terabient

Title: When All Is Said and Done
Fandom: Soulcalibur
Pairing: Ivy/Siegfried
Rating: PG-13 (violence)
Words: 328
Warnings: Major character death

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It's hard to breathe. His throat is filled with blood: every labored breath he takes reeks of it.

He is dying and he knows it. There is nothing he can do to stop it. He has failed in his mission, and the bitterness of that realization is worse than the blood that floods his mouth.

"I'm sorry it has to end this way," Ivy tells him. Her voice is cold and without mercy, but her hands are gentle as they brush away the matted hair in his eyes and wipe the blood pooling at the corners of his lips; and Siegfried thinks that if his destiny is one of failure and not redemption then it is fitting he die at the end of her sword.

He is too weak to raise his sword, but somehow he finds the strength to grasp its hilt, and he offers it to her as best he can. "Take it."

Ivy's eyes are impossibly bright in the darkness of the tower. "I can't," she says, her voice thick with tears, and Siegfried aches at the thought that she can still weep for him. "I'm...tainted. It won't accept me."

He wants to tell her she's wrong. He wants to tell her she's purer than anything, far purer than he is, because she had done what he could not, because her heart would not betray her resolve. He wants to tell her she will succeed where he has failed because she accepts what must be done. He wants to tell her he's sorry; he wants to tell her that if she's tainted, it's only because he is the one who sullied her, because of what he'd done to her years ago, and not some irrevocable curse in her blood.

He wants to tell her he loved her then. He wants to tell her he loves her still.

But the blood is behind his eyes now, and he can tell her nothing at all.