They are where they should be; where they were always going to end up, a conclusion long forgone but still very anticipated.

Isati watches as the Paragon comes into this second connection, watches as everything clicks into place.

Yes, patience has not been easy, patience has not been kind, but in this, at least, it has finally been rewarding.

"You're tired," Isati notes, taking in the dark circles, the way the skin sags on the other woman's face, puffy with sleeplessness, with wear.

Something has happened.

That face twists now, a faint grimace, a snarl of irritation.

"A natural consequence of fighting back an invasion."

We won't speak of it then, won't acknowledge it. Very well. Isati can wait a bit longer.

"From where I was looking, the people fighting back an invasion were the ones you were cutting down," she returns instead, enjoying the darkening of the Paragon's features, the way her black eyes glitter at the taunt, all rankle and rancor. "They fell like little matchsticks all around you, even my little friend. You've been practicing since we last met. You're getting the hang of this sport."

"I wouldn't call it that."

"A sport?" she lets herself smile, as if to consider the denial, the deflection, but Isati can feel the other woman poking, prodding beneath these meaningless words.

No, none of that just now.

"You're right, it's not a trivial hobby, is it?" Isati throws out, shifting so the Paragon freezes, all attention now, all suspicion and fear. "It's something deeper, means something more. Maybe a birthright—a calling, just like the Skills."

An ugly grimace flickers in response to this.

"Killing people isn't a birthright," the Paragon shoots back, though her voice is quiet.

A shimmer—regret. Isati's head turns to the side, tilting, as if to hear a sound of it, and she looks at her, this Paragon, this being of power and might, who holds everything Mother could have ever wanted, but somehow looks like a reflective shadow of Isati herself.

Hair still in place, face still clean, unblemished, Isati corrects herself. Still giving off the pretense of fitting in.

She slides to her feet, moves in this metaphorical space, around the conjured room as this new shadow watches, fixed and tense beneath all the armor, all the walls she's trying to build up.

Pointless.

"There comes a time," Isati tells her, the words rolling out in a practiced certainty born from years of saying it back to herself, alone, in the dark. Her dark mantra, now given to a new audience. "A time after the suns set on that finite adolescence, when the world decides the slack on your rope is over and the leash needs to be tightened. The allowances of youth have dried up; the blush of innocence is now a mar. It's time to get your piece on the board and play the game. Our way."

It's mocking bow, an arch tone barely masking the sneer beneath it—but no, that can't come out now. Not yet.

"They expect you to just let it all go," she tells the Paragon instead, pulling herself back to that dangerous honesty, the earnestness that has always betrayed her. Her fingers twitch but she masters them. She will play this right. "The dreams, that shimmering twilight of simply feeling alive, all the way up to your fingertips. They want you to put it in a box and shove it in the closet, underneath the clothes you'll outgrow but never throw away.

"You shove it down deep only to unearth it an eon later, when all that's left of that vibrance is a dusty echo, a muddled memory," she continues. "It'll be a jolt in the system, a cruel reminder of how much more you were before. But don't worry, they assure. It fades soon enough—it will have to fade soon enough, because you're too far gone to go back. Those sunlit days are over."

The other woman's expression has hardened, as if to grow a mask on itself, but Isati knows better, knows the understanding and the fear that grows beneath this façade.

She turns, fully facing the Paragon now, separated by the width of the room, but that distance means nothing here, and it cannot save the woman from the truth that crawls along her face.

Don't deny it, Isati thinks, because that sliver of twilight sadness resides in Isati too, inside a shadowed, shapeless room. In front of a cracked mirror. Don't deny the things we both understand.

"They couch it in inevitable terms," she pushes on, her voice growing now, the simmering, knuckle-knit rage boiling with it, "in rightful terms—'growing up,' 'facing reality'—as if the slow slog toward slaughter, toward mediocrity and obscurity, is some unavoidable fate. Some desired fate."

The words are bitter on her tongue, warping her mouth, and she bites them with the sharp blades of her smile.

"Here is your box on the board, they told me, Get yourself in and cut off whatever doesn't fit. There's no more time for dreaming. So I wedged myself in, squeezed tight between things I never wanted, never cared for, but they said were important.

"Don't you want to be the same? these husks of buried childhoods hissed across the ages. Don't you want to settle in? Get married, breed, become established?"

She shifts, slinking back onto her throne, back against the cold womb of metal, taking solace in its familiar hum, coaxing its unyielding touch.

"I first cut off what I thought I had enough of," she remembers, settling now, holding the Paragon's gaze, refusing to let her look away, to pretend.

Don't deny it.

"Time, attention. I whittled it down and parsed it out for these expected aspirations. But still I could not fit.

"You don't need this, they told me, pulling at my dreams, my ambitions, my wants... my desires. All the things outside this rigid plan."

The bile surges back and Isati leans forward and hisses it: "Cut it off."

The silence that follows is a challenge, a dare to deny this, a dare to deny that the Paragon understands when Isati knows, Isati saw that room, the mirror.

But the Paragon says nothing; and so Isati presses on:

"I declined. I got myself into that box, but I didn't cut off what they wanted."

She watches as the Paragon's hands twitch into fists, tendons tensing all the way up to her long, elegant neck, which bows back, tucked behind a chin. As if to protect a weak spot.

"The hair was first," Isati pushes on, and it's flickers of memory, flashes of dark hair falling, untethered onto tiled ground. "I didn't need it. Didn't want it. All the things it signaled, all the coyness, the girlishness, went after that. It was my little fuck you, tied nicely in a pretty little bow hidden behind a blank mask."

She jumps to her feet now, all muscles and meat, and the Paragon predictably stiffens.

"You see, in the beginning I had to cut off my real face—it didn't fit in their box," Isati tells her, leaning in, peering over, pressing into space that isn't hers, but also doesn't exist. "I only grew it back when they became too afraid to point out how it stuck out of my container."

She lets her teeth show now, because even here she can taste it, the salt of their fear, the smell of their quaking. It was the sweetness to every bitter pill they had given her, the reward of years playing on their little board.

They'll be afraid of you too, she wants to say, wants to press darkly, though she knows the shadowy, watchful mind in front of her is not ready—not yet—for this. We can make them too afraid to tell you to get back into your box.

No, before she accepts it, the Paragon needs to hear of it.

Isati begins to pace.

"I'm creeping out a little further now, under the guise of this moonless nighttime, in the shadows they're too frightened to peer into," she continues, letting her tone wane, lull into that calm purposefulness. This too the Paragon understands: the dangerous quiet, the power of hushing when they expect a boom. "They're all burying their heads in their grave plots, turning blind, and now..."

And, despite herself, she can taste it again, what she's been working toward, and, for a second, her smile is real.

"Now I sometimes think, in brief, sunlit moments, that I might remember how to feel alive, all the way up to my fingertips."

Isati almost does it unconsciously, a small flutter of fingers, reaching out as if to recapture it, because it's that warm, yellow glow, that permeating feeling of life and all its infinite possibilities. It's an old memory, from before all this, before being alone, before the monster and handle-less knife. It's the thing she has been chasing all down this long, dark corridor.

"I sometimes think," she's whispering now, but it carries both in sound and soul to the transfixed being across the room, and it strikes Isati suddenly, with clear precision, that this transfixion isn't because of a performance on Isati's part. This lure has suddenly become real, and Isati's brow crumples in confusion as she finishes it, the confession to a vital enemy of this last secret hope, buried beneath all the carcasses she has made:

"I sometimes think that I might soon break free."

A/N: Very, very curious about people's feelings on this one. Very curious. :)