I need you to understand something, something you didn't hear when we were fighting and the pool ledge got told who is in charge. Something you distract me from fully telling you when we're in private.
It has never been easy for me.
I have known my own heart since I was a child and in equal measure I have known it did not matter. I was born a natblida, and natblida's do not get to feel, to love, to know others in that way. No one. If I had loved men, or if I liked all genders it would not have mattered for a single moment. It was forbidden to me. I was to become Heda or I was to die, and that was that.
And to a Heda, a Commander, love is a weakness. Even lust is. We are to stand alone.
But when I was young I was foolish. I won the conclave, and that was.. that... but after a while I met a girl. She was beautiful. We were fourteen, fifteen, something like that. To me, she was special. To everyone else she was just a village girl until they noticed more and more me taking her hand and pulling her close and loving her. Because she was mine, because of that love, Azgeda took her. She was tortured, questioned, they cut off her head and delivered in a box to my bed where I had laid with her dreaming of the future our people would have.
I had to swallow that grief, that rage, that storm that burned me up inside. I never thought I could get over her. She was my world, second only to my duty to my people. Because of who I was she died and because of who I was I could not avenge her. Instead, I welcomed Azgeda into my coalition of clans, I endured every meeting with the woman who ordered it, I did my job and tried to pretend it did not cut me every time and just accept that Titus had been right. Duty was my only purpose and love, a weakness.
I was a walled citadel from then on out, I saw girls I liked, of course, but none of them mattered, none cracked through my thick walls for even a moment. It was not easy, but I thought it was easier than losing again.
Then one day, years later, well there was another girl. She's your age, give or take. Clarke was... unstoppable. She is a force of nature. She fell from the sky - literally - killed three hundred of my warriors and when I came out to seek justice against her and her people she marched right up to me like I was anyone and not the Heda and took my heart back out the tent door with her when she left. I didn't have a choice. And even then it wasn't easy. Costia haunted me despite my best efforts to forget her, my people's lives always lay in my hands. We were at war on two fronts. Then one, when I made a treaty with Clarke.
A lot more happened, I did bad, unforgivable things to her. I made her into a monster when I should have borne that weight instead. But I loved her, and though I will never have deserved it, she loved me back. And eventually, she forgave me. We got to be together for one afternoon, Ren.
Just one. Because Titus, my teacher, my mentor, my flamekeeper, a man who helped raise me and truly did believe in me. He knew I loved her and he lay in wait in her room to kill her, with a gun, a weapon my people do not use. He lay in wait and tried to shoot her and I walked through the door not long after her and he fumbled or misaimed - I don't know - but he pulled the trigger and he killed me. I bled out, slowly, in Clarke's bed, watching her try to beg and plead and reason her way through as if her will alone could stop me bleeding out like it stopped so many other things.
You know what I didn't think in that moment? I didn't think that I wished I hadn't taken the path I did. That I should have done as my people bid me, that love really was a weakness and I had been wrong to follow my heart even though it was always the hardest thing I did.
I thought that Clarke had been right all this time, that it finally sunk in that life was about more than surviving and here I was choking on my own blood. That I wouldn't trade that one afternoon for a thousand more without her. I wish I had known when I left her at the mountain. When I let her rage about in the woods for months. I wish I had this space with her that you can have, however you chose, now.
Duty is important but it is not the entire world. Especially not here.
Even now, Ren, the other day... it was not easy for me to go out like I did, looking soft and fresh and not geared for war. It wasn't easy to reach for you - or anyone - it wasn't easy for me to kiss you. Every doubt, every dissenting voice against me being myself I have ever known in my life still echoes in my mind but I will not fill my afterlife with regret like I did my life. I cannot. It is hard enough to go on without pretending to be something I am not.
The first time she reads it her eyes glaze over halfway through and she gets distracted. Not because she isn't interested but because it's a lot to read and Ren has never been a good reader.
But, something in her makes her sit and read it. It's no small feat. Ren has never finished reading a book in her life before she got distracted and wandered off to something more exciting. And Lexa's story wrenches at her heart. It's a song she's heard many a time; a tale that never fails to set her heart into misery.
So many stories and tales of the Fianna come with the warnings of what comes when you fall away from your duty and fall to the dangers of blind passion. But, family, kin, mates, they are the glue that hold together the kin. The love and adoration of them all that makes it worthwhile to fight against the Wyrm.]
im not
i don't
im not trying to
[The words start and stutter out each time she tries to come up with a response to Lexa's story that doesn't seem like she's pitying her or glorifying her pain. Ren is no wordsmith.]
do you really think duty can be set aside. even here?
I do. More than that, I do think there is a single spirit worth knowing who would hold it against you for having this in a place like this that is more of a dreamscape or a secret part of ones mind than it is the real world.
I do not exist in your world. There is no Leksa kom Trikru, no conclave, no thirteen clans to make my coalition. I do not hurt your duty to your people, I don't hinder it.
Think of it as a place to be free in ways you maybe cannot be in life. Because that is what it is. And in that, it is both paradise and torture. To be free and to know it will not ever be quite the same at home...
Life is about more than just surviving. It has to be. Let yourself breathe, Ren.
but what if you do. that's the problem. what if you do exist.
i don't trust me
the fairies made my family what they are . we have a long history with them. what if you do exist and when i do here does matter and.
im not saying i am. im not saying that. but what if i fall in love with you? what if i don't forget when i go back? im being serious here. there's a chance i won't. im not like the other people here.
What year is it in your world? I was in the year 2150. It was February 16th, the day I died. My ascension day. About a hundred years before that, the world burned. Almost all of it. A great fire engulfed the earth and flooded what didn't burn with radiation that killed almost everyone who did not manage to hide underground. We would've died, stuck like rats in a caved-in burrow if not for Becca coming from the sky and giving us the nightblood.
I promise you, Leksa Kom Trikru does not exist in your world. There is only one me, and she will be back in the flame where she was fated to be since before she was even born when the fey are done with her. Until the end of the Earth, or the end of the need for Commanders. It is the way of things.
Everyone forgets, Ren, except those of near-equal power to our captors or those who make a deal. I will forget. Which is a great tragedy... no sliver of love is worth throwing away or losing, however fleeting or unrequited. Most people here are alike each other only in surface things. I am not like anyone else, either. Beau is different. Peony is different. There's a blue man with horns, half-elves which I guess are a thing... But how we come and go seems fairly universal to me after a year and even those who would benefit from remembering when they go home, don't. [Largely.]
She barely had thirty years until the Apocalypse. She barely had thirty to stop it from happening. Fuck. How old would she even be in thirty years? Sixty? No. Wait. Eighteen plus thirty was...
Fourty-Eight.
If she lived that long it would be nothing short of a miracle or through the strength of her pack. Which meant she had to stop it from happening well before that. For all that this was important...she couldn't ignore the sense to dread that griped her throat at the thought of it. There was no guarantee she would last that long.]
but how do you know
everyone who doesn't remember comes back
nobody who doesn't can't be asked about what they don't remember
[Lexa can almost see the point sailing right past Ren's head as she waits for the reply and is, of course, greeted by just that when Ren writes back to her.
She sighs softly.]
While you are correct in that, Ren, I have powerful and knowledgable enough friends here and the fey do not seem to lie at all, merely twist their words now and then when it suits them. And I do not think it would suit them to have hundreds of people who in their own worlds are incredibly powerful, beyond what I even understand, to be pissed at them. Making us forget is a safeguard for them not a means to mind our hearts or the sanctity of our worlds.
You do not let a prisoner go free with information about you if you can avoid it, and they are more than capable of avoiding it.
It depends on why they're imprisoned. And who is to say the world going on as it should have before is not of use to them? They cannot draw people from worlds if those worlds break down.
All of this is beyond the point, which is that no ill will come of you being yourself in this place. No one cares, Ren, save for you.
if anyone knew, back home, it would be the end of me
im not sayin that's right but im sayin its a fact
if you're lookin for someone who knows how to deal with this shit, you're lookin in the wrong direction, i already warned you i fuck everything like this up
[It's like talking to a brick wall, sweet Becca why.]
They will not know Ren. I promise you. If I thought for a second anyone back home would find out I certainly wouldn't fuck anyone. Ever.
I know you don't know how to deal with shit which is why I'm bothering to explain, though I realise most of this is going in one ear and swiftly out the other because you are panicked about your family knowing you're into women even though you're also into, and willing, apparently, to be with men as you are supposed to when the time comes.
I didn't say you were a moron, I said you were panicked. Anyone can panic. I have. Many times. Even when I was Heda and could not afford too.
If you're going to act as if I insulted you at least wait until I actually do it. This is like how you preemptively kick yourself out of my room when I had no such intentions of getting rid of you.
That you are not listening has nothing to do with you having a brain or not, Ren. If I thought you were brainless I would never have touched you. I wouldn't be exhausting myself over you. I wouldn't care as much as I damn well do.
I don't want to kick you out of my bed, or insult you, or even be arguing with you, again. You are young and scared and it shows but you are still worth the effort. At least, I thought there was something between us that was worth the effort. If there is not, then I was mistaken.
[Genuinely nothing about Ren should be endearing, especially when they are writing and not speaking face to face. Yet Lexa finds herself rather endeared by those little things.]
Though I do not know where we go from here. I am never going to be less than I am, and hiding myself is less than. I did it for so many years, not because my people are like yours and care that I want to be with women but because a Commander cannot afford the indulgence. It is dangerous to both them and their beloved.
It is exhausting to pretend, Ren. So, so exhausting.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
It has never been easy for me.
I have known my own heart since I was a child and in equal measure I have known it did not matter. I was born a natblida, and natblida's do not get to feel, to love, to know others in that way. No one. If I had loved men, or if I liked all genders it would not have mattered for a single moment. It was forbidden to me. I was to become Heda or I was to die, and that was that.
And to a Heda, a Commander, love is a weakness. Even lust is. We are to stand alone.
But when I was young I was foolish. I won the conclave, and that was.. that... but after a while I met a girl. She was beautiful. We were fourteen, fifteen, something like that. To me, she was special. To everyone else she was just a village girl until they noticed more and more me taking her hand and pulling her close and loving her. Because she was mine, because of that love, Azgeda took her. She was tortured, questioned, they cut off her head and delivered in a box to my bed where I had laid with her dreaming of the future our people would have.
I had to swallow that grief, that rage, that storm that burned me up inside. I never thought I could get over her. She was my world, second only to my duty to my people. Because of who I was she died and because of who I was I could not avenge her. Instead, I welcomed Azgeda into my coalition of clans, I endured every meeting with the woman who ordered it, I did my job and tried to pretend it did not cut me every time and just accept that Titus had been right. Duty was my only purpose and love, a weakness.
I was a walled citadel from then on out, I saw girls I liked, of course, but none of them mattered, none cracked through my thick walls for even a moment. It was not easy, but I thought it was easier than losing again.
Then one day, years later, well there was another girl. She's your age, give or take. Clarke was... unstoppable. She is a force of nature. She fell from the sky - literally - killed three hundred of my warriors and when I came out to seek justice against her and her people she marched right up to me like I was anyone and not the Heda and took my heart back out the tent door with her when she left. I didn't have a choice. And even then it wasn't easy. Costia haunted me despite my best efforts to forget her, my people's lives always lay in my hands. We were at war on two fronts. Then one, when I made a treaty with Clarke.
A lot more happened, I did bad, unforgivable things to her. I made her into a monster when I should have borne that weight instead. But I loved her, and though I will never have deserved it, she loved me back. And eventually, she forgave me. We got to be together for one afternoon, Ren.
Just one. Because Titus, my teacher, my mentor, my flamekeeper, a man who helped raise me and truly did believe in me. He knew I loved her and he lay in wait in her room to kill her, with a gun, a weapon my people do not use. He lay in wait and tried to shoot her and I walked through the door not long after her and he fumbled or misaimed - I don't know - but he pulled the trigger and he killed me. I bled out, slowly, in Clarke's bed, watching her try to beg and plead and reason her way through as if her will alone could stop me bleeding out like it stopped so many other things.
You know what I didn't think in that moment? I didn't think that I wished I hadn't taken the path I did. That I should have done as my people bid me, that love really was a weakness and I had been wrong to follow my heart even though it was always the hardest thing I did.
I thought that Clarke had been right all this time, that it finally sunk in that life was about more than surviving and here I was choking on my own blood. That I wouldn't trade that one afternoon for a thousand more without her. I wish I had known when I left her at the mountain. When I let her rage about in the woods for months. I wish I had this space with her that you can have, however you chose, now.
Duty is important but it is not the entire world. Especially not here.
Even now, Ren, the other day... it was not easy for me to go out like I did, looking soft and fresh and not geared for war. It wasn't easy to reach for you - or anyone - it wasn't easy for me to kiss you. Every doubt, every dissenting voice against me being myself I have ever known in my life still echoes in my mind but I will not fill my afterlife with regret like I did my life. I cannot. It is hard enough to go on without pretending to be something I am not.
5 willpower successes to stay focused
The first time she reads it her eyes glaze over halfway through and she gets distracted. Not because she isn't interested but because it's a lot to read and Ren has never been a good reader.
But, something in her makes her sit and read it. It's no small feat. Ren has never finished reading a book in her life before she got distracted and wandered off to something more exciting. And Lexa's story wrenches at her heart. It's a song she's heard many a time; a tale that never fails to set her heart into misery.
So many stories and tales of the Fianna come with the warnings of what comes when you fall away from your duty and fall to the dangers of blind passion. But, family, kin, mates, they are the glue that hold together the kin. The love and adoration of them all that makes it worthwhile to fight against the Wyrm.]
im not
i don't
im not trying to
[The words start and stutter out each time she tries to come up with a response to Lexa's story that doesn't seem like she's pitying her or glorifying her pain. Ren is no wordsmith.]
do you really think duty can be set aside. even here?
no subject
I do not exist in your world. There is no Leksa kom Trikru, no conclave, no thirteen clans to make my coalition. I do not hurt your duty to your people, I don't hinder it.
Think of it as a place to be free in ways you maybe cannot be in life. Because that is what it is. And in that, it is both paradise and torture. To be free and to know it will not ever be quite the same at home...
Life is about more than just surviving. It has to be. Let yourself breathe, Ren.
int - 1 success
i don't trust me
the fairies made my family what they are . we have a long history with them. what if you do exist and when i do here does matter and.
im not saying i am. im not saying that. but what if i fall in love with you? what if i don't forget when i go back? im being serious here. there's a chance i won't. im not like the other people here.
no subject
I promise you, Leksa Kom Trikru does not exist in your world. There is only one me, and she will be back in the flame where she was fated to be since before she was even born when the fey are done with her. Until the end of the Earth, or the end of the need for Commanders. It is the way of things.
Everyone forgets, Ren, except those of near-equal power to our captors or those who make a deal. I will forget. Which is a great tragedy... no sliver of love is worth throwing away or losing, however fleeting or unrequited. Most people here are alike each other only in surface things. I am not like anyone else, either. Beau is different. Peony is different. There's a blue man with horns, half-elves which I guess are a thing... But how we come and go seems fairly universal to me after a year and even those who would benefit from remembering when they go home, don't. [Largely.]
no subject
In black and white.
She barely had thirty years until the Apocalypse. She barely had thirty to stop it from happening. Fuck. How old would she even be in thirty years? Sixty? No. Wait. Eighteen plus thirty was...
Fourty-Eight.
If she lived that long it would be nothing short of a miracle or through the strength of her pack. Which meant she had to stop it from happening well before that. For all that this was important...she couldn't ignore the sense to dread that griped her throat at the thought of it. There was no guarantee she would last that long.]
but how do you know
everyone who doesn't remember comes back
nobody who doesn't can't be asked about what they don't remember
no subject
She sighs softly.]
While you are correct in that, Ren, I have powerful and knowledgable enough friends here and the fey do not seem to lie at all, merely twist their words now and then when it suits them. And I do not think it would suit them to have hundreds of people who in their own worlds are incredibly powerful, beyond what I even understand, to be pissed at them. Making us forget is a safeguard for them not a means to mind our hearts or the sanctity of our worlds.
You do not let a prisoner go free with information about you if you can avoid it, and they are more than capable of avoiding it.
no subject
everyone knows that
when they don't serve a purpose you kill them.
no subject
All of this is beyond the point, which is that no ill will come of you being yourself in this place. No one cares, Ren, save for you.
no subject
ive had to be careful about this for years
if anyone knew, back home, it would be the end of me
im not sayin that's right but im sayin its a fact
if you're lookin for someone who knows how to deal with this shit, you're lookin in the wrong direction, i already warned you i fuck everything like this up
no subject
They will not know Ren. I promise you. If I thought for a second anyone back home would find out I certainly wouldn't fuck anyone. Ever.
I know you don't know how to deal with shit which is why I'm bothering to explain, though I realise most of this is going in one ear and swiftly out the other because you are panicked about your family knowing you're into women even though you're also into, and willing, apparently, to be with men as you are supposed to when the time comes.
no subject
enjoy your cake
i said my piece
i won't waste your time with my moron explanations any more
[Ren is huffed.]
no subject
If you're going to act as if I insulted you at least wait until I actually do it. This is like how you preemptively kick yourself out of my room when I had no such intentions of getting rid of you.
no subject
nothing fuckin hotter than someone saying you've got nothing between your eats.
take me fucking now[/s]
its. what. im. used. to.
it's how it's been every time. this is different.
no subject
I don't want to kick you out of my bed, or insult you, or even be arguing with you, again. You are young and scared and it shows but you are still worth the effort. At least, I thought there was something between us that was worth the effort. If there is not, then I was mistaken.
no subject
im not trying to argue with you
ffs i don't even like writing this much. my hand hurts. i never write this much.
i normally would have told people to fuck off by now
i don't know. i like you. i think your hair smells nice. im trying to explain myself even though my hand hurts. you're interesting
no subject
Would you prefer to speak in person?
[That could never go wrong. Neverrrr.]
no subject
not because i don't want to see you
i don't trust myself not to say the wrong things
things are easier if i have time to think about wot im saying
no subject
Though I do not know where we go from here. I am never going to be less than I am, and hiding myself is less than. I did it for so many years, not because my people are like yours and care that I want to be with women but because a Commander cannot afford the indulgence. It is dangerous to both them and their beloved.
It is exhausting to pretend, Ren. So, so exhausting.
no subject
before everyone understud the way things has to be
ive never been in a situation like this before
it aint that i don't like you
i dont know how to do this
this is new
i aint goin to be able to do things proper until i can figure some stuff out
no subject
Until then.