Quoted By:
>Be polite
Arledge's eyes, you notice, are not blue. Not wholly. You'd thought they were, from the brief glance you got of them, but they're mainly a cool grey: bright blue rings the outside only.
You shake his hand.
It isn't oily, and his grip is firm but not overpowering. He isn't mumbling any secret pagan rites or tracing any suspicious runes into your palm. He is shaking your hand. Your hand is being shaken. You're staring down at it because you can't quite believe it, and then it occurs to you that might be strange, so you look into his eyes. You look into his eyes. You look into his eyes. You look into
and they are bright blue, you mean <span class="mu-i"><span class="mu-b">bright</span></span> blue, scalding electric atomic blue, and the stuff left inside you is thrashing and pounding against your chest so you can hardly breath—it is not alive you don't think but it is gushing red hatred into you so your cheeks flame and your muscles tremble and your hand crushes Arledge's white and it wants to wants you to you want to kill him, you think. With this red stuff you could kill him or at least snap his hand off at the wrist but why stop there? You think "you" think <span class="mu-r">you</span> think you could do so much more than that, could be so much more, because what wouldn't be an improvement? You are <span class="mu-i">flawed,</span> you are cracked to the core, there is something so luridly wrong with you everybody can smell it from a mile off— what whole and good person would murder her own father? What is there to salvage in you? It would be better for you and for everybody if you took the hand off your mouth and let the stuff out of your throat where it's coiling. You should really take it off. Take it off. <span class="mu-s">Take it off.</span> TAKE IT OFF. TAKE IT <span class="mu-r">OFF.</span> TAKE IT
>[-2 ID: 10/13]
You are clamping your free hand over your mouth as hard as you can physically manage. You are choking on the thing on your throat. There is nothing in your throat. Arledge doesn't seem to be doing so hot, either: he is trembling and sweating profusely. He has made no effort to break your gaze or death-grip, but he may not be able to. You certainly can't.
You don't honestly know how much longer you can hang on. You can't breathe. You can't move, really, except in the directions it wants you to— can you say it wants? You're not being talked to. It's not animate. But you've long since learned what desires not your own feel like.
Your elbow slips. You bite down hard on your finger to keep the hand from slipping, too, and taste your own blood. TAKE IT OFF: they feel how discordant notes sound. TAKE IT OFF. TAKE IT OFF. This one is more like a duckpin-ball being slammed at random on a piano. TAKE IT OFF. TAKE IT OFF. TAKE IT OFF. At least you have that image to go out on before you wake up either in a bloody daze or in Wind Court custody. How's that for positive thinking? Ha ha. You wish you could swear.
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