Who Are You to Wave Your Finger?

[sarcastass]

Who: Szelhamos and Amberdrake
What: I DON'T FEEL BAD ABOUT BEING AN ASSHOLE AND TO PROVE IT I'M GOING TO TALK TO A THERAPIST ABOUT HOW RIGHT I AM.
When: Early evening
Where: Drake's office in Attleton
Warnings: May edge into territories of past abuse/trauma. Will update warnings properly if this happens.

A good full day spent stewing. A full day, since Tannusen had snapped at him.

Unjustly so, hissed the old, familiar voice that dictated most of his thoughts these days. The line of thought he was sure always kept him neat and sane.

It isn't even his world. It's his own mistake for picking that human out of all the others here.
It isn't as if he was chosen just to spite him. He's over sensitive. Insane. A lunatic, none of this should be a surprise to me.

And yet that same voice was being quietly contested. A long forgotten one, long jammed into the background-

If it didn't matter, it wouldn't hurt. He knew that. So many other cuts like this he could laugh off,
wave away. How many times had he been insulted now before this point? By someone who actually mattered,
no less. By someone who had a real point and purpose to him. Someone who had a real impact on his life.
It shouldn't matter. The opinion of one love sick, desperate idiot shouldn't be enough to rattle him.

Coward. That one had hurt.

Levanael.

He'd activated the sphere then. Talked to it clearly, he remembered how chatty he-

... How chatty Levanael was. Never could shut his mouth for a moment. It shouldn't hurt. None of this should hurt. He shouldn't have felt anything at that stupid comment about the sphere to begin with, it was just another stupid little dig to get him going. If he'd kept his hand closer to him, he could have waved that off too and yet... He'd let something, no matter how minor, slip out.

You don't know me.

The spider paced about the main hall of his fortress, the gentle pleas from Midge to sit down, to eat or sleep or read falling on deaf ears. For once, the insects words were not making any headway at all, not even considered. It did nothing to soothe that open lesion in his mind that Tannusen had so easily scraped open with just a few stupid, insane words.

He had to talk to someone, someone who he knew would not offer petty condolences and agree with him, for once. He needed-

... He needed to talk. Just talk.

And that was how dear Drake ended up with a familiar face in his office, hair still unbound, falling around his back and shoulders, wings tightly pulled to his body. He didn't even have the time or consideration to hide them this time, using one to wave away the sweet smelling smoke he'd arrived in.

"We're going to talk."

Yep. That's how this is starting.

Comments

[sarcastass]

I know he said.

He couldn't fathom the pain of it, just the barest human fraction. There was no way he'd understand it, not to the level Szel had.

Certainly not to the full extent, certainly not. Trying to gather himself back up again, rebuild those weakened and crumbling walls that Tannusen had almost too easily chipped away at.

"There is no way to escape what has been decided for you, and if it is your fate to be a cog, a knife or kindling, then you either accept it, or you destroy that system."

Now pulling himself back together.

It was a mistake to come here.

"It is either your destruction, or everyone elses. Which would matter more to you?"

[amberdrake]

Every kestra'chern made that choice nearly every day, Amberdrake especially. Not as literally as Szel meant, but still... nearly every day. To re-open their own wounds, to keep themselves fresh, their pain fresh, in order to help others with their own.

The Healer, called a martyr by more than one person who knew him well, always chose to help others.

Every time.

He wouldn't try to explain that, however. There was no point to it. No, he just continued his point.

"There is no middle ground? To survive, to better yourself, to make it to a position where you could help others do the same... if you so chose to. That's picking yourself up and continuing forward. That's fighting. That's beating the system, Szelhamos, if what the system wanted from you was lesser."

Perseverance, bucking the odds.

"But hurting other people who never did you any harm, that is something different. Revenge does little but make the one seeking it into the next monster, because there is no revenge that doesn't come with collateral damage. You say it's revenge, and then you say it's purely about a broken system -- and you want to wipe out existence. Is this a suicide pact that everyone who has never hurt you has also signed off on?"

A soft, soft sigh.

"I'm stating things that you already know, of course, but that is often a part of my job, to be the one to say it out loud. If you weren't aware, on some level, of what this is... you wouldn't be so upset that one of those people you're passing the pain onto has called you on it. You are expecting your 'tool' and his friend to accept their place in the fire, to be kindling. And this time, it's a fire that you've set."

As he'd said earlier; how quickly we become that which we hate.

"But I don't think you would have come here, if you didn't already know this," Amberdrake added, just as calmly as ever. "Now, we're about to start going in a circle. And while I will sit here and let you vent if you need to, and even make tea if you would like some, my opinion is that you should simply come back after you've had some time to think about what we've discussed."

[sarcastass]

There... really wasn't much he could say to that, was there? Drake had him at this point, even as he himself began to veer wildly off course.

Kindling for a fire, that was what he'd been expected to be. Not a cog or a weapon, just something tossed into a blaze to keep the world turning, a forgettable, meager sacrifice that no one would remember after a few years save for the briefest flash of pity.

And with Cassian, it would not even have been that. There'd have been no one left to even remember him, no heaven or hell or earth at all.

Another crack, this time as bone threatened to give when he gripped the cane.

The last word wasn't really a word inasmuch as a snarl, blackened feathers shaking free of his wings before he vanished in a far more acrid, chemical smelling plume of smoke, leaving coal dust colored plumage on the floor that would slowly crumble into so much stardust.

... This was far, far from the last meeting.

He knew that already, even as he swore he'd not be trying this again.

... He knew himself better than that.