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Renetta doesn't move. She is frozen - empty, hollowed out, ripped open and left bleeding. Her eyes - once sharp, once filled with fire, once alive - are blank now, devoid. There is nothing behind them, nothing but the storm raging inside her skull, tearing through her like shattered glass. Her body caves in on itself, shoulders drawn tight, arms limp at her sides. She feels weightless, she feels sick, and her stomach churns empty. She is drowning in thin air. She is everywhere and nowhere, she is free as a bird, she cannot escape. Her heart races. Her lungs weigh a thousand tonnes.
Everything she knew, everything she once believed, had been a lie. A repulsive lie covering an ever more vile reality, and she had swallowed it all willingly, letting it fester inside her. Had Kwai' ever loved her? Had they ever even cared? Or had she been just another fool, another piece in their game she had never realised she was playing? Bile rises in her throat, she swallows it down. She swallows the rage, the grief, the self-loathing that claws at her, tipping from the inside until nothing is left. Until the person who had blindly defended Kwai's actions is erased.
Kwai' had destroyed her. They had destroyed them all, taken, maimed, violated, and even their death had not freed her. They were still here, weren't they, still hurting them? Still sinking their claws into her, into all of them. Casimir is on his knees, whispering apologies like they mattered, like it can undo anything that has already been done. And Renetta stares at him. At the shattered ruins of a man she had mocked, a man she had hated, and she finally sees.
There is nothing left of him. And she helped to do that. To break him down and turn him against himself.
Her vision blurs. Her throat burns. She chokes on guilt. She should leave. She should run. She always runs. Why isn't she running? Yet her legs won't move. She is trapped, held in this moment, in this unbearable reality where she cannot take back what she has thought and said and done, where she cannot unsee what has been laid bare before her. She should hate Casimir. She should be furious. How dare he take away the Kwai' she had formed in her mind? How dare he ruin her and them in one fell swoop?
A part of her wants to reach out and hurt him, to scream at him, to tear him down like she is being torn down, to make him feel every ounce of weight crushing her chest. But he hurts yet, and she knows he does.
And so, she does the only thing she can. She moves slowly, like she is made of something fragile, something that might shatter. She kneels before him, closer, close enough that she sees the way his shoulders shake, the way his breath comes in ragged gasps. The way his hands clutch at his own arms, like he is trying to hold himself together. She understands that feeling.
She reaches out.
She barely feels it as she wraps her arms around him, face buried in his chest. And then, she breaks. A sound rips from her throat, something raw, something that doesn't even sound human. The dam bursts, and she is torn apart all over again. Tears and screams, screams and tears, and some distant part of her wonders where the screaming is coming from. She has not yet noticed that her mouth is open, not that her cheeks are aching nor wet with tears, nor the scrape of each ragged sob through her vocal cords.
For the first time, Renetta lets herself truly grieve. She does not grieve for Kwai', not for what she lost, but for the girl she had been, for the girl she had destroyed with her own tongue.
She cries for Casimir. For herself. For the lie she loved. She cries because she has nothing left. Because she does not know who she is anymore. She clings to Casimir because there is no one else. Because she cannot do this alone.