#empress ember

She's got the Devil's eyes and they'll cut you like a weapon.

(( Also enjoy some NEFEX - Fight Back; big time vibes for Jak/this writing! Also it’s just a sick fucking song.))

"Retaliate, Jak. You are a fire. You have strength. You have numbers. You have cunning that even you underestimate. It makes me sick. If you're a wounded animal, maybe we should just finish you off. Don't be pathetic. Don't wallow in this shit. Burn. Burn inside and kill those who throw you in shackles and cord you to their paths and thoughts. You're wild. Act like it."

Caid’s words were seared into her mind - be they his, or his Other’s. Even here, even now, deep as she was in this hollow place inside her - buried beneath her pile of furs, and blankets, peering out at a smoldering hearth in a foreign land, all alone. Still, those words felt like a slap in the face; no, worse than that - they bit deeper than even the Wolf’s levin had. 

“It makes me sick. If you're a wounded animal, maybe we should just finish you off. Don't be pathetic.”

The words rebounded and...even here, they bit. Much like the Wolf’s. What was she doing wrong? Was she doing something wrong? What did anyone’s opinions fucking matter? She did fight back. Was it wrong not to want to be assaulted with fucking levin? She’d snap and snarl, but gods-fucking-forbid she not want to be tortured, or it made her weak. Gods forbid she not want Kincaid attacked, or it made her weak. Or, like the fucking idiot assholes they were, they took it personally that she was concerned on their behalf; that she didn’t want to sit by while they were tortured, if one of them slipped up.

There was some sick irony in the similarity in Caid and Ketsuchi’s words, however. Hadn’t the Wolf been the first to tell her never to smother her fire? Weren’t they both just as likely to hurt her, in the end? Why leave one, and not the other, if the risks were equally as likely to blow up in her face? 

Kincaid, at least, had the grace to say he’d keep his opinion on the situation to himself - and yet, even as he said it, that too wounded her. She didn’t want him to feel like he had to stifle himself, or withhold his opinions and advice! And the fucking Wolf - who was he, to tell her she’d make the same mistakes as him? She was already different, wasn’t she? They’d both lost people that defined them, and she was the one brave enough to go back out into the world and try to find purpose. Fuck him. Fuck all of them. Even the Smuggler, with his gods-damned optimism, always trying to put a positive spin on every pile of dogshit that crossed his path - hiding from his own pain behind moko and a partyboy lifestyle he’d convinced himself was a mask; not to mention, she was fairly convinced he was still trying to paint her as someone better than she really was.

She was just....so fucking angry. 

And yet, she cared. 

She had flaws too, didn’t she? 

The ice around the hollow place thawed slowly, but surely, beneath the embers of ire that smoldered and caught fire anew. She did care. And yes, it hurt. Every single one of them hurt her in their own ways - be they small, or large. But if it didn’t hurt...was it even real?

She couldn’t discount the Wolf’s words, all the same. From the moment she’d received Caid’s first gift, she’d asked herself if she wasn’t being naive - inexperienced and ill-used to displays of emotion, she knew she could be easy prey. She knew that she was navigating strange, new territory and she’d have to take care, lest she blind herself like all the rest of the world; and that was the Wolf’s claim - that she was like everyone else. Just in it to feel a little less alone. To feel a little better with someone beside her.

Of all the scathing, foul insults he’d hurled that night, that had been the seemingly innocuous one that had buried itself in her. Jak was not like anyone else. She questioned all of it, constantly. Everything, and everyone. Every act, every word, weighed. She wore no rose-tinted glasses, had no optimistic dreams of settling down. She went into it all knowing it would bite her in the ass one day - but that was his issue. That she purposefully made these choices that he viewed as mistakes. That they both knew would hurt her, in time. 

Why did it matter to him? Didn’t it serve his fucking purposes, if she got burned and became colder and more distant because of it all? Claiming he didn’t want to rub her face in her failures! What a thought. The man who takes every opportunity to tower over her, to look down at her, to condescend...claiming that he, of all people, wouldn’t glut himself in rubbing her nose in her mistakes.

Slowly, did she emerge from the cocoon of furs, at last - olive-toned skin prickling as it met first the chill air, followed by the warm brush of heat from the nearby fire. 

Words. Too many words, and emotions. They were like the barbed little thorns on scraggy bushes that caught in your flesh and clothing when you passed through them - if you acted on instinct and pain, you’d jerk yourself away, and tear a deeper wound, yet. But if you took a moment to pause and think - if you slowed down and worked them out one by one, they were far less painful; easy, in fact, to pull out or break off of the plant.

Words, it was all just words - barbed little thorns she could burn away. And so, she would. Let the Wolf think what he would. Let Caid think what he would, of her choice to keep working with the Wolf. In the end, she knew that there was no running from the Wolf; nor was she willing to put an execution order on him, either - he was her Wolf, after all... despite his frustration at the insistence. Complicated, that.