Title: His Dark Mistress
Rating: PG-13/K+
Genre: Angst
Characters: Volke; Sothe
Pairing: Volke/OC; Sothe/Micaiah (implied)
Summary: An attempt at giving Volke a back-story.
His Dark Mistress
Many would have found it surprising, but Volke was as religious as any priest. Although unlike the clergy, devoted to the divine benevolence of Ashera, Volke served a darker mistress.
Service was not rendered with quiet prayers, sweet smelling incense or dusty holy tomes; it was something intrinsic and instinctual. Anyone could take a life - in the heat of passion, in the heat of battle - but it took something special to kill a stranger in cold blood. It took sacrifice.
It was sacrifice he tried to impress upon his clients with his exorbitant prices - bleeding their wallet and their pockets as surely as he would bleed the veins of his victims. If they thought him arrogant and greedy, as they often did with his laconic demanding attitude - he really didn't care.
He too gave something of himself with every kill; something his well-bred and often decadent clients wouldn't understand - something priceless, but nevertheless, he named his price solely for their inconvenience.
The first time he killed, he paid with his blood.
It was many years ago when he had been nothing more but a young and foolish street thief - not so quick or precise as he learned to be in later years. As a result he lay on the cold ground bleeding until his skin was almost transparent and his dimming eyes saw the death he had dealt only moments earlier.
That death was never realized however, as he opened his eyes - not to the dismal endless vistas of the afterlife, but to the anxious compassionate eyes of a young woman.
Volke, for his part, found her perplexing. Knowing nothing of him, only that he was hurt and alone, she had spent her energy in calling him back to life. The very idea was anathema to Volke, and as a result he found her fascinating - so much so that, a few months later, he made her his wife. Their vows were spoken quietly before only one living witness and consummated that night beneath the stars.
But Death always demands her due, Volke learned later, much to his dismay. For each life spared her clutches, a price must be paid.
Volke saw this as his young wife gasped her last breath, sickened with a virulent fever that plagued the land - a plague to which his childhood in the disease-riddled slums gave him immunity. As he buried her frail and wasted body in the earth, he realized he was doomed to serve a jealous, ever present mistress.
He remembered standing beside the rolling ocean, listening to the hissing whispers of the sea against the sand. He tossed his wedding ring into the depths, watching it sparkle briefly against the waves before turning his back on those memories forever.
Every time he took a life after, he did not pay in blood - either his own or that of an innocent. He paid with his humanity, and knew that one day he'd pay with his life.
Occasionally after a job he would find his way again to that strange and lonely shore. Rowing a small leaky boat out to the place he had last seen the ring, he would let the gold and silver pieces jingle through his fingers before they hit the waves - their musically song slowly strangling the ghost of the better man he could have been if things had only been different.
Volke was well aware, as he cast the gold away, that if any of his clients knew of this strange ritual they'd probably soil themselves in shock. Volke didn't care. Rich or poor - beorc or laguz - death came to all. Money was meaningless. It could lie with heart on the ocean floor, untouched, with only the sharks for company.
Years later when he travelled with Ike's company, he saw in Sothe something that he recognized. The young thief with too-wise eyes reminded him of himself in a younger more innocent state - not that he had ever been innocent, only less experienced.
One evening he silently approached the boy and, in his own stilted laconic way, offered to teach him the secrets of dealing death. Unlike his interactions with the other mercenaries, he didn't price his knowledge with a ridiculous sum of money. He didn't have to. On an instinctive level, the boy already knew what that price would be.
"I'm sorry," the boy said - his penetrating eyes meeting those of the assassin. "But I've already given myself away."
Characters copyright Intelligent Systems.
Used without permission.