#ahrwit

I walked into the long room where the wedding presents had been. Where I knew that he would be. What I held in my hand was only natural, really.

There was a long case - a casket, really, but he lay on a low table nearby, covered to the neck with a blanket. His face - looking at his face - was like being punched in the gut.

I remembered the first time I met him, in Rata Sum. How he’d once loved Tasha, Malachi’s wife. Speaking with me about elementalism when he was still called Bastion, and claimed to be worried about my deep ties to Water. I remembered him hugging me briefly, and the feeling of his arousal against me.

Even as Bastion, his flesh had wanted mine.

And then when he was Kristoff, and he wasn’t Bastion any more. I remembered how he reached into me somehow, and woke me, and then he took me, and then after madness and blood?

I remember - how can I ever forget? - trying dimly to heal myself in the Ocean, trying to use Water to make the pain stop. And him finding me like a bloodhound.

And raping me.

What else can you call it? I told him no. I didn’t want it.

And he made my body respond and react despite me. 

And that was how he kept doing it to me. He convinced me that because my traitor body would climax to his skilled hands, I belonged to him. He made me believe that he was the only man who would ever love me. Would ever truly desire me.

Wasn’t he right, after all? Malachi married Tasha, and fucked me on the side. When he made himself twice-married and me a convenience, a lie legally told, whatever I felt was meaningless, wasn’t it? He left me to Kristoff’s tender mercies, to go and be a pirate again. I never was important to him beyond being a young body to bed.

And that’s been my life, honestly. An after-thought, a fuckable body that men expect me to give to them. It was like being locked into a prison.

No one made that more clear to me than Kristoff after he proved to me again and again that what I hoped for, what I wanted in life, didn’t matter as much as his plans for me. He made me feel jealous - how sick is that? - when he’d come to me stinking of Hart’s sex. Just a man with his cock forever out, intent on fucking the world. And me his toy, trapped and afraid.

Seeing him now brought it all home. Brought it all back. Made the world spin, made my pulse throb on my ears. I could feel Fire in my veins, burning at my fingertips as I walked up to the supine form of my tormentor. I heard the door open behind me, and I didn’t need to turn to know that my family had stepped in. Father. Uncle. Reiner, Kalonah... 

I knew instinctively that they were there to support me. No one spoke, though father coughed once.

I felt rage. I felt fury. But for all I knew, he wouldn’t hear them.

“Wake him up.”

Had I said that? Had I ordered it? It certainly seemed so.

Father stepped into view, and his face was very pale and set. I could almost feel his emotions. I walled them off, and returned my stare to the bronze skin of the man who had shattered me like a well placed blow against a fragile vase. Others had made it possible for him to break me.

But he’d been the one who finally did it.

I watched his eyes open. Golden.

And before I could let myself feel afraid, I spoke. 

“What you did to me was wrong. I was not made to be yours, or your belonging. I am NO one’s possession, and the elements did not design me to be a thing for your use or your abuse. I belong to myself only, and I decide my life. I decide who I want to have a child with. I am not, and I never was, your vessel, Kristoff.”

I heard the indrawn breath, the sound of anger behind me, and knew it was Reiner. But bless whoever held him back, because that was all I heard.

I had more to say, and if I lost steam, I might not say it.

“The fact that you made my flesh reach climax is meaningless, Kristoff. A wiser woman than I am told me about a funny thing: that when someone puts a sleeping person’s hand in warm water, they tend to piss. My body’s reaction was nothing more than piss and you were just a glass full of really arrogant, seriously used water. It definitely didn’t mean you had any right to me, or rights over me.”

I took a step closer and stared directly down at him. There was a little smirk on his lips, and I knew he was mustering clever, commanding words.

“You think I should listen to you now, and hear you. But Kristoff, your opinion doesn’t actually matter, and you don’t matter. You. Don’t. Matter.”

And then I drove the dagger I was holding into his throat.

And I stood watching him die, and I didn’t cry. I wanted to see the pain, and the shock. I did. It didn’t actually make me feel good, and it didn’t take away the pain he’d caused me.

It was just something that had to be done to know he could never hurt anyone else ever again.

Crying later in the supportive arms of my family. Of my husband. I knew that like I knew the sun would come up in the morning.

Later, they told me that they’d taken their vengeance, and wondered that I hadn’t. But I didn’t need to. It was never about vengeance for me. It was, at the end, not even about hate. It wasn’t about him at all.

It was about hearing myself say those things to him, and knowing they were truth. 

I belong to myself. And no one has the right to choose for me. Who I could have been may have been forever changed by what I went through. But who I will be now is for me and only me to decide.