Because I still have crazy-intense Cassiopeia feelings based on this. Also with Cassivir because I shamelessly ship it.

Warnings: blood, violence, manipulation.

The blood is hot on Cassiopeia’s hands, running in rivulets down her forearms, staining her clothing and skin with irrefutable truth of her planned treachery. Sivir’s body has gone rigid in shock and pain, her breath frozen - she’s not yet made a sound. It’s funny, Cassiopeia muses, her grasp tightening on her blade. Even someone that had seemed larger than life, brimming with power and personality, can be brought low just the same as any other.

And Sivir is the same - for all her infinite complexity, she is also infinitely weak. Just a tool to exploit. Just a loose end to tie up. The tomb all around them is still, silent as the dead, reeking of blood and ancient magic. Cassiopeia does not flinch when Sivir snarls something intelligible around the blood bubbling up her throat. She doesn’t reach out to hold the woman, not anymore, her eyes on nothing but the gleaming goal ahead.

It’s just as it always has been.

Sivir cries out when Cassiopeia sharply pulls her blade free, blood splattering to the stone beneath their feet. She falls to her knees then, and then to her side, her vaunted strength fleeing her along with her lifeblood. Cassiopeia does not spare her a glance, her eyes still fixed ahead, to the serpent guardian she’d been told of just weeks prior. She certainly doesn’t think that she’d come to enjoy Sivir’s company in the years that they’d known one another, Noxus and contracts and stringless nights of passion. She doesn’t. Instead, she steps over the woman, instead thinking of all that lies beyond the serpent.

Power. Everything she’s ever wanted.

She can still hear Sivir struggling to breathe, ragged wet gasps through clenched teeth. So determined, unbreakable even at the end, when she had to know how badly she’d been played. Cassiopeia looks down to Sivir then, to that betrayed expression and hurt eyes. The impulse to kneel and cup the woman’s face in her hands, to allow Sivir the final respect of watching her life slip away, is almost too strong to bear.

But that would be conceding too much to Sivir, too much to the insidious affection Cassiopeia has grown for the woman.

So instead, Cassiopeia bends to take the crossblade, the key she’d recognised the moment her Black Rose spy had recounted the legend of the sands. She pulls it free from Sivir’s now feeble grasp, looking down at the ancient weapon with triumph curling through her chest.

She refuses to remember admiring that blade, in all the years Sivir fought for Noxus. She doesn’t think of waking up in the woman’s tent just that morning, mere hours ago. She doesn’t let her mind drift back to stories told over the campfire, the exchange of sharp words with no venom; the warm brush of Sivir’s hand against her cheek, how she’d admired an intelligence so different to her own.

She’s killed before, so many times. Why is Sivir any different?

Cassiopeia doesn’t think of those things at all, she tells herself. The triumph in her chest has not become bitter ash in her mouth, and it’s easy. Between one step toward the snake and the next, Cassiopeia has come to believe it.

Sivir has always been destined to die, just as Cassiopeia’s has been to take the power within the tomb, to seize it before her political rivals could so much as realise it. It’s meant to be this way, and so her attachment to Sivir changes nothing.

Cassiopeia fits the crossblade in the lock, and she listens to Sivir try to struggle to her feet, to the hissed, agonised threats being spat in her direction. Her eyes remain fixed on the shifting serpent guardian. Her mind stays on the goal, and not on the sticky, cooling blood all over her hands.

It’s impossible for her to come to love anything. It’s impossible, and yet…

Cassiopeia has no warning before the snake strikes, and then there is no time for thought, no time for planning. Just pain. The snake’s fangs tear into her, blood both hers and not mixing with the venoms melting her flesh. Cassiopeia is screaming, this was not what she’d come here for, she was not meant to die too -

Over her screams, over the agony, she hears Sivir snarl out something, and it takes her a moment to understand. It’s Cassiopeia’s name, not a curse, though perhaps to Sivir they are one and the same. It breaks through Cassiopeia’s terror and the torturous pain just momentarily, but she can’t take it anymore.

She’s screaming again. Maybe, in her madness, she does fling out a ruined hand for Sivir.

Who is left alive to know for sure?

###

Cassiopeia wakes in Noxus, half a continent away from the cursed tomb and the horrors awoken there. For a terrifying moment, however, the oppressive darkness all about her is just the same, reeking of blood and ancient magic that she knows will not be there when daylight comes. Her entire body is curled up, defensive against remembered terror, against phantom pain that has long since died away with her rebirth.

She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t sweat, not with this still-alien, powerful body. All she can do is remember that those horrors are years gone now, no matter how they’ve been carved into memory and nightmares. The feeling of blood on her hands, Sivir’s eyes, the torn curse of her name.

And the pain. So much pain.

Cassiopeia quells those thoughts. Those last moments with Sivir and the snake guardian hold only the power she gives them. Cassiopeia will not be victimised by the past.

It’s easy to fool herself into believing it. It always is.

So she settles back onto her pillows, and she doesn’t find herself disappointed they are forever empty of a warm body. She doesn’t think of a woman with a daring smile even she’d found… beautiful. She doesn’t give a damn. She doesn’t care that Sivir is dead and not with her, steady and strong and oh-so interesting.

It’s just that Sivir would make a good distraction.