And what if Venka had survived but even so that will not change her destiny?
Imagine Venka finding out about the meeting of Nezha, Rin, and Kitay on Speer and staying behind to try to put Nikan in order while they are away, she doesn't know what can happen at that meeting but she knows that Rin will not allow Nezha to set foot in Nikan again. She also knows that Nezha would not allow Rin to do it even if it cost him all his humanity.
Against her better judgment, she would try to be a noble leader for the moment. She would try, because no one really knows how to govern a country until it is given to them.
When she hears rumors of movement on the coasts, she suspects it; when she sees smoke in the distance, she knows it; when she feels a deep pain in her chest while she sees a small vessel that does not belong to them, she recognizes it.
She has lost.
And she has lost at the hands of her best friend.
Nezha arrives crying and behind him the Hesperian vessels can be seen, in one of them, she assumes, the corpses of her friends must be.
She tries not to give up control so easily, Rin would not have wanted it that way.
She tries but she cannot stand against them, she is all alone, she does not have a phoenix, nor a great mind, she is just *her*.
They take her prisoner, too valuable not to be used they say, Nezha comes to see her, he recognizes her.
Just like with Kitay, he arrives to tell her his sorrows, his disappointments at work. Unlike with Kitay, from her he does not want information, everything she could have given him he already has or will have very soon, with her he only wants to find comfort, a good soul who takes pity on him and tells him that everything will be fine.
Venka cannot give it to him.
She is no longer the girl who would give everything for Nezha, and she knows that this Nezha is not the one who used to call her "meimei", he is a distorted version of himself, just as she is distorted within herself.
Venka's hair grows back, it is no longer silky nor beautiful like she used to wear it at the academy, due to various factors, the food, her mental condition, the scarce sunlight that reaches her cells
Nezha for her birthday gifts her makeup; she should be happy, at last they give her something she can control, she cannot control what she eats, what she hears, and she even cannot control her thoughts, but she can control how she looks, that is something she has always liked.
It causes nothing in her.
Desperation invades her when Nezha tells her that he is getting married.
Really not for any romantic reason, she had never had anything like that toward him, rather it is how hilarious the situation seems to her; there was a time where together with Nezha they talked about how incredible Rin was, both admired her enough to feel the attraction of the other toward her, they loved her.
Now Nezha is going to marry a white, Hesperian woman, probably modest and prudent.
Everything that Rin is not.
Everything that at some point she herself was.
Rin transformed them both in incredible ways, no one will ever allow them to be forgotten because of it.
Time passes and Nezha makes enough changes so that Venka is assigned a decent room, as if nothing had happened, she even meets her friend's future wife, and yes, it causes her nausea.
Obviously she would never comment to anyone about her aversion toward this girl, she trusts no one enough to tell them the reason why she hates her attitude so much, and no one listens to her enough to listen to her anyway.
However, weeks before the wedding, the girl appears dead, no one knows the reason, but the girl's father points out that the guilty one is Venka and the matter was settled.
Because obviously she was jealous, obviously she is an aggressive witch, obviously her small Nikara brain had driven her to act this way.
A trial is carried out which consisted of listening for an hour to all the sins for which she was condemned while Nezha, seated, looking at her fixedly, could only nod his head.
He does not believe that she did it, but if he does not do this, the Hesperians will leave Nikara to its fate and he cannot rule without them.
"What is the order?"
"Kill her," whispered the Hesperian elder.
As a final act of "kindness" (if that's what you could call anything the Hesperians did), they let her choose her death.
Venka decides to die burned.
"I remember that Kitay once told me that in Hesperia they kill witches like that, definitively I am not one, but, I want to feel her before I go. You must be extremely jealous, I will see her again before you do."
should I post this on AO3?
please no
maybe
