[s72] mental link.

[whereabout]

you care for people so much it breaks your heart...and you're lying to yourself about it.	however much you may model your behavior after a normal, decent person, you are no such thing.
you have no place in the lives of normal people.	you aren't a broken wreck. that's how i see it, and i know i'm right.

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[erbier]

( Those are difficult skills, to be given as a child. They will make you quite unlike to many of our host. I have found it hard, to find empathy in them. I have interacted more intimately with death than most of them. They find it uncomfortable. )

[ A careful shaping to this answer. A kind of warning, without the same explicit naming as her objections to Sam but... of the same vein. They won't understand. And they will hurt you with that. ]

[whereabout]

[ That ought to sound more dire, maybe. But nobody hurts Joshua with what he is more than he does to himself. He was young when Weissmann started grooming him, yes. But he was still young when the Brights pulled him out of that life and tried to give him some kind of normalcy again, and the conclusion he came to - childish though the logic might be - never left him.

If killing was bad, and normal people didn't do it, then there could only be something deeply, irreversibly wrong with him. ]

( That's only natural, isn't it? )

[erbier]

[ She had never thought there was something wrong with her. She felt blameless in all the terrors that had occurred around her. Now, as the only survivor of her world, surrounded by people who did not understand it... They certainly had a way of making the rope of it feel tight around her neck. Making her feel resentful when they demanded she change: to conform to their morals, all the while bemoaning the changes the Nest demanded of them. Hypocrites.

The Nest accepted her as she was: bloodied and power-hungry and sharp and false. ]

( I suppose it is. But their fear doesn't mean that we are wrong. )

[whereabout]

[ Doesn't it, though?

It's not...normal. Not for his world, at least, but - ]

( It's...normal, where you come from, right? )

[ He'd probably feel differently, in a case like that. Instead of just feeling...broken. ]

[erbier]

[ Normal. There's something inadequate in that word. It did not at all seem to describe the thing. ]

( Shall I show you? )

[whereabout]

[ Right. They can do that, can't they? ]

( Okay. )