Category: Gen (canon)
Characters/Pairings: OCs
Rating/Warnings: K+
Summary: A man catches his wife doing something horrible, yet still he understands.
Notes: I've had this idea for ages now, but didn't have the characters until tonight.


Today, at least, the executions were over quickly — a man and a woman, strangers perhaps, but both truly guilty of performing the Dark magic of which they were accused. A rare thing these days, he mused, but then again, perhaps that's what led them to it. It was hard to tell nowadays who was evil and who was driven to it, and the distinction became less and less important as time went on. He didn't know why anyone would choose that path, when it only confirmed the opposition and hastened their execution.

But they and their motivations didn't matter to him, though they might have in the early days — only one person mattered anymore, and so he hurried home to her, leaving their bodies swaying sadly in the breeze.

He rounded the corner to hear wailing coming from his house, and his heart nearly stopped. Everyone was still in the courtyard, but still he stopped himself from running home, just in case someone was watching, because he couldn't attract any attention — all the neighbors had been led to believe that she had fled, but the soldiers must have heard somehow — and yet his door, his door was still standing, so surely—

And then he burst through it, calling, "Mara, Mara, are you—" but the sight that met his eyes was not what he expected yet no less horrific, and as the door fell shut behind him he exclaimed, "Mara!" For there was his wife, his beloved, magic-doomed wife, holding her arm in the flame of a candle and sobbing as she watched it blister.

"What are you doing?!" he demanded, rushing over and snatching her arm away, and then blowing out the candle in case she thought to fight him. But she only sobbed harder, collapsing in his arms, so he held her and rocked her and wished he understood.

"I just wanted to know," she whispered several minutes later, when the only sounds were his noises of comfort and her ragged breathing. "I just wanted to know."

And when understanding struck he wished it hadn't, because he could think of nothing to say. What words of reassurance could he offer, when faced with a confession like that? What had the world come to, when his wife could burn herself to know what others had felt, what she might soon feel, and he could think it sane? "Oh, Mara," he said instead, feeling inadequate, because all he could offer was sympathy.

And as he held her tighter and wept himself, he thought he understood something else: that those who turned to Dark magic did so not out of evil but out of love. He understood this because he knew that if he had magic, he would do anything, anything, to make the world safe for her, and if it worked then he would call it good.