• they/them

tatterpigs, video games, arknights 😔


figura
@figura

an imagine spot that didn't happen (an imagine spot of an imagine spot, if you will) from this game of CMWGE

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It knows Mara would hesitate when it asks. At least at first.

Even though there's so little time.

That's why it shakes her with more desperation, now. Because she's not even unconscious, really—just dazed. It had laid her down as gently as it could, nestled in the twining roots of a tree and cushioned by moss (which is to say: another part of its own self). But now there is so little time, and it needs time enough to ask this at all.

At last, though—perhaps from the shaking at her shoulder, perhaps from the urgency of, “Mara, Mara, Mara… please, I need you”—she would stir, and she would turn to it. Vividly aware, despite her wounds Wounds.

“All of them,” it says, turning its head so she can follow its gaze across the grotto, to where Cora and the exorcists are still arguing with Liza and Theremin, “…they will never see us as anything but monsters, will they.”

And Mara would choke out that low laugh of hers. “No. No, of course they fucking won’t.”

“I...” It is still hard to say: an idea so perfect, and so lonely. “I want you to temper me—the way you were going to with Theremin. I need you to do it right now.”

And, sure enough, Mara would hesitate.

“You're really asking. Really asking—again.”

Sometimes it thinks that Mara is most beautiful like this—in the fragile way that a precious thing is beautiful—in these moments when she doubts. When the uncertainty and the caring about of her shows through the seams. Even if she wants to be all sharpness and hunger and the keen edge of the infinite (and she is those things), there is a part of her which is raw, and new, and full of longing.

Like calls to like.

“There isn't much time. And they're going to—to make you smaller. Make it so you can't choose. I've been trying to convince them, but... but what does my word mean to them? From something like me.”

By that point Mara would be staring at it. She would push herself up to leaning against the trunk of the tree so that she could focus on the moss properly—studying it with renewed intensity. And her attention floods over it like—no. Not like sunlight. Like the fresh breeze of night.

The words come rapidly now, all cluttered together. “What I saw, just now, in your waylet—in your body, I mean—was like… like dreaming. Like dreaming and waking at once. Silvered with possibilities. Like art. And you know, the thing that frightens me isn’t dying or being eaten or whatever Theremin thinks this would be because—it’s not the parts of me that would be lost, right? Because what if I like this you? I keep wondering: where would this you go?”

And Mara would be silent at that.

“It's just—” It has to keep talking. It has to, because if it stops it might lose its nerve (or let Theremin get a word in edgewise), and because the need to save her is overwhelming. “—You need this, don't you? To feel complete. And I want you to have this, if this life I have is actually worth having. Please don't try to be like the rest of them, and tell me that it's just the same as destroying myself.” A pause, making eye contact. “I want to feel complete too.”

“.........Fuck.” Mara's voice has gone quiet, the curse almost like an exhale of breath.

“In the end, it is still like I said: they will never see us as anything but monsters.”

Its voice is soft too, almost strained, as it clutches Mara’s hands; as it keeps meeting her eyes with its own as if it can will her not to turn away. To look at those eyes is to see the night sky and falling stars. Unfathomable, and so much more beautiful than the featureless white of carved stone. And it thinks: Ah. This really is love, isn't it.

“So… let’s be the same monster.”


Cora and the exorcists would finally be turning back to look at them again, all the way on the other side of the grotto. Theremin would be screaming in their heads. (—Which isn’t fair, really. Don’t they know that their life has always been there waiting for them, precious too and whole? Don’t they know that they aren't the only one who has wanted to dissolve into the ones they love like morning mist?)

But it pulls Mara forward—she pulls her forward, into her arms. And finally, finally they would kiss: two broken things.

Their mouths are not warm; they are stone and something almost like glass—like a too-thin barrier between the real and something more beyond. Like she could just press a little further against her lips and tongue and—ah.

She tastes it at last. That art which lies beyond the veil of dreaming. It cuts her free.


She feels herself crumble.


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“Hello,” she would say to them all, afterwards. Her dear friends.

They would be staring—perhaps at her eyes, since they would be the part that remain the same from when she was Mara. So she would smile to reassure them. (Theremin especially, though she's unsure whether, in that moment, it would be them she would want to look at most or least.) But there really isn't any reason to be upset, because this one solution mends everyone's problems so elegantly, doesn't it?

And she would introduce herself with the full poem of her name.


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