The Guild of the Forsaken

CHAPTER 7 - Tragedy In Their Blood

One Is the Loneliest Number - Alec James Milewski

September 5th 2024

RAVENHOLD

Those who reside at Ravenhold are born with tragedy in their blood. It flows through them like the passing of time. Be it tragedy they are destined to bestow upon others, or the call of tragedy to their own lives.

Derek has witnessed the inmates break, or were they always broken.

Lost souls searching for a calling, a purpose.

They found it in the comforting silence of death, the callous charity of destruction.

Derek found peace in watching over the inmates, perhaps their own retched souls called to his own.

By helping those who were lost he helped himself find.

He had seen Marinette rile up and taunt her visitors before. She had demonstrated the same process with him, poking and prodding trying to discover a weakness, a crack in a carefully crafted mask of calm.

Though he knew she didn't do it to be cruel. Well, not always. Yes, she enjoyed watching them get frustrated and angry at her. Bare their raw intentions. She liked to know what people really thought of her.

If she was cruel, heartless, a monster.

He had once inquired about why she acts the way she does, why become a villain? What lead her down the path to act the way she does. Gazing at him through thick lashes she pursed her lips.

"I accept chaos. It calls to me, it gives me air. People don't understand that...Understand me. I'm not like them." She made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

"Their minds function differently to mine. Maybe it's because of my past, maybe the magical manipulation has changed my primary functions. I don't think I'm human, honestly, I don't think I ever was. So why do they expect me to play by their morals."

Marinette threw her hands in the air and released a breath.

"I have lost everything time and time again. For what? Nothing. Yet I still go on. I survive. Find strength in some lost crevice of my mind. I am not a 'good person' if I can be considered a person. I know I have done evil things; killed innocents, tortured without reason. By Kwami, I enjoy manipulating people. Getting what I want out of them, watching them break."

A bitter chuckle filled the tense silence her words left behind.

Though perhaps Marinettes self-awareness and acknowledgement of the dark parts of herself is what left Derek so stunned. Rarely has he seen 'evil' people admit they are truly bad; they believe that all they are truly doing is enacting their own version of justice or peace which really is just the opposite.

"You know what's the best thing, they don't even follow their own moral code. I have seen the worst man has to offer and if you ask me. We should destroy it all."

The determined glaze to her eyes and the tense energy that filled the room when she spoke made sure that Derek never followed that line of inquiry ever again.

He watched as time and time again she hid herself away. She saw others express themselves in ways he knows she doesn't allow herself to do.

Marinette enjoys when people express their negative emotions. When they let them consume them. Her eyes light up and she watches in awe as a person cradles their fury, unleashes it.

While her sits, tamed.

This meeting with Batman and company proved this. 

She played with them, gave them some of what they wanted. Showed them what they wanted to see.