who we are and all that we're trying to be
“Fallen off the limb,” he ascertained, some level of death taking over the fronds and leaflets, something near perishing, something near deceased and gone. He hadn’t expected the next set of her words, content with utter silence while they worked, studied, or examined, left to his own musings or stifling parameters, lost in the haze of thought.
The bitterness, the rancor, that followed was a familiar tone: he’d resounded, ricocheted, and embedded himself within it last year, around this time, when the world was crumbling around tyrants and their impending treacheries. “He did.” The rest wasn’t a shock – as much as it was disappointing, in the way that some things never changed, in the way that no matter what they’d ever done, some alterations couldn’t manage to sink in. Heroes instead of useful things, and in the end, none of it amounting to anything at all. They’d survived, and that was it. “I am not surprised.” And then he had to decide just how angry, just how irritated, just how annoyed he was. If he needed to simply push it all aside, again and again and again, and accept that Jigano was incapable of moving past those reaches and pinnacles. That for all his boasting of loving and cherishing Amalia, this had been at least the third or fourth time he’d abandoned her to other notions. His tone, flat and nonchalant, came out as a hiss, some feral growl winding its way through him. Irritated, annoyed, and exasperated, hands fisting together, and then maneuvering onward, so he didn’t strike at something nearby. “He has done this several times before.” Why they kept giving him chances was beyond him now.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
