Chapter Text
{You need to eat,} Ruin’s voice, a curious amalgamation of several voices, as if they couldn’t settle on what they wanted her to hear as their voice, its tone was not… Worried. Per say. She does not think it is in God of Destruction’s understanding to worry. But she does feel a pointed urgency, faintly, in her to feed herself. Ruin understands starvation and death that will follow if she doesn’t eat, doesn’t sustain herself. And Ruin understands that Vin could enter the Well of Ascension to unleash them back into the world.
They had made a pack, years ago, she alone in the Mists, them swirling around her, tugging at her bare legs and touching softly at her fingertips, almost like hands reaching out to hold her, a silent vow.
Ruin had waited centuries, and she is here, an instrument that knew exactly what to do to get them out.
“I also need sleep,” she muses, amused, “I got like two hours.”
Faintly, she feels Ruin make a sound that reminds her of a car crash. Grinding metal. Breaking glass. She hums in response. Faintly. A song of another world, a song of another life. As always, it is the creation and show of life that makes Ruin in her head shudder in disgust, disgruntled unease. Push slightly away from her. She tugs on her bronze earring, out of habit in a quiet apology, not because Ruin actually resides in it.
She sighs.
“I will eat, I promise,” she murmurs.
{And sleep?} Ruin’s voice wasn’t worried. They did not worry, did not find the true value in worry, but there was a curious tension to their voice, which slipped into a feminine tone. They usually preferred feminine voices when they were trying to convince her of something.
“That I can never promise,” she mused, because it was easier to be awake at night, with the Mists affecting her as they did.
Ruin gave her a sound that vaguely sounded like the groan of a dying whale.
She snorts in response.
She wonders if she should be worried, as she knows the bad of Faustian bargains and all, making promises to an ‘evil’ deity. She had made several at this point, but, well, at least Ruin has to be unsealed to collect, so to speak, so it’s not like it mattered at the moment. Their influence is minuscule, in comparison to what it could be; their power is limited until and if she decides to let them out. They could, of course, always kill her. Get anyone they could influence to rip her head off for not doing it sooner. They had enough influence to do that much. But they haven’t. Any time she’s even seen an Inquistor, rare as it was when she was near one of the Twenty, even when she’s in the middle of using Allomancy, they sort of… Just slip right past her.
As if she wasn't there at all.
It was an unspoken truce, while they danced around the fact that she could and would attack Rashek eventually. Whether that would lead to Ruin’s release was up to their Great Debate(Trademarked, of course in her head).
This world was supposed to have died so long ago.
And Vin, as someone who had died once, can understand the necessity of death as much as she thought that sudden death was awful.
Her response to Ruin’s need to destroy the world was simple.
Do it. Do it slowly, not suddenly. Let this world die as all worlds die, over the course of eons, of stars’ deaths. Let it end, but slowly.
But, of course, they did not want it. They argued, pushed back on the years and years the world had been given. Past the original bargain. And it was simple on her part. She lived on this world, so she argued she was much the same, and by virtue of being an example of what happened when life was given more time.
Hence their Great Impasse(Also Trademarked).
In that impasse, nearly twelve years had passed by. She doesn’t quite understand it, but in those twelve years since young Messily had been sacrificed for her Seeker powers, Ruin has… Doesn’t she know if she can call it mellowed? They stopped spewing all the useless, pointed vitriol that she had ignored with boredom that had infuriated them. One, because it was difficult to really insult her, and two, because she had a very good thing against them. She’s supposed to destroy their consciousness. She has the power to do it. They know it. Felt it since she had first started practicing on taking the body of Preservation to fuel herself, more than to speak to Ruin, but to actually use the power she would need to go after the Lord Ruler.
Mutually assured destruction was a shitty peace maker, but a peace maker nonetheless.
But she also had the power to set them free, and if it weren’t their Impasse, she would have already done it.
Their relationship is a complex mess, she can admit.
They had spent their first few years doing their damndest to make her go into Kredrick Shaw, which she had argued was stupid as fuck until she was taller than two feet-
But in the thousands of years since its seal, Vin has been the only being to answer when it spoke to them from the Well. The only being that could respond, fueled partially by the Mists at first, until it became second nature to reach out with her voice to them. It had taken her longer than she liked to really pick out her own self-destructive thoughts from Ruin’s intent and bullshit, but she had managed it, and Ruin had, of course, by then, focused on her because of the abnormality. Because. They must be fucking bored.
I guess even gods grew lonely in solitude. Maybe it's because I work with the power of their Counterpart. They miss and hate Preservation at the same time, I think.
And of course, over the years, they had seen her mind. And then she saw that she was… Neutral if leaning on ‘eh’ on the possible destruction of the universe as long as it happened gradually. Like. Star's death timeline is slow. In her head, Ruin grumbles at her thoughts. She grumbles back.
{This world was never meant to die quietly or slowly.}
“And I was never meant to be in this world, Ruina,” she counters. She uses Spanish because it irked them slightly to hear the tongue of a foreign universe, and because it felt nice to have a little bit of home spoken, “And you know it's rude to speak.”
They’re response was a breeze over a field of grass, almost a sigh. She sighed in response, pushing back her long dark hair, absently.
{So you are here,} Ruin says, simply, unapologetic about the fact that they had looked into her thoughts.
She hummed again.
“So I am.”
She had spent the majority of her second life skirting around the Dominances instead of bee-lining straight to kill Lord Ruler once she had been able to somewhat control her Allomancy and her ability to draw upon Preservation's remains. Beyond waiting for the right time to draw on the Well’s power and to usurp the Lord Ruler’s hold on it, this timeline argument was what kept her away. She carefully slips past a minor noble, relieving him of some of his belongings quite easily. The weight of the coins in her dress pocket is slim- a purposeful thing on her part. She doesn’t take a lot. Taking a lot gathers attention, and if there is one thing Vin the Skaa, the girl with Ruin whispering in her ears, doesn’t want is attention. So, a little bit, every once in a while, she stole. The fact that she is still a thief, even just a simple pickpocket, doesn’t weigh on her. Living out her second life as chattel, as an object due to one Dick Head’s urge to exert control and commit genocide, even on his own people, had left her very little sympathy towards this world’s rules. Which is why she slips her coins into the pockets of various Skaa as she makes her way past them. A tired-looking mother, a bent-looking leather worker, is working on polishing someone’s shoes.
Fuck the Nobles.
Fuck the Lord Ruler.
“Just not everyone else,” she said, gently, to Ruin.
Ruin sighs in her head, and this time it the voice of a tired old man, deep and gruff. Annoyed, maybe. Maybe just tired. A thousand years was a toll on any being, and the God of Destruction had been denied their purpose and imprisoned for centuries by their counterpart. They had been angry, cruel, and vindictive the first time Vin had spoken to them. Now, years of speaking, of being ‘together’ in this way, had… Not quite mellowed them. She cannot claim to understand them. To even like them, after all these years, and it was really hard to really pinpoint the God of Destruction’s vibe and feelings, and all that, even after twelve years since she had first reached out to them. Ruin is a companion, an ill one, but Vin, once a girl of another world, the would-be Heir of Preservation, knows no other voice if she can help it. In a world living under the Yoke of a reluctant nomad hero turned apathetic and cruel God-King, you don’t tend to make friends. If she were a good person, she wouldn’t have abandoned Reen, a boy she vaguely remembers who would have died for her. But she is not a good person. The second, she was old enough to do more than trip over her own damn feet; she was fucking ran from his abusive ass.
{You must eat something, Vin.}
Again, isn't worry. Gods do not worry. Or at least this god didn't.
But it is the closest they would ever come to it.
“As soon as I get to the shop, Ruina. I promise.”