Unsurity
OOC: This is after Shin left, but before Tag left - that is, this stuff is all on Thursday. I am sooooooo bored!
I have read my journal, from beginning to end. From the day that Whithower presented it to me, It is a thick book, truly, An entry for nearly each day of my life, some as spare as "woke, hungry, ate, spoke to Harrick" to entries that take up pages and pages in my small mean handwriting, writing that grew and changed over the years. Seventeen of them. I am nearly to the last few pages, and so it is these that I will take up with my thoughts, and then I shall put this book away, and begin another.
I am...lost. I have lost myself completely, and I am afraid. I am afraid of myself, for I no longer know how to act, how to be. I am not myself. I do not break rules. I operate within them, I can stretch them when it suits me, and I can push them when I need to. I strive to be everything that I never was as a child. I am a figure to be respected. I am a man to be obeyed.
I am not someone to be loved. I cannot love. I cannot make friends, I cannot DO what I have been so close to doing with Toile, with everyone aboard the ship. I have let my guard down, and my secrets slip, and it is costing me everything that I have and hold dear.
In that first year, I wrote about how confused I was that people were so scared of my body. As Mo'i'ro it was simply accepted that a scarred body was normal - I had no way of knowing that the extent that I had was far beyond the norm. I know only that I was never to show it to others - doing so only caused me and them pain, confusion. Even during those spare times visiting prostitutes with Harrick and the others, I learned that my body was something to be covered, hidden. Touch, but do not look. I see the entry from the first night I spent with a woman, when I'd come back on ship and felt, unlike everyone around me, shamed and tired. Harrick was roaring with laughter and pride at himself, but he'd spent a year before joining up with Whithower's ship in a House, learning his way, it was to be expected. When it was my turn to tell of my conquests I could only muster up that it had been "nice" and simply left to pour out my anger and sadness to the page.
I read of the night I had flown with Bidgete, when she had first shown me that yes, she was strong enough to carry herself and me and fly so high above the ground that the air thinned. I think that, looking back upon it all, she truly does love me in her way. I am like another thing for her, a shiny pretty thing that she would like to keep, something that gives her joy. It is a pity that I do not love her back.
I have never been with the women of my home planet - something that Harrick has told me many times that he will have me rectify someday. I am almost depressingly chaste, it is part of my duty, and my station, not to form such relationships. My life is to be one of emptiness, free from pain. I help others realize their potential, and up until recently that has been enough for me, always enough.
The entries after I lost my arm are perhaps the saddest. I recognize the melancholy now that I see in others in myself, then. I do not think that I have ever truly recovered from it, ever felt anything but disgust for it. I do not see it as a part of me, only as a tool, a set of them even, at my beck and call. My sword is more a part of me, the needles, the knives. I do not have the capacity to think of the mass of gears as ME, and it shows. Though I am no longer in danger of killing myself over it, I think that if I had not had my friends by my side, Harrick rushing to me, Ethan writing me, Bidgete's shrill fawning...I would have never made it through. I will see Harrick before this ship leaves this port.
But Toile...Shin-sin-fa. I do not know what to do. I have not fallen asleep with someone else before. It felt...right, and good. I love him, and I think that he believes it, but he's so damned...SET on something I don't understand, this unwillingness to show weakness, and I cannot comprehend why it is so important. In dueling you show your pain, there is no shame in being hurt, that's half the point. Some even claim to be more hurt, to get the upper hand. Emotions are something to be savored, between friends and family, but I think that he shuts me out from sheer habit. It hurts more than I could ever say.
He is tiring me, wearing me down. I know, I think, what might be his most deepest secret, but there is little I can do to act upon it. I cannot even talk with him further about it, cannot speak with him, or even simply look upon him, share a cup of coffee, feed him grapes, not even wake up next to him and know that he is loved, and I am loved, and that in spite of everything wrong with this world and myself I am doing something right. Instead I wake cold, and alone, with a measly bottle of wine in my stomach and nothing to follow it, aching muscles from holding him when he cried and nothing to show for it beyond a residual warmth of him pressed against me while I slept. Perhaps I even imagine that. He leaves me with only a note - I am only good enough for that, that he wishes to be alone. Nothing about me has changed. I get a feeling that everything about him has.
I do not know if he will come back to me. He carries such guilt over everything, but I cannot seem to give him any comfort from it. I fail him at every turn. I have underestimated him in his fighting ability, pulled when I should have left him well enough alone, and now tangled him up in my cursed life.
I am such a fool.
I will end this last page in my journal as I began it.
I am cold. I am alone. I am afraid.
I have read my journal, from beginning to end. From the day that Whithower presented it to me, It is a thick book, truly, An entry for nearly each day of my life, some as spare as "woke, hungry, ate, spoke to Harrick" to entries that take up pages and pages in my small mean handwriting, writing that grew and changed over the years. Seventeen of them. I am nearly to the last few pages, and so it is these that I will take up with my thoughts, and then I shall put this book away, and begin another.
I am...lost. I have lost myself completely, and I am afraid. I am afraid of myself, for I no longer know how to act, how to be. I am not myself. I do not break rules. I operate within them, I can stretch them when it suits me, and I can push them when I need to. I strive to be everything that I never was as a child. I am a figure to be respected. I am a man to be obeyed.
I am not someone to be loved. I cannot love. I cannot make friends, I cannot DO what I have been so close to doing with Toile, with everyone aboard the ship. I have let my guard down, and my secrets slip, and it is costing me everything that I have and hold dear.
In that first year, I wrote about how confused I was that people were so scared of my body. As Mo'i'ro it was simply accepted that a scarred body was normal - I had no way of knowing that the extent that I had was far beyond the norm. I know only that I was never to show it to others - doing so only caused me and them pain, confusion. Even during those spare times visiting prostitutes with Harrick and the others, I learned that my body was something to be covered, hidden. Touch, but do not look. I see the entry from the first night I spent with a woman, when I'd come back on ship and felt, unlike everyone around me, shamed and tired. Harrick was roaring with laughter and pride at himself, but he'd spent a year before joining up with Whithower's ship in a House, learning his way, it was to be expected. When it was my turn to tell of my conquests I could only muster up that it had been "nice" and simply left to pour out my anger and sadness to the page.
I read of the night I had flown with Bidgete, when she had first shown me that yes, she was strong enough to carry herself and me and fly so high above the ground that the air thinned. I think that, looking back upon it all, she truly does love me in her way. I am like another thing for her, a shiny pretty thing that she would like to keep, something that gives her joy. It is a pity that I do not love her back.
I have never been with the women of my home planet - something that Harrick has told me many times that he will have me rectify someday. I am almost depressingly chaste, it is part of my duty, and my station, not to form such relationships. My life is to be one of emptiness, free from pain. I help others realize their potential, and up until recently that has been enough for me, always enough.
The entries after I lost my arm are perhaps the saddest. I recognize the melancholy now that I see in others in myself, then. I do not think that I have ever truly recovered from it, ever felt anything but disgust for it. I do not see it as a part of me, only as a tool, a set of them even, at my beck and call. My sword is more a part of me, the needles, the knives. I do not have the capacity to think of the mass of gears as ME, and it shows. Though I am no longer in danger of killing myself over it, I think that if I had not had my friends by my side, Harrick rushing to me, Ethan writing me, Bidgete's shrill fawning...I would have never made it through. I will see Harrick before this ship leaves this port.
But Toile...Shin-sin-fa. I do not know what to do. I have not fallen asleep with someone else before. It felt...right, and good. I love him, and I think that he believes it, but he's so damned...SET on something I don't understand, this unwillingness to show weakness, and I cannot comprehend why it is so important. In dueling you show your pain, there is no shame in being hurt, that's half the point. Some even claim to be more hurt, to get the upper hand. Emotions are something to be savored, between friends and family, but I think that he shuts me out from sheer habit. It hurts more than I could ever say.
He is tiring me, wearing me down. I know, I think, what might be his most deepest secret, but there is little I can do to act upon it. I cannot even talk with him further about it, cannot speak with him, or even simply look upon him, share a cup of coffee, feed him grapes, not even wake up next to him and know that he is loved, and I am loved, and that in spite of everything wrong with this world and myself I am doing something right. Instead I wake cold, and alone, with a measly bottle of wine in my stomach and nothing to follow it, aching muscles from holding him when he cried and nothing to show for it beyond a residual warmth of him pressed against me while I slept. Perhaps I even imagine that. He leaves me with only a note - I am only good enough for that, that he wishes to be alone. Nothing about me has changed. I get a feeling that everything about him has.
I do not know if he will come back to me. He carries such guilt over everything, but I cannot seem to give him any comfort from it. I fail him at every turn. I have underestimated him in his fighting ability, pulled when I should have left him well enough alone, and now tangled him up in my cursed life.
I am such a fool.
I will end this last page in my journal as I began it.
I am cold. I am alone. I am afraid.