#ofthegun

[dcschain]

@cllgood​ / @ofthegun​ said: Bombardier blue eyes that find him, above the battlements of a shining city that lords over a land of milk and honey. Steven who lords over them all. "To protect Gilead, the Affiliation, and the Way of Eld – our work takes us into the dark in order to save the light. You and I are pledged to violence, Roland. Now and always."

It's hard to catch his father with his heart outside his ribs. Steven Deschain abhors weakness of any kind, if only because to open those gates would open a flood, torrential. And to his son, moments like these where there are no office walls to confine them to the role of king and son, he walks around the edge of with all the confidence of skinless cows.

But sometimes there are darknesses that cannot be broken without a light. Sometimes there are if i had lost you i would have died and with that more revelation than any magis could hide behind an open door. It is always like this: those terrible moments you discover your father is a man. The face you must remember not a mask, not featureless, not papier-machè and mythology but bone, and on it flesh, and on it skin, and in it blood.

Those moments where the light floods in. Where to be seen is the only option possible.

Were he a boy of imagination he would know what his father is trying to mean beyond the mere words. In a sense, he understands it: he lives it. The dust-blood-pain of it. The trail has left him kisses everywhere and they are nowhere as abundant as his father's. Today on this sunny day he sees the scars peek on Steven's forearms, his shirt rolled up to the elbows. He knows none of the stories behind any. He knows he never will: first there will be no time for it, and then there will never be enough.

Steven leans with his elbows against the sandstone edge, his brow furrowed against the glare of the sun, hat on the wall beside him. A strong gust and it'll fly away, were he anybody else, but he is nobody but himself: so if the hat flies, he will grab it before it's gone.

Roland leans with his back to the wall, with his hair pulled back when he is on official business and if nothing else, he knows his father's words are true because of two graves: the marble one of a mother, the bramble thicket of a hawk's. More than anything else, those graves remember, and whisper. There will be many more to come.

[polupenthes]

@ofthegun:

Kit Johns, already with his hackles raised after a less-than-pleasant debate with his excuse of a brother, finds Williamson sitting by the campfire and sizes him up, eyes burning. "And what kinda clown are you?"

He doesn’t like gunslingers no more than he likes lawmen or covenant men or barons. He’s met a few of the first, too many of the second and third, and never one of the latter. 

Sitting beside him, Sean MacGuire snorts half a laugh he answers with a kick. Even Bill knows that the joke Kit Johns has just made was not made to be laughed at by the likes of them.

“The one who don’t take too kindly to being heckled by a stranger in his own camp. Sir.”

[mercysought]

@ofthegun​ said : ( SECRET ) arriving where they both agreed to meet in secret in the dead of night. [rose to maxima] // SEDUCTION ( accepting! )

The tension in the halls during the endless days was almost unbearable. 

Which, of course, meant that her days were far fuller than they had ever been in the past. Not because there was much going on in the halls, but silence itself was telling enough. Enough that any whisper sounded like a shout. But there was more that worried her, even as the tension subsided in the evenings there is still something that remains, just atop the settled dust and waiting to be kicked right up upon the first ray of daylight.

It was only then that Maxima felt herself enough to sit down and sift through it all. There was much, but not all was important, nor true. And that was the true strength of her job, to sort through misinformation and to be able — to try — to distinguish and weaponise it. There was as much as a battlefield as well as outside the walls; truth was that a battlefield only exploded outside when it could not be contained within the polished walls of these palaces. 

When words fail and the wrong thing reached the wrong ears at the wrong time.

   “Rosalie, my dear...” she hums seeing the gunslinger swiftly make her way. Her face more heavily freckled than before; it always did whenever she returned. One thing that didn’t, however: was the pained expression each time she crossed the threshold of her door. As if Maxima’s domain physically pained her. And with each of her step the same tension was kicked right up in the air, Maxima was breathing it as well as she did with the sun glaring outside of her window. Maxima leans forward on her desk, resting her chin against her palm.

She wonders if it is as tiresome to hold a frown for so long — though her guess was that it was not given that was seemingly the trademark of gunslingers even before the war — as it was to hold her smile “I promise I won’t keep you for long, after all, I imagine that you have had quite the day.”

[westpromised]

If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife. (from good old john johns himself)

deathless / accepting.

He had not yet become the man he would out west, where he would shed the name of the great house and ancestry he had been born into but forfeited; where, in a streak of self-indulgent brilliance, he would claim a dead king’s sister’s name for himself, and in the marriage of them both proclaim unto the world who he was and who he had chosen to become. Then, his rebirth would be complete. 

Now, it had hardly just begun.

Now, on the eve of his meeting with the bondsman’s staff. He had just come home to tell his father, his mother. In less than a year’s time, she would be dead in the ground and he would blame a son’s folly for it. Arthur had no means yet to know the truth for what it was: the self-denial of the grand and the important, the blood he had born into, curdling to sour milk in a land that would soon have no purpose for it anymore. 

“On the contrary.” He gritted his teeth, unseen by the man who thought himself both his father and his deliverer. “I wanna start livin.” 

[imbricare]

@dcschain / cont.

Under the rim of his hat, in the dusk and the cold, he flashed his teeth in a smile; and he held up his hands, a right parody of a gesture of deference. “Dirt ‘n bones, and damn it all. I been reborn in the West, brother – and ain’t that a daisy?” 

He had taken to their way of speech, too: it was a rare and stumbling thing now, to conjure the Tongue – if he could do so at all. Fourteen summers a whining of its elegy; fourteen summers under the spires, behind his mother’s skirts, in the sand of the training pits. And then the bondsman’s mettle untouched, unbroken. Not the same to be said about Arthur Morgan’s pride. Arthur Johns-that-was. 

It had all been so long ago.

He watched the boy pull himself up to his full height––damn, was the kid tall––and stalk off, silent as a hawk and obedient to the core, no doubt. Deschain’s boy through and through. If Arthur’s grin returned to bleed into a chuckle, he couldn’t have helped it if he tried.

“That why you here – beratin me for a thing in the past?” He had to laugh, as he passed the gunslinger who bore his father’s name and his father’s irons, and clapped him on the shoulder. It was not a friendly grip; nor was it an aggression. It just was: like them. A book with blank pages was still a book. “Well, I’ll be damned. Take your pity and choke on it, Christopher.” 

[gcnenineteen-blog]

     In the end, Vannay reflected, the essence of prophecy was standing upon the parapet of a tower that has already fallen, and by virtue of one’s fixed place in time being forced to pretend it is still there. Prophecy was looking out upon a city that has already crumbled, upon a people who have already died, and knowing that you must live among them, and never tell them how little their lives, their dreams, or their plans mattered. Buying pipeweed from the merchant by the dock every week, and smiling as though his child has not already died in the womb. Watching the farmer slave in the orchard as though disease has not already taken the trees. Fastening a collar of mourning that one has already been wearing for decades. Prophecy, in the end, was not wisdom, but despair. 

     For prophecy was not knowing what could be, but what must be. The appeal of foresight was the delusion that, if one knew the future, one might be able to change it to suit one’s fancy, and it was only the prophets who knew their gift for what it was: the act of burning alive years before it will happen, and either opening one’s arms wide to the comfort of madness, or living on with one’s skin aflame. 

     “Hile, Dinh-Gilead.” He would turn, had turned, was turning - past, present, and future converged, meeting blue bombardier’s eyes as he had been meeting them every moment for twenty-five years, long before this man had been a man, much less a king. Long even before he had known his name. And there too was the nature of prophecy: to have conversations one was already having, had already had, as if anything in this world could be new - as if it were possible to be human outside of time. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

[uthaale-blog]

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[makerbound]

——————— ROLEPLAYING HISTORY !

the rules are simple ! post ten characters you’d like to role play as , have role played as , and might bring back . then tag ten people to do the same ( if you can’t think of ten characters , just write down however many you can and tag the same amount of people ) . aside from that , please repost instead of reblogging !

CURRENTLY PLAYING !

·       cuthbert allgood    //    the dark tower   //   @cllgood​​

·       various characters & OCs    //   the dark tower   //  @ofthegun​ & @ofthebarony​

·       cassandra pentaghast    //    dragon age  //   @makerbound​  (hiatus / semi-active)

·       dwalin fundinul    //    tolkien legendarium  //   @fundinson​​  (hiatus / semi-active)

·       asunn asviul    //    tolkien legendarium   //   @ursinh​​  (hiatus / semi-active)​

HAVE PLAYED !

·       nyreen kandros    //    mass effect    //    @venatrixturiana​  (inactive)

·       king thráin II  //    tolkien legendarium    //  @thrainsonofthror​​  (inactive)

·       glaw-y-nos  //    tolkien legendarium    // @bearskinned​​​  (inactive)

·       clotaire bonchance  //    dragon age    // @wineandgildedarms​​​​  (inactive)

WANT TO BRING BACK !

·       thráin perhaps maybe like really kinda low-key. right now though i barely have the time to keep my active blogs going.

WANT TO WRITE !

·       ooooof. As said I barely have the time to dedicate as much time as I would like to to the blogs I have, but theoretically speaking: more OCs always everywhere in every fandom.

TAGGED BY: @chevaliersreach (ty dear!) TAGGING:  @curufinwefeanaro, @brightflight, @tofindthesun​, @makhlun​, @breniatham​, @defenestratio​

[dcschain]

[ from kit ] ( GRIP ) holding mine by the back of the neck.

@ofthegun. | | from here. | accepting.

“Bleed, boy. Make your daddy proud to call you heir.”

The pain in his chest, born bright of black gravity. Lifted and then slammed into the ground: the last he had heard was Kit Johns in the shape of a snarl, before all the wind had been knocked out of him and he’d met, face-first, the mud and the blood of his split lip. Broken into the sky, wings a flash, silver in the arch of the blue summer light he can see past his hair and the mud, half his face pressed into the dirt of the training grounds. Kit Johns’ grip is neither gentle nor kind: it is a grip for wolves, to tame green things and bend them to grow straight, to teach pups their place amongst the gods.

He heaves, and yet Kit is relentless, unrelenting: the grip tightens and hurts, crushes his windpipe against the muddy ground. He sinks his fingers into the dirt of it. Kit John’s knee is square between his kidneys. Under it, his spine creaks: dry wood in the sun, the soft singing of a summer morning, turned into a crunch of bones, a curling of his lower back to compensate. 

In the glittering sun, he sees the shapes of his own pain like wisps of smoke. 

He pushes his arm forward, the one Kit is clutching at the wrist. His elbow scrapes against the dirt. Kit’s chest is exposed: a brief second, the time it takes for him to notice, but it’s enough for Roland to throw his elbow at it. It connects: hits the spot where the ribcage blooms, the crook where the diaphragm flutters. Kit laughs and lets the air out with a sickening gasp. Roland takes the laugh Kit gives him and uses it as counter-balance, the weight against which he must throw himself. Kit loses his balance and falls back first in the mud. His shirt, like Roland’s, stains. The blow Roland gives him, the second one, leaves him winded again, wincing, lying on his back. Roland gasps for his own breath, too: he’s dizzy. There’s blood filling his mouth with iron. Kit sits up. His smile’s all teeth, sharp like the one around his neck.

“Good job, boy. Now, let’s start again.”

[mercysought]

@dcschain​ / @ofthegun​ : Lies and secrets. And the one who doesn’t know the difference between them. [from rose to maxima] from Destiny’s Book: Marasenna ( accepting )

   “The difference is inconsequential if the end result is the desired one.”

Short-sighted? Arrogant? Foolish? The statement could be all three of them; but it didn’t erase the fact that to say that to someone like Maxima, like Rosalie herself? It could only be taken as a joke. Maxima’s head tilts forward, green eyes watching the other through heavy lashes, thin and lean shoulders hunched forward. The top of her back exposes light skin, lightly freckled by the overbearing sun in the past few days. Connecting both shoulders there are thin lines of gold with deep, tear like emeralds now resting against her body. Her elbows rest against the table, chin against the back of her bare, long fingers. Her smile, playful and loud. So loud and large that it occupies the full chamber. And so sharp that if one was to take a deep breath it would cut them too “Or are you to tell me that only you and your songbirds should be given the right to make others believe whatever song you decided to sing?” 

Long fingers tap against the side of her chin, up the curve of her jawline and her eyes narrow. The movement from being seated to standing beside the other is seamless. Her feet so light over the carpet that her heels remained silenced. 

   “Do you feel threatened, Rosalie?...” it is whispered between them, one step as Maxima takes the space that she knows is not hers to dance in. And yet she did, a step and another as green eyes watch the other’s eyes. Circling “Afraid that if you look the other way for but a moment that I will tear each brick of these walls to the ground for my own amusement?” 

Her eyes look around for a moment, her dance and choreography coming to a stop. Her hands falling on her back and a sigh given. Of course that was the concern, the concern for the fact that she refused to paint within the lines at all times. The concern over the fact that she was not one of them, one that did not follow blindly. She held no irons, and if she had gone through the training she would have refused to use her father’s. She had heard the mantra; there was nothing more that she could desire than to forget the face of the man. It would likely make her better for it. And that was why Rosalie kept giving her veiled threats, was it not? She was too different and so, a potential threat.

They had their guns. She had her tongue. Her mouth. Her mind.

   “Fear not, dearest” she hums, looking Rosalie one over before striding back to her desk “I see no fun in shattering the ceiling above my head.”

[westpromised]

i knew you had heart. [from bob to hosea]

“You knew that, didn’t you?” Hosea’s grin was all ease and suave, all a successful actor’s encore once he jumped off the boards of the stage. Then again, the Bard did say that all the world’s a stage, so there’s that. 

“Are you,” he eyed the tall feller with the charming smile up and down and up again, “a connoisseur of the fine arts, or mayhap a practitioner yourself? The name must be Allgood, of course.” Even if he hadn’t been alerted to the presence of the high and mighty at today’s performance, it would’ve been impossible to miss him. What gave him away? Apart from the height, the guns on his hips, his own body weight in golden jewelry? Or the fact that they played in Gilead and the gunslingers with their entourage were wont to show up? The man was stinking rich, of course, and looked it. And therefore a promising fish to hook, after a performance.

He was also, of course, Master of Dances. Hosea smacked his lips, closed his eyes. “Ah. Yes. Forgive me, sai, it slipped my mind. You’re all too familiar with the stage of course.”

[gcnenineteen-blog]

❝You’ve got the best eyes in the universe.❞ for jamie from ur dad richard

    “You only say so because they belonged to Father first.” They did, too - their keenness as well as their color. The only difference was the first faint hints of jaundiced yellow edging the whites - and that he used his to take lives, not to preserve them. 

[dcschain]

“Sun is the cradle of life, but we cannot remain in the cradle forever.” 🙃🌞

@cllgood. / @ofthegun. | marasenna. | (selectively) accepting.

With Susan dead, he thought that pain had found its tongue, its language to shape breaths. He hadn’t known. He’d only just learned: the coldness and the terrible cruelty. He’d chosen the Tower over Susan, and so his heart had begun the slow process of its own death. He’d made the choice, he’d taken the penance, he’d covered his head in ashes. This was different. 

Robert Allgood called her Sunshine, when her smile still swelled her cheeks like rain would swell the clouds above the waters of Arten. Now there’s nothing. At the end of the stairs where he walked there was her ghost still covered in blood. Then there was nothing. Past the hallways still ringing with gunshots, into the silent empty Allgood kitchen, and his grief was a deadshroud, his grief was a noose he had tied around his throat and around his father’s and pulled and pulled and pulled, and then the spine had snapped. She’d hit the wall with her blood in her nose and her throat. She’d died like a fox dies wounded on ice, shot once and then shot again to end her misery, the rictus of death clawed in smiles across her face. In the wheezing moments where life was still fighting and it didn’t understand it had been cut, in those few moments where the price to pay was so steep there was no quantifying it, and the smile was the color of dead things left to rot in the water. She had dribbled her grief down her chin in red almost black, and her blue dress had been stained with her stomach and fragments of the ribs four bullets had broken.

The governess had come in. The governess had found them, and she had screamed. Belle had screamed and dropped the fresh linens. They were soaked with blood, now. Someone will have to wash them again he thinks, before the pain engulfs him again.

He closes his eyes and she drops dead and it’s there and it’s there and it’s there, over and over. His mother’s death is endless unsurmountable, and it is tied, blood-pact, with that of her son, and it is tied, blood-pact, with that of the land. Steven mourned her already years before, but then it was a mourning made like rage. Here he is distraught. Here, when he comes in, looking for his wife and finding misery, heralded by Belle’s screams, with Robert and Kit close behind him, he finds Roland clutching his grief in his hands as it overflows past his child’s small fingers.

He is struck still by her in death. Like when she was alive, she is ill-fitting in his reality, something plucked from a dream he never remembered dreaming. So much grief: Henry, and Guinevere, and Roland dead and then returned to life, to them. A love weaned on loss, for a king and a queen of a world that’s only bones. 

His father had ripped Roland’s hands from off her wound, those shaking, shaking hands, and he’d seen his father like this: fragile. Lifting his dead wife past the anger and resentment inside him to hold her, against himself, in a cradle that was tender. Roland grabs again the guns he had dropped and crawls backwards. An animal in the throes of its grief. Something stripped of the flesh of a person.

Roland will remember for the rest of his life the way Steven Deschain’s body bent and folded to hold a wife who was dead. He had not wept. He had held, in silence. On his knees, the penitence red and soaking into his fair-day best. In the grief, all the anger forgotten. All the pain swallowed down with her death. Their gaze meets over her shoulder, past the braids of her hair, and his father sees him, for an instant, and then no longer does.

“Kit?” he says so softly Roland doesn’t know if he’s heard it. But Kit has, and has heard the blankness of the voice. “Kit, fetch Doctor De Curry, if it please ya.”

A beat. Kit Johns sets his jaw. “Right away, Steven.”

She died before anyone could comfort her. She died surprised, she died alone, she died with a violence her body did not deserve. She died and beheld her son to bear witness to her death: his own guns have tasked him with this, this memory-keeping, this remembrance of grief. He does not know where to put it all: it is already so heavy, so burdening, like tar under too hot a sun.

Robert Allgood watches Kit Johns walk down the hallway. Marcia has long taken Belle aside, to comfort her as best she can. Kit Johns walks, does not run: Gabrielle Deschain is dead, after all. The doctor is to come with an assistant, to arrange for the body to be moved. There is no healing needed. When he looks again into Gabrielle’s rooms, the shattered mirror and the wide-eyed boy, he takes a single step forward. It is a simple movement, fluid like water, and he reaches out with both hands:

“Ro, to me. Come here, dear. Here.”

He is the sun. In the darkness that has swallowed Roland whole, Robert Allgood with his outstretched hands and tender voice shines, and Roland stands and half-stumbles. It is easy, when he walks to him, for Robert to slip his hands in his and take the guns, those big irons, that heavy legacy, and then to curl an arm around Roland’s shoulders. Perhaps it is a gunslinger’s duty to bear witness to the horror, and perhaps the sun is the cradle of life, and we cannot remain in the cradle forever, but right now, Robert Allgood chooses tenderness above all else, and turns Roland away from the carnage. Roland lets himself be guided, too docile to be real, away from his father hunched above his mother’s shell. Robert Allgood is ka-mai, and ka-mai dance when the world drowns in blood. 

Yet Roland must look, perhaps to learn again the shape of a grief that will never abandon him. And he does, he does look, over his shoulder, one last time. His gaze to take in the ruin of his youth: and then, after that, only silence. 

[touchcd-blog]

“ Every great war has its heroes. I’m just curious what kind you’ll be. ” [christopher]

Dragon Age Inquisition | @ofthegun

     For a five year old listening to stories, war is barely more than a word. Something mysterious and maybe even desirable, for it seems to be involved in any greater one; a test for whatever hero this one was about. The idea of what it really was was a rather vague one in his head, and one that had quite little in common with reality. Just like death itself which seemed to lurk around in those stories was. A clearer concept, of course, but still something that seemed hard to imagine, and was no more than that after all. A concept. And all other things that came with it? Well, stories barely ever talk about fatigue or arsonists, about rape and despair; and even if they did, they wouldn’t capture it, and would even less get into a child’s head. Stories only ever talked about fighting, and honor, and all such things. Even though the ones coming from Christopher Johns’ lips were a little less black and white than the good night stories his mother would tell him, they left out the more gruesome parts. So far.

     (Not yet, anyway. That comes later, when the visions of a burning city haunt every night, when hung and skinned corpses become more frequent than landmarks, when blood drips over his own hands, and even before, when the wind drags the scent of burning flesh and screams far, so so far.)

     But to a boy, this is all far. To a boy resting on the floor with his head against his father’s seat (a position much preferred to taking a chair himself, with his mother giving up on trying to get him to sit proper) this is so far, eyes up bright at the one and true hero in a child’s eyes, and listening fascinated to whatever words coming from him, in that soft tone he uses only at home and that is so different from the man out on the streets, in the Great Hall, on the trail. (Another big word, that one. Another one woven into too many stories to count; and written in all big letters in his mind.)

     And the answer? Well, it is no thing he needs to think about, not consider. He might do if it was asked ten or five years later, actually consider what laid behind these words, but for now, the thirst to grow up and have his very own tales spun is still big and eager and does not know reality.

           "I want to be like you.“

     Prompt, and sincere. After all, this man is the only hero that could possibly, truly count for a young heart bursting with adoration and love.

[mercysought]

@dcschain​​​ . @ofthegun​​​ : For people like us, power in this place is most effective when it is least perceived. [from rose to maxima, but while they're undercover somewhere?] from black sails season 2 ( accepting )

The bottom edge of the empty shot glass makes its second round over the table. Maxima’s legs are crossed under the table; heels replaced by worn travelling boots, the long flowing dress replaced by a worn deep red coat that kept her body warm, thick. Warm and filled with bad memories like the streets themselves; fitting. The heavily scented cherry smoke left slowly through her nostrils, green eyes are not on the woman sitting opposite to her but beyond her. Shadows dance in the thin space between the wooden floor and the warped door from behind the counter. The cigarette is kept between her indicator and middle finger, away from her body and away from the table, not unlike many of others within that parlour. She and Rosalie were but a few in the sea of many. The many that just became a sea of brown tattered clothes and dust. 

Oh, and how this was familiar. 

The hand keeps holding the cup, turning it once again. The long red nails are gone, clipped and bare. Red lips are gone, hidden behind a curtain of smoke. Dust, smoke and dirt; how was it to be back home around your own kind? Far away from the eyes of the court, from the smooth conversations, from the unspoken rules. It felt like being held bare behind an empty stage with an empty audience. The only eyes there, the only opinion, the only judgement her own.

   “For people like us, power in this place is most effective when it is least perceived.” her voice is audible beneath the murmurs that swiftly became roars in their own right. Enough to be heard, enough to be drowned by the offkey piano in the background. Green eyes move from the thin line of light to land on Rosalie’s.

A LOT OF SOULS HAVE GOTTA DIE TO KEEP THE RUST BELL ROLLING. How many do you think would dare to come up to me and put out my cigarette? To claim that it was unbecoming; it might be a word and a belief that rang loudly in their minds, but in a land where men and women held so little possessions or chances to enjoy such small pleasures, a sort of empathy was born from it. Do not take a cigarette from one’s hands unless you want a fight. Do not wake someone unless you want to die. 

Maxima and Rosalie’s eyes are not so different than the others. Tired and heavy, though their backs were far less bent. Maxima pauses the rolling of the cup and lets it rest against the surface of the grimy table. Even against the thick material of her coat, she could feel how it stuck to the harsher parts of the fabric.

Us. A sharp smile forms behind the cloud of smoke.

A LOT OF SPIRITS GOTTA BREAK TO MAKE THE UNDERWORLD GO ‘ROUND. The word keeps rolling and spinning and it has for days and now Maxima has heard it coming from Rosalie’s mouth she can no longer taste its meaning. It does not resonate in the way that she feels it should and instead holds the twang of something that she had once loved to swallow completely and yet didn’t hold water when compared to her memories. It felt sharp against the side of her tongue, even if she was not the one to have said it.

Maxima leans forward, legs uncrossing. The cigarette is snuffed out against the stained empty dish. Her hair is kept in a simple ponytail, the wavy hair wilder, left untamed and dull when against the light that poured from the outside. Those curls too, the way that they would lay against the top of her head in a halo, hidden beneath a brown rimmed hat.

   “Of course.” she pauses, waving the smoke away. As someone that had spent her whole life at court, she needed guidance. As someone that spent her whole life in luxury, within a safe little sphere, what did she know about these strange and dangerous people? My, the dangers that Rosalie James must be running with to take her to the field... Or perhaps she wasn’t quite so blind. Maxima’s eyes narrow as she smiles, leaning once again on the back of the chair. Perhaps she was. If the answer to such a question mattered, Maxima was still pondering over. Maxima winks “I will follow your lead.“

[mercysought]

@dcschain​ . @ofthegun​ : If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t considered killing you in months. [from rose] / black sails season 4 [ selectively accepting ]

For perhaps the first time, Maxima’s cup filled at the half with dark liquid is left atop her table. Forgotten, perhaps, but untouched all the same.

The conversation had been easier than in months, which was saying something when their conversations often bordered on the terse to the tense. At times landing right in the middle of both. Truth be told, the games that Maxima had enjoyed for years, the games that she still, theoretically, enjoyed had brought as much joy as before. More often than not she felt herself back as a small young girl in a word where nothing but dust rises, nothing but dust is allowed to grow. She felt it. Clammy, even dressed in finery, beneath the beating sun with dust all around her and a roaring stomach. Her stomach was now silent, having moved on from the hunger filled days to one of quiet anxiety and unease. 

Maxima knew how to read the signs though. Like a palm-reader reads the lines on one’s skin she can read the world around her and know: her stomach would know hunger again, and the sun that she had enjoyed on her face wasn’t so much as a caress as it was it staring at her from outside. A quiet warning, a quiet threat that the day would come where no roof would cover her head again. 

Years had passed since she had hid food beneath her floorboards. The same way that she had moved to far loftier places to rest her head upon, so did her food. From empty floorboards to some drawers where some bread could be better kept. Grapes atop her bedside table. Fruit and freshly baked bread on baskets that were swiftly kept in far more appropriate places. Now Maxima felt the need once again, the call: the same way that her food didn’t want to return to such humbles starts, she felt that they must.

What else will it be sacrificed before it all ends?

   “If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t considered killing you in months.“

Maxima’s playing absently with a single small marble in the shape of an eye. Carved into the deep green gem. It had been a gift, one of many but the only one that she truly carried around with her. A small grin forms over her lips as her eyes move from the gem to Rosalie, watching her for a moment before her attention returns to the small object.

   “I am unsure what should worry me more:” her head tilts and the marble comes to a stop between her fingers as she finds its carved iris “the fact that you seem to be attempting to console me, or the fact that you seem to think that I’m in need of consolation.” 

Both were alarming in their own right though she felt that one was more of a positive change than the other. Positive, however, didn’t mean good. No, she was not playing the same games as before and because the eyes of the powers that be were now on her some questions would raise from it. Many would assume it was simple heartbreak but she doubted that Rosalie would consider it that. Maxima Aurum didn’t have much of a heart to speak of, much less one to break. Perhaps one could call the anger towards oneself but a symptom of it: either the breaking of a heart or the growing of one.

Maxima’s eyes are on the gem with the same smile.

If she was to leave her opinion on such matters she would say that it was likely closer to the killing of a small babe in its crib. If she was to be a romantic about it. She wasn’t, and as it stood she took it for what it was: a mistake, one that could have cost her life and livelihood if it hadn’t been for her past self good decision making. It was a mistake and she was alive to learn from it. She would not waste it.

Not thinking about what should have been, should have done, should have said. Not focusing on her anger — her own, towards Cuthbert, Rosalie. All of them. Green eyes rise to look into Rosalie’s. 

The whole lot.

How easily they toyed with the lives of the others. Her life. No time to focus on the sun, the hunger and the dust as it looms closer.   

   “What will I do now without the fear of death at your hands, I wonder?” her brows arch with a grin. The hand with the gem falls to the side of her chair “My life might just truly be devoid of all meaning now!”