forsaintcecilia | IC Inbox [Victory Road]

Very, very few.

[ She goes quiet again, holding the empty glass in her hands, remembering. All her memories... the ones she can access, they talk about a time four years past. They're closer to the surface now than they should be, refreshed in a way that paired with the terror behind discovering her own lost time. ]

A... friend once told me that it's not a matter of good or bad people. Everyone is good or bad to someone else, in some way. He said it's a matter of someone being a good person to him, in that moment.

[ Her smile now is both bitter and wry. ]

Convenient logic, if you ask me, but compelling in its own way. Even by that measure... no. [ She says, expression going neutral, returning to how she usually faces the world. Resting neutral face, sometimes tending toward resting bitch face. ] I don't know many good people who last.

[Kazuki, again, has to give himself a moment to try and understand her words. He'd never had such a view on the world, and people. He believed there was good in everybody. That everyone was just trying their best. Truly bad people... He considered them a rarity. They existed, but he didn't know any personally.]

I guess... Whoever said that, they're not wrong. What everyone thinks is good and bad, it's different for each person.

If you really believe that, then... Why aren't people good to you?

Edited 2019-06-19 22:00 (UTC)

... Good to me, or for me?

[ For a moment, she wears the ghost of a very, very tired smile. Then she holds up her empty glass, tipping it toward him in silent entreaty while looking out over his garden. ]

Would you like to know a secret? It's not a good one. It's caustic enough to burn, and it's true.

[Kazuki took the invitation to fill her glass again.]

If you want to tell me a secret, I can at least promise I'll keep it.

[ He's so kind, filling her cup again. She probably... proooobably shouldn't drink it as fast as last time. She hasn't eaten enough today to offset how this might hit her system.

Ah. ]

I was born into hatred, and raised to be despised. And I've never fought against either.

[ Not in any meaningful way. Sparing lives, only certain lives, wasn't enough. Blood stained her hands, and she had put it there, one death at a time. ]

To imagine the kind of hatred someone would have to incur to make me palatable for the world... that's a truly horrible thought.

[Kazuki didn't understand. How could someone be born and raised to be hated? He had to repeat her final words in his head several times before they made any sense to him.]

[Trying to find a reply was even harder. His mouth opened to begin speaking a few times, but no sound emerged. Nothing he could think of really felt right. There was no way he could match her suffering with his own words.]

...Even if you think you're awful, I don't... I don't see how you could blame yourself for something you were forced to do.

[He has no idea what it was, but despite the chilling feeling that it would be something unfathomable to him... Kazuki saw this sad, distant girl, and as began to understand a small fraction of her suffering, he knew it was nothing she was proud of.]

[ She lolls her head back, looking up, then shifts so she looks his way. There's resignation there in her eyes, but an awareness, too, of why things are this way. People are shitty. The pressure of a society is the flow of events that moves her. This place has a whole different flow, and it's why she's here, why she fought at gyms, though none of the elite battles yet.

So it goes. So it goes. ]

Saying you just followed orders is a statement of fact, and an explanation, Kazuki. It's never an excuse. Do or die, lives are made up of choices. Sometimes nothing but shitty ones.

[ No matter what she did not want to do, she still wanted to live. She's culpable for that, and well aware of it, and not quite fully apologetic because she can't wish herself dead. ]

[Kazuki wanted to tell her that it wasn't really an excuse, that she shouldn't feel so burdened by whatever she had done... But the truth of it was that he didn't know, and making assumptions about whatever she suffered through would be insulting.]

[He was quiet for another moment longer.]

...You may not think you're a good person. But, if what your friend said means anything to you... You're a good person for me.

...

[ She regards him for a few beats of her heart before she looks away, hair falling across her face, and she laughs, rough and low and short lived. ]

Ah... if you say so. [ She has to grant him the respect of acknowledging that he knows his own mind. If he says that for him, she is a good person, then it is true. Here it's unlikely to need to become false. ] To good people. May I decide one day if you're one for me, too.

[ There's the glass held up toward him, not empty, and not asking to be filled. Cheers. ]

You haven't decided yet? [Kazuki's tone and expression carried several emotions, like laughter and feigned hurt. Surprise, however, was not among them.] Usually people get along with me right away! I'm really going to have to work for it, huh?

[Despite his lackluster protests, he readily lifted his glass to clink against hers.]

[ A not quite smile curls her lips up at the corners. Perhaps too good natured for his own good, but unlike so many places, that shouldn't harm him here. ]

Never said I was easy.

[ And then she takes a drink, just enough to fill her mouth before she lowers the glass and swallows. ]

IC Inbox [Victory Road]

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this feels hilariously overdramatic so HELLO

nah my dude I eat this shit for breakfast

i am so glad

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