Aim For My Heart

[Victor Lark]

Anger flashed; the fire raged anew, tainted by yellow umbrage but burning nonetheless. Victor thought he could feel the warmth of it on his face and shoulders, heavy as they were with the anticipation of success. But even he was not foolish enough to think that their emotion was any more predictable than a growing flame, any more containable than a puddle of blood. The fear was lost in the poor little stranger that lay helpless on their bed and, resigned to her fate, she tugged pitifully at the heartstrings in Seven that had long since been cut in his accomplice.

Victor wrenched his gaze from Seven and bore down on Roxanne. For an instant, his mind raced out of the window, passed the eccentric streets of Alvadas and flew over the sea to the citadel city beyond, dodged those stone walls and fell in the wilderness, to a golden-eyed girl that had called herself Sophia. She had felt the pain and feared it. She had been afraid to die. She was a Kelvic; he could see it in her eyes. She would never be more than that fear, and yet he had tasted it in her dying face and thought it beautiful. His memory of her had faded like her unmet sister’s life, thousands of miles away. He needed more.

They were all the same. They had to be. If they weren’t, why should Roxanne deserve the death she so craved? Frowning, trying in vain to twist Seven’s rising fury onto his own mask, Victor descended on her. He raised her by her throat, as he had once held Sophia, but she did not resist. She choked, or maybe sobbed, and a tendril of gratitude slithered across her dirty yellow eyes. “Please...” she repeated in a whisper, and Victor shook his irritation into her. “Kill—”

“I will not.” He asserted, a child with a broken toy. He dropped her again, eyed the dagger that he did not dare take from Seven’s anger, and threw a hard, back-handed slap against her crumpling face. She shrieked with surprise, but her energy was spilling out of her with her blood. She did not have enough for fear. She turned to Seven again, mumbling, “Oh gods, please...”

Victor flared. His foot stomped forward at her yet again, but before his arms could reach for her, words he had barely heard tickled the back of his mind. He turned suddenly towards the door, glaring. “Go away, Laszlo,” he insisted, but still he stepped towards the door, turned the lock, opened their privacy to the world.

Victor’s grey eyes were hard with the shadow of rage as he beheld the frightened symenestra. Sweat made his scarred skin shine like the silver pendant that forever hung against his chest, dotted with blood that was not his own, blood that dripped heavy from his fingers. He tilted his head curiously at Laszlo’s fear, distracted enough to allow the frail man to push the human aside and enter. Dumbfounded, he stared at that reaction with newfound purpose: true fear, full of something more real than an instinct to survive, though he could not yet tell what it was. Ignoring the useless words, Victor seized Laszlo by the shirt and pushed him against the door. It snapped shut, and the stronger man met those frightened amethysts with his empty steel. Around unfeeling eyes, a mirror of Laszlo’s expression molded itself onto Victor’s face and, for a moment, the human seemed terrified.

But, Seven. Victor’s countenance fell, as if washed away by a sudden stream of invisible water. He turned to the scene behind him with almost a grin on the corner of his lips. His fingers spread over Laszlo’s chest, holding him in place so that they might both bear witness. Rage, glorious wrath: Victor thought he could smell it on the air—but that might have just been the last of the Kelvic’s blood. “Watch,” he whispered, so low that even Laszlo might not hear, “It’s beautiful.”

[Seven Xu]

Laszlo could not have known that in a frantic, djed-fraught plea to end the mad clatter of screams and wails beyond the wall of oak, the words severed a lock the hypnotist recently latched within a fragile mind—a mind that had worked so hard to forget. Open the door. Beneath the heavy torrent of burden, Seven was a witness in his own reminiscence. He flexed his left hand. Bloodied warm leather stuck itself to a scarred palm. Open the door. Open the door. Open the door. The door was gone; the room was gone; his raven-haired spectator and a frightened Symenestra were gone. It was only he and Roxanne who remained in that tiny, suffocating world, but even her face had twisted into something sickeningly familiar.

The floor beneath his feet as he ascended on the Kelvic was sodden and slippery in her blood, but he stepped over the mattress with all the grace a quarter of his own would afford him. White eyelids fluttered over an empty garnet stare as a heated exchange long forgotten tore at the last of his wits and drowned out a string of mewling pleas.

“You’re the bastard son of a whore,” “End this. Gods, please.”

“Who was the bastard daughter of a Widow demonspawn from Kalinor.” “It hurts so bad.”

“Instead of leaving you to die in the cold, I gave you my last name and raised you into the contemptuous twat you are today.” “Please.”

“Is that what you wanted to hear?” “Gods, have mercy.”

“Are you happy now, Dra-Seven?” “Please, just kill me.”

“You’re the latest in a long line of pale, venomous bastards.”

“Shut up.”

There was a short grunt and a garbled, empty wheeze as the dagger slid easily beneath the girl’s waxy jaw, granting a mutual wish for her silence. Seven yanked the iron blade sideways, drawing that familiar grin that haunted the backs of his eyelids—the original he left in a mess of sheets and a sardonic prayer to the blood god a world away in Lhavit, a fact the pale halfblood was more aware of now, than ever. What crimson life remained inside that crumpled, naked frame spat forth across the sheets, his face, and her chest. Claret rivulets dribbled down Seven’s sweat-drenched brow and he blinked them away like tears.

Orange light and silence filled the room, deafening silence that drummed at his ears and clawed at his failing acumen. It was broken by a choking, giggling sob. “He’s gone now.”

Red on red on red listed in the direction of a pair of men he seemed almost surprised to notice, pressed against the far door. “He’s gone,” he rasped again, and slid away from the empty, bloodless shell that had once been called Roxanne. Bare feet pressed against a floor equal parts blood and hardwood and Seven began his slow approach towards two familiar faces, one twisted in unfathomable fear, the other glimmering in empty, awestruck amusement. Thunk-dunk-dunk. The dagger rattled harmlessly across the floor, as forgotten as the woman left in ghastly repose on his bed. Seven drew in another shallow breath, his brows rising over a thin fanged smile.

“He’s gone.”

[Laszlo]

Even if Laszlo could rush forward and take Seven by the wrists, to wrestle him away from the poor creature, he wasn't sure it would make any difference. She was already dead, her life trickling away like the scarlet droplets dripping from the sheets onto the defiled floor. Her soul would soon depart, leaving an empty fleshy vessel and all the agony fear it had suffered. The only mercy she could receive now was a swift death, which Seven would happily deliver.

"Don't," he whispered, trying to press forward. The broad human hand at his chest pushed him back, strongly enough that Laszlo's feet faltered in a backward stumble. Even if he was helpless to stop this madness, the idea that Victor was holding him back gave him the illusion that there was something he could do. Victor's prevention gave justification to his despair and leashed outrage, until he was prepared to surrender to his guilt. He could have stopped this if he had come earlier.

The blade hissed into the girl's skin, producing a grotesque, wet sound that Laszlo could still remember from Ulric's murder of the Symenestra. Flesh didn't sound like meat, when it was cut. The gurgling rendering of flesh was a noise unique to itself, severe and final, that reverberated in the Ethaefal's nauseated gut.

Laszlo's effort against Victor's palm slackened, and he fell back another step. There was no room in his mind for the fear of his own safety. There was only the woman and her enders. Laszlo didn't know her. She could have been anyone in the city. A whore, a dancer, a mother. And he thought he'd known Victor Lark and Seven Xu: the Ravokain and his eternal boredom and fixation on petty games, the Lhavitian halfblood and his defeated, polite cynicism and buried resentment.

This… how a person could be capable of this… people he knew…

These weren't the people he knew. Victor was a mystery, but this was the Seven he'd gotten a rare glimpse of by accident. The laugh that had ended in a sob.

The emotions were primal, and Laszlo didn’t understand them. The Ethaefal knew that death was never the end, that every life was a soul's chance to breathe, and that the woman would simply pass on into her next reincarnation. Her death, and this murder, shouldn't have affected him this way. Yet it was impossible to rationalize this mourning for a stranger, the emotions boiled up from somewhere instinctive, somewhere mortal. And… seeing who he thought were his friends do something like this felt close to betrayal.

"Do you feel… nothing…?" Laszlo asked of the empty smile perched over the woman's broken body. He turned to Victor, too numb to feel startled by the expression on his face. "Nothing at all…?"

Before Laszlo realized it, he was grasping the handle of the door. He looked about to leave, but he couldn't. His legs were frozen. Where would we go? There was no running from this. Wherever Laszlo chose to hide, this had still happened.

Outside, the new dawning day pushed away the cold leaden sky. Golden sunlight spilled over the east side of Alvadas' silent architecture, painting them in orange blaze. The exposed areas of Laszlo's skin grew bright like a hot iron, blinding but for a brief moment, and leaving a horned, immaculate creature in place of the spidery Symenestra. The same horror remained on his perfect face. Laszlo spared no thought to his shift, as it happened every morning.

He's gone. Seven's father. The halfblood remembered now, but would he forget again? Would Victor let him?

Asking why they had killed her again seemed fruitless, and Laszlo was afraid of the answer they might supply if they saw fit to. His shaking voice, now sweeter in tone, formed the only other question he could think of.

"Who… was she…?"

[Victor Lark]

“He’s gone.”

The hand that detained a newly attractive Laszlo slipped and fell to Victor’s side. He reciprocated Seven’s approach, pulling black leather shoes through a viscous red pool. An absent frown had weighted his face, lingering from the throes of heated murder that had conflagrated in blood-kissed irises. Now, the corners of his lips tipped upward, echoing the happy freedom on Seven’s red-and-white mien. A breath of a chuckle grasped for that happiness, that consuming relief that bubbled like oxygen from a pair of skyward eyebrows. He reached out for him with two bloodied hands, held him by his marble-white head and strung his red fingers through feather-white hair.

“He’s gone!” Victor agreed merrily, though he did not know what it meant.

The human had wanted plenty of things, but he could not have dreamed this end. He had seen rage and fear alike, but he did not expect to see this thing, that which he could not even guess was the bliss of untold revelations and shattered delusions. Failing delight seeped into the silver eyes that swam in scarlet, lighted on a pleasure-thick tongue. Laszlo’s words were whispers to him, but for some reason his ears found them and were compelled to oblige. “She was no one,” he replied with a shrug, and ended the brief interrogation by embracing his lover in a violent kiss.

No one could have known the passion in the harsh tremors of Victor’s hands, the hard clutch of his lips on a pair smeared with no one’s blood. Thin red lines dropped down Seven’s back and Victor held him by his waist, pulled him close with a vice-grip that threatened to never let go. He would not lose this man, who had found him helpless and helped him rediscover his life, who had turned out to be a vessel of emotion that could fill his emptiness, whatever the cost. I love you, he thought he should say, but those were the sort of empty words that he spoke to persuade, the purest and simplest of dishonesties he knew. Victor could not love Seven, but he could try to share his happiness, his sadness, his fear and his rage.

He could not foresee what he had created with his game, but neither did he care to.

You feed me fables from your head
with violent words and empty threats,
and it’s sick that all these battles
are what keeps me satisfied.

-Rihanna, Love the Way You Lie, Part Two

[Bedlam]

Thread Completed!

Seven

Experience:
2 Persuasion
1 Dagger

Lores:
A Symenestra’s Mercy
My Friend, The Monster
Killing No One

Victor

Experience:

3 Torture
1 Dagger

Lores:
My Friend, The Murderer
Killing No One

Laszlo

Experience:
2 Hypnotism

Lores:
My Friends, The Madmen

Notes:

Notes: You should probably ask Bina—it looks here like you transformed at sunlight’s touch, but I always figured that they changed according to the time of day, regardless of whether they were beneath the moon/sunlight or not. This seems like something that needs to be asked.