What was the point of asking one to say something? To say you needed to hear it before that hate could start to slip away? To make them say it did not ease that pain, if anything it only confirmed that they’d never understand. That they would never know how you felt or why what they did was so horrible. He believed her capable of understanding what it had done to him without having gone through it herself. He thought her capable of being able to open her eyes and see just how it wounded a man like him. But perhaps she was not. Perhaps she could only see what she was forced to go through her self and if that was the case…then she’d never understand.
As Diarmad would never seek to make anyone feel the ways he’d been forced to feel. He’d never force another to live through what he had been forced to. And so if she could never, ever, truly understand just what she had done to him.
Then they were lost. And Diarmad, in time, would have to accept that fact.
He knew she’d not broken for others as she had for him. But neither had he ever been made into a slave and treated as she had treated him. All those moments she’d forced him into meant nothing as he had not done exactly as she wished the moment she showed something new. If that was the way of things between them then he very well should walk away. His entire life he had sacrificed himself for her, he’d thrown all else, all care, aside, for her.
And once he had not. Once he had not laid down and consoled her wounds over his own. And now he was a man not to be trusted. A man cruel. He was a man that did not care. A man that had now changed completely because he had not still laid down and done her bidding when her tears commanded it.
Was it any wonder he held such anger?
No, Diarmad was not here to mock. And the thought that he was showed only still that she had no concept of the man he was or what his words meant. For all their time together she truly did not know him and more and more with those passing days it was becoming apparent. Perhaps he truly could do nothing for her. He could not make her open her eyes and see in hundreds of years. Should he truly hold onto hope that there was still chance?
Perhaps he truly was nothing more then a slaved fool. Slaved by his own word as much as the tie between them that words of dismissal would not remove.
“Because I gave my word to do so.” Diarmad did not flinch from that cold gaze, he was well used to seeing it directed at him. Often cold, often looking at him as though he were the one who had done fault, who did all wrongs. Perhaps he was. The man who had done all wrong since the moment she took him from his honor and turned him into her slave. Perhaps truly the fault lay all upon him for everything. He knew he had his part to play, that not all moves were correct. But “I gave word to guard, promise to watch over you, and I will do so.” If she did not want his protection she should never have put him in the place to give his word.
“My word is my bound and I do not intend to break it.” Not just because she now thought him a cruel beast. She’d taken all else from him, he had to keep something. And his word was all he felt he had left.
If she wanted his word to no longer hold weight she could kill him and rid his word of all meaning.