Quotes of Torment

[naturaltwohands]

Quotes and words I have said mostly to cause pain for finding_honor_in_darkness.

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[CW: Sexual Assualt] That Zak was a tormented soul.

[naturaltwohands]

Knowing that Zak's best memories may indeed be their time training together hurts Drizzt, because Drizzt has gone on to have so many other wonderful memories, of times that he has spent with friends, just being near each other. And Zak never had that. Zak doesn't know what it's like to spend time with another, without speaking, simply enjoying the company of the other. Every moment they were together seemed to have another purpose, when the greatest thing of all is to just spend time together for the purpose of spending time together.

Drizzt knows that his father hated Menzoberranzan and everything that it stood for, but that he was understandably too scared to leave the place. Everything else was an unknown... A terrifying unknown. Drizzt only had the courage to leave because of Zaknafein—and because Guenhwyvar was by his side. Now, years later, after having barely survived the Underdark, Drizzt knows that Zaknafein would not have survived it. It's also troubling, because Drizzt knows he was born because Zak did not flee.

He does not fully understand the pains that Zak went through that resulted in his birth. He knows that it wasn't mutual, and even Vierna outright mentioned it to him. Drizzt, like many children, does not want to really think about his parents having sex. Unlike most children, it is because he's effectively the result of Zak having no ability to consent. Rape, in other words. He doesn't go down that road of thought, partially because he doesn't want to, and partially because even if he ran away from the situation himself, more than once, it's normalized. And he doesn't want to think of how awful it must have been.

Also because he knows, even though he has never thought of it consciously, that his father would have done it all again if it meant that Drizzt would exist.

His father was chased by the sounds of dying children, often killed during House Wars or possibly sometimes just because. Zak had mentioned it to Drizzt, more than once, and Drizzt now understands just how significant those words were. Drizzt knows that his father had an innate love for children, and that in another world and life, his father would have been, well, a wonderful father with a loving wife and surrounded by children. Or maybe even someone who ran an orphanage after retiring from his years of adventuring. Fantasies that can never be reality, but fantasies that Zak would have entirely deserved.

Drizzt mourns the loss of what could have been. What kind of drow would his father had been if he had not suffered centuries in a society that did not match what was in his heart? How different Zaknafein would have been! Zak would have been smiling more often than not, he tells himself. Sometimes during a moment of kindness of another towards himself, Drizzt wonders how wonderful his father would have felt receiving it. Drizzt was his only friend. What would it have been like if Zak could have met all of Drizzt's friends! How happy he would have been to know that his son was loved.

Except he does know, Drizzt tells himself. Somewhere, he is watching and smiling. It's sometimes the only thought that keeps Drizzt together when he thinks upon his father when his thoughts take a darker turn. That his father promised that he was at peace. That his father was happy that he had the courage to flee, and that he fought well.

How lonely his father must have been! Drizzt knows he had been afraid that Drizzt would be destroyed by Melee-Magthere. If only he could tell his father that he was the one who had given Drizzt the knowledge and strengths he needed to survive the Academy and disassemble the lies before they could truly take root. Maybe the knowledge would have reassured his tormented soul, if only a little, to know how he had been able to protect his son, even from afar.

Drizzt also wished he could have taught Zak the word "love". It doesn't exist in the drow tongue, but they both felt it strongly for the other. Zaknafein was the first person that Drizzt loved so deeply that losing him burned a permanent hole in his heart.

There are so many thing that Drizzt wishes he could tell his father. He wishes he could tell his father just how important he was. But be couldn't. Soon after he was starting to realize just how important his father was—that his father was even his father at all!—Zaknafein was dead. Less than twelve hours after they had opened their hearts to each other after nearly killing each other, both believing that the other had fallen to evil, Zaknafein was sacrificed to the Spider Queen by Drizzt's mother Malice, Matron of House Do'Urden. Drizzt never got to tell his father what he meant to him, what he did for him.

It's one of Drizzt's greatest laments: that his father cannot hear his words of love. That Drizzt cannot thank his father for what he did for him. And, most painfully, that there is not a thing that Drizzt can do for him now, save for one thing that he feels is too small in comparison to what torments Zaknafein must have felt throughout his life.

Drizzt lives his life to the fullest, surrounds himself with friends, and fights for the forces of good and to protect those that cannot protect themselves. It is the only thing he can do now. The ranger knows and fears that will never be enough.