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mxssful · 9 days ago

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troubled girl

Hands are curious things.

Hers are small, and calloused. Her fingers get a little twitchy when she starts to get bored. Currently, they pulse with the ache of swollen knuckles and split skin.

The girls’ hands had not been calloused. They had made a point of it, she remembers— hands on her cheeks, the scent of honey and rose water. Squishing her face, laughing, such a silly girl, Rosie. Do you even know what the words to that song mean?

Her hands are calloused now. She had known this for a while, but she had not felt the weight of it until a week ago, when she looked at her palms and suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to lather her entire body in milk and honey and rosewater and lavender, to find something soft she could wrap all her jagged edges in, something sweet to disguise the scent of ozone.

She turned sixteen a week ago. Had she still been with the girls, she would have been put to work proper— properly, that stern voice corrects in her head.

Hands are curious things. Hers pulse with the ache of swollen knuckles and split skin, her gaze fixated on dried blood and clear fluid. She thinks that if she makes a fist, angles it in the light just right, she can make out the paleness of bone underneath. She wants to lick, to peel back her skin with her teeth, find out the hue of her skeleton. Eat herself until there is nothing left but the cleanest, barest bones, instead of the mess of flesh and blood and feeling that she is.

Perhaps she would feel better after her own cannibalization.

“Are you listening to me?”

Viago doesn't squish her face, but sometimes he does this— grab her by the sides of her jaw, move her head until she's focusing on whatever he wants. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes she leans the weight of her head into his touch, a beast of burden leaning into the bit inside their mouth— and if the metal hurts against her palate, then it hurts. But at least it's something to bite onto.

(Fire polishing might be another alternative. Let the worst parts of her melt down to nothing, and whatever is left behind be smoothed, hardened, cleared, purified. Maybe that’s what they tried to do to Andraste, but they had the temperature wrong, and she burned down to ash with nothing to show for their efforts.

There are glass lamps in Treviso. Bright. Colorful. She should like to be a little like that, she thinks— with an option, naturally, to smash them against the ground, and use the shards as a weapon.)

“I am a Crow of House de Riva,” she repeats, “not some petty criminal.”

Everything is sharp, sometimes, so sharp. Herself and the whole world— if she could only close her eyes just so, just until things come out of focus—

She imagines Viago's hands aren't soft either, but she does not know. She remembers more the taste of his blood than the texture of his skin. Rosa understands not how he lives like that: always with a barrier between himself and the world.

Everything is so sharp, but his eyes are sharper, caught somewhere between blue and grey— violet, sometimes, in the right lighting. Like a storm. Someone had said— who? When? Was this a song? Was it something else? Perhaps an old refrain?— ‘Clouded eyes, unclouded future.’ Maybe this is what he looks at when he frowns and schemes, some crystal-clear future that will only take a hundred and thirty-six steps for him to reach.

She does not have storms in her eyes

She carries them in her head, and in her heart.

She cannot see the future. But she can walk right on his footsteps, and maybe she’ll get somewhere.

“Why do we keep having this conversation?” His face is stern as ever, his tone halfway between disappointed and annoyed. He carries tension in his shoulders, but this is not new.

Not for the first time, she thinks he would make a very poor whore.

The thought pulls at the corner of her mouth.

“You think this is funny?” Viago asks.

“No,” she answers. “But that thing on your face you insist on calling a moustache is.”

Retaliation will come later, mixed into her dinner, she knows. And she will welcome it— leave no crumbs, look him right in the eye and demand he ups the dosage next time. And then she will spend a night throwing up, writhing, crying, feeling like her stomach is on fire or like her brain is melting and dripping out her nose. But she will not die.

Neither will apologize. They will move on, there won’t be hard feelings.

No matter how much they might fight— and lately, oh, lately she feels like the only thing she’s good at is fighting— it would be much worse to simply be… apart.

Rosa leans her weight onto Viago’s hand.

He can support her. This is good enough, even if he doesn’t squish her face.

“Why do I bother with you?” He says, not for the first time, not for the last.

“Because you hate being wrong,” she answers plainly.

She knows what they call her; what they have been calling her for years. Viago’s pet project— shortened to Viago’s pet. Like a half-trained dog always trotting after him. Viago’s pet, in different tones— from curiosity, to fondness, to derision.

Woof, Rosa thinks, and keeps trotting after him, day after day.

His nostrils flare, and he looks at her that way he does sometimes— like he would like to put her in a jar and shake her very hard, see if her pieces come loose. She snorts.

She’s sitting on his workbench, his collection of jars and vials pushed carefully to the side. She supposes she fits there just fine among his studies. Rosa curls the toes of her left foot inside her boot.

“Make a poison after me.” She says. Suggests? Demands.

“No,” he denies.

This is one of his favorite words with her. No. Sciocca. No. Sciocca. She does not know how he can stand to be so predictable.

He lets go of her face and begins searching for something in his drawers. A bottle of antiseptic. Cloth. Pity, she quite likes dried blood on her knuckles.

“What would you use? If you were to?”

“It doesn’t matter, because I am not going to.”

"What would my poison do?"

"Nothing, because it won't exist," he pauses, then. "Perhaps give whoever ingests it a terrible migraine."

“So make it.”

“No. Sciocca.”

She deflates, but gives him her hands without waiting for the request. He’s precise in tending to her wounds. Not affectionate, but careful. But this is how he handles everything— sometimes she likes to watch him work, whatever it is that he’s doing with his hands: developing a new concoction, practicing his bladework, taking notes. She sits nearby, and watches, and gets lost in the rhythm of Viago’s hands, and sticks out her tongue at him when he complains about her being unnerving again.

He has nice handwriting. She does not. She tries— sort of. Sometimes. She could try harder.

There was a rough patch between letters and her— she would keep setting her notebooks on fire by accident, again and again, no matter how her trainers tried to instruct her. Constrain her. Said things like control, and intent, and she had tried to understand those things— and they also said things like mana output and channel the harmonics and her eyes glazed over.

And then she had taken Viago’s notes on the development of a neurotoxin, led by nothing but the curiosity to see if she could get away with stealing from him (she could.)

He has nice handwriting. Rosa had traced over the grooves of the paper with her bare finger— trails of fire had followed, perfectly controlled and constrained to the path of his sentences. And that had been that.

Whatever books she set on fire after that, had been with intent.

“Is it another rage demon?” He asks her, straight to the point. He had been unnerved, mistrusting— rightly so, of course. She had been unnerved and mistrusting as well the first time she heard those saccharine voices, promising her things— but she knew not to trust things that sounded like they might smile too much.

Nothing ever comes for free. Unless you steal it.

Eventually, whatever demon hangs around her, leaves.

“Perhaps I am the rage demon,” she says. Shrugs.

Viago does not smile, because he rarely smiles. This, she likes about him. She would like it better if he laughed— she’s convinced, still, he doesn’t quite understand her jokes.

Except the puns. He does this thing when she makes a pun— breathes slowly through his nose. Once, she saw the corner of his mouth twitch. She knows she will wear him over, in time, erode him in the relentlessness of her humor. She wants it to be so, and thus it will be.

(Nothing is ever free, unless you steal it. Everything else you grab with your own hands.)

So Viago does not smile, but there is a note of something in his voice as he tends to her bloody knuckles.

“I have no doubt about that,” he says.

Rosa does not smile either, because she is not in a mood for smiling. Her knuckles don’t look quite right without blood on them— too clean, but not in a good way. They sting at the touch of antiseptic. There were no rage demons, but maybe she descends from one, It would explain the fire in her blood.

(But what would explain the storm in her heart? What kind of demon is linked to lightning? Pride? But she would rather have no pride, because then she has no shame. Shame is for those who can afford it.

She can afford things, these days. She still steals, to see if she can get away with it.)

“You can’t keep picking fights,” Viago tells her— stern as ever.

The look she gives him is sharp, and dark, and stormy— she can, she says without saying, she can, and she will, day after day if she needs to. And she always needs to. Sometimes, something feels wrong, just at the edge of her perception— when she looks at her hands and does not recognize them, not because they’re calloused, but because they lack wicked claws and are not constantly covered in blood.

At least she stopped throwing rocks at Chantry sisters.

“You do not have the size to keep picking fights,” Viago tries again.

She resents this. She resents this, so she bares her teeth— that stings as well, her bottom lip is fat, the barely-congealed blood not doing much in ways of maintaining the cut sealed. Fresh blood wells— she tastes metal, and does not mind it.

Viago reaches for her face again, digs his gloved fingers on the sides of her jaw. A muzzle, perhaps.

Woof, she thinks. Woof, woof, woof. She’ll trot after him the next day, and the next.

“Everything you do,” he says, “reflects on me, the good and the bad.” He brought her here, after all. Pulled her out of a cage, saw something— some potential— and said come along.

And along she went. She’s dangerous, now. She likes it, calluses and all.

(She still feels like she must bathe in some pleasant scent. Something sweet.)

“If you must insist on picking fights— do it quietly. Hit fast, hit first, do not let them get up. If you’re going to be stupid, be clever about it at least.”

Again, she settles in his hold, as she ruminates on these instructions.

Her knuckles are clean. She’ll dirty them again soon enough, so it’s bearable.

“Yes,” she says. “I don’t dislike that.”

#when you are 16 and full of rage and a sorcerer between wizards #dont worry girl youll fight gods in 12 years and that will fix you #viago de riva #rook de riva #viago & rook #rosa de riva #dragon age veilguard #veilguard spoilers #moss writes

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