[Thancred's door doesn't even have the decency to release him back to his own apartment — although, on second gander, maybe that's not such a bad thing. It means Ryne won't see him looking the way he does when he tumbles out, like a phantom from her worst nightmares, as volatile and haunted as he'd been back in the years they'd traveled together on the First when her eyes were bluer than blue and her hair the spun gold of someone else.
It's ironic, though. He tumbles out onto a street somewhere in the city — blessedly not raining, but the skies are an active threat of it — and for a second all he can think to do is walk, walk until he catches his bearings, and wouldn't it be funny if he walked until he saw a familiar window and he —
Gods. Gods.
I get—night terrors, sometimes. Nightmares. Tonight it was worse than usual.
And now look what he did. Now look what he's wrought, as though Reno's nights weren't bad enough already. As though he didn't already hate it when something he did or something he implicated or even something he didn't do put that feral snarling smile back on Reno's face, the one that —
A bullet to the brain, squish! Or a button under the plate, squish, fifty thousand dead and that's all on me.
Fifty thousand dead is such a specific number. Specific like someone counted. Specific like someone knew the population of the people who would've been under that structure when it fell and still —
And still —
Reno used to look at him like he was waiting for something. Sometimes he still does. Reno curls up in the corner of a couch and makes himself small and says things like this can't be for me when it's kindness he's shown and he'd always thought, always thought it'd been something else, something bad or something rough but not fifty thousand families already committed to whatever scraps of a life they could manage to scrape out until the very sky fell and —
And he remembers how it feels, the moment before the roof comes crashing down. He'd had only a few yalms of it to wait. They'd had a plate as high as the sky. They'd had just enough time to see it falling and understand what it was.
It's not a question of forgiveness.
He's not even within a thousand malms of beginning to touch a notion as thorny as forgiveness.
It's just — it's just all of it. The truth of all of it.
Glory be to Garlemald.
He doesn't have to see the aftermath to know what it looks like, the agony and the cruelty and the heartbreak of a nation that sacrificed its own.]
juts col d
[Oh. His hands are shaking. Maybe he's just cold.]
no subject
It's ironic, though. He tumbles out onto a street somewhere in the city — blessedly not raining, but the skies are an active threat of it — and for a second all he can think to do is walk, walk until he catches his bearings, and wouldn't it be funny if he walked until he saw a familiar window and he —
Gods. Gods.
And now look what he did. Now look what he's wrought, as though Reno's nights weren't bad enough already. As though he didn't already hate it when something he did or something he implicated or even something he didn't do put that feral snarling smile back on Reno's face, the one that —
Fifty thousand dead is such a specific number. Specific like someone counted. Specific like someone knew the population of the people who would've been under that structure when it fell and still —
And still —
Reno used to look at him like he was waiting for something. Sometimes he still does. Reno curls up in the corner of a couch and makes himself small and says things like this can't be for me when it's kindness he's shown and he'd always thought, always thought it'd been something else, something bad or something rough but not fifty thousand families already committed to whatever scraps of a life they could manage to scrape out until the very sky fell and —
And he remembers how it feels, the moment before the roof comes crashing down. He'd had only a few yalms of it to wait. They'd had a plate as high as the sky. They'd had just enough time to see it falling and understand what it was.
It's not a question of forgiveness.
He's not even within a thousand malms of beginning to touch a notion as thorny as forgiveness.
It's just — it's just all of it. The truth of all of it.
He doesn't have to see the aftermath to know what it looks like, the agony and the cruelty and the heartbreak of a nation that sacrificed its own.]
juts col d
[Oh. His hands are shaking. Maybe he's just cold.]
are yuo
okay?