[The dining hall is full of passengers showing up with extreme and impossible body modifications. There is a time when Ben would have taken one look at them and known them for Nomlies with absolute certainty, would have attacked them, maybe killed them. Even once he graduated, there would have been the urge to speed his pulse and slide adrenaline into his system like a needle into a vein, painful but not by enough to matter.
Today he just stared at them and moved back into the kitchen; there's too much to do and he feels the anxiety scrabble for a handhold where much greater problems have already taken them all but that's as far as it gets. He avoids them and he finishes his task list and he leaves the kitchen for the day. Later, he fails to save Abigail and he fails to kill the man who killed her, and he knows he was right: there are greater problems in his life now than monsters that he didn't make up, but that he made real.
When he can do nothing further in the infirmary he comes here, and when he looks up from closing the door he sees something else that isn't possible. It's not like the picture on the card his brother held out to him years ago, begging answers, begging sense; it's messier, and more delicate, and real. He blinks, just once, slowly - and then speaks in a very small, very faintly trembling voice,]
I can see your heart.
[He should be concerned, he thinks, but his nerves are too frayed and numb for that; what he feels instead is that maybe he is finally once more insane.]
no subject
Today he just stared at them and moved back into the kitchen; there's too much to do and he feels the anxiety scrabble for a handhold where much greater problems have already taken them all but that's as far as it gets. He avoids them and he finishes his task list and he leaves the kitchen for the day. Later, he fails to save Abigail and he fails to kill the man who killed her, and he knows he was right: there are greater problems in his life now than monsters that he didn't make up, but that he made real.
When he can do nothing further in the infirmary he comes here, and when he looks up from closing the door he sees something else that isn't possible. It's not like the picture on the card his brother held out to him years ago, begging answers, begging sense; it's messier, and more delicate, and real. He blinks, just once, slowly - and then speaks in a very small, very faintly trembling voice,]
I can see your heart.
[He should be concerned, he thinks, but his nerves are too frayed and numb for that; what he feels instead is that maybe he is finally once more insane.]