I don't know.[break][break]

Where his resolve strengthened, her own faltered.[break][break]

A large hand, which had once sought to drag her to her own fiery destruction in this very place, alighted gently on hers. Not so long ago, she'd have brushed that comfort away. The strange encounter that had led them each to unmask the other held a new clarity for her in the wake of these revelations, however.[break][break]

His torment drove him to inflict it on others, just as hers did.[break][break]

"I don't know that I believe in anything. Or anyone."[break][break]

Looking into his eyes felt too dangerous, suddenly. All her energy had been spent to maintain the empathetic link between them, and only now did she truly feel the way it made even standing upright a struggle as dizziness muddied her thoughts and exhaustion weighed down on her shoulders.[break][break]

I should leave, she thought distantly. I know who he is, because I know what I am.[break][break]

Elisabeth rested her forehead against his own instead, shutting her eyes. She wondered idly if the confidence radiating out from him was something you could breathe in, stealing it for yourself.[break][break]

"Myself least of all."[break][break]

The world had taught Elisabeth her own humility over and over, painful and persistent in its reminders.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

"I wonder what it might be like," she said as a soft laugh fluttered through her words, "to look at the world as you see it for a day."[break][break]

He had such a boyish certainty about things.[break][break]

The allure of him, she realized in this instant, had never been power. Ambition, for all its hold over them both, could be attained countless ways: through influence, through money, through the gods they had both shackled themselves to.[break][break]

She did not need MATIAS SILPH to stake her claim to power in Hoenn. Her own Avatarships had proved that, twice over.[break][break]

He did not need her to achieve power, either. Groudon and Virizion each afforded him that, in a manner that she never could.[break][break]

Elisabeth exhaled and withdrew from him, understanding dawning as heat flushed through her skin. She studied him the way a child might study the night sky, surprised to belatedly discover how each star had outlined constellations all along.[break][break]

Their mutual suffering hadn't been all that compelled her to stay in his company.[break][break]

"You see the future as a clean, empty slate for you to write your legacy upon," she realized aloud. Her face reflected the careful thought that had gone into her observation, and the rumination that had followed after. "I... can't remember the last time I did the same."[break][break]

I focus on the past instead, as if it's a prophecy doomed to repeat again.

[break]

Her fingers dared to tenderly run through his hair, overcome by a bittersweet stirring of pity. She knew how this story would play out, regardless of how many times she attempted to rewrite its script.[break][break]

Moments like these were fleeting. They were misleading pockets of time, grains of sand that slipped through the hourglass to be mistaken for pearls.[break][break]

"This will not end the way you hope," she reminded him gently.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

His hands encircled her face, and she thought absently at how these coarse palms were better suited to cruelty than kindness. The same could be said of her own, despite their deceptive softness.[break][break]

Neither of them possessed the delicacy to hold fragile things. But maybe they understood being broken better than being whole.[break][break]

"When the world ends, something always comes after, doesn't it?" she said instead of answering him.[break][break]

In the wake of calamity, nature still thrived. Overgrown ivy ensnared rubble and ruins; molten lava paved the scorched earth with smooth basalt stone; lightning left behind glittering fulgurite glass in the sand.[break][break]

Destruction could beget creation.[break][break]

"I don't need a legacy," she said, shaking her head. "I don't need to be remembered."[break][break]

He'd said that neither of them needed love, yet she'd known even then he'd lied to himself.[break][break]

"But," she confessed, in a voice so soft and quiet he could only hear it for her closeness, "I will mourn you, too, when your time comes."[break][break]

I don't want to be the only one who understands how this feels.[break][break]

I don't want to be alone.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

This was a mistake, but she wondered if he understood that truth as well as she did.[break][break]

The things you wanted had a way of cruelly turning on you, she knew. Men had betrayed her many times over, while others had tasted the venom of her betrayal just as intimately.[break][break]

Which would happen first: his betrayal, or her own? She didn't know, but one would eventually precede the other.[break][break]

Here in the glowing heart of Mt. Chimney, he left himself vulnerable to her, showing the naivety of youth hidden beneath mountains of arrogant bravado and careless confidence. Her own mask had faltered somewhere along the way, the sneering veneer lost to smoke and ash.[break][break]

The first kiss between the two of them had been an act of violence; the last, an act of defiance. "You'll regret that," she'd warned him then, and she still believed it now.[break][break]

She'd not added aloud: I'll regret this, too.[break][break]

It was an act of treason, this time.[break][break]

She didn't kiss him the way lovers do, giving into the heat and passion of the moment. Instead, she kissed him with the knowing tenderness of a farewell, burdened with sorrow for the departure soon to follow. No matter how prolonged this moment between them was, its brevity in the greater scope of time remained ephemeral.[break][break]

"Matias," she breathed out as she pulled away, looking up at him with an expression that veered between guilt and wondering. "Do you trust me?"[break][break]

You shouldn't, whispered a quiet voice in the back of her mind.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

I don't.[break][break]

"You do?" she repeated instead, unable to read his own sincerity with certainty. The hurt she recognized, however, and she immediately recognized herself as its cause.[break][break]

He should learn to expect that from her, she supposed, if this was what he wanted.[break][break]

Her hand covered his in apology, enveloping his warmth with her own.[break][break]

"If you trust me," she said, glancing up at him, "then I need you to do something for me."[break][break]

Kindness and cruelty went hand-in-hand in this request.[break][break]

"There will be an attack near Dewford in the coming days."[break][break]

A pause, spanning no longer than the beat of a Beautify's wings, preceded her selfish demand.[break][break]

"I need you to be absent."[break][break]

Because if you're there, I will have to kill you.[break][break]

Because I have to be there, to kill a brother I don't know if you'll even mourn.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

This was a gamble, but then again, she'd only ever felt the thrill of playing when stakes were high.[break][break]

She leaned into his touch, her lips brushing against his palm as she whispered, "Because it's my turn to cut off the head of the snake, and if you're there, you'll be forced to stop me."[break][break]

Hadn't she already given him enough ammunition to forewarn the League? Wasn't that trust enough for him, in itself?[break][break]

But it wasn't. Words meant nothing; to outcasts like them, actions dictated everything.

[break]

Ancient contingencies maneuvered into place, set into motion with a series of kisses she trailed down his arm. She only knew how to lie with the truth, and that translated in how she pressed her body against his, prepared to seal the pact between them with something solid he could believe in.[break][break]

"Don't make me implicate you further, Matias," she murmured into his neck, even as her hands invited his to commit transgressions elsewhere; she made herself into something soft and easy to hold, offering him a surrender in all but name. "Either trust me, or don't."[break][break]

No hesitance restrained her now.[break][break]

She tempted him with their mutual destruction, her mouth claiming his as the volcano around them burned.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]