Day 58: Arts & Crafts (Fourth shift)

[immortale]

Firo was glad to see the end of lunch, if only for the fact that in a few more hours, the day would be over. Night was the only time he had any real freedom of movement, and it was the only time he could do something worth doing, instead of just sitting around

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[she_is_ruin]

She stared at the wall. His face was so human, so like someone else's she knew. It couldn't give her any answers.

No, it was this man who wanted answers from her. She had seen him live through the memory displacement that night they'd got into the basement just the same as he'd seen her, so honestly, why the surprise? Was he afraid of death or pain even after having his identity shredded at the Institute's whim? Or had he come to accept the Institute's potential to reach inside his mind and could rationalize it away? If it was the latter, she envied him.

Yomi exhaled deeply when his questions for her started turning into statements about her, the only sign that she hadn't turned into a living statue where she stood. Did he expect her to answer to any of it? The time for explaining herself was long past. The moment she had stabbed into her cousin's soft body, sliced and hacked until the pleas for mercy stopped coming, people had stopped listening to explanations. And she had stopped giving them.

"That's right," she said, "I did it. It was a decision I made, a simple one. You seem to be forgetting that sort of thing's my business, not yours." Finally, she looked at him again, just a silver of a glance from the edge of her eye. "You can be upset about the others if you want, but don't get on my case like a chiding father. Do you think I haven't been on the brink of death before? Been injured beyond repair?" The strain in her shoulders added a new sizzle of pain, delicious and raw. "Death would have been easy. This is just a nuisance."

What could have happened? Who cared about what could have happened? It was what had happened that mattered. What had locked her onto this path until she was taken off of it.

And what could anyone, least of all him, do to change that?

"Nothing," she murmured to herself, and once she realized she had spoken aloud, she put on a brittle smile and said more loudly to the wall, "I'm saying you should do nothing because that's all you can do. You can't stop people from risking themselves. And why should you want to? Have you ever considered that doing as much might mean something for them?"