Dead Dove

So over on the RQ server we were talking about dead!Xaden fics and Moth mentioned that you can't write a dead!Violet fic from Xaden's POV because of the chain reaction.

And the plotbunnies apparently decided to take that as a personal challenge.

Warning: does what it says on the tin. Dead Dove, Do Not Eat

I feel it when Sgaeyl's life spills out, soaking back into the Source.

It begins with a pounding in my chest, and the sensation of claws around my heart. The daylight turns solid black around me, shadows forming a wall without even needing a command. For a moment I think it's one of those fucking Sages trying to teach me respect again, and I start to throw up my shields.

That's when I realize where it's coming from. The navy blue night sky of Sgaeyl's presence on my hill as if she'd never left, as if I'm not standing on barren earth here now where I used to let her power and her love wash through me.

She'd banished me, but she'd never completely severed our bond.

I wonder what could make her reach out now and when I see the stars falling in her sky I know. She's dying.

The wrench in my gut when I realize she's dying and I won't die with her is harsher than would have expected. It's been years, years of loneliness, of dragging myself up through the venin ranks, learning their secrets and leaving them for the rebellion to find-

For Violet to find-

Oh gods, Violet. If Sgaeyl is dying, then Tairn is going with her to whomeever takes the souls of dragons, and Violet…

There's no way for me to know which part of their bond was reason for it, whether Violet's already gone or taking her last breaths against Tairn's bloodblack scales. The scar on my chest burns, my scarred and faded relic burns, my own breath burns in my chest.

I should be dying with them, Violet in my arms or my hands on Sgaeyl's side. If I was a better man, I would be dying with them, or maybe if I was there I would have saved them.

Instead I'm alone here, wrapping myself in layer after layer of shadow like the blankets I hid in when my mother left, as if I have any right to be upset. As if I have any right to grief or regret after everything I've done.

In my mind, on my hill, the stars have gone out of the night sky now. The dark blue fades lighter and lighter until it's gone, replaced with the parched, bone-white sky that's all I ever see now. Dead sky and dead earth, and me standing here wondering if maybe I've been dead the whole time.

I am realizing just how much the knowledge that Violet was out there, still fighting, kept me tethered to my sanity. I haven't let myself think about it, but now my walls are broken and every feeling I put away in the last three years rushes in. Has Bodhi forgiven me for leaving the burden of the rebellion to him? Have Garrick and Imogen finally gotten around to talking to each other? Has Sloane been able to come out of her brother's shadow?

Are they still alive?

Do I deserve to know if they are?

No, not yet. I've played at this, but I haven't done enough. I stand up and the shadows around me retreat.

I stare at the back of my hand, where black veins snake under my skin and disappear into the whorls of my rebellion relic. My heart never let go of Violet or Sgaeyl, but the rebellion had been my family. It's time to take this fucking seriously.

Back on my hill, I plant my feet on the dead ground and send myself as deep as I can go into the ground. Sgaeyl returned to the Source. Tairn went with her, and a part of Violet would have stayed with him, I'm sure, no matter what Malek tried to make her do. Fallen stars. The inkpot sky on Winter Solstice the first year after Threshing when Sgaeyl took me back to Aretia, hours on her back feeling her breathing and the cycle of energy between us. I know this. I know her. And she reached out to me at the end, so maybe I can even believe she wanted me to do this.

I pull, and I hear her clear as the last words she said to me, "I chose you!" She did. She chose me. She told me I was ruthless, and relentless, and she liked that. She had given me such a gift.

That gift is still mine, the last lifeline. I feel her warmth in my veins, flowing upward. I can almost, almost feel her breath on me as it reaches my heart and mixes with everything else I've taken, everything I've carried, and begins to flow into the rest of me.

I pull and there's more, there's so much, there was always so much and I'm no longer afraid of burning out. I can carry all of her, because that's all that's left, and I feel the burn that Tairn's energy had always felt like at the corner of my hill, like when I snuck into my father's good liquor cabinet as a kid. When I recognize it I drink it in like a drowning man because I know, I know-

Ozone and hope flash through me and I can feel her hands in my hair. Her lips on my neck. I can hold Sgaeyl and I can hold Tairn but somehow my Violence is the one who's always been too much. I shatter, my awareness ghosting through what feels like every shadow on the continent.

Every venin I can find is torn apart by their own shadow. We're hard to kill but not immortal, not when reduced to shredded, rotten meat. I feel the shadows of running feet, of dragons wheeling mid-air to change tactics, the obliteration of shadows that disappear in fire.

I come back to myself choking for air, and somehow, impossibly, Violet is holding me. I only feel the fever when her hands are cool on my cheeks, and I wait for something awful, something I know I deserve.

"Say something," I manage to get out.

"Come home."

So I do.