{Every time I take your lead, feels like a curse

[shadowthief]

Who: Inej + Various / Kol + Various
When: Month of January
Where: Cadens / Thorne + the Horizon
What: Various threads through the month
Warnings: Kol: a history of child abuse; violence, torture, murder, death; foul language; alcoholism; general hedonism; manipulation; heavy trust issues; paranoia. Any/all of these may come up at any given time within a thread with him, and most if not all of it will be referenced rather casually by Kol. Inej: stealing; murder; descriptions of touch aversion, anxiety, depression, PTSD; heavy trust issues, paranoia; mentions of past instances of prostitution, slavery, and sexual assault. Everything will be clearly marked if-when it comes up.

And every time I try to stop

it feels even worse

Comments

[shadowthief]

"Thank you," she smiles, a soft, reverent thing. A promise from the Divine is the most precious thing she could ever receive.

Inej doesn't miss the pinched expression, and she matches it with a frown of her own at his first statement. "In my experience, soldiers are always made for war," Ravka had been war-torn for longer than she'd been alive, and it wasn't any better in this world, if you asked her.

"How do you protect everything without interfering?" That sounds like a nearly insurmountable task to lay at anyone's feet.

[familysucks]

Oblivious to the significance his agreement carries for Inej, Michael barrels on. He lifts his eyebrows a hair at her remark.

"And how many of the soldiers you have known have been angels?"

A soldier is a soldier, but an angel is not a human being. For all that he couldn't trust his younger brothers and sisters to keep their blades out of each other when he wasn't around, his and Raphael's command of the Heavenly Host had been near absolute. There had been no wars without his say-so.

"With minimal interference," he amends, then motions between the two of them. "These days, with direct and frequent interference. Though we may not be speaking of the same protections. It was never my job to defend humans from one another."

[shadowthief]

"None, I suppose." At the very least, none she'd known of. But she seems to accept that for what it is. She isn't meant to understand the workings and designs of The Divine, and that's okay.

"Did you prefer it the other way? When you had the distance." she's just curious. Michael is such a...stern sort of- well, man? person? are they even the right words? She's not sure. But he's got a very no-nonsense sort of vibe, which she supposes might clash with plenty of other people, Angels and humans alike.

She considers it for a moment and hums softly. "I think I understand...?" but the way she says it lends to the idea that she could still be wrong, and is fine with it if that's the case. "Your job could never be so simple as that. I know as a whole, we tend to think of ourselves as the most important, but everything means... everything. Humans are only a spec inside the wider universe."

She tips her head to the side as she considers him for a long moment. "I can hardly fathom the burden of the pressure laid on your shoulders." There's only so much the human mind can even really conceptualize, and she knows it doesn't end there. There are so many things they still don't know the answers to. But someone like Michael would hold all of that in their hands and have to choose when it was best to wield it or share it. Fate of some era or other of the world in his hands.