he could actually see her face when he bled the fuck out.
Honey, you're familiar, like my mirror years ago, Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword, Innocence died screaming; honey, ask me, I should know, I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door. [b][sup]▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃[/sup][/b]