[Requiem - Valentina] The Road Not Taken

[autumn-skald.livejournal.com]

OOC: Another one for the challenge on killing. It is written as more of a journal entry, or perhaps part of a longer letter to someone. Some of you may be able to guess who :P



It will come as a surprise to you perhaps, to learn that I have never directly taken a life. Given how much death you have handed out in your comparatively short years it might seem almost miraculous until we examine the reasons for this to be the case.

In yours you are in many ways a soldier, you have fought many people and sometimes you have had to kill them. I have never been much of a fighter, I can fence, but that art is somewhat removed from the arena of actual combat and I have never drawn my blade with the intention of killing someone with it, not that I can immediately recall at any rate.

Does this lack of killing come from any moral standpoint then on my part? I think we can both safely rule any such thing out. You know as well as I do that my soul and heart and both blackened things with little regard for anyone else left in them. It is more that I am a social creature; I seek to destroy others through their reputation and their possessions. Should it come to the point that I need someone to die for whatever reason, I get someone else to do the actual deed for me, something that you know all too well.

Do you remember that Kindred I walked in the mind of? The one who had been setting up murders for other people to watch and enjoy? I remember looking at his mind and wondering what the difference between us was and realising that the only real one was that he had done those dreadful things and I hadn’t, not because I was not capable of them, but because I simply chose not to.

The choice has never been due to my thinking that killing is wrong, I don’t. I find it hard to care about the life or death of any other being unless it impacts on my own. Even your death, whilst I would mourn it, I would hardly do something stupid to avenge it, that would risk my own and that is not something I am prepared to do.

I do not randomly kill people because the further down that path I go the harder it would be for me to stop. If I started to kill because I enjoyed it then I would keep on doing so, at some point my actions would threaten the Masquerade and so my actions would then threaten my own existence. Since I do not wish to threaten my own existence I do not do these things. It is a simple premise and one that lets me appear to others as perhaps a little less of the cold and callous creature you know me to be.

For the moment this keeps me in check. If I ever grow weary of this life though, should my instinct of self-preservation cease to keep my darker impulses in check then we both know well where that path will lead me. Next time I fall you should let me go and remember well the promise you made to me. Show me no mercy for you know well that I will show none in return.