Entanglement

[Yvonne]

Felicity lashed out at her, not to injure, but to push her away and create distance between them. The fiery-haired berserker glared at Yvonne with eyes to match those scarlet strands, such roiling and boiling, quiet fury the Alerian swore to herself she could feel the blistering heat on her skin. Her companion, her friend had one simplistic question to ask of her, one potent, powerful question to pose.

Why?

The furious berserker erupted red hot wrath, channelling the fury of her soul through her voice and unleashed the hell she experienced routinely unto the individual who had tried to help her. Felicity gave Yvonne a taste, an ember of how she felt and it shook her benefactor to their very core. The wounded woman screamed follow-through questions that impacted like definitive statements, each assailment another blow that lead back to her original question.

Why? Yvonne... Why?

Whether it was the searing tears burning trails down Felicity's cheeks - her anguish so openly on display - or the scorching remarks that deliberately ignited a firewall between them, tears of her own welled up in Yvonne's goggled eyes. She took them off the moment her vision became blurred with a watery haze, and as soon as she did her tears streamed down her cheeks like cascading falls. She'd been taken entirely by surprise, holding no expectation whatsoever that Felicity could let loose a volcano of agony and in her direction, least of all. No, she hadn't anticipated this outcome. Consistently what would happen was, when Yvonne went out of her way to help someone suffering, she was met with gratitude. Thanks.

Not this time. Yvonne's silvery eyes shied away from those flaming furnaces billowing a hellstorm for her, looking to the left-open medical kit from which she'd pulled all the tools she needed to bandage Felicity's wound. Her trembling hands closed it, symbolizing her charity and support were coming to an end. All these tools strewn about, all the effort - the lengths she had gone to, socially-demolishing the owner of this storefront, imposing her will on the milksop assistant, sweeping her fears and feelings aside to operate on her gaping wound... how did any of it mean anything, how did it matter at all if Felicity wasn't grateful for it?

Yvonne had no words. For all her etiquette tutoring in Kachuck, all of Abel's mentoring as they'd travelled most of the known world, all of the people she'd confronted to grasp onto some kind of ledge on the social-cliff she'd been falling from throughout her life... this was a confrontation she didn't want to have. She had no grounds to stand on, couldn't argue with one of the first people she'd ever met that was so much like her, a hybridization of races that could barely tolerate each other. To quarrel with Felicity was to quarrel with her blood-sister. To fight with Felicity was to fight with herself.

There were no words at all.

Yvonne turned away from the explosive teen and took hesitant steps toward the door. She was trembling uncontrollably, her legs shaking to such a degree she could scarcely walk in a straight line. Her spyglass goggles, her clockwork gloves she abandoned - her sorrow flooding her face - as she neared the doorway to the outside world, her tear-droplets shaking free of her black skin as she quivered hysterically. Her phobia was wracking her entire body - she was so afraid she didn't know herself anymore, experienced so much dread and terror that this couldn't possibly be real... could it?

If what Felicity had screamed at her was true - that she was a magic-manipulating mage - she should go, run, run away and never look back. Run out into that blistering sunlight that felt like a mild fever compared with the wrath she was being subjected to here. This entire city - this Donnalaich, her thoughts spat the name - was a coven of witches her dark elven brethren would love nothing more than to put to the torch. Why had she ever come here at all? Why had she submerged herself in this cesspit of magic? Why had she aligned herself with someone who practiced the arcane?

Should her superiors - or so they presumed themselves to be - ever discovered she had willingly sought refuge, refuge among the ruined buildings of wicked practitioners of sorcery, or cavorted with a travelling companion who dabbled in reality-bending hocus pocus... she would be exiled from her homeland forever at best, and executed as a foul demon-communing witch at worst. She would be made an example, for all dark elves and dwarves to take as a lesson from her charred, crisp corpse, to steer well away from in their own lives. Never play with mystical forces beyond the scope of rational thought and science, or you will be brought to heel.

Yvonne broke down and wailed, wholly and utterly howled with grief. New tears filled her silver eyes to the brim. She had always tried to act upon what she believed to be right. Everything she had done, every struggle she had overcome, every argument she had won she had known herself to be in the right. Felicity had a good heart beating in her chest, had a compassionate soul holding her to this world and yet here they were... opposed. They had come so far through the jungle, helped each other survive the dangers that desired to eat them alive and now, now they were met with conflict? They had arrived at a stalemate?

The grey dwarf's gaping lower lip quavered as she, herself, was harnessed by her own immense sorrow to be the conduit of her despair. The floodgates were well and truly broken. Yvonne's aching grief drowned out all sound in the room, her pain shuddering through her meager dwarven body. She struggled to take a breath, her sadness eking out every last ounce of time it could take from her as it forced itself to be known. She struggled, struggled, closed her elven eyes and spilled all of those brimming tears at once, like dams breaking and releasing the reservoirs. Finally she managed to take a breath, but the unmitigated suffering and torment she had experience throughout her entire life could be understood in that one inhaling outcry.

"No Felicity. No. I won't go. Nobody can tell me I be doing tha wrong thing. Nobody should ever be made ta feel how ye and I have been made ta feel. I will go ta tha ends of tha earth ta ensure that nobody suffers how we have suffered. Tha ends of tha earth! Ye understand me?" Yvonne vowed, the question she knew Felicity would feel understanding for in her very bones. In her excruciating, black blood.

Yvonne hurried toward the neanderthal hybrid, her willpower - unrivalled by no woman or man on this plane of existence - allowing her to decide, in that moment for herself, she alone was in control of her own fate. The half-dwarf was met with the barring hands of the berserker trying to keep her at bay, Felicity's demands of "Leave me! Leave me alone!" trying to turn her away as she rushed to the fiery woman. Yvonne sidestepped around her block and embraced her side, burying her tear-drenched face against her back and holding on for dear life. The warrior might fight her still, throw her off in rage-induced tantrum and if that happened so be it. She would make her will known and nothing could stop her. Not anger, not fear, not sorrow. Nothing.

"There be a monster in all of us, dear. How we control that monster... it breaks us, or makes us," Yvonne spoke, offering deep and meaningful words of wisdom through her shuddering sobs.

Was she afraid? Yes, but in this moment she realized what she was truly afraid of. It wasn't magic that inspired her terror. It was rejection from people she cared about, and Yvonne cared for essentially everyone until they gave her a reason not to. Her phobia was a fear only of magic because her dark elven brethren despised it with their very being. It was them turning their backs on her that filled her with dread-tremors... but she would let them all turn away from her if this one would remain.

Ta hell with them and their misguided hatred!