She's So Hard – The Jezabels
All that really matters is love
But if it's all that you really care about
then tough
I'm all out for the war
I guess love wasn't what I'm looking for
I don't care when you cry
I think self-pity is a state of mind, I'm so hard
I'm so hard, I'm so hard
She's so hard, she's so hard, she's so hard
and maybe you're just too good for me, good for me
or maybe you're just no use to me, use to me
Returning had quite possibly been his worst mistake. Worse, even, than leaving in the first place, worse than deciding to disappear without a word, worse than ever abandoning her, fully aware of what it would have done to someone as proud as Arra. His second-worst mistake, though, had been hoping to surprise her by waiting for her in her cell.
As he waited for the unbelievable pain in his ribs to subside – of course she had heard him behind her, of course she had lashed out thinking it might have been an enemy; he did his best to convince himself that she hadn't wanted to hurt him. But even as he crouched at her feet and clutched his ribcage, struggling upwards, she made no move to apologize or to help him up. Instead, as he pulled himself up to face her, she brutally slammed the handle of the long sword she had been carrying into his lower back, sending him crashing back to the floor.
"Arra!" he cried, struggling up again, but by the time he was ready to attempt staggering to his feet she had flipped the sword, pressing the sharp tip of the blade rather than the handle into his back. "It is me! I mean no harm."
"No harm?" she cried incredulously, and that was the moment he realized the magnitude of the mistake he had made. She dragged the blade up from his coccyx to the back of his head, snagging on his tunic all the way up and resting a little too hard at the nape of his neck, drawing a little blood and making him hiss. "You mean no harm? Are you under the impression that I'm happy to see you?"
This was an Arra he recognized but had not been hoping to see – one he'd only ever encountered in their very worst arguments, classic Arra at her angriest. With nothing left to say to him she had clearly come to believe that the only way to get across quite how strongly she despised him was to resort to violence. Fantastic, Larten said to himself, and pressed his forehead into the floor in despair.
"I just want to talk," he tried hesitantly.
"Talk, then," she spat back, tapping the blade against his shoulder.
He rolled his eyes, though luckily she was unable to see it. "It would be far easier if I could look at you," he supplied, perhaps pushing his luck, but unwilling to make his speech lying face-down at sword-point.
"As I remember," she remarked, but without even a hint of amusement in her voice – he even fancied he could hear a change from the voice he remembered, she sounded sharper than he could ever recall, low and dangerous. "You never were one for doing things the easy way. Or even the sensible way. Or even the vaguely moral way. So, if it's all right with you, I'd like you to stay down there for now."
"Mm," he hummed, vaguely unappreciative of that idea but unable to see any other option for himself currently. "I understand why you would be angry with me, but let us not behave childishly. I would like –"
This had been another of his greatest mistakes. Before he had been able to register that accusing her of being childish might not have been the best idea, and before he could even begin to encroach on the topic of what he would have liked, a sharp and vicious kick to his already sore ribs instantly silenced him.
"Talk about kicking a man when he is down!" he cried, and, for that display of outrage, she kicked him again, just for good measure.
"I was between kicking you and dismembering you," she growled. "You got off lightly. Now, say what you've come to say. I'm getting bored."
Perhaps it was that she was angrier with him than she ever had been before – and rightly so, he supposed – but it seemed more than that. In the five years he had been away, not only had her anger not subsided, but she had also hardened; towards him at least, and probably towards everything. He felt a pang of regret instantly.
"I am sorry," he said suddenly, though he had been planning to work up to that in his discussion of the ways in which he regretted leaving her half a decade ago. "You have no idea how much I have regretted the night I left – how much I have regretted leaving you if not the clan. I love you, I never stopped – I know I cannot excuse what I did, but please try to understand that, of anyone, you are the person I wish I had hurt least."
There was a short silence, and Larten waited to see if she might lift the blade from the back of his neck. Instead, she let out a mirthless laugh.
"Is that all?" she asked, unimpressed.
He was lost for words. Was there no talking to her anymore? He had known she would be angry – she had never searched for him; she had never allowed herself to display the weakness of letting him know she wanted him to return. Perhaps she hadn't because she really had begun to hate him. He had imagined himself returning, facing a whirlwind of insults and accusations, but eventually a calm conversation. He hadn't allowed himself to hope that she might eventually agree with him, or might eventually feel the same way he did ever again, but he had hoped at least to erase any animosity between them.
"I miss you," he said eventually, wishing he could see her expression. When he made to turn his head to the side to look up at her she tapped the side of his head with the flat side of the blade, a silent warning. She said nothing for a moment, then stepped back.
"Get up," she said from across the room. She was sheathing the blade and waiting with folded arms. "You look ridiculous lying there."
Without mentioning that it hadn't exactly been his choice to lie face down in fear of his life for five minutes, Larten pulled himself to his feet. His ribs really were sore, and he knew he'd be terribly bruised tomorrow – she wasn't playing with him, she really had meant to hurt him. The thought made an uncomfortable feeling rise in his stomach. He could never imagine bringing himself to resent her, no matter what she might do to him – let alone really want to cause her any pain. This kind of real resentment was more than he had ever expected from her. The Arra he thought he'd known could never have done that.
As he faced her the juxtaposition between her clear emotional change and her lack of physical change became all too apparent. It was like facing the exact Arra he had lost five years ago, but without any of the love for him in her eyes. He could see now what the young vampires she trained disliked about her – her eyes really were a cold, hard grey, merciless, soulless.
"Have you come back just to spew nonsense at me?" she asked, cool, calm, collected, not sorry for the way she'd interrogated him. "Or are you intending to come crawling back to the clan as a whole?"
"I should hope the entire clan does not hold me in such low regard," Larten threw back at her, unable to bring himself to be afraid of Arra – still waiting to see a shadow of the woman he had come back for.
"I only wish they did," she grumbled. "Some of the Generals who used to work for you have made up these fantastical tales about you – many vampires with a little rebellion left in them think you're a hero, breaking free of an oppressive system, or something along those lines. If you're the hero, I dread to think who they consider to be the villains."
Her words stung but he tried to be as hard as she was, shrugging nonchalantly.
"How have you been?" he asked, trying to change the subject as though she might be more amicable to a discussion about her current life than one about their past.
"Fine," she replied bluntly.
He waited for any other information that might have been forthcoming, but she stared him down, unashamed at her curt attitude towards him. He shuffled his feet.
"I heard you have been moving up," he said lightly, not meaning anything by it. "You had your own squadron on a mission in Moscow the way I heard it."
She shrugged. "You don't approve of that anyway," she said – not a question, more a statement. He tried to keep control of his temper. He'd grown up so much since leaving the Mountain, and he was no longer prone to the same sorts of hot-headed outbursts she would remember, but once his temper had rivalled even hers. He didn't relish the idea of transforming his intention to tell her he loved her and missed her into a shouting match. He was incredibly frustrated, though, and clenched a fist when he saw her eyes narrowing in suspicion. "Why bring that up?" she asked with a knowing look. "To tell me you think I'm wasting my time?"
Tired of her aggression, he threw his hands up in the air, an exasperated gesture of surrender. He looked her straight in the face, wondering how he could get her to be her again instead of this bitter, hateful version of herself. He could still remember kissing her under the moon, hands entwined, making love at sunset. It wasn't a distant enough memory for him to want to give up on his crusade just yet. But, as clear as the pain was on his face, she looked back at him without even a shadow of recognition in her eyes that she cared.
"I'm sorry to break it to you," she said, though she didn't sound sorry at all. "But I think you've had a wasted journey."
At the end of his tether, Larten couldn't help but raise his voice just slightly. "But I love you!" he cried, hating how childish he had managed to sound, but unable to help it. She was disgustingly stubborn. How couldn't she see what being without her had done to them? He had tried his best to remember that she was part of his life in the Mountain among the ranks of the clan that he wished to move on from, but he had not been able to leave the memory of her behind the way he could leave behind everything else. He'd looked for distraction over and over again – anything to take his mind off of her – but nothing had sufficed. And, looking at her, he felt she'd probably done the same. She had clearly thrown herself back into her career (reactionary to his rejection of his own in no small part, he imagined), trained and battled hard, placed her emotions in the back of her mind. Were either of them any better off? "I am sorry," he said. "I am sorry I left. I thought it was time to go and I was wrong." He floundered for words that put across just how desperately he wanted to go back to that night and change his mind – how hard could it have been to tell her? He'd dreamt about going back so many times, even wishing he'd told her just so that she could have rejected him outright. Then, at least, he could have felt that he hadn't shamed her, that he hadn't run away. "Nothing is right without you; whatever I do, wherever I go, you are always in the back of my mind. I regret not telling you I planned to go, I regret deceiving you – I regret it all more than you can possibly grasp."
"Probably almost as much as I regret the whole sorry affair as a whole," she said under her breath. He wished he hadn't heard her – he played the memories again in his mind; I love you on the edge of the shore, his arms around her, the unfaltering trust in her eyes, even their various plots in aid of trying to sneak an hour away from Gavner, and he wondered how she could have possibly forgotten it all.
"As much as I'd love to stay and talk with you longer," she said sarcastically as he gawped back at her, unable to believe that she could brush him off. It was almost Mika the cold way she discarded his emotions – the very thought of her turning into her mentor made Larten's blood boil. "But I've a meeting and I'd rather not be late."
"I love you," he told her, one last time.
In the first flash of emotion he'd seen since arriving, she looked away from him and blinked hard, as though trying to keep some kind of control over herself. "That's not enough," she said softly, and with that turned away, throwing over her shoulder, "I trust you remember your way out."
He was tempted to stay, wait for her to return later, but then he wondered what difference that could possibly make. She was different – everything was. As he looked around, even her things didn't seem the same now. She had never been one for trinkets, but he vividly remembered a treasured knife that had always caught his eye, the leather handle patterned in a way she adored. Where was that now? It didn't feel right to look too hard, but the room was bare and he could see it nowhere. Perhaps she had lost it, but that seemed so unlikely – like him, she just probably had no feeling left for it anymore. Her personal effects amounted to a variety of clothes he'd never seen before, a couple of pairs of dark boots, an unobtrusive black hair ribbon, a sturdy rucksack and a set of keys for something, though he had no idea what.
He caught sight of the meeting as he left. A group of Generals, almost all of which he remembered being in the same position five years ago, the Princes, and Arra, at Mika Ver Leth's right hand. He caught Mika's eye instantly, but the Prince said and did absolutely nothing, remaining eerily still as though he was determined not to draw attention to his discovery. Larten might have laughed had he not been so downtrodden – Mika was still as cunning as ever, it seemed, and clearly had no idea that Arra already knew of his temporary return. Then he made eye contact with a General he had worked with many times over the years, a bulky but sly man named Emil, and then turned away as he saw him open his mouth, no doubt to alert the entire group of them to Larten Crepsley's mysterious reappearance. He found he couldn't stand to watch the look on Arra's face, that awful derision, that he'd surely see again if she looked at him. Without another thought – certain he could feel all of their eyes on his back – Larten stalked away, back into the freedom he had been so determined five years ago that he wanted. It was a shame that he had not anticipated that being free could be such a lonely existence.
hope you enjoyed reading if you have got this far :)