#so often when writing arabella I find myself having to write her Profound Realisations that just. aren't fucking true

[ehlnofay]

Summerfest Day 3 - HUNGRY

It’s almost embarrassing, really, how utterly Arabella fails to realise what she’s going to do until she’s already halfway to doing it. (It certainly wouldn’t be the first time; she is less aware of herself, a lot of the time, than she would prefer to believe. Just think of how desperately she clung to the deep forest roads of Valenwood until her metaphorical fingers were dislocated with the force it took to rip her away; just think of the College, and how spectacularly that all went. Just think about nearly dying, her body almost left to deform with foreign rot into a foreign tomb’s dead dirt.)

It is after she and the two other Nightingales – still, the title wears strange in her head, as pretty as it is pompous – have dragged themselves, gagging and spitting, half-frozen, from the waterlogged cave, what little is left of their luggage soaked nearly through and their clothes almost iced; after they have set up some ratty little camp across the lake with what’s left, been spelled blisteringly dry, a hasty campfire lit with all the set-jawed, dogged ferocity of the sun. The sky is shaded dark, moons cut down to slivers. They’d sorted through what remained of their belongings, the spoils of their fight in the cave handled precious as blown glass; found an unreadable map and set of ruined playing cards, among other things, though Brynjolf’s prized ivory dice seem by some miracle to have made it unscathed; found little in the way of eatables besides a jar of dribbling-thin honey, cracked, seeping over everything else in the canvas pack, and a bag of soggy nuts. There isn’t so much as a wedge of cheese or some wet salted meat. Brynjolf and Karliah divvied the nuts up and ate them. Arabella lit the fire, then crouched down on her haunches in the snow and hissed breath through her teeth until she stopped seeing stars. Something a little too watery-thin to be blood started leaking from somewhere on her left hand; the creases that run through her palm and bisect the bends of her fingers have worn thin enough to glow. That used to only happen over the fascia of her palm. Probably a bad sign. But they got the bastard – and at the time, that was all that mattered. Arabella has never been very good at planning ahead.

Brynjolf has gone off in search of something more substantial to eat, though they all knew he’d be the worst pick for it – a city man through and through, that one. Arabella is of the Valenwood, so she’s as comfortable with hunting as she is with barter, and Karliah has spent the better part of the last decade in the wilderness on her own, but Arabella was preoccupied with swearing under her breath as the fire crackled itself properly to life and Karliah is searching through the damp dregs of their supplies for anything approaching medicine. She’s having precious little luck, even after Brynjolf’s tramped inauspiciously off into the snow; not much is left, and what is there is all of the sort she used after Arabella was stabbed in the belly of the tomb. The salve that stinks, grassy and green; the flaxen sutures she’d cut out of her own neck one by one. She expresses more consternation over this than Arabella does; Arabella just nudges the broken jar with the back of a knuckle (even that bloody stings) and tells her to just make a honey dressing. It’s the best thing they’re going to scrounge up.

She asks, after a moment’s silence, to see the Key; woodsmoke curls luxurious from the campfire (dead sticks, wet in the snow, doesn’t count when it’s unavoidable); Karliah puts it, gentle, into her hands. It’s cold against the blurry brilliance of her burns. Lavishly painful. Arabella bites down on her tongue until the rich copper-tang of blood – bright and meaty as bone marrow, and fuck, she’s hungry – distracts her. She looks at the Skeleton Key, hard-earned, personally meaningless but said to hold such great power, and she thinks, what now?

And then she thinks, oh.

(Arabella has never been very good at planning ahead, but she always has ideas running for what comes next – and next – and next. She didn’t mean to stay in the Guild as long as she did – but she’d been embroiled in a conspiracy, which caught her interest, and then she’d been cut open and left for decaying dead in an empty Nord tomb, which gave her something of a personal stake in this fight. And she’d been caught up in it; distracted by the present; because she so rarely plans ahead, and because she is less aware of herself, a lot of the time, than she would like to believe. But now the mystery is unravelled and her debt is paid, and there is nothing left to keep her here. Nothing substantial.)

(And if the Key is all it’s said to be –)

(Unlocks doors – throws open the blinds – looses the restraints and makes every possibility tangible, in the literal and unliteral sense – if it can do away with the limitations of a person, make them anything they want to be – good enough to do anything –)

(Well, then, she already knows what she’s going to do, doesn’t she. She has known since the beginning.)

A pit like a peach’s settles in her stomach as she turns the midnight-cold metal in her hands. She tells herself it’s anticipation, because she doesn’t know why it would be anything else

Karliah is tipping everything back into their overstuffed pack with sodden irritation. Arabella remarks, “It doesn’t look so special.”

“Powerful things rarely do,” Karliah says, sounding vaguely, smugly satisfied, and Arabella thinks, again, untapped abilities - thinks not just physical barriers – thinks limitless.

Arabella twists it again in her hands, frostbite-sharp against the worn, inflamed skin of them; there is still blood gushing into her mouth. She is still hungry. Lightly, she says, “It’s a shame we have to take it back.”

Karliah’s reaction to that is more understated than the feared it might be; she just exhales, mist-bright in the cold, and heaves their wreck of a pack nearer to the campfire. “You have no idea,” she replies – her tone surprisingly wry – and she holds the broken honey jar to the light. “It would be – incredibly useful for the Guild, for a little while. But the Mistress of Shadows has barely forgiven our last failure – she’d never let the Guild forget if we broke our oath again.”

Arabella twists the key again; watches stars spark and fizzle in its bow. “What we?” she asks, glib. “I wasn’t even here.” It shines, so very darkly, like the whole expanse of a sky; like an aurora, or an absence of it. It feels colder than metal usually does, smoother, too perfect to be the fruit of any forge or put to shape by any key-cutter. It winks with reflected firelight. “And what oath, I ask? I’ve still never had my end of the bargain.”

An exhale, short and sharp and almost-laughing. “Not until it’s returned.” With a faint noise of triumph, Karliah produces a bent metal spoon.

“She’s sharped me,” Arabella says with mock indignation; she licks her bloody tongue over the points of her teeth. Bluish light flickers over the key’s end, flashes bright in the crooks of its teeth. “Why, at this point – my due so recanted – I’d say our bargain doesn’t even count.”

The fire flickers, spitting charred wood embers; Karliah snorts. “You sold your soul,” she tells her, flat-voiced, sets the jar down, leaking, in the snow. She licks the honey off her fingers and pulls a face at its sweetness, looks, firelit, over her shoulder. “Mercer tried to outsmart Nocturnal, and you saw how it went for him. You can’t nitpick your way out of a contract – hell, even if we wanted to, even if we succeeded, she would exact the price and all accrued interest from it when we were dead, all the same.”

The Key glints. There is blood like mutton marrow in her throat. Arabella thinks limitless and Arabella thinks potential and Arabella is so desperately, ravenously fucking hungry.

She hums and says, slippery as her own oil-slick blood in the cave’s freezing water, “I’m not dead yet.”

(She didn’t think about what she would do next, because she never thinks about what comes next, because that would ruin it all; but she is always thinking about what came before, no matter how much she turns her head away. She can’t look away from it completely, the past pressed into the curls and creases of her palms, marked behind the lopsided rows of her teeth, braided into her hair. She hasn’t gone home in going on ten years and home is the bloody mess and meat of her heart; she craves it like sunlight, like air, like space to run. She misses it like a limb. She’s never full. She stayed as long as she could, and then longer still; stayed well past the point where it became glaringly inadvisable, because as Mercer learned tonight she is stubborn and she is vengeful and she is a child of the Valenwood who pays her fucking debts, but she conceded, in the end. Left, still owed and owing. And she’s never been able to escape it.)

(She didn’t want to leave, but she had to; she’d torn her gums to shreds and no matter how desperately she tried, how she remade herself and remade herself again, it all ended at the bounds of her own skin. She tried to make herself brave but skittish cowardice still pooled in the soles of her feet and valour lay just out of reach. She couldn’t contort herself enough to be a saviour. She was feral-fierce and runagate and all she could ever manage to do was watch it all as it burned, but if the Key works like they said – if she can turn it on herself, crowbar open the doors and tear out of her skin singing – make herself an ocean instead of a dish, spin herself any story she wants, be what she couldn’t when she realised she couldn’t stay – then there’s no choice, is there?)

(She has never wanted anything else. If it’s even on the table, then nothing she has now matters.)

She’s not quite glib enough, perhaps, because Karliah turns, her face sharply shaded under the edge of her ever-present hood, and she says with half a smile, “You’re not serious,” and Arabella doesn’t say anything at all.

The Key shines with all the glowing dark of nighttide; Karliah’s smile drops from her lips, languid as dripping syrup. “Arabella,” she says, quiet, breath misting in the frozen dark, “what are you doing?”

“Nothing.” The fire crackles. Something clearer than blood is beginning to dribble down the inside of Arabella’s wrist, into her sleeve. Her teeth click, arrowhead sharp. “I’m not doing anything at all.”

Karliah’s face goes cautious-blank as a clay mask in a theatre.

Then – and this is unexpected – she lunges, low, like a pouncing cat, and Arabella takes a hasty and instinctive step back, closes her hands around the cold line of the Key even as Karliah grasps for it, tearing with narrow fingers –

The snow is shocking cold against Arabella’s back; she snaps her teeth with little effect, Karliah prises her hands open, and then fucking ow ow ow it’s burning – rips the Key out of her grip, and, it feels like, half her blistered skin with it. In the very edge of her peripherals, Brynjolf reappears from the little thicket. Karliah reels back as if Arabella might try to follow; Arabella stays in the snow, unsticks her jaw and lets out a high, sodden whine. (Wearing pain so openly is not her instinct. But this way, Brynjolf sees it. And it really does hurt.)

Brynjolf comes running, asks what on earth is happening – “She scratched my hands,” Arabella snarls, on the heels of a sharp, fluting curse, and shoves herself up, clasping them, red and weeping, to her chest. “Of all the thankless – I lit them on your hearth –”

Karliah’s clay-flat face falters, for a moment, but all she says is, “I don’t want her holding the Key.”

“Well, congratulations!” Arabella snips. “I’m not! Will someone please give me the honey? I’m bleeding again.” She is; though it’s perhaps closer to pus, skin raked up and inflamed in neat nail-lines. It’s an interesting contrast to the blooming curls and swirls of the base scars. Hurts like nothing else. She’s still keening, breath ragged; Karliah tucks the Key silently into a pocket inside her jacket, and Arabella marks its placement through squinting-shut eyes.

“I left for fifteen minutes,” Brynjolf says, one brow raised and hair still damp; “how did you have time to fight? I couldn’t find anything for you,” he adds, with something like sympathy. “Sorry.”

Fire crackles, bright on the snow. Arabella says tightly, “It’s fine. And we’re masterfully gifted at squabbling, I suppose – I certainly am. Help me with my hands.”

Brynjolf lathers them, ineptly, in honey mixed with river-water, an inelegant sort of poultice, and does a much better job of binding them with the cut-up ends of a woven wool tunic. Green-dyed; but she can only afford to be so picky. And she won’t have to keep making concessions, soon enough. He’s happy enough to start talking, changing the subject, and Arabella is very good at pretending things never happened (she does it all the time) (she’s beginning to do it now) so Karliah is the only one who stays reticent and watchful. Arabella catches her imparting, in low tones, that she’d been acting strange, but Brynjolf doesn’t put too much stock in it and Arabella spends the rest of the night being very, very careful not to give the assertion credence. Brynjolf has brought back a heaping pocketful of berries that Karliah says are safe to eat and nothing else; Arabella licks what’s left of the honey jar clean. It tastes wet and swampy. They all turn in early, then, snow kicked onto the fire to smother it into something more safely self-contained. Karliah doesn’t stop looking at her. Arabella doesn’t meet her eyes.

By morning, it will have burnt down completely, and Arabella will be gone. There’s no other way it could go. This is a singular chance; and she would burn all the flesh clear off her carpal bones before she can let it slip through her fingers.