[ Time and time again, whenever the Ritual had been brought up, they had argued. He had never seen the point in it, the willingness to love something that would kill you in the end. To entrust the future to something, to someone, other than yourself.
Death was transience, a change of form. The Ritual was a form of that - reincarnation - but even so...
He had never understood it. (He had kept returning to it, because there was something there, some blind spot he was missing, surely. Something he could not see that would help him understand
why he kept returning to at all, why it bothered him so much. It did not matter. It should not matter. His own transformation had required him to die, to abandon his decaying shell for something smaller and newer, and it was abundantly clear that the conversation was something they would never agree on and therefore it was useless to continue, so why-
The gears click and turn in his head and something in him long-rusted and neglected, what he had long considered useless and irrelevant, says you already have everything you need to solve this. You have always had what you needed to solve this.
That first, tiny step to understanding does not come in a flood or in a rush; it is not a key unlocking a door to where things are barred. It is simply a long-ignored piece of a puzzle, a solution that was always there.
In all his life, he has never felt anything - until much more recently. So there is no repression because to repress would imply that emotions on a smaller, more useless scale even existed for him in the first place.
But that small piece of understanding lets him see that this denial was irrational from the very beginning. That this achingly useless flaw is irreversibly intertwined with everything that he is.
There is no way of preserving what he was. There is only what he has become.)
Would it happen? There is a future where it happens. He already knows the shape of it; a broken lantern and an extinguished dream. Never to return again.
He- ]
Taking that action would not solve anything.
[ His tone is resigned. Not tired, because even when he works himself to exhaustion his voice is never tired - it is only his body that fails him, not his mind - but...
no subject
Death was transience, a change of form. The Ritual was a form of that - reincarnation - but even so...
He had never understood it. (He had kept returning to it, because there was something there, some blind spot he was missing, surely. Something he could not see that would help him understand
why he kept returning to at all, why it bothered him so much. It did not matter. It should not matter. His own transformation had required him to die, to abandon his decaying shell for something smaller and newer, and it was abundantly clear that the conversation was something they would never agree on and therefore it was useless to continue, so why-
The gears click and turn in his head and something in him long-rusted and neglected, what he had long considered useless and irrelevant, says you already have everything you need to solve this. You have always had what you needed to solve this.
That first, tiny step to understanding does not come in a flood or in a rush; it is not a key unlocking a door to where things are barred. It is simply a long-ignored piece of a puzzle, a solution that was always there.
In all his life, he has never felt anything - until much more recently. So there is no repression because to repress would imply that emotions on a smaller, more useless scale even existed for him in the first place.
But that small piece of understanding lets him see that this denial was irrational from the very beginning. That this achingly useless flaw is irreversibly intertwined with everything that he is.
There is no way of preserving what he was. There is only what he has become.)
Would it happen? There is a future where it happens. He already knows the shape of it; a broken lantern and an extinguished dream. Never to return again.
He- ]
Taking that action would not solve anything.
[ His tone is resigned. Not tired, because even when he works himself to exhaustion his voice is never tired - it is only his body that fails him, not his mind - but...
Something has changed, it seems. ]