#the anger turns me on so bad uuuuugh

[ho-for-joequinn-fics]

He is beauty, he is grace, when he’s angry he’ll smash a vase

*dreamy sigh* The rage.

[matter-of-a-pinion]

Prompt 4: Baleful

At 16 years old Livana Fallenruth had lived what she'd considered an impossibly boring life. She lived in the freezing wasteland of Western Coerthas on the outskirts of an incredibly small settlement where everybody knew each other's names and no one bothered to say them because it was too damn cold to hold a prolonged conversation. She didn't even live in Ishgard. At least if she lived there there would be things to do. At least there were people there… not that she had any idea how to interact with them.

"Hi. So. How do you feel about plants and animals? Because wow. I love them. And that's really all I know about!" just didn't strike her as the riveting pinnacle of conversational genius that she'd want it to be.

Not that that mattered much. The times she and her twin sister Nyra had gone to the city for supplies (always arriving and leaving later than they thought they would because time management was not their forte) she felt as though she wasn't even there anyway. No one noticed when she tried to talk to them because they were too busy trying to talk to her radiantly charismatic twin sister instead. Liv thought that should make her feel more comfortable, that not even being required to speak would make the excitement of being in the city less awkward for her. But it didn't. It annoyed her. Why did people gravitate towards Nyra like a moth to the flame and why did they treat Liv more like a fly buzzing around their ears?

"Stop giving me that look," her sister would say. "Or your face will freeze that way."

"What way?" Liv would ask.

Then Nyra would do an over-exaggerated mockery of Liv's sour, annoyed expression that always crossed her face when she'd try to ask a stranger for assistance and they'd address their response to her twin instead.

"I don't look like that!" Liv would huff, insulted.

"You look just like that!"

"You'll look worse when I punch you!"

"You'll look worse when I tell Mom and Dad you punched me!"

"Uuuuugh. I hate you!"

"Ha! No you don't! You love me!"

And of course Nyra was right. Even more infuriating than how everyone loved being around her twin was how they were right to feel that way. Liv felt that way too. She had as little choice in the matter as anyone else. Nyra was a flame after all. And it was so fucking cold in Coerthas…

At 16 it's easy to believe that life is destined to be exactly as it is at that moment for the rest of eternity. Relationships will be the same, feelings will be the same, the world will stay the same, and you'll remain the same too. But it doesn't work that way. Not for anyone. And not for the Fallenruth twins.

At 17 Liv started having the dreams. In them she'd wake up in her room but everything was frozen, everything encased in ice except for the big black raven perched on her bedroom dresser. Each time she had the dream it was there waiting for her with a sort of agitated demeanor, as though it had been waiting there for hours for her to arrive and was annoyed she hadn't bothered to apologize for wasting its precious time. 

It wasn't just that every item in the house was frozen, icicles hanging precariously from the ceiling and down from the lips of every bit of furniture, but the people were too. Never in exactly the same place in each dream, but always in the same condition: encased completely in unbreakable ice. And always with the same expression of their faces: somehow looking right at Liv, mouths twisted in scorn, and eyes burning with accusation despite the cold.

But Nyra? She was never frozen. Sometimes Liv would look for her in the dream and sometimes she wouldn't have to. The raven would alight to Liv's shoulder and flap its massive wings when her sister would arrive in the dream and Liv would turn to find her twin staring back at her, same accusatory expression written across her beautiful face. Then Nyra would raise her hand as though to cast a spell and…

Liv would wake up.

Her world only frozen in that every day felt exactly the same and every day was unfathomably cold in Coerthas. 

Liv decided at 18 she was done with the area. She was tired of being overlooked, she was tired of being "oh yeah, that's Nyra's sister", she was tired of the cold. She wanted to be somewhere teeming with sounds and life… but not people. She wanted deep dark forests alive with the sound of birds, insects, and frogs. She wanted babbling brooks and the creaking of ancient oak trees in the wind. She wanted to see animals she'd never seen before and plants she'd never cataloged. 

She moved to the Shroud and like a wilting plant left too long in the shade she bloomed once she found the sun. In the Shroud she disappeared into nature but found herself there too. She no longer felt lost. And without comparisons to her sister she no longer felt superfluous. 

She still missed Nyra. Of course she did. She was the one part of her old life she couldn't stop missing. But she had to get away. She had to put that distance there. She had to step out into her own life. Liv had to live.

At 21 she got the message from her father that they wanted her to come home. It was a messy letter, hastily written, one part full of confusing apologies, one part desperation. Her family rarely wrote to her and when they did it was certainly never like this. It was obvious something was going on. And she needed to go back. She needed help. And immediately. 

And in the biggest regret of her life…

She didn't. 

She waited.

Liv was never on time.

She had been working at Bentbranch Meadows on rehabilitating an injured raven and she was making great progress with it. It had been skittish and outright aggressive to the other workers and only seemed to calm down under Liv's care. Day by day its injured right wing got better and better. Soon it'd be able to fly again. She wanted to be there for that.

Three days after receiving the letter, she was there for that. That early morning was surprisingly cold. A thin fog had settled in the woods obscuring the details of the landscape so that Liv felt she'd stepped into the first layer of a painting or into a dream rather than reality. She moved into the room with Pebble the raven (so named for his obvious affection for his namesake) to see him looking agitated.

As though he'd been waiting for her for hours.

As though she'd wasted his precious time with her delay.

His wings fully healed he alighted to her shoulder and croaked loudly in her ear. And she could have sworn he said "Home."

That solidified it. She rushed back home, out of the comfort of her forests and back into the cold of Western Coerthas, past the settlement, to her family's modest home on the outskirts.

And she watched as her house began to turn to ice. She should have moved the moment she saw it but fear gripped her as steadily as the ice gripped the siding. And she'd always been bad on timing anyway. Five seconds earlier she might have been able to save her mother. Three and maybe her father. But by the time she broke into the downstairs window that had not yet covered in supernatural ice she only had to to save her twin sister.

And she swore the look Nyra gave her when she did that was one she'd never seen on her face save in dreams and when she was mocking Livana in Ishgard.

Anger.

And though afterwards she burst into tears and told Liv how happy she was she'd come and thanked her for getting her out of there… something felt off.

One home lost forever, the Shroud felt lost to her too. They might as well have both been frozen over by whatever that spell was. And as long as her parents were trapped inside, she was trapped by guilt and the paranoia that her twin sister, who everyone loved, herself most of all, hated her.

In Liv's mind, Nyra's face had frozen forever to what she'd seen inside the house: scornful lips and baleful gaze.