[center][h1][b][color=red]A[/color][/b][/h1][/center][sub]Interactions/Mentions: VV-[@Estylwen][/sub][hr]
[indent]A stood rooted to the spot, her breath a staccato against the sound and suffering around her. The battlefield was no longer a place of mere conflict—it had become a grotesque theater of war where bodies convulsed like marionettes with their strings severed, their final, gurgling gasps swallowed by the fog of burning flesh. The metallic sting of blood clung to the air, thick enough to taste. Distant screams punctuated the din, a cacophony of despair from men who had, until this moment, believed themselves invincible. And yet, none of it held A’s focus. Her gaze was fixed, unblinking, on VV.

The darkness around Vin writhed, its tendrils slithering and constricting with a slow cruelty as if savouring the agony they inflicted. His cries tore through the battlefield, each snap of breaking bone reverberating through A like the strike of a hammer against brittle glass. Violence had sculpted this landscape into something unrecognizable, a hellish tableau painted in fire and ruin. 

And in the midst of it stood VV, grinning as if this slaughter was nothing more than a game.

Her words—[b][i]“Your powers are damn scary, A”[/i][/b]—were meant as praise, yet they struck A like a cold hand wrapping around her throat. Was this what they had become? Was this the price of strength? The blood she had commanded, the pain she had exacted—it had all felt necessary, a grim toll demanded by survival. But now, watching Vin’s body fracture under VV’s merciless grip, she felt something insidious creep into her bones. A sickness, a slow-sinking horror at the reflection of what they had done.

They were winning. They were unstoppable.

And that realization, more than the carnage, more than the screams, sent a chill through her that no fire could burn away.

[i]These feelings, [right] this pain,[/right] [center]Opens the doors to my domain. 

Opens the doors to me.[/center] [/i]

Her gaze flickered back to Vin, his features a grim mask of anguish, twisted and taut with pain—but not surrender. No, his [i]damned eyes[/i] still burned in defiance despite the wrecking of his body. He felt no remorse. No regret. Not for D, not for anything. A could see it in the slight upturn of his mouth. He would carry his sins like a banner, revel in them, never once flinching at the weight of what he had done to them. 

And yet. 

“VV,” A’s voice cut through the chaos, “[i]Stop[/i].”

The word startled even her. It had been reflexive, surfacing before she could crush it down, before she could weigh the consequences of saying it. The battlefield churned around them, but in this moment, all she could hear was the pounding of her own pulse. Because she knew why she’d spoken up. She [i]saw[/i] it—the precipice VV stood on now, the void yawning beneath her feet. A had stood there once herself. And she knew what it felt like to fall.

Blood had always been the conduit of A’s power, but it had never come without cost. The first time she had truly felt its insidious strength had been the night of the accident. Her best friend’s body, limp and broken in the wreckage, the scent of copper thick in the air, the helplessness clawing at her ribs as she pressed trembling hands to cooling skin. That moment had been an awakening, the lock broken, the floodgates thrown open. The power had surged in answer to her desperation, an ancient thing roused from slumber, and with it had come the realization that it had always been there, waiting for her to break enough to let it in.

And every time she called upon it now—every time she reached into the red and bent it to her will—she felt that same presence, lurking at the edges of her mind. Watching. Waiting. Wanting. A quiet, insatiable hunger, whispering of how much easier it would be to give in, to take more, to stop fighting the tide and simply let it drag her under. But she’d resisted, despite the hunger she’d felt. 

She wasn’t going to let VV drown in that insatiableness, too.

A swallowed hard and forced herself to meet VV’s gaze head-on.

“I want him to suffer just as much as you do,” she admitted, voice with a slight tremor. “But this isn’t justice. This is just more of what he wants.” Her eyes flickered toward Vin’s trembling form, toward the dark tendrils coiling tighter, eager to snap him apart like brittle bone. “We’ll… find another way.”

They had to.

Because the more pain they inflicted, the more power they fed.

And they both knew what that could do to someone.[/indent]