#nobody hate xikist please T.T

[outoutdamnspark]

The Serpent and The Hound

Some purely self-indulgent OC stuff this time, set in the D&D world @psidontknow have going on together. (Technically this is an AU of an AU, but ehhhhh, I don’t feel like boring anybody with specifics. XD)

The Hound of the Emperor is the bad-end au version of my D&D character, Gibrahltar (”Lysiri”) Seventh-Star.

Xikist is the Snake God of Knowledge; he and ‘Sister,” “Brother,” and the “Nameless Sibling” belong to my bro-bro and are borrowed with love~

(CW: Hella Daddy Issues™️, regret, anger, emotional hurt-no-comfort. heavy/dark themes. references to past god murder. Snake Dad fucked up and now they’re both paying for it.)

===

She sits, arms folded, staring daggers like the ones she used to carry at his back. He knows she's there, she knows he knows; he just won't turn around. She'd landed on his windowsill, in the office she can remember from her childhood - napping in his coils on the soft, soft carpet, stealing snacks with one brother to sneakily give to another, feeling loved and happy before it all went to shit and she closed her heart against the family that had apparently never let her into theirs. (And if they had, well, then they had a funny fucking way of showing it.) She'd landed, and she'd broken the lock with her bare hands and a spark of magic, pushed open the panes to climb inside. She'd stayed there then, cloaked in her spell of invisibility, not sure why she'd bothered in the first place when he'd know immediately where she was. 

But she'd wanted to see what he'd do.

(Did she still mean nothing to him? Had she ever meant anything to begin with? Turn around, turn around, turn around, Father, turn around and LOOK AT ME.)

She'd kept the shield, the invisibility, up like a cover over a frightened child's head - though her heart was filled with anything but - until the sun had started its descent and the air had begun to cool. 

And now, even as she drops it, he still doesn't turn. 

Why had she even come here in the first place? She'd had no clue, still doesn't; maybe it was a kind of bitter nostalgia, a foolish wish to appease the rotting part of herself that longed for all of the pain of betrayal to have been nothing but a bad dream. To sever loose ends, maybe. She doesn't know. 

She steps closer, footfalls muffled by the second spell enveloping her, the one she hasn't yet dropped, and comes to stand directly at his back, so close that should he turn his head he will touch her with his braid. 

"Rancid viper," she hisses, a habit adopted as a child that she still cannot shake, a daughter wishing to emulate her Eniri, now a soulless Hound staked through with memories of a life that never truly existed. "Turn. Around." Her lips curl over her teeth. "Face your mistakes for once in your  life."

He sighs, his shoulders slumping. He still doesn't turn, though his head tilts to the side, ear positioned now in her direction. "...I've made many mistakes in my lifetime," he says, and his voice fills her heart with both anger and childlike misery, pain and longing, until it overflows to fill her eyes with scalding tears. "You were never one of them."

"Liar," she rasps. She holds her volume low and it scratches at her throat on its way out, trying to be bigger than she allows it to be. "What was it you said to Sister after my second brother left? That you'd put too much time and effort into me to let me die just yet?" She spits to the side, onto one of his open journals resting beside the desk. 

He glances at it, and she can see the frown tugging at the side of his face in profile. Regret, her heart wishes; distaste, her head rebuffs. 

Ignorant of her thoughts, (though she wouldn't put it past him,) he lowers his head. His hands fold overtop the ledger in front of him, closing it and coming to rest daintily atop its leather cover. "...Words cannot express how many times I've wished I could undo having ever said that."

She laughs; a bark, mirthless, incredulous. "So that your experiment would have stayed where you could see it?"

"No." 

Finally, he turns. 

He pivots slowly in his chair, head lifting only after the rest of him has shifted in her direction. His eyes are the last thing to reach her, and even then do not fully meet her own. 

His expression is slack, closed off as she'd expected, emotionless, with lips down turned at the corners and lids heavy. Gone is his usual smugness, the smirk that has fueled her anger for centuries, and in its place is… nothing. He is as hollow as she remembers him, and yet. He is not. The lines around his eyes are sad, tired, giving him the look of someone who is lost, resigned. 

Sorrow, her heart wishes again; apathy, her head once again replies. 

"No?" she prompts, demands, when he does not continue. Her eyes burn directly into his own, daring (beseeching) him to look at her properly. 

He shakes his head. "No."

Her lips curl further, a bestial, canine snarl. The Hound growls. "Then why?"

His voice is an uncharacteristic whisper when he finally says, "Because it hurt you." He breathes. "Because it cost me my daughter."

She reels back as if struck, a cry of rage and anguish tearing from her throat. Instinctively, a knee-jerk reaction to pain, a substitution of violence so that nothing can touch her long enough to hurt, she reaches for the dragon-headed hilt at her side. With a fluid slice of her hand through the air she draws her sword and lets its tendrils dig into the flesh of her arm. Flames erupt from the mouth of the hilt, forming the blade of the ancient Dragon Buster Sword. 

She holds it to his face, now a barrier, an extension of an arm's distance between them. "Fuck you," she hisses again, ignoring the way her voice and breath both catch. "Fuck you, fuck you. Call me that again and I'll take your venomous tongue." 

The flames singe at the edges of his hair. He does not try to move away. 

A horrible sound crawls its way up and out through her mouth, and it's impossible for her to tell through the ringing in her ears whether it's a sob or a strangled scream - a cry for blood or a plea for help. "Your daughter is downstairs," she accuses, tries and tries and tries not to think of the twisting feeling in her gut that she'd felt upon seeing the little fiendkind girl playing among the books - the feeling that persists as she pointedly does not look at the girl's drawings on the snake god's office walls. "I saw how easily you replaced me." 

He sighs, shifting his gaze to finally see her, and for a moment she is thrown for a loop by the utter sadness with which he looks at her. 

(She has the sudden, powerful urge to throw herself into his arms and sob, to cry into her father's dress like she did over a dozen lifetimes ago, and to beg every god that remains, every one she hasn’t hunted and slain as the Emperor's Hound, for a path back from the darkness she's allowed to swallow her up.)

She feels a single traitorous tear slip free, sliding down her cheek. She hides it behind another hateful snarl. Call the Hound and it shall come. 

"Say something!"

He simply looks at her. "...What is there that I can?" he whispers. "The damage is already done." His gaze lowers to the sword fused into her arm. "...I'm so sorry, Lysiri." 

She screams. 

It is an ugly sound, one of torment and grief and years and years of both missing and hating her father; it rakes her voice raw and steals the warmth from her blood. 

Xikist's desk smolders as the Dragon Buster slices it neatly in twain with a single, mournful swing. 

She stands there, chest and shoulders heaving as she fights for control of herself. Her teeth are bared, a hunter's fangs, and her eyes clenched so tightly that behind her lids there are spots of light. Without looking at him - because she can't, not now, not right after her heart has overridden her hate - she pulls the sword free from the smoking wooden remains of the desk and summons the fire back into its hilt. The tendrils retract from her arm, but she keeps her hand gripped tightly inside. She turns her back to him then, and steps back towards the open window. 

She pauses, just for a moment, with her hand on the windowpane. She doesn't look back at him as she spits a bile-flavored lie. 

"The only reason you still breathe is because of your blood-tie with Sister," she tells him, and even to her own ears it sounds thin. "I will not take her life by taking yours." Her hand tightens on the windowpane. "Be grateful."

And before he can (or doesn't) respond, she leaps out the window into the desert air beyond. 

She almost lets herself hit the ground before she bothers to open her wings.