Snippet #1531309

Though he offered to provide her with further assistance, or to send someone else to do the same, Kat knew it was not an offer she would be taking advantage of in any capacity. She was not the sort to wish a burden upon anyone else, least of all if she constituted that burden herself. Machai had Nike to tend to, and dutiful as he was, it would be hard for him to do anything else simultaneously. The others were in just the same position as she was, and she had no right to lean on any of them, nor the staff that knew nothing of her save perhaps more of her identity than she ever had.

This was not so bad. Katarina had been alone for most of her recollected life. She stood solitary as the lighthouse on the shore, and maybe someday soon she would be able to say that she lived up to the purpose of one: perhaps, perhaps she would be able to guide just one lost soul to safer harbors.

The flawless guardian, the exemplar of a sentinel at the gates, departed with a smile which she returned, turning his back to her and returning to the side of the Mother of them all, just as it should be. His footsteps echoed down the hallway, and Kat, never one to laze about when there was thinking to be done, made to stand again, pleasantly surprised when she proved to be capable of just that this time. It was as though she had never felt weak at all, and she circled her room a few times, trying to decide what exactly she should do.

She thought to visit Nike, as something about the encounter played ill chords on her mind even now. Perhaps the the woman who was at once a pillar of strength constructed of naught but paper needed to understand that she had done no wrong in Katarina's eyes? It was almost impossible to imagine that such a one could need what humble validation she could provide; maybe it was simply that Kat needed to know that she knew it, just in case. She had reached the door frame, hovering in it for a second, when she recoiled as if struck.

Her fingers tightened on the wooden frame, and Kat's breath left her in a near-silent gust. This feeling... it was so much like earlier, as though she were being destroyed from the inside. This time, though, the foreign presence was on the offensive, and it left her reeling. It felt as though something were clawing it's way through her mind with wicked talons, and she cringed with pain not physical but no less real for it. Old memories, old demons, were dragged to the surface, and she wondered at the fact that her thoughts were not her own.

She saw the meeting room at her orphanage, where she sat, small and unimportant, across from one or two people, faceless, always faceless, because the faces always changed and never wore the one expression she always wanted to see. Plain faces, beautiful ones, harsh of angle or round of slope. At first, all of them were beautiful to her, because all of them gave her hope that even if her parents were gone, there was still someone out there in the world that wanted her. Eventually, though, she came to see nothing in them at all.

At first, she had blamed herself, assumed that there must be something very wrong with her, that nobody wished to bring her home with them. Then, she had thought that maybe the fault lay with them, but that had never really stuck. She thought she had laid all of it to rest when she emancipated herself, but apparently, this was not so, not if the pain she felt now was anything to go by. Whatever was digging through her mind right now seemed to find perverse delight in this, and she shook her head harshly. No. It was purposeless to allow these thoughts to consume her. What was past was past. she had promised herself that she would not dwell upon it. Looking back only makes you slower when you try to move forward.

"Katarina!" the voice chased away the vestiges of her reverie, and her head snapped to the source. Though she still felt horrid and useless and miserable, as she had so many times before, she ignored it and moved towards the speaker- Machai, she realized belatedly. He was standing at the end of the hall, unmoving, though she knew not why.

"Machai? What's wrong? Why does it feel like something-" she cut herself off, deciding it was unimportant. He did not look well, and she laid a cautious hand on his shoulder. Beyond where the two of them were standing, she could see the others assembled before Nike through the open doorway. The feeling of wrongness had only increased as she got closer, and now she was positive it wasn't only her. She wanted to do something, but she didn't know what. "You have to tell me what to do, otherwise I can't help." The realization was a bit disconcerting, and her entire body thrummed with the need to act, but to do so without thought risked more harm than good.

---

Vincent ignored the Father, choosing instead to focus on nothing in particular, to allow the sharp, trained mind to drift amongst half-remembered recollections and inconsequential emotions so diluted they might as well have belonged to a dead man. In a sense, they did. The man they ought to have belonged to was gone and buried long before he'd had the chance to me a man at all. In his place stood the ghastly spectre of Death, not horrid for all the sharp angles or gaunt visages in the world, but because he looked so much like Life. Sun-gold locks, eyes the color of a thunderous dawn with the promise of warm, invigorating rain, tall to be noticed and built to be appreciated at the very least.

Death should not look so alive.

The same in a sense was true of each of them. Each invoked in some measure a quality of vibrancy, of activity, of miraculousness. It was a sick and twisted irony that it should be so, while the Descendants muddled and wallowed in uncertainty, confusion, and despair. But the Father had always been fond of irony, the more dramatic, the better. It was a tendency not entirely lost on Vincent.

His mind was disquiet. The words he did not mind whispered balmed platitudes and salved assurances, as a dog licking its wounds, but such things the son heeded no more than he would anything else. He knew the Father was wounded, too, though he could not yet discern why. His eyes did not miss much, his ears less. There were layers of meaning underlying the words the two had spoken to each other, and there was no mistaking that.

Perhaps if Vincent had been more inclined to gain an advantage over his patriarch or his brethren, he would have been more dangerous than any of them in more ways than one. But he did not indulge in their fickle, petty games, and he did not attempt to gain knowledge of them that he did not need. He was a blank slate, a tabula rasa, fit to be manipulated as his master saw fit and of a disposition to allow everything else to fall away. The thing that none of them understood was that he knew this, and consciously chose to accept it. He could be otherwise, he supposed, he just felt no inclination to be.

And that was where each and every one had misconstrued him. It would seem he was no less fond of irony than the man who had brought him up, that all of those who thought they knew better than he just what he was knew so little at all. But so it went.