#eothas: says something Blindingly Earnest

[adraveins]

orthodrome (3 / 3)

➸ The Watcher, Edér, Eothas ➸ 7k ➸ AU, canon divergence ➸ Chapter 1 // Chapter 2 // Chapter 3

The figure blazes before you, faceless and still. You blink and blink again, afterimages of the sickle and lantern imprinting on your eyelids and vanishing, and there is more sorrow than gladness filtering through the parts of his mind that you can touch. I would rather have you hate me than need me, Edér.

You feel the way the words strike at Edér like a blow, but he doesn't pull back. He stares unflinchingly at the light, his mouth set in an angry line. "Well," he says, his voice low, "you've done a pretty good job of getting folks to hate you. But that's the thing." His steadying breath isn't so steady. "I don't." His voice trembles with the admission. "I don't even know how to. I wish I did, believe me."

You don't think he wants that. You think he just wants to hurt Eothas even a fraction as much as Eothas has hurt him, in the only way he can.

But the full weight of that isn't easily grasped by a god, you think, even a well-meaning one like Eothas. That mortals dare and defy, pray and persist, just to see a reaction, and one on their level, not on a god's. It means more than the grandest gestures, and it's power too, in its own way, that evens the footing by a margin. You know that Edér wants to see it in Eothas, and you know that Eothas won't give it to him, that his patience and understanding is a double-edged sword. And Edér has no cipher's senses that let him feel a sliver of it anyway.

There’s something underneath the keep. The Watcher is sure of it. // AO3