hadriel_logs | Event Log: Speak Your Truth

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Event Log: Speak Your Truth

Who: Everyone in the city
What: The event log for the Speak Your Truth
Where: All over the city
When: April 3rd-April 9th
Warnings: None

There's a secret burning in your chest. It's hot behind your ribcage, and you need to let it out or else it might consume you- but who would you tell? Who could even begin to understand what you need to say? Your closest friend? Your significant other? Maybe even someone you don't get along with very well? It's hard to know who to trust and who will even understand, but in a strange way, neither of those things seem to matter- all you can think of is what will cause someone the most pain.

Maybe you're trying to get it out in the open so you can put it behind you. Maybe you just need to come clean because the guilt is eating you alive. Maybe you just really want to hurt someone- regardless of the reason, you're aching to tell someone else your darkest secrets.

Will they understand? There's only one way to find out, and it won't be pleasant for either party involved. Good luck, Hadriel!

► This log covers April 3rd-April 9th.
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If your secret gets a bit bloody, please let us know here.

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[ Died. Left.

A small exhale escapes her. ]

They brought you back. [ Well. Someone did. Without thinking about it, she raises a hand to ghost across the front of his chest, knowing well where the scars are that he's been so elusive about. ] You cheated death.

[ Magic is not always so kind. Dany wonders at what cost Jon was returned to life. ]

...Khal Drogo was brought down by one of his own, too. When it seemed that a witch could restore him to life, it was at the cost of our child, and he - Drogo - was not truly alive again, even so.

[ - Oh. She gasps at the admission, eyes widening with surprise. Jon isn't the only one stunned and winded. ]

[When her hand goes up against his chest, he raises his own hand to hold it there.]

A red priestess brought me back, one who used to follow Stannis. I don't know how, I've never known why. I was dead for a day.

[He listens to her speak. He likes and doesn't like her telling him about her husband: it brings them closer together, but still, it's another man, a man who knew her before he did, who bought her for no reason other than that she was a princess. To Jon, she is not a princess: she is a queen.

But what she says in the end makes him feel cold.]

At the cost of your child? How?

I know of the red priestesses. [ And their Lord of Light. ] They were more common across the Narrow Sea...

[ But it doesn't matter. She feels relief at having admitted the truth of her past to him, but facing it again brings a cold pit to her stomach despite the warmth of his hand. ]

Blood magic. [ She nearly turns away, unable to face him with the old burn of shame still blazing within her. I never should have brought that woman into our number. Should never have asked for her aid. If it could even be called that... ]

He was stillborn. [ A monster. Dead long before his birth, or so the witch said. ] I lost them both that day.

Did you --

[The coldness rises up in him, and his hand tightens over hers.

He knows her -- he thinks he does, at least. There's a deep, rich sweetness to her, one often hidden behind a reserved manner and immaculate braids. That sweetness stands beside a fierceness that sometimes seems unconquerable. She is kind, often gentle, but formidable.

What he had nearly asked her is wrong. He can't imagine, with everything that he knows of her, that she knew the price and paid it anyway.]

How did it happen?

[Why did she hurt you?]

[ Dany just shakes her head, banishing the thought that she would willingly give the life of their unborn child. In that moment, she had been in a haze of pain and blood and visions, had no idea what would happen until it was far too late.

He's asked another question, but this conversation hadn't begun with her confession. ]

Your men... Why did they...?

[ Who could possibly dislike this man so much that they would betray him so completely? What could he possibly have done to draw their ire? ]

[The denial relieves him; it allows him to release that last bit of tension that he'd held when he asked the question. But his hand still stays clasped over hers, and he finds that it's a little bit easier to speak now.]

For the Watch. [It comes out bitter.] The purpose of the Night's Watch was always to prepare for the return of the White Walkers. But they passed into legend, and what we had was the Free Folk and their raids in the North, so there were many who thought the Watch's purpose was to fend them off.

When I let the Free Folk through the Wall, some men who'd fought them their whole lives saw it as a betrayal. But it wasn't. We could make peace with them or we could fight them as wights after the Night King got to them. There were no other choices.

They took your life because you sought allies who could help to defend the Wall - and the Seven Kingdoms - from a threat they had sworn to stand against. [ Dany scoffs, impassioned irritation flaring up briefly in the pit of her stomach. ] And what happened when you returned?

[ She can only imagine their surprise (light a word as that is to describe seeing someone again after you've killed them). ]

[His expression hardens.]

The Free Folk took the castle in the night to stop them from burning my body. Some of the men died in the fighting.

The rest of them, I hanged as soon as I was able to. All the officers of the Night’s Watch, and my own steward.

He was a boy of twelve.

[ It might shock another to hear him speak so plainly of the execution, but in it, she thinks of Mirri Maz Duur on the pyre, of Doreah and Xaro Xhoan Daxos in the vault, of Mossador in front of the crowd of Mereenese. Freedom and justice: one cannot exist without the other. ]

After their betrayal, there could be no other resolution. [ He'd done the right thing: she would have done the same. ] A boy of twelve can still choose for himself. He can wield a blade.

[ It's not an easy thing to speak of, though, despite its necessity. Finally, she releases his hand and clasps her own, brow knit with concern. ]

Without your choices, the North would have been taken. Your men were blind to not have seen it, and fools for having struck you down.

[He nods, but there is regret in it.]

Aye. He was the one to put the knife in my heart. The rest...

[She’s seen the scars, lower on his abdomen and still ridged in purple.]

I know why they did it, but they have to find a different way. If they don’t learn to live together, all of them will die.

After what you told me... what happened next?

The same is true of the Seven Kingdoms, if what you said is true. [ It's nearly a joke; he knows that she believes him completely now about the threat from beyond the Wall. She nearly smiles, but the conversation is too grim for it. ]

After? [ So much has happened since all that, years ago. Dany goes quiet, recalling. ] ...I took what was left of Drogo's life myself. He was dead, if not for his breath. [ Beyond that physical movement, her sun-and-stars had vanished. ] ...I had visions, I-...took the stone eggs that were my wedding present and spent that night in the flames of his pyre.

[ He may have heard the tales: she isn't sure how much of the stories of the supposed last Targaryen reached the North. With the truth of his own lineage, she finds herself wondering if he, too, would have walked again from the flames unscathed. ]

It is true.

[She has a lightness to her sometimes, a lightness that goes with her sweetness, so he catches the irony in her tone -- but she is exactly right. It's what he's been trying to convince people of.

Still, when she tells more of her story, his expression grows troubled. She killed him herself. And then she burned herself.

He shakes his head slowly, rejecting the entire story. He knows that if he had been there, he would have done whatever he could to stop her.

If he had been with her when they were both young, she would never have had the dragons at all.]

Dany.

I had to burn the body of my first lover. I made her pyre myself.

[-- That's not what he meant to say.]

[ Oh. And there's yet more that they have in common, it seems.

She looks up at him with sad, quiet understand. The kind of empathy one can only have after suffering through a similar situation. ]

I'm sorry. [ She hadn't made Drogo's pyre, but she had lit the fire herself. ] What happened?

[ He certainly doesn't want to discuss it, and not with her, but she can't stop the curious, gentle questions that spill forth from her lips. ]

[He shakes his head. Why he feels the need to talk about this at all, and why it hasn’t come up late at night, when they curl around each other, he doesn’t know. His words would have been slow, and he would have been reluctant to voice them. Now it feels like they’re pouring out of him like blood from a fresh wound.]

She was a Wildling, attacking Castle Black, with her people. She had me in her sights, but someone put an arrow in her heart before she could decide whether or not she wanted me dead.

[An ambivalent shrug.]

I wouldn’t have blamed her. I joined her band when I was ordered to pretend to desert — I never meant to love her, or to lie with her. I couldn’t keep to my orders and to my vows.

[ Interesting. She studies his face as he speaks, silver brows knit in gentle concern. She believed that they were on the same side, then moved to kill him when he betrayed her. I think I might have done the same. ]

Some promises aren't made to last. [ Not all, but...some. She's made and broken promises of her own, but knows, in her heart, that she could never abide something like that.

Dany wonders about the woman, the Wildling. Her face is a blurry visage, but the point of the arrow in her bow is clear as day. ]

Surely you weren't the first to take the black who broke his vows.

No, but —

[Which part is he saying no to? He’s not the first brother of the Watch who broke his vows, and his reasons were better than most. Still, a broken vow is a broken vow.]

If I had been able to choose, I would never have betrayed her. When I burned her body, part of me wanted to crawl into the fire with her, so we wouldn’t be apart again.

I’m glad I didn’t. I would never have met you. And if the promise had lasted, and I was with her when I met you.... [He shakes his head.] I don’t like to think that I might have betrayed her. I don’t like to think that I could have.

[But there’s more than small chance that he might have, and the same part of him that wanted to crawl into the fire with Ygritte hates the rest of him for it.]

Sometimes I’m jealous of the man who married you.

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Event Log: Speak Your Truth

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