“So I’ll be scaling the train instead,” Inej finishes. “I remember.”
“Scaling the train while it’s moving,” Kaz stresses, narrowing his eyes at her. “Get inside the locomotive and make the conductor stop. The tracks will be destroyed, so the conductor would need to stop either way, but you’ll need to subdue him. Make him tell the passengers that they’ve stopped for maintenance. If we panic the pigeons, they’ll be more difficult to work with. Jesper and I will start at the first car, and Matthias and Nina will hit the last. We’ll reconvene in the middle.”
Inej’s hands shake as she says: “We’re robbing them, and then leaving. We aren’t harming anyone.”
Kaz’s head dips. “Unless they make things difficult.”
“Kaz. I won’t kill anyone. I won’t kill innocent passengers.”
He scoffs at her. “Yes, your holiness, you’ve made yourself clear. We’ll see about that.”
Your writing skill is not gonna run away from you. It's fine to write only when you feel like it. It's fine to have a writer's block. It's fine to rest for a while. Writing is a passion that burns eternal fire, it can be lit up again when you try. It will always remain in you.
Snippet:
A tiny tremor—a temblor—rattles the dishes on the table.
Vi is hit by a different quake. As if the floor, the walls, the balcony are falling away. Everything, except Silco's words. Throughout the night, they've strobed at the back of her mind.
Vander, saying the same things. Vander, warning her. Vander, and Blut.
Blut.
Vi's mind, struggling against the epiphany, bursts at the seams. Memories burst too: a red tide gone blue. She'd spent all this time fixated on him. The man who's ruined her sister, and her life. The man whose accent—when it lapses from sterling correctness—bares the serrated edges of the Lanes. Whose voice—when it's not spouting convoluted spiels—becomes soothing as a bedtime story. Whose eyes—red and blue—are a mirror reflecting more than her hatred back to her, but the safety of a simpler palette.
"You," Vi chokes. "I know you."
"What?"
Vi's lungs seize. Gods, she'd been so stupid. She'd had the puzzle sitting right in front of her, and hadn't seen it. Because she couldn't accept what it meant.
The man who's taken everything from her, the man she's hated for seven long years, the man she's determined to hate until her dying breath:
They're the same.
She remembers him—Blut—tossing her to the ceiling to her gleeful shrieks. Sitting, crosslegged, with a comic book open in his lap, and reciting the dialogue in funny voices. Scooping her into his arms and carrying her into the Last Drop, humming a tune that's now embedded into her bones...
Silco's knuckles rap on the table. "What's gotten into you, girl?"
She wants to say, "Nothing." Except her throat is glued. So are her eyes.
This man. This murderer.
The stranger... and who he once was.
"It's you."
"Me?"
"Blut." She points a quavering finger. "The one Vander always talked about. God, why didn't I—?"
Silco's expression morphs from surprise, to understanding, to the smallest iota of apprehension. "What did he say about Blut?"
"He was Vander's childhood friend." Vi can barely squeeze the words out. Her heart is racing a mile a minute. "He was—the smartest guy Vander knew. And he—he was my friend, too. When Mom and I were staying at the Last Drop, Blut was there. He'd call me Pet, and tickle me, and make me laugh. In the evenings, we'd play in the cellar. Hide-and-seek. Sock puppets. Whack-a-mole. Sometimes, he'd read to me. The old comics from the trunk—"
Very quietly, Silco says, "Mavis and Mutthead."
"He'd put on a show. Like a vaudeville act. He'd do the funniest voices." She tries, and fails, to replicate the squeaky tone. "'Hoy, Mavvy! What'd the ceiling say to the wall?' 'Dunno, Mutthead. What?' 'Hold me up, I'm plastered!'" The laugh is a paroxysm. "Vander told me... he'd died on the Day of Ash. Killed during the blast on the Bridge. Nothing left but cinders."
Silco's jaw works, as if his tongue has burnt to cinders too. "Vander said that?"
"Every year." Her breath hitches. "I never forgot. But I never put it together. He—you—"
Silco's expression holds a shadowed emptiness. The shark-eye inverts: a trick of light. The blue blooms: bright as memory.
"It's a lie," he says.
AO3 - Forward, But Never Forget/XOXO
FFnet - Forward, But Never Forget (XOXO)
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The Reader, Alfred Stevens. 1860.
"Kaz would have ripped off Tolya´s eyes for liking Inej"
🤮 🤮🤮🤮🤮
why do you want Kaz to be the Darkling so bad? Inej is not his property
Also is reducing the problem to just Kanej and not
a)Tolya´s very much implied asexuality/aromantic being erasured just for the sake of a random love triangle
b) the implication that Inej would rather skin contact (supported by the director) despite her being also trouble with contact is a big deal , therefore erasing her trauma
c) The fact that if the show had continued with this in mind, they would have recicled the storyline of a love triangle where the east asian man gets rejected by the white man TWICE. If you remember the only important shu male character is Kuwei and both he and Tolya and noticably one of the few living male characters without a romantic storyline
But no...lets center on the shipping issues, Inej has to be with Kaz because she is his property she is NOTHING without him, everyman who even looks at Kaz´s property much perish because he is the alpha man,ug ug so superior
Like, Kaz like...wouldn't do that, he is canonically jealous Jesper can touch Inej but he reacts with more melancoly than anger and he doesn't have this entitled to have you actitute towards Inej. He only gauches eyes of men that actually hurt Inej or threaten to do so, i don't know why you want to add more yandere male characters when they are already too much
house of the dragon & religious imagery 🤝
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