“War is coming,
I can hear it in my heart.
Blood will flow
along the grounds of the innocent.
I can't deceive the darkness anymore...
I'm letting go, I'm losing control of myself...”
. . .
The first thing to reach her ears when she woke up—since when she had fallen asleep? —is the sound of her little brother’s screaming.
“W-Will…?” Winters called, her voice a weak rasp that even she barely heard as she tried to push herself upright before her eyes could even force themselves to fully open, trying to make sense of which direction his voice was coming from—the sound of his screams, oh god he wouldn’t stop screaming—but it was too dark and she couldn’t tell where her brother was, how he is and what are they doing now…?!
The discovery of William’s very existence, here, in this wretched place, in this hell on earth when that awful, awful man finally deigned to tell her after he… after he had his way with her that he—they had her little brother, they had William, oh god, dad what do I do—had been like giant a slap to the face.
(“Win, are you cold?” her dad had asked her that fateful day, hours before the fire, before the monsters, before everything that mattered—their home, their childhood, their safety, their father, all of it, gone—)
Winters had a horrible sinking feeling in her chest (in her heart that was frightfully whole, stubbornly still there) that he had only thought it as a fitting punishment enough after she had attempted to slit her throat.
If she strains her ears long and hard enough, amidst the screaming and past her ragged breaths, she can still hear it. She can still hear the sound of glass, the mirror shattering on her grip, ringing loud and clear in her ears when she struck.
It had been painful, but exhilarating.
It feels like freedom the freedom she never lost as she destroyed something with her own bare hands. Feeling it break beneath bruised, bloodied hands.
The glass of the mirror immediately cracked with a single blow from her closed fist, spider-like webbing into a million different pieces and cascading down all over her like a crystal waterfall as she watched on, transfixed, delirious and thrilled as her hands eagerly took hold of one of the many glasses, never mind how its jagged edges easily cuts through already broken and bleeding skin just as the door behind her slams open.
Instinctively, Winters whirled around, backing up like the cornered animal that she was in front of him with her poor excuse of a weapon clutched in her shaking hands.
“AMARA!” he shouts, absolutely livid.
“Don’t come any closer,” she snarled.
She did not miss the terror, the absolute fury practically glowing in his eyes—those awful eyes of red that looked so red like blood, like roses, like fire—as he stared at the glass poised to cut through her neck.
He tried to inch forward but she won’t let him.
“Didn’t I already told you,” Winters gritted out, pushing the glass deep enough for her bruised neck to start bleeding. Not hard enough to hurt, just enough to be a threat. The feeling of her blood running down her skin no longer phased her, “… don’t come any closer.”
Winters knows well enough by now that he can move faster even with her eyes trained on him should he wish it and she doubts she will ever have a chance of an out like this.
Still, knowing the cards she had doesn’t change the hand she had been dealt with. This is a desperate gamble, but she was already well past the point of being desperate. She has to make the gambit now, throwing everything into the show because the tell just isn’t enough for the likes of this demon.
“Amara, I beg of you, please… please drop that thing. You’ll hurt yourself,” he finally tells her, holding out a placating hand, that inhumanly deep, commanding voice of his now more mellow and gentle, or as much as it could be as he calls her by a name that was not even her’s. It was like listening to thunder that was far too close for comfort and Winters wasn’t even fooled, not for one second.
“You stole me from my home, my family! YOU… HURT ME!” Winters finally rages at him, her voice incredulous and on the edge of falling straight to madness.
It was offensive how affronted he looks, “I would never–”
“LIAR!” she screams, not even letting him have the chance to lie because that’s what he do, “You lied! You lied, you lied, youliedyouliedyoulied!”
“…So, you are going to try get away from me again? Is that it?” Roman suddenly demands, the panic and fear in his eyes immediately shifting into something else as he braced himself to his full height—as though such emotions was never there to begin with—and a part of Winters churns and chills when that same, deluded look in his eyes graced her once more, “Go ahead. Do it.”
She froze, alarmed at the sudden change of demeanor. He had done this before, just as spontaneous as the first time she’d seen him do it, but it was still just as frightening.
And not only does he fight with his unnatural abilities, but he also fights with words, with the knife you won’t even see coming… and while Winters has never been good at any kind of fighting, it doesn’t mean she wouldn’t ever try to learn.
She sneers.
…if only her words can be used against him.
“Oh, yeah? Don’t think I won’t–!”
“And I promise you, my love,” there was no light in the room, but Winters… she could have sworn that his eyes glowed red as he regarded her with cold rage, like a drop of blood against the glint of a bloody knife, “…that your brother shall be the one to suffer the consequences of your cowardice.”
W… What?
A hidden knife. A trap.
“Y-You…!”
She has already known, but only there did she remembered just how much the glass she was intending to end herself with was shaking so much in her grip. She nearly dropped it for a second. And she has never felt as helpless as a fly… only to be feasted upon by the ravenous spider.
Winters has never felt so enraged, so horrified at the direct threat against her little brother that for one moment, she was rendered speechless in sheer outrage while the King of vampires simply looked upon the tears that finally fell one by one on her cheeks as he tells her gently, ominously, “I suggest, from here on out, that you choose your decisions wisely… my love.”
A keening cry slipped past her lips at the endearment.
How dare he.
How dare he call her that when he… he…
What he did to her…!
Just thinking of what he did was enough to make her skin crawl, making her fingers twitch as she resisted the sudden desire to rub and tear through her skin again just to get rid of the awful, disgusting feeling of his hands, his mouth, running all over her all over her all over her ALL OVER HER GET THE HELL OFF OF ME.
Oh. God…
For a second, she feels like she’s about to throw up.
Winters may never have been in love, but she knows what love is supposed to be. She remembers it in the way mother and dad used to look at each other, in the way William follows after her like a little duckling.
And his feelings for her aren’t love—they can’t be.
“I…” she chokes past a broken sob, “I hate you.”
“Do you hate me enough to want me dead?” he asks, and for some awful reason, he looks and sounds genuinely curious of her answer.
And it’s making her sick.
Past the veil of her tears, Winters could see his blurred form coming closer and closer until he was close enough to hold her wrists, those eyes of red eerily staring down at her when she pointed the glass right where his heart should be, never mind how his hands easily encircled around her bony wrists.
Noticing the bruises left behind on her skin, the bright reds and blooming green and purple he had left on her, he silently lifts one of them up and gently presses his lips onto it, a mockery of a lover’s kiss.
She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe–!
“My love. do you even have what it takes to kill me?” he quietly asks, his voice muffled against her battered skin, and Winters didn’t even know if he was still talking to her or wondering out loud.
She doesn’t… could find it in her to answer that, only trembling and trying not to hyperventilate in place as she silently, shakily stands before him, with him looming over her like one of the crudely drawn illustrations of monsters in the fairytale books she used to read to William come to life.
He smiles and gently takes her other hand, the one that is holding the glass, and brings it closer to his own neck. Close enough, that the tip pricks his too-pale skin, and a small trickle of blood rolls down.
Her eyes widened.
“Know that I do not mind if it is you,” Roman confesses, smiling down at her with that same adoring gaze that makes her blood run cold, makes her head pound and her heart stutter, “Truly, if it means you will continue to think about me instead of the other way around… for the rest of your life. I’d like that, my love. Very much.”
And just as she registers that small, knowing grin, one that was filled with so much, too much sharp teeth breaking over his face, she lurches forward as everything goes black.
Beginning again.
(Odd how she can recall the idyllic scenes of what was once her daily life as vividly as the day it happened. These deceptively pleasant snapshots of memories as they slowly crawled up to the worst day of her life.
But no matter how much she dares to look back on it, Proserpina could barely remember much about what truly happened, when and how she woke up lying on the snow, all alone.
Their house, their home… burning and collapsing on in itself just a few feet away from her, “Will?” she breathes out in a small, terrified voice, looking around for her little brother in panicked confusion as everything that she knows came crashing down in front of her in smoke and ashes, “…Dad?”
No one answered.
No one came.
“Please,” Winters whimpered, curling in on herself as the first snow falls from the heavens, “D-Dad, I… it’s so cold…”)
. . .
“You beat me down,
so low and now
I'm crying my soul.
I'm losing control.
You led me to
a place where I
can't feel my face...”
. . .
It was the witching hour when Proserpina stood by the hotel’s entrance.
Other than her most unlikely companion, there wasn’t much (if any) people out and about now despite the gods-forsaken hour, no thanks to the awful chill of the autumn air.
But from time to time, the goddess of shadows can still sense some vengeful—or particularly mischievous—spirits wandering aimlessly about… though they were quick to skitter away from her once they felt her presence drawing near, no doubt sensing the bubbling rage just hiding beneath the surface.
…It’s fine.
It’s fine. She’s fine.
William’s going to be okay. He has to be.
Thanatos isn’t here to deliver, anyway.
Proserpina clasped her hands behind her back to keep them from trembling on sight as she silently stared up at the stars that dotted the night sky. When she was a child, she remembered being told by someone long gone that the stars can be used to guide her home.
She once tried to do that too, despite knowing that whatever was left of home is gone, couldn’t return to. But desperation is a curious, dangerous thing.
One that even gods aren’t safe from.
Years after being held captive in that too-small, too-dark room, the eternally twinkling bright stars are the first thing she and her brother sees when they finally, finally got out.
They didn’t lead her home though.
…instead, a white wolf, of all things, helped them.
Proserpina holds back a sigh as the face of Alastor’s older twin brother—Alistair Nyx, proud and righteous—immediately comes to mind.
So nice people like him do exist…
And at the next second, she pushed away the raw memories—the first helping hand they ever received after so many years of nothing but pain and false kindness and what helping them had caused Alistair and his family, his pack in return—back down, under lock and key where it couldn’t haunt her or him, or anyone involved.
No.
She could not afford to dwell on this anymore, she refused to go back to that line of thought again. To that memory, that wretched place. It was done. Over. Long ago.
She’s okay. William’s going to be okay…

And yet–
Her eyes slid over to her companion.
And yet…
The rest of the walk back to her hotel room was done without any sort of interaction between the two of them, the silence hanging over them like a thick, dark cloud.
To any outsider, one would assume—with her companion still dressed in his school uniform and her looking like she had just attended a funeral (she might as well be but there was no body for her to mourn to, not if she can help it because William can’t be dead just yet)—that the two of them are completely unknowing of the other. Strangers, who had just happened to cross each other’s path.
Her lips twitched.
That couldn’t be far from the truth.
They didn’t know each other, not really. Using one another was simply the mutual agreement. It was… wrong of her, she admits, to ally herself with a monster, a vampire no less. And as soon as she stopped to really think more about this, about her wretched plan, she can feel her skin crawling in disgust, in dismay at the new depths she had somehow allowed herself to sink to.
By associating herself with the very same kind of monster that she had sworn to end, she knows she’ll have no choice but to turn a blind eye to its… eating habits.
Proserpina was no fool nor an idealistic one.
She has known the lives this one had taken—no matter how meager or light compared to her main target—could never be accounted for, could never be justified… but still, here she was, sweeping it all under the rug instead of cutting his head off just to be done with this mess all because she needed him for her goal.
And William…
He didn’t know.
He couldn’t know.
She would not…. William must never know, would never understand why such a move was going to be necessary. It was wrong. It was evil. Hypocritical of her, even.
But it was a necessary evil.
(´Keep telling yourself that’ Thanatos hissed.)
Perhaps, in a few years’ time, when (not if because her baby brother has to be alive somewhere, he couldn’t be gone yet, and she doesn’t know if it should relieve or terrify her) William would later come to understand why his sister had done such a thing—if she ever had the courage to tell him—that the line between good and evil; right and wrong was not as straight as their… his father had once taught to him once upon a time. It was a blurry, tangled mess. The road to hell was supposedly paved with good intentions, after all.
Her own road to hell surely had been.
Using fear to her advantage, using death to gain power, as well as pain and grief to augment said power. It had taken her a whole decade and then some just to get to this point.
She can’t back down.
She can’t stop now. She’s in too deep.
And she doubts she can even stop.
So, that is why, just when they were about to part ways to their respective floors, the goddess of shadows finally called out to her most unlikely companion over her shoulder.
“Buck…”
As the vampire immediately turned to face her, spinning on his right heel, as though he had been anticipating for an order all this time, “…Yes, milady?”
Her eyebrow twitched.
That reverent tone reminds her too much of Roman.
The vampires’ King.
The mere thought makes her skin crawl.
And while she’s at it, the very idea of this vampire betraying her was always on the forefront of her mind, always a looming possibility that shadowed her every waking step and more often than not, she found herself questioning if having Buck still walking about—and moving upon her orders no less—was truly worth it as he had simply been given a choice and the promise of a reward to join her side.
Ha. Choice.
She almost wanted to scoff at the word.
It was something she’d never been given, after all.
Choice was but an illusion, her being an immortal goddess was nothing more but another trap to keep her controlled, contained. Her godhood was but another prison, a longer leash.
And that is why Proserpina perfectly understood the repercussions of choice. Of disobedience. It stared at her in the mirror with her father’s blackened eyes. When the stench of rotting ichor and rancid flesh fills her senses every time Thanatos has to deliver lost souls back to the underworld.
The marks on her skin throbbed.
“...This is an order.”
She didn’t look back, couldn’t look at him.
Over her shoulder, she directed, in a voice so quiet—one that she could barely hear herself—what was hopefully her final command to this vampire.
But even without looking, she can feel it even without actually seeing the way his lips were crawling into the makings of a smile. His smile was a vicious little thing that reminded her of the sharp edge of a broken glass, while one of his fangs glinted from the corner of her eye.
“…I want you to kill the son of Hypnos,” she told him.
. . .
“Death is just an anesthetic
for what's to come.
A body left behind with no face,
feeling numb.
All alone, I cry here,
fading into nothing.
All alone I lie here
dying...
...losing myself...”
―Remnant