no_sin_but (
no_sin_but) wrote2007-12-24 09:43 am
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Stairs are not...let us try this again.
Where would you prefer to collapse, your room or the road? For a stairway is really a road, and this one has heavy traffic, but...
But you do not choose when, you do not choose where, you do not choose who triggers it.
This is why Marlowe is sitting at on the landing of one of the stairs on one of the floors, head against the wall and eye closed. One leg drawn up, the other foot resting on the second stair down; he could just be thinking.
People's knuckles aren't normally so white when they do that, though.
Where would you prefer to collapse, your room or the road? For a stairway is really a road, and this one has heavy traffic, but...
But you do not choose when, you do not choose where, you do not choose who triggers it.
This is why Marlowe is sitting at on the landing of one of the stairs on one of the floors, head against the wall and eye closed. One leg drawn up, the other foot resting on the second stair down; he could just be thinking.
People's knuckles aren't normally so white when they do that, though.
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Her seat is two steps below where his foot rests.
"You okay?"
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"You could say that."
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"But would it be true?" she asks, even softer.
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"Well...no."
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"What happened?"
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And she knows the lady too, in passing, but that's not as important right now.
"But how did all that get you here?"
She thinks she knows, or guesses, but she wants him to tell her, if he can.
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"I've told you, haven't I?"
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She looks down at her hands (no blood tonight, not even under the nails). "...but I don't understand, because it never quite feels like you say what you meant, or all of what you meant and I want to understand because I think that'll help somehow, which means answers even if I tear them out of you and sometimes I tear too hard and I'm sorry but I don't understand."
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Eventually,
"What do you want me to say, Mary Anne?"
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"That's just it. I don't know."
It's as helpless as he's ever heard her sound.
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I played in the streets, dodging in and out of the way of those carts with my friends, and we'd get covered in it.
I'm used to it.
And it shouldn't affect me like this."
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"It'll carry you to a point, sure, but when it's from people, when you're--"
Mary Anne never considered herself the squeemish type, even learning how to shoot (live) enemy targets didn't shake her up, but killing someone up close and realizing just how much blood you have to lose before you die--
"...it's not the same."
And he has to know that already.
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Her boys painted red stripes beneath her eyes, with her first real kill. It ran in warm red tears down her cheeks and she never saw her face in a mirror that night, but it became a habit of hers all the same.
Wear it, so you own it.
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"I'm not. Killing."
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"Then what are you doing, honey?"
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"Fucked if I know."
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"You want to keep sitting on these stairs?"
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He hasn't moved his hand away from hers.
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She doesn't move either.
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"Figured at some point even you might run out of room on your plate."
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