Chapter Text
I like your anger. Go then. And do more than the Sword Saint.
Ram was hunting. Even without her horn, she could still feel the instincts welling up inside her. She was hunting. And her prey was near.
She had sobbed her eyes out when she woke to find her sister still alive. Sobbed and hugged and confused the poor girl but it hadn’t mattered cause she’d been there and alive and it would be oh-so-easy to keep her like this.
Her prey was weak. Scared of his own shadow. Scared of them and rightly so.
But it did make it oh-so-difficult to get him alone.
Oh-so-difficult to find him at all.
She stalked the halls, under the pretense of chores, looking for him. She didn’t need to tell Rem, Rem didn’t need to bloody her hands with him, poetic as that might be. No this was Ram’s prey. And Ram knew she needed little more than her bare hands to take him out.
Rem who looked at her with concerned eyes. Rem who started helping her with far more chores. Sweet Rem who seemed to think she needed some sort of rest, some sort of break. Like there was a break in a hunt!
Her prey was smart, clever. She knew that, she had prepared for that. (And didn’t that go oh-so-well before?). She would not make the same mistake, she would keep him from any allies. Separate her pray from a pack.
Rem would know better than to get to close, Roswaal would hold to her judgement on this. Emila…white hair, frozen crystalized blood, pain pain pain…. Emilia could be distracted.
Emilia who awkwardly flitted around her crestfallen whenever Ram brushed her off. Emilia who offered her some expensive looking sleeping draughts, as if she would take something from her murderers hand. Emilia who whispered to Rem and oh she had to get Rem away, danger danger danger…
Rationally she knew she needed to find out how Subaru went about his murder to stop its accrual. Rationality, seemed to slip from her brain more and more, little more driving her through the haze then a need to hunt.
She knew the curse must have come from the mansion, for that was where he was, and if she could not find him, surely he must be setting it up.
Roswaal offered her a device of his, a way to track magic in the house during the second night, “for a full night sleep, can’t give things away for free naaah?”
Naturally she waited until he’d retired and snuck out anyways, prowling the whole mansion for any sort of anomaly.
Nothing.
They needed supplies from the market, she could expand her hunt there…
Emilia stopped her at the door with too fake a smile, “I’ll come with you to the market.” Her smile wide but more genuine then this one, purple eyes meeting hers, cold such cold, pain pain pain….
She was trembling. She could not be trembling, not in the presence of a predator. She could not give in to fear, especially not when she knew somewhere something in Emilia’s statement was so very false…
“I will gladly accompany you both,” came Rem’s cool voice from behind her.
No.
Rem couldn’t come, Rem couldn’t be with the ice and the red and the pain and the mad voice. Rem couldn’t die like Ram. Rem couldn’t die at all.
Rem and Emilia were staring at her with concern. She had slipped up, shown weakness to the predator, and her sister would pay for it. This was not good not good not….
“Emilia, I have some treaties I need you too look over, can’t have you slacking off on your training for Queenhood!” at Roswaal’s command, the world rightened itself. Emilia left Rem to return to the mansion. Rem moved to pick up the basket and Ram moved to follow before a hand stopped her.
“Ram, if I might have a word?” he said guiding her away from Rem.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said voice filled with a firm disapproval.
So? “I had to find it.”
“You deliberately went against my orders,” he said turning her around to study her, as if she’d done something especially unusual. As if she wasn’t the one who disobeyed the orders of the Purge King in any way she could.
What wasn’t he understanding? “I had to find it!”
He looked at her and tapped her the space of her head where her horn had been, frowning. “A different tactic then,” he mused to himself before turning to her. “Why not let it come to you? A trap. One that would wake you should it have your prey.”
She’d rather do something with her time, but Roswaal was not taking no. Instead he was showing her a complicated spell, one she couldn’t quite follow with the haze in her brain. She didn’t really believe him when he told her it would only be activated upon her falling asleep. She wanted to laugh, no way she could sleep while she was hunting. But she had not slept since she returned and the pillows where thick and Roswaal was turning out the lights and closing the door behind him, taking the last bit of light with it…
She awoke to the sensations that something was off, blinking her drowsy eyes open to the room she’d been left in. It wasn’t her room. She should go to her room.
And suddenly she was up and walking to the door, head clearing a little as she headed down the hall to Rem and her room.
She only realized that she’d probably wake Rem when the door was already half way open.
Rem didn’t stir as Ram crept in, sleeping so peacefully. Ram couldn’t help a smile on her face as she turned to watch her sister sleep…
So
Still
Like she wasn’t
Breathing
There was a noise loud and shrill filling up the whole mansion. It hurt Ram’s ears but she didn’t care. She was shaking Rem. Expecting her to wake to stand she’d been promised!
She had promised!
It was cruel to cruel to cruel to give her hope and rip it away.
What had she expected from the witch?
Her screams gave way to sobs and she collapsed by her sisters bed, watching her worst nightmare play out again. Footsteps behind her, none that really mattered…
…except the one’s she knew better than her own, the ones that came to her every day she was trapped in that awful place with food and mad ramblings…
A hunter, no a madman, come to see his handiwork.
A madman about to become prey to her vengeance.
All she had last was anger, so anger she would use. Wide cuts of wind, letting go of all finesse or strategy. Just rage fueling her movements, rage at the man who did this, at the witch who dangled a future in front of her, at the spirit who dared to stand in her way!
The sunlight hit her as she exited the mansion, leaving her blind in the brilliant colors she’d lost when in that cell. That cell. She was not going back there. She was a hunter, not the prey.
So despite her anger, she did not chase him towards the spot where he’d attacked her first. She was not spending those years in that cell again, for the off chance he’d let her kill him? No. This death would be painful and it would be at her hand and he wouldn’t be begging for it.
Instead she chased him towards a cliffside, lots of sharp rocks below. If she angled the wind right he wouldn’t even die on impact.
So what if Beatrice, who had the nerve to stand in her way, managed to make it to the same cliffside? Her prey had the cliff to its back, it couldn’t even run while she fought its little protector. It would be an easy fight. The little spirit lacked power outside of the library after all.
Easy, especially as he brushed off his protector’s help (in a manner so strange, so unlike the Purge King), stepping out and bowing to his hunter.
Her prey as accepted its fate, she can live with that. She lived with that before.
She should have known the Purge king was not to be underestimated, for even if he had no skill in combat, his words could stop even the most ferocious of predators.
“…But I do remember, I know a part of you two that you’ve forgotten!”
She hated him but, now with everything going on she needed to know, needed to know why, “What do you know? What do you know about Rem and me?”
His first few words were cryptic and vague and she almost prepared to throw him off the cliff right then and then he said….
And then he said…
“That I love you guys!” doubling over with the confession.
And he Jumped!
“This is something only I can do! I’m going to save you!”
Taking her revenge from her, swearing to amend this and …watching him leap into the air, the man who singlehandedly clawed his way into becoming a threat kingdoms feared, the man who built his fortune on miracles….for a split second she thought he’d do it somehow.
Then he fell.
“After all that nonsense you kept spouting. Was this part of your plan as well Beatrice?” she growled to the current protector of the Purge king…no he wasn’t the Purge king, he’d never be the Purge king.
Beatrice still cried for him. As if he’d mattered to her somehow. She wondered if the others had cried for him when he’d died the first time.
“This is what you call ‘love’?” she said to the corpse who had claimed to love them. She should have known better really, he’d let her kill him the first time. She should have known this was his version of love. “Honestly. There is no help for you.”
Bitterly she cursed the sky, his memory, his “love,” and the witch who sent her back.
Don’t curse witches. You never know if they are listening.