She had told herself she would kill him, when the time finally came.
She would spill his blood on the black earth and end this war, somehow.
She wouldn't, couldn't, hesitate.
She was wrong.
"What….are you…waiting for?"
His voice is like acid, burning through her veins and her blood. He knows he is beaten. He has accepted it, far too easily in fact.
He wants to die.
(Maybe he always has.)
And Etihw stands in place, unable to move or speak or finally drive her sword through his heart, because of the one fleeting thought that passes through her mind.
She doesn't want him to die.
It contradicts everything she has ever promised herself, and she hates herself for it. She hates that she cannot end this, right here and now, on this battlefield of blood and ash and bone.
(Blood and ash and bone that they have created together, as if in a strange contest of who could destroy more.)
(She is not sure who would win.)
"Stop fooling around and finish it."
His sneer is cut short by a wet cough, and there is even more red staining the white of her robe.
(Or should she say, there is less white on her red robe? That seems to be more accurate, now.)
The broken devil before her is not the one she has known throughout this war, and he is not the devil she knew before all of this.
She barely remember who she was before all of this, honestly.
"Or are you too weak to, god?"
She thinks she remembers a time when he would call her Etihw. She thinks there may have been a time when she smiled and called him something other than the venomous word devil, as well.
(Or maybe those times were never real. Maybe they were all in her head. She can't tell anymore.)
"Etihw,"
She flinches.
(Real.)
He's pushed himself up now, leaning heavily to the side, but standing nonetheless. Blood drips onto the black earth,
(just like she promised)
and mixes with her own in-between them.
Black eyes meet gray.
She doesn't know what she expects to see there. Confusion, maybe. Hatred, definitely.
But all she sees is a tired man waiting to die.
"Finish it." He says again, trying to make it sound like a threat. It sounds more like a plea.
(And suddenly she knows what she must do.)
She drops to the ground and presses her hands to the dirt,
(bones and blood and ash and tears and now, something else)
and the earth splits.
(She can't kill him but, she can do this.)
"No! You-"
He realizes what is happening just a second too late, and he's already disappearing in the cracked earth.
(He'll be out of sight, but never out of mind.)
Black eyes meet grey, and now there is only hatred in them.
(She doesn't know what she expected.)
And as he is sucked down, down, down, down into the blackness, he makes a promise to her.
"I will destroy everything."
And he's gone.
The earth closes, but she doesn't move, still kneeling with her hands pressed to the damp dirt.
And she whispers a promise to the ground as well, knowing it will not reach him.
"I'll fix it."
.
