emprcsario:
he’s almost forgotten the last words he’d spoken to pasha but the ambassador promptly reminds him. you’ll come back. and despite him saying that he won’t, kane realizes that he needs him to. this is what he’s here for. except the last time he wasn’t asking; he is now, better yet, he’s convinced he’ll have to beg. and for once he’s willing to.
it’s strange—to feel guilt. it’s never been an issue for kane before, he probably wouldn’t be able to live with himself if it were. there’s too many things he’s done in his life that one should feel remorse for, he’s made so many people his victims, made so many people pay for his sins but he’d always choose to ignore the repercussions. he’d tell himself he’s doing the right thing—right for him—and forget everything else.
and then this place happened. abel’s spirit happened. he can hear him all the time now, ever since he’s touched the knife at the shop—he can hear him, he can see him, he can feel him. kane’s convinced he can see blood on his hands then he blinks and it isn’t there. there’s a shadow in the corner of his eye, follows his every step. there’s whispers in his ear, names of people he’s forsaken for his gain, so many of them and they don’t let him rest, doesn’t matter where he goes. kane hoped they’d quiet down once he steps back onto the ship but the voices followed him; even now, he sees his brother’s face, he sees his partner’s face, they whisper pasha’s name over and over and kane—he wants to scream.
“i’m sorry.” he says instead, and the word trembles just a little. the voices quiet down. all he can see is pasha’s expression—clearly annoyed by his presence, ready to throw back whatever kane says right back into his face.
it’s another word he never uses the way it’s supposed to. but there isn’t any other way. to make all of this stop. he’ll apologize. and he’ll mean it.
he stops pacing, turns to face the other man. he feels frozen; his own admission has taken him aback. this is the only way. “i’m sorry. for everything. for what i did to you. for the way i betrayed you.” kane can’t believe his own words, not because they’re false but because for the first time in his life, his apology is actually an apology. you have to mean it. you mean it. “i’m sorry.”
The admission caught him unexpecting. The bottle pirouetting between his fingertips froze, the ambassador seized by the same icy lapse that halted his visitor. A moment later, both heads stiffly faced each other. Pasha’s gaze went wide and hard, all earlier nonchalance exhaled in the clench of the jaw. It wasn’t his intention to search for something - the ashen eyes on his didn’t shift an inch. What he intended was to wring it out of him.
“You weren’t last week,” he observed frostily. If anything, he’d attempted to wedge his claws into a closed wound. Pasha canted his head, eyes dark. Once unquestioningly complaisant, now steeled in his wariness. He couldn’t be lied to if he believed nothing. “Not for months and not for years.”
It wasn’t me that broke you, then. Who? “You lie as easily as you breathe,” he sloped quietly back into his seat and tipped back his bottle. Made a show of tilting it into the light, examining how much time he had left. ”Have you ever said anything to me that you meant?”
Never mind that- Why mean this? He’d proven his conscience a bottomless pit, so what weight was he here to alleviate? The ambassador had spent his career identifying the machinations that tended to brew around the long tables, and orchestrating his own accordingly. Weaving truth and lie into one inextricable ideal. Kane had shown him nothing but ideals, and Pasha was too enervated to start distinguishing their history thread by thread. A closure achieved through nitpicking was not one he wanted. He wanted Kane to unravel, and show it to him. He shifted his cinder stare from the fermented hourglass to the accused. More ash than fire.
“Why does this matter?”


















