Search for the Truth, but it's all used up
El's not home. Where the hell would he go? Kae went to bed and Demitri...
Oh boy, Demitri. he's mad. stark raving lock him in the attic mad. But only not all the time. Just - it's like he's got a windup key, and things just slowly crank that key and then he goes off and he doesn't have any control over himself at all, and he's DAMN LUCKY he takes it out on people who won't take it the wrong way, or he'd be dead a long time ago.
But it took a bit for me to understand what was happening. I thought--first he looked like
Takeli
Like a guy looks when he's got a slow rage going, and he comes up on you and you don't know what's wrong, you don't know that anything's wrong because you asked to stay in lockup and clean, and you've got everything tidy and the mattresses have aired and even the walls are scrubbed down clean - so *awful* with that first swipe, they were actually white underneath, not gray, I had to move *everything* and do every inch and the *FLOOR* - and everything looks nice and you think he's just going to laugh and call you his little wife, because once you start tidying you can't fucking stop until everything is perfect, because it's wrong, it's not right and it has to *be right* or you can't stop thinking about it or concentrate on anything else until you fix it...
but then you look up to chatter something else, to say that you're happy he's back (only not really) and there's this light in his eye, and he lets you see it, smiles as the cold rock hits your belly and you think frantically oh shit what did I do
And then the fist comes down
but you don't know what you did, you didn't do anything you just stayed in all day and cleaned
And then he
NO! I am not talking about fucking Takeli! I am not talking about him stop this right now, it's only that Demitri had that look, and it scared me but i wasn't going to crumple for the likes of him, i don't belong to him, he's got no fucking right to look at me like that but I did try to talk him down a bit so he wouldn't try and take it out on me but he wasn't out to hit anyone.
He was out to get beat. the crazy bastard! Kae punched him in the face and he laughed, he tried to get more, and then I realized - it was like some kind of a fit, some kind of - he wasn't really seeing us, he was caught by this thing, trapped by it, and the things that came out of his mouth, they were worse and worse, trying to bait kae, make him hit demitri again, make him hurt him--
He's *damn* lucky he only pulls this shit on people who won't give him what he thinks he wants.
But Demitri was interrupting, wasn't he? I was talking to Kae. and he was telling me the same things that Nathrae and El and Vii said when i told them what I wanted to do. That I shouldn't waste my time trying to help Seilir. that Seilir didn't deserve my care or my compassion or anything from me after what he did to me and to nathrae. But Kae...
Kae thinks that Seilir won't actually contact me at all. that he won't even bother and i shouldn't wait around for him to want to talk to me, because he won't. That seilir doesn't actually care about me at all - he asked me if Seilir came after us that day when we found out that he'd taken someone else as a mate without a word to us, if he tried to talk to us at all.
I said no. he didn't come to us after. He ran away, changed himself. became small and broken.
He said, "And there is where you see where his heart lies."
Kae believes that we gave Seru everything we had, and he took it like it was his due, and that he doesn't deserve my help now. That he abandoned us and deserves to be that shriveled up hollow shell, because that's what he really is.
and again, it hits me: It wasn't real. none of it was. I was in a dream-spell that I could touch and taste and live in completely, but it wasn't real, no matter how much i believed in it--
I can't think that. i don't want that to be true, I don't
but everybody blames him, everyone! everyone says it's his fault! and when I asked, why does everyone blame him even Demitri had an answer, and he was up to his eyes in the CRAZY! He said the only reason why I was the only one who didn't think that Ceru was to blame was because I was living in a delusion, and fuck your aim demitri why you gotta hit the target like that
Fuck it, when everyone around you is saying the same thing, and it's coming from people who know better from you and people who have been there before you and people who haven't been there before you and people in the middle of a rage driven fit all say the same thing, maybe you better listen to them.
Hell with this. I'm going to get out of the damn house and make some elixirs out of my back stock and try to figure out how to tell Vii that Kae won't let me teach him how to kiss anymore. Kae's being totally unreasonable! Vii's going to flip.
Why didn't El come home?