ever know each other [ooc]
--
[bic] such a softer sin
As he moved into her line of sight, her heart skipped a couple of beats. This wasn't the delusion that helped her (nearly) survive the encounter with her half-brother. This wasn't fancy mind manipulation, not somply an image or a sound. Now, Ahren was real. If she could have gotten up, she could have touched him, but she couldn't lift herself up, and she doubted he would let her touch him if she'd wanted to. It was unclear whether pain or fear kept her down, but either way, she made no attempt to get up or move towards the male who had given this existence to her. She gazed at him, the fire in her heart mirrored in her eyes, her pain pouring off her in torrents.
'Are you all right?' All right? Who was he kidding? She wasn't right at all. She wasn't meant to be here. She had never been meant to be born.
Still, she didn't snap at him, or curse him, or even prod at the irony of that question. His calm, his almost-caring... were they false, as fleeting as the kind image of him, the hallucination that got her by? Something in her insisted differently.
'Give him a chance,' her mind begged her, and she heeded it, offering a wry smile and a bitter, humourless laugh to the male she knew as her father. It wasn't much, but it might be a start, and the next step was to answer his question. But what could she say? In so many ways, the answer was no. No, she was not all right. She was broken, and hurting, and driven by fear and unavoidable ignorance. That last bit, that was why she was here... to kill it. To find the knowledge she needed. But to do that, she would have to hold her temper. She would have to work as hard, if not harder, than Ahren... just to survive this.
"I plan to live," she stated softly, keeping her eyes fixated on his form, cautious, and yet offering vulnerability in the form of a weakened yet welcoming smile.
"And yourself?" Perhaps not the right phrasing, in terms of grammar or speech. But it was honest, raw and real... and when you can dig deep enough to break the shell of cautious speech, there was something real, something right. Something worth living for.
And, if she wasn't careful, dying for.
