#ship: bajsaljen x bianca

[galvus]

prompt: destruct • words: 1447 • era: shadowbringers patch content • [ masterpost ] cause deliberate, irreparable damage to.

content warning: grisly character death — misija. [ trust me. ]

She was already dying.

Everyone spoke in hushed tones. They were all made up of worn down, soft shapes in the shadow of the Dalriada – curved shoulders, weary and heavy-lidded eyes, wringing hands, mouths that couldn't quite finish the words they began. Indecision sat over the group like a blanket of smoke, and the air smelled of it, too.

Misija lay on the dusty ground, already halfway gone, blood trickling out of the corner of her mouth and down over the curve of her cheek.

“It should be your decision,” Halvar said from where he stood beside Bajsaljen, a comforting hand resting on the hrothgar's shoulder. The Warrior of Light was soot-smeared and wounded, his opposite arm hanging limply by his side, but he still wore a lopsided little smile. “You're the leader here, not us, and you've felt the damage she's done more strongly than anyone.”

Jadeite rarely spoke up in the quiet, but something urged him forward. Something convinced him to intervene.

“She helped us,” he murmured.

“Yes, she helped us.” Bianca couldn't keep the bitterness from creeping into her voice. She hadn't meant to snap, but even seeing Jadeite avert his eyes and take a step back didn't stop her. There was too much fire in her belly. If she didn't exhale, she would burn from the inside. “In her final act, she helped us. How very fucking generous.”

The remaining Resistance stood solemnly by, too tired to nod, too relieved to argue. There were so few left. That was the only answer Bianca needed.

Misija curled over and coughed, flicking bloodied foam from her lips. “You know she's right.”

“Don't,” Bianca spat her warning. “The last thing I want is you agreeing with me. I offered my help to the Bozjan Resistance because I believed in their cause. I believed in them. You – oh, you turned them into weapons. You pitted them against us, against their comrades and friends.” Her upper lip curled. “You forced us to kill them.”

She hated how her voice wavered. She hated that every word that passed her tongue just pulled her farther back into those godsforsaken Bozjan ruins where she lost so many of them.

Her fingers curled into fists, nails biting into the calluses that riddled her palms.

I would rather do this for years than ever have to bury any of you.

“What you did for us doesn't matter!” Bianca shouted, the ferocity of her cry forcing her forward. Marsak reached out to stop her, but she tugged her arm away from him, her hem of her robes flaring as she stumbled towards Misija's prone form. She stopped inches away from her, the whites of her eyes practically glowing as they flew wide. “Nothing you've done has mattered since the moment you killed them!”

A glimmer of fear crossed Misija's face, but she didn't budge. She understood what would happen, where her choices had led her. And she could not court regret, not after everything she had achieved.

“Kill me and get it over with.”

“I'm not done,” Bianca shot back, her voice deepening around the word. “The Bozjan Resistance became a home to me. I never felt like I belonged anywhere before I fought alongside them. You didn't just take that from me.”

She pointed behind her in the direction she knew Bajsaljen was standing.

Gangos had been as quiet as a grave the night they returned from the ruins. Everyone grieved in their own way. Some told hushed stories around a fire pit built into the sand. Others drank. More than a few Resistance members broke off to train, even though their bodies were weak and exhausted.

The flaps of Bajsaljen's tent had been closed, but not tied shut. A gentle, salt-sweetened wind pushed the heavy fabric just enough for Bianca to catch a glimpse inside.

No matter their losses, she had never seen the leader of the Bozjan Resistance cry.

Until that night.

A toast to fallen soldiers ended in a rallying cry, one loud enough to snatch Bajsaljen's attention away from his mourning. His head snapped up, and he stared with aching eyes through the few inches of space between the entrance of the tent and the fall of fabric that hadn't been laced shut.

Bianca stood there, feet blessedly bare in the sand and short hair tousled by the wind.

He nodded to her. She nodded back.

Gathered around the fallen form of a traitor, Bajsaljen nodded to her again. The understanding had been reached without conjecture.

“You took that family from him.” Her eyes filled with furious tears, and her forefinger shifted from Bajsaljen to Marsak. “And him. And so many others. And they are too tired to be angry with you for all that you did!”

“Just do it.”

Misija pressed her bloodied lips together and looked away from Bianca as she slipped a cruel-looking dagger from her belt. The weapon fell to the ground.

Bianca reared back.

“A dagger?”

The woman's pale eyes circled back around to her. “What else?”

After years of fighting and being torn in two by loss, after failures that brought her to her knees, after attempts at peacemaking that ended in ash, she was done. She had had her fill of everything, but especially feeling warmth slip through her fingertips. So, instead, she grasped onto it. She held firm.

Her fists loosened, and she forced herself to breathe, her fingers stretching outward as her eyes fell shut. She reached for the familiar voices of the elements – of earth and water and air.  She reached and reached, between the earth scarred by Garlean fire to the subterranean river that ran beneath Zadnor, between the smoke-choked air that surrounded them to the flickering leaves of fire that destroyed what remained of the invasion bit by bit. She stretched out as far as she could and only found silence.

Silence wasn't good enough. She needed more.

She needed —

Sweat pearled at her hairline as she widened her stance and dug deeper, pushing every remaining bit of her reserves into her hands and into the ground. It shook and shifted as if in rebellion. Never before had she demanded that the elements obey, but needs must.

Misija's gloved hands dug into the dirt as columns of packed earth rose on either side of her head. Her body went taut, fraught with a sudden onset of fear as Bianca's old conjury tricks blocked the sun from her eyes. The pillars's rise slowed, and they quaked out of sync with each other, sending a spray of debris down to the ground.

The dirt beneath Bianca's feet broke apart, crumbling like so much sand, and she sank. Dirt swallowed her boots up to her ankles, but even that did not stop her.

Desperation pushed her onward.

She forced her arms above her head. With that arc of her limbs, the pillars shot upward towards the sky. Her thighs trembled as she felt her body sink another inch. Halvar rushed forward to stop her. Bajsaljen rushed forward to steady her.

But she needed neither.

Her hands curled into fists, crashing the pillars together, and she flung them inwards. Pain shot up her forearms and into her elbows on impact. The earth answered.

The columns of dirt and rock melded together before plummeting sharply downward.

Misija let go of a half-scream before the stone crushed her.

“Bianca!”

The cry of a masculine voice echoed in her ears, but Bianca couldn't turn towards it. Her entire world shifted, turned, and sank when her knees gave out beneath her. A shiver ran up her spine, and she let go of a frustrated sob as she struggled to stand again, only to have the ground give way beneath her.

She caught a single glimpse of Misija's body before she was lifted up into a pair of strong arms. Blood seeped into the fabric of her armor and into the dirt.

The earth drank of her.

“Bianca,” the voice repeated – warm and low, a worried rumble that belonged to Bajsaljen. He held her in one arm and used his free hand to keep her eyes turned on him. There was a haunted glimmer in how he looked at her, but she could not blame him. She could not blame any of them. “Look at me.”

She couldn't.

She twisted in his arms, casting her attention between the remaining Resistance soldiers, between Marsak and Llofi and Halvar and Jadeite. It did not come as a surprise to her when no one could even look her way.

For once in the past few months, Zadnor was silent.

Everything was, even the wind.