#klath'reo

Back at it again with the speculative fiction of my own dnd campaign…. ID under the cut!

TW/CW: discussion of murder/massacre, throwing up, nausea, disordered eating, self loathing, implied/referenced self harm and implied/referenced suicidal ideation. DEAD DOVE!! Seriously, I don’t CW/TW lightly

For some context: Theo’s (my PC, she/her) love interest (Klath’ra, they/them) has been kidnapped by their patron Mephistopheles, Archduke of the Eighth Hell. Theo, Cas (my flatmate’s PC, he/him) and Ronzur (my brother’s PC, he/him) dove into Hell after them.

They arrived on the Forth layer and have entered a deal with Gazra (he/him), current Archduke, to give them safe portals all the way down to Cania, where Klath’ra is, on the condition that for each layer they pass through, they must do a task for him. The first of five tasks, being on the fourth layer, was to kill all 100 servants in his manor. These were all trapped people that Gazra claimed were “evil souls.” They were neither of those things.

In the wake of this, Theo is gonna Mad Traumatised and is mechanically more Evil. So. So.

Theo is going to dive head first into her self destruction if/when they get back bc she feels like she deserves it. (She does deserve it.) Okay, ways this will manifest:

For the first two or so weeks, she just cries at night. She can’t let anyone hear her crying, so she’ll leave the Teeth to find a rooftop and climb. She cries and cries. She thinks the tears will run out but they never do.

All the while, in the back of her head, there is that voice that scorns her, that insists that she doesn’t deserve to be upset by her actions, the people who suffered at her hands do. Did. It all feels so performative and she has never hated herself more.

It is so clear when she comes back what she’s been doing. Her eyes are so red and her palms have crescent marks where her fingernails have drawn blood.

After a week or two she has no more tears to shed and that’s worse. The apathy feels like it will tear her apart

She doesn’t sleep. She can’t trance bc she’ll be back in Hell. She can’t sleep for just the same reason. She will never sleep, she can never rest.

How can she sleep in Klath’ra’s arms with all the things that she’s done just to get them here. How can she??

She lies awake with Klath’ra plastered against her side, their touch to gentle and patient—and oh, they’re so good to her and this is how she repays them?—and for every inch of skin they touch she can feel a buzzing beneath her skin

She thinks about how Klath’ra teeth would be so so sharp against her throat or at her wrist.

She doesn’t sleep.

Going for big heists that she can’t reasonably pull off. She can’t, she can’t. If she gets in trouble with the law, so be it. If she gets arrested or sentenced to death, fine. Fine, she deserves it

She can’t look Klath’ra in the eyes sometimes. She can’t be around them. Her happiness feels cheap, she’s never been poorer. She goes over the plan she had for their date in her head and she could throw up.

I feel like, where she would normally invite Klath’ra with her to do crime as a cute date, she’ll just disappear. She’ll just go—god knows she’s capable of it—and she won’t return for hours and hours.

Very obsessed with the image of Theo coming home from a heist gone wrong, bleeding and there is this hunger in her eyes. She aches for the adrenaline rush, for that feeling of blade against her skin bc at least she felt something. Klath’ra is just so furious and they keep scolding her and they patch her up as best as they can.

Theo sits there and stews, listening to their words and she knows they’re right and she knows this is stupid, she knows she knows she knows. This feels far too close to Laudine. So she does what she did then and snaps back

She is so convinced, as they stand in wide-eyed wake of whatever acidic thing she said, that they are going to leave her. They hate her, they must. How could they love her? She’s evil.

She feels like she’s walking around with an open wound. She is, that’s why Klath’ra is healing her.

She doesn’t say a single word afterwards. Neither does Klath’ra, they just chew the inside of their cheek and finish cleaning her wounds.

They kiss her on the forehead and she just breaks, clutching them by the lapels of their jacket and pulling them so close and begging in a hoarse whisper for them not to leave her. Apologies waterfall from her mouth and she doesn’t know if she’s apologising to Klath’ra or to every one she’s ever murdered.

She wants to cry but she can’t.

When she can’t cry, she throws up. This happens often. Her nausea hounds her. It gets worse the less she sleeps. Her throat aches, her enamel is wearing.

Throwing up gives way to dry heaving when she doesn’t eat or drink.

She doesn’t eat. She can’t, she can’t. Her food can be given to someone else.

Are there any members of the Teeth that look especially similar to Gazra? To Mephistopheles? She feels awful for feeling sick around them. She is so so careful to be so so kind (they don’t deserve her anger, none of them deserve this) but her kind words feel less than dirt. She’s a fucking liar.

She can’t fight. She can’t even look at her rapier without feeling sick. She casts eldritch blast and throws up immediately. She can’t speak to Sara bc she can’t bear to hear her try to encourage her to cast again.

 I feel like if she does, it will just end up in a complete breakdown on Theo’s part just screaming and begging for her to take it back, she doesn’t want it, please, please.

She spends much, much too much of her time on rooftops. She sits too close to the edge.

Sometimes, when she’s lying awake at night, she can hear her dagger singing a siren song, that sick rhapsody of bleeding she knows too well

I feel like Klath’ra will often find her with her legs dangling over the edge of high buildings, á la sitting at the edge of that caldera.

She knows so many fire spells. She can’t craft with green flame blade. She can’t stand to be around fireplaces.

She wears Mage Armour all the time. She can’t be surprised now but I think so much of that is just absolute paranoia.

Depending on how Nyr is when she gets back, what state he’s in, he’s going to be one of the few people she can actually confide in.

She could talk to Klath’ra, and she should. This was for them, after all. But she knows she’s not the woman they fell in love with, and she doesn’t want to make them hate her more than they already do, so she keeps her mouth shut

She has a lot of nonverbal days

My worry that if she doesn’t confide in them is that they won’t confide in her. She wants them to have an outlet for what they went through, and god knows they aren’t gonna tell the Teeth or Yulul (Klath’ra’s sister, they/she)

That’s the thing, they’re so stoic. And she won’t dare push them to the point they were at when she kissed them the first time. She’s not going to let them bottle that up bc it will kill them

It will kill her too but she’s such a hypocrite and she always has been.

She could talk to Cas but he’s her brother and she can’t bare to bring that back to him.

She could confide in Ronzur but Ronzur has never been one for words. She still feels so guilty for bringing him along

She expresses this sentiment only once to Klath’ra. “You would have died,” they say, brute force honesty.

Good, she doesn’t say.

She might be able to talk to Laudine but that relationship is already on shaky ground and like. She doesn’t want to her to think so badly of her

That’s the thing with a lot of her hesitance about opening up, she wants to be liked and loved but she also believes she doesn’t deserve it

On nonverbal days, she just makes shoes or what have you. I feel like she gets sensory overload a lot on those days.

On her good days, she’ll be able to smile without hating herself. On good days, she can laugh with the Teeth and joke and it’s so good. She curls into Klath’ra’s chest at night and hold them so so tightly.

She’s gonna be so fucking emotionally removed. She’s just going to withdraw from everything

I just don’t see a way for their relationship to make it out of this. All of the above rides of Klath‘ra being more or less the same person after all this and they won’t be. Like. God. God.

And like. I was discussing this with my DM and Cas’ player was like, “What if they have to take a break from each other when they get back?”

Which would be an objectively good thing for Theo, I worry that she doesn’t know who she is without them. But at the same time, I think it might break Theo. I think she would feel like everything she did in Hell was for nothing. She already thinks she’s evil (she may well be by the time they get out) and if Klath’ra dies or if they split up she’s just going to hate herself more bc she’s killed so many people for no reason