hold my hand in yours

[valeas]

WHO: Emilia & some closed starters.
WHEN: One is backdated to dragon shenanigans. Others throughout October.
WHERE: The Bessis Tower. Doxe's palace. Places!
WHAT: Cold misery. New allies. Wrath.
WARNINGS: Food that might make you hungry. Some KotC spoilers. I'll add the rest as we go.

( if you'd like anything with emilia, please feel free to send a PM or hit me up at moonstones. i love writing starters. ♥ )

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[valeas]

Her gaze narrows right back at him.

"Nothing that I haven't already said," Emilia acknowledges with a deceptive level of calm, "beyond the fact you must know I am perfectly understood when it comes such currency, that anything can and will be used against you. I understand Hell's politics in theory if not practice. Should you expect us to operate in the same manner, speak it now so that I may tell you how little I'll tolerate it."

She would like things to be different between them, regardless of how his brothers or their denizens operate. It would need to be different, whether she ends up accepting this bond or not.

[inferus]

Wrath does not believe the calm she speaks with, but he has the unfair advantage to feel the danger within the anger placed inside of her chest as she speaks these words. He loves her sharpness even when he is constantly surprised at how with ease she is at leveling it at him. Though he supposes with all that he understands now, he should no longer be surprised.

"I have no intention of us operating in the same manner as Hell itself." They are no longer within Hell. He is aware of it. His expression remains unreadable, as calm as her own but with an undercurrent of tension. "Choose to believe it or do not, but I have no desire for it either, Emilia."

He wants something different for them. He wants what they had when they were seeking answers to the murders together.

[valeas]

"You keep using that word."

Choice.

It settles bitterly down her throat, considering.

"But I believe in making informed decisions, and you kept something about our betrothal that I had every right to know. You hate being called a liar, but omissions are lies, Wrath. And you lied to me."

[inferus]

Wrath's shoulders square with tension when she does call him as such. He is limited on what he can tell her based on the curse, but there was some information he kept entirely that he could have shared.

"I wanted your choices to be uninfluenced by the choice I made to save your life, which binds us for eternity. But even in the bond itself, you have a choice. You can refuse."

There was no time to explain to her the consequences of the mark he left on her when she most deserved to know (before he bound them together with the mark upon her neck). She was dying. He asked her decision, and she said yes without fully knowing what she agreed to. Something dark explodes inside of him, and it only briefly crosses his expression- hurt and anger, pain and frustration.

"I asked you to live long enough to hate me for this. So hate me for it."

[valeas]

Hate is the easy part. Emilia wishes it was all she felt toward Wrath.

She fights the urge to reach up and graze the hidden mark with her fingertips, letting the coolness of it bite into her skin, such a sharp contrast to the heat that he emanates. Never just one or the other. He's always both.

"I have a choice, except if I want to marry the devil."

The words are out of her mouth before she can think better of it, before she can let them crawl back down her throat. Before she sees the flash of hurt and pain on his face, and he has no way of knowing how this complicates her true mission.

She didn't travel to the Seven Circles to find love, or to let her heart get in the way. She did so to become queen. To infiltrate Pride's circle and discover why his consort was murdered — and why her twin and other innocent witches suffered the same fate. To give them justice and peace. Sometimes it feels like she's given up everything in the pursuit of this vengeance, including herself.

[inferus]

Wrath remains still until she says that word- those words. He flinches helplessly and then looks away from her. She is, in fact, betrothed to marry the devil. Her marriage bond did so before she realized who the devil truly was, but he cannot say so for multiple reasons. Yes, there's the curse, but there is also the fear- the deep intense fear of what she would think of him if she knew the truth.

The mortal world thinks the devil to be a monster. So be it. They can think what they wish. He does his job, his role. He follows the responsibilities set in front of him. But he does care about what she thinks and feels about him.

She speaks of Pride, he's aware. Without having met him, she believes him to be the most powerful and to have the answers she needs to solve and bring justice to what was done to her sister. That is the reason she wishes to marry him, and Wrath does not want their own marriage to be for those reasons.

"Even then. You can choose to not consumate our bond," Wrath says, and he would not want her to choose to do so for any other reason than wanting him. "You can choose to align yourself with another House, and I would not stand in your way."

[valeas]

For all that she keeps calling him a liar, she knows what he says to be true. He would not stand in her way. If anything did, she would have to remove it through any means necessary to fulfill the vow she made to the sister she loves.

A vow she made long before she met him.

When she first met him, he seemed so cold and unmoving. A heartless bastard, just like Anir said. Difficult if not impossible to read, as the mask he showed was most unfeeling. Perhaps he's lowered down a wall or two. Perhaps she simply knows him better after all these months. But it takes her aback whenever she's evidence of the fact she can hurt him.

She's done this, hurt him. They've hurt each other in profound ways. Demons and witches are enemies, and have been for as long as she can remember, Nonna whispering tales at her ear. Yet there's more to their story, isn't there? If only she could put the pieces together. Because they're there, the pieces. And they keep threatening to surface the longer they remain here. Their bond is eternal, whether she marries him or not. And it all started with her summoning. It started with her. She did that.

"You know it's no longer that simple."

It sounds simple when he speaks, but there's too many factors to consider.

[inferus]

There are many factors he's done his best to mitigate. It is the reason he marked her to begin with, to help quiet their urges the bond heightens.

He swallows in the quiet that follows her words. There is nothing at all simple about this, about them, but that does not change how he feels.

It does not change that for the first time in centuries he feels more than hate and anger but love, desire. Hope even trickles in at times, so dangerously to the heart he did not believe he had. For the first time in so long, he finds beauty in her. He finds beauty in the way she smiles, in the sight of her fury, in the sharpness of her tongue, in the ferocity of her gaze, in her search for justice and determination to make it so regardless of cost to herself. And then there's the softer moments: playing cards together, bringing cannoli for him, how those wonderful soft intimate moments open up a part of him that had long been buried.

He believes her to be his equal. He believes with her at his side, ruling over Hell- It would change everything. Beyond leading to the end of the curse itself, he would be changed. He would feel happiness. He would take joy in the everyday activities of ruling and the rest if they were done with her at his side. She would change everything for him by the simple nature of being herself- this fiery, furious, beautiful cataclysm. The Queen he would choose over and over again, curse or no curse, memory or no memory.

It all claws at his throat and none of it leaves him for a multitude of reasons.

He straightens in place before finally speaking, "Despite the less than ideal circumstances, we are well suited enough."

[valeas]

Emilia does not blink as she stares at him.

Well suited enough?

"With such a wildly romantic declaration, indeed what else is needed?"

It is times like these that Emilia is reminded she wishes to — in earnest — strangle Wrath as often as she wishes to kiss or bed him. Sometimes she wishes all these things at once. Sometimes all that will soothe her is the vivid dream of tossing him over a cliff and painting the sea stacks with his blood. Theirs would be an unholy union of fury.

Well suited enough is not good enough, not to her. Emilia would want a true partner, an equal and a confidant. More importantly, she would want no secrets between them, and she's lost faith this is possible between them. If she cannot marry for the sake of her mission, she will marry for love, or she will not marry at all. She'll only ever belong to herself, as it is.

"Every time I think our enmity has thawed and we might feel something for each other, something real, I am reminded of how utterly foolish that is. Perhaps I have been a foolish witch, as you so loved to remind me once upon a time, but I'll still choose my fate to yours. I'll have my answers, and my freedom, one way or another. I'll find the fiend that murdered Vittoria and destroy them alongside all they hold dear until there is nothing left. I'll best your brothers, to their bitterness and yours. We'll see what choices are left then."

She moves to leave, aware that he enjoys her anger. So she means to starve him of it. ... Before she does that, though, she snatches the bag that holds the rest of the cannoli. He will not have her baked goods, either.