sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] One-Man Show

Why is a tricky one. Shiro's spent the last few months struggling with questions of why, himself.

"...They took my arm in I think the... third month? It was hard to keep track of time." Shiro lifts the hand he has left, flexing the fingers, looking at the callouses across his palm.

"I didn't escape for... Eight or nine more, maybe." Escape was putting it generously. Turned loose by a spy. Nothing of his own doing.

"They had me there for a year. Give or take." His fingertips unerringly find their way up, like a nervous tic, to push absently at the white forelock. He'd almost forgotten what he'd looked like without it. Without his scar. Seeing himself so vividly had been distressing in and of itself.

"And I never lost. I hated fighting. Had never really done it before, hated doing it for a crowd. I could have just stopped, given up, let it be over. I had to choose not to. Every time."

He drops his hand again, watching the delicate crack of the flames off their small fire.

"Maybe you saw an opportunity. Maybe you didn't even recognize it, but in your gut, you knew it was the first real chance you had. So you took it."

"...It has been little over a year. Perhaps a year and a few months, for me." Since that day. Since his choice to die- his failure to see it through. The bargaining afterward. Whatever it was that stayed Jonas' hand initially, whatever it was that had him and Alistair keep him on even with the risks...

The need must have been universal for Alistair's Warden to have made the same choice. Their ragged, merry band facing off against the Blight.

"...But it was a year of following, I suppose. A different set of handlers but handlers none the less. Orders. Missions. Though they were no longer 'find this man and kill him' though we did do our fair share of killing- it was more 'find this gemstone and put it on this pillar or smear blood on this altar or slay a nest of darkspawn.' Whatever job needed doing to raise money for the armies. Whatever good Jonas saw that needed doing, whether or not it was directly connected to the war effort." He turns his slice of rabbit over in his fingers, eyes on the fire. "You do not have them on your world, Darkspawn. I am uncertain how to...describe them, to you."

A beat, a long moment.

"But- perhaps I could show you. If you wanted." Something he could choose to share. Something he could offer that they both...wanted. Instead of having it torn from their minds and lives and pasted on display.

The offer, the gesture of it, is staggering given what they've just been through. Shiro looks staggered, but he also nods, fractionally. If Zevran wants this, wants to share this piece, Shiro considers it a gift, and he won't refuse it.

"Show me."

How was it with Alistair, again? Touching, yes but...He does not wish to remove the fur from Shiro's shoulders, to expose him to the chill of the night. He pops his slice of rabbit in his mouth before peeling off his gloves, turning to reach up and hold Shiro's face much as he had for Alistair.

When in doubt- do exactly the same as before. Like this it is-

He remembers all too well, the First Night. The warmth of wine in their bellies and how sweetly Shiro sighed. Remembers well the tenderness, the affection between Altair and Shiro not long ago. So he does not lean in. He simply cradles Shiro's jaw in one hand and lets his eyes focus on the middle distance- for a moment? Nothing. Just the warmth of the fire crackling, the stillness of the night-

That becomes the muck and oppressive darkness of the Deep Roads. The skittering patter of Genlock's feet, the dull groan of Hurlocks lurching from all sides. The scrape of a shirek's blades against stone, the searing acid and rage of Emissary's hurling their blackened magics about.

The ground shaking force of an Ogre's blow, the rancid puff of its breath, the crushing grip about his ribs before he's able to twist free. Slogging through their endless hordes over the bridge with the Legion of the Dead at their back-

Flickers of memory of the fields surrounding Loathering, once full of life and color, burnt and blackened, reeking of blood and death.

The inhuman wail and roar of the Archdemon, a tainted dragon flying high above, urging onward a massive wave of twisted, tainted bodies swarming the walls of Denerim like locusts.

The noise that leaves Shiro's mouth is low, guttural, and entirely unbidden. He recoils from the images, turning his face away but into Zevran's hand, not breaking the connection, even if he wants to.

"Oh my God," he gasps.

"They die like anything else but-" The taint lies thick on the land, destroys crops- he recalls a few thralls, those he's seen that were touched by the gore and blood, the illness they bring with them. The madness.

The destruction they bring simply by existing aboveground where they were never meant to see the light of day. Zevran lets the knowledge go, thumb swiping against Shiro's cheek out of habit born of doing the same to Alistair. "For the past year- that is what I fought. We win in the end. Slay the dragon, stop the Blight, become great heros, as I said."

Shiro pulls in a ragged breath, and exhales it just as shakily, meeting Zevran's eyes.

"That's... That's insane. Those creatures- that's the result of... of magic, in your world?"

He wants to understand, even if everything in his rational mind wants to reject it. Even if his skin is still crawling.

"The short answer? Yes. Magic. The long answer...we are certain it is some manner of magic but- it happened so long ago? And when a Blight rolls through the continent it takes everything with it. Crops. People. Knowledge. They last years, decades sometimes- but this one in Fereldan? A single year. We were quick to squash it- so not much was lost comparatively speaking."

He lets his hands fall away, pulling his gloves back on to stave off the chill. "I am not certain how it is they came to be- but they come from underground, digging up the old gods and feeding them tainted blood- the dragons. Creating archdemons to guide them to the surface and sweep over the continent like a wave of fire, blood, and death."

"It's terrifying," Shiro says honestly, shifting close enough now to share the fur, easily draping it across Zevran's shoulders so it spans them both.

"I've never seen anything like that. Anywhere."

"The worst part isn't even the taint, or the way they do not seem to feel pain, but the smell." Zevran shudders in memory, tucked close to Shiro- for warmth. For the moment, nothing more. "There is nothing like this in your world, your war?"

"No. Maybe, once- but not on Earth. Infantry battles, fighting on the ground? There's a long history of that. But there hasn't been war on Earth in a hundred years. And the war we found when we left it, was..."

The scale of what he saw in Zevran's memories felt overwhelming, but he knows, from a sheer perspective of numbers, it doesn't really compare to a Galra fleet. One plague of aggressive, poisonous demons struggling to overtake a continent is horrific, but it's hard to relate it to the scope of an intergalactic battle.

"I'm a pilot. So I... control a mechanized suit of armor. An ancient weapon that chooses who wields it, and that can join itself to four others, to create a... a super weapon, I guess would be the easiest way to describe it. We fight mostly in space, or at least in the air. It's-"

He breaks the thought off with sigh, and flashes Zevran a rueful sideways smile, then lifts his hand, palm up.

"I can show you. If you want."

Edited 2019-02-01 09:24 (UTC)

"It is a very different war." One with an intelligence of some sort on the other side rather than ravenous hunger. That- makes it more dangerous. He could attempt to wrap his mind around it but- assassins are not meant for war. Small missions, in and out, on occasion a large coupe but this?

Beyond him.

With a moment's hesitation, he removes his gloves again, taking Shiro's hand. "Show me."

Shiro hesitates, only in that he's not certain how to access the best, cleanest way to get it across. He closes his eyes, and unbidden there's Adam, in his cadet greys, looking out the observation deck window at the Garrison's newest, untested fighter with barely suppressed disapproval. You're flying that? Shiro forces his mind away from it, past it, and he's standing in front of the Black Lion for the first time, in a massive hall of the Castle of Lions, the other four flanking him behind. It's huge, bigger even than the others, and its eyes gleam as it comes to life after ten thousand years of waiting and roars, like a seismic event.

It bows its head not in submission but in acquiescence, in curiosity, allows Shiro to approach it and reach his hand out to touch his metal fingertips to its metal jaw, and then he's in the cockpit and they're climbing. It's not a fight Shiro needs to revisit, certainly not one he wants to see to the end, but it's the best way he knows to show what they were up against.

The lions dodge around brilliant lances of pink energy, emitting from massive warships. The first Galra cruiser Shiro saw had blotted out the sky, and this is a fleet, an armada. The lions individually do damage, cut through hulls and return fire with their own mounted lasers, but it's not enough.

Paladins, on me! As Voltron, it's easier. Once the connection is forged, Voltron lands bodily on the flagship, kneeling. On Shiro's word, Voltron draws an energy sword from whatever Quintessence fueled ether the lions could access, and they drag it diagonally through the massive ship, even as manned fighters pour from it by the increasing hundreds.

The explosion dwarfs them all, sends a shockwave rippling through the next ship, and Voltron's wings gleam with blue light as they move to forward the attack.

At the last moment Shiro opens his eye, only a split second of the inadvertent memory coming into focus. Standing in a field of black stars, just space, eternal and endless and empty.

He clears his throat, looking over at Zevran with some curiosity.

"Hopefully that wasn't just... additionally confusing."

It's- quite a lot. A man in an unfamiliar uniform, stars and ships and massive structures unlike anything he's ever seen, flight and magic beyond anything he's ever seen- lions, massive and metal and alive in their own way, ships that bond into a steel warrior-

This is the thing operas and epics are made of.

He doesn't have words. Doesn't have context for any of this- his ears tipped down, his eyes wide and wondering, hand curled in Shiro's.

"That is..." He mumbles to himself in Antivan for a moment before settling. "The lions are- ridiculously awesome."

Shiro laughs, a genuine peal of it, and nods a little.

"Yeah. They're incredible. We still don't know that much about them, really. What they can really do. But they... revealed it to us, over time." He sighs, squeezing Zevran's hand gently before pushing it back toward the fold of his coat and his gloves.

"...the black lion saved me. When I died, my body was destroyed. But it, uh. Protected my soul. Held it, inside of itself. I wish I could explain how."

"...That is how golems are made, in my world. A volunteer is encased in armor and molten lyrium poured within- which kills the volunteer but imbues their spirit into the armor." All the more reason to destroy the anvil, Jonas said. A volunteer would only remain so for so long. An eternity of servitude is-

It isn't a thing that should exist.

"So it is- strange but not unfamiliar?"

"That sounds like a nightmare, frankly, and a bad situation waiting to backfire," Shiro says honestly, wondering if Zevran's talked about golems with Connor yet, "but I guess the concept isn't totally dissimilar. I wasn't bound to Black like that, though, I was just... held there. I tried to reach out to my team a few times, warn them, I just... wasn't strong enough."

"It was. We destroyed the means, the only man- golem- that knew how it worked? Threw himself into an abyss afterward. It is not something that is meant to be done. A living spirit is not meant to reside in something hollow." Something meant for war.

"...no," Shiro agrees, looking down at his hand again. Was that what Haggar wanted? To turn him into something hollow to control. Was that what the clones had been at attempt at? He couldn't know, not really. The tactical advantage of having a copy of him to control was obvious, but sometimes her words echoed dissonant and harsh in his memory.

You could have been our greatest weapon.

"It isn't."

[MINGLE] One-Man Show

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