#might x-post to AO3 might wait til there's a collection to make chaptered

[swordbisexual]

round and around, this time for keeps

What is routine, without memory? (cw: mentions of canon-typical violence/Dark Urge)

~750 words title: "Little Amsterdam," Tori Amos

--

There’s little Vissenta can remember; that she remembers to wake, to move, to be what she thinks is a human being with most of their faculties intact, is a miracle in and of itself. 

Crafting a reasonable morning routine? Well, that’s completely unknown.

None of the little pinpricks in the fractured void of her mind, those brilliant needle-sharp bone-shard fragments that stab and startle her every time they pierce through, have offered up anything useful. No, useful is the wrong word; normal, is what she’s desperately searching for, every time she opens her eyes to the muzzy gray light of dawn, up and moving before any of her traveling companions.

—they would be so easy to kill, even Astarion, now that she knows that all it takes is a stake, all she’d have to do is take a knife, and another, and another, and—

She can’t completely quell the voice that whispers in the back of her mind, but she can calm it by tending to the steel she’s plucked from every body on the road. Vissenta whets her daggers beneath her shabby excuse for a tent, breathing in with each stroke, then back out again, drinking in the verdant air. No memory of wilderness, not at all, not like this - crisp, green, teeming with life (ripe for slaughter) - and she wants to pretend, for a moment, that she’s always been part of it.

A huntress, that’s all. A huntress sharpening her daggers, because there’s no use at all for a dull knife.

But with every pass of steel to stone, her head also thrums, a faint, pulsing agony, roiling her gut as she perfectly - exquisitely - pictures the cruel, slow twist of a blunt-edged blade. The way it rends, the way it pulls the flesh along when it finally catches hold. The way it skips and scrapes, the way its removal is a source of even more pain than its slow, wriggling insertion.

She remembers: a dull blade does have use, if there’s questions that need answers.

But she isn’t sure she even wants those answers.

Vissenta puts down the daggers before she can whet them down to even more useless slivers, then turns her attention to more mundane matters of the head; her hair’s still down, long, too long, long enough for someone to take hold of it in their fist and drag her—

—cruel fingers winding through her braid, hand and hair alike soaked in blood, her cries of pain strangled on a sickening wet bubble in her throat that refuses to burst, and another long plait swings in her vision, as bone-white as hers is coffin-dark—

—but she won’t cut it. Her hair has always been a point of pride; she knows this, somehow, even if she doesn’t know the rest, even though she knows it could be her undoing. Still, there’s a solution.

This is what people do, Vissenta tells herself, as she weaves together a plaited crown, starting just behind her ear, careful to avoid the ridges along her scalp that she discovered on the first night she scrubbed intellect devourer viscera from her skin and watched it float away downriver. They wake up. They tend to themselves. They—

—plan all you want, wretched thing, but you never could have planned for this, could you—

—face the day. And she won’t face it alone; she hears the crackle of the campfire’s embers as they’re stoked back to roaring life, and already her belly grumbles in anticipation of whatever magic Gale’s done - and she almost smiles at her own little joke, there - to turn their provisions into a hearty breakfast. As Vissenta pins and tucks the braid in place - lock-tight, no grabbing, no pulling, no swinging behind her as steady as a pendulum to count down the seconds before another untimely end - she sees the flash of silver out of the corner of her eye, as Lae’zel fixes her armor in place, as Shadowheart walks a wide circle to avoid the githyanki, as they all ready themselves for the day, just as she does.

There is no past; she can tell herself that for now, at least. The now keeps her alive, and keeps her blades sharp, and keeps her hair pinned, and keeps the voice—

—easy, so easy, cut them all and run—

Quiet.

Vissenta stands, and sheaths her daggers, and tucks back the loose strands of hair by her ears with shaking hands, and strides out to the sharp unknown of now.

This much, she’ll remember.