Sub Rosa Hotel, The Stacks
Drezda was unhappy to be crying but she knew that it was a flaw within her to feel as intensely as she did and allow such feeling to bleed out onto her countenance where anyone could read it. However, her companion’s tears unsettled her more. It wasn’t the fact that he was a man — honestly his masculinity had never been something she’d thought considered and this was hardly the first time she’d seen him get weepy in this way — but rather that she had provoked this within him. The diplomat regretted saying and doing whatever had brought that pain out in the raen, the recent confidence that he’d shared the most likely culprit and he would never have-
It seemed impossible not to view herself as the root as his tears by forcing him to confront something from his past and yet she had found herself unable to let matters lie, feeling the need to goad him, to make him feel worse. She hadn’t expected him to say that he’d become a better person since he’d first killed so what had she really been trying to achieve?
You want to feel as if you aren’t the only one who’s fucked up, her mind suggested matter-of-factory. Did she really feel it necessary to drag it out of him though? Could she not have left it at the fact that he was technically dead and only inhabited the shell she saw before her because he’d killed its former inhabitant? Maybe the fact of Tom’s very existence wasn’t fucked up enough for her, after all, he’d only done what he needed to ensure his survival — and sanity if her mother was to be believed. So did she really want to know that he was somehow on her level or did she just want him to feel as bad as she did?
Questions, questions, so many questions. The diplomat wasn’t entirely certain that she’d like to know the answers to them.
“You didn’t have a huge amount of choice when it comes to posing but unlike me, you are not a failure,” Drezda pointed out. “You’ve certainly been passing yourself off rather well. I, on the other hand, am getting rather worse at it.”
She sighed, making some effort to tease her hair back into place now that her questing fingers had discovered the cloud of loose strands. Speaking of being a failure of a politician, she wondered if she should tell him of her intentions to resign. They weren’t entirely solid in her mind yet and she didn’t know that now was the time to discuss such things. Oh they were sharing but this… didn’t seem right. However, the fact that she no longer wanted to be a politician was connected to the fact that she’d changed.
Her companion was volunteering a response to the question that she shouldn’t have asked, providing her with insight that she didn’t deserve to know. She was slow to draw herself out of her own self-centred misery, a frown pulling her mouth downwards as she listened to him. The Hoxian didn’t know the right thing to say, didn’t know if there was anything she could say that could be right. Should the young woman reach out and touch him? Would physical contact help?
Maybe she would have remained frozen in indecision if he hadn’t mentioned the bottle, her black gaze whipping to his face, intense.
“Don’t! Don’t crawl into the bottle. It won’t… help,” she told him, reaching a hand out across the table, moving to set it firmly on his arm. She hazarded a smile, glad that she couldn’t see her face right now because she imagined that it was grotesquely false, probably not even close to the real thing. She tried though.
“Do you know, I wouldn’t have cared before. I didn’t used to care about anybody else before, not really so perhaps I have gone soft,” she told him, laughing lightly, self-consciously. The diplomat would drag her hand back across the table, fingers trailing over its surface as she returned it to her lap. Her teeth rolled her bottom lip back and forth, humming thoughtfully to herself. She swiped her cheeks with the back of her hand once more, before making another attempt to stand. This time she was unsteady but her legs held her, especially as she had the table for support.
“I… can’t imagine what it’s like, Tom. What you go through, what you’ve been through in the past. My life… well, it would have been rather different. I won’t pretend to understand how you lived or what you might have had to do — felt that you had to do — but I- Maybe I understand what it’s like to see a stranger in the mirror. It’s not the same, I know but I- You aren’t alone in that.”
It was a quiet, pained admittance, an effort to provide some penance for what she’d asked him before as well as trying to offer some commonality between them. She knew what it was like to feel lonely, as she had felt as if she was the only Hoxian who had something inherently wrong inside of her by allowing emotions to control her too much. She had felt like an island and while they would always be different people who had been forged under quite different conditions, maybe they didn’t have to be entirely solitary if they put the effort in; they could be part of an archipelago.
“I would appreciate your company. I think… my mother will understand but I- She’ll be disappointed, but she’ll understand. That won’t be new for her,” Drezda explained sadly, moving around the table and holding her arm out to him once more. He could take it and escort her upstairs as he had escorted her down in the first place. She'd welcome the support right now as well.
“I can’t go and explain to her but I can ring down to reception and have someone deliver a message to her and bring some food for us. She… will occupy herself. We were supposed to go to Brunnhold Library but I… I wouldn’t have been much use to her anyway. I don’t think it’d be any real loss…”
Was she trying to convince Tom or herself?
“I’m going to have to go upstairs anyway so I suppose that I can rescue you from your weeping and you can save me from moping on my own. I’m sure that someone will think that it’s a great scandal, the two of us disappearing upstairs together not to emerge again but well… the joke will be on them, won’t it?”
Her lips quirked up in a more genuine smile this time, the notion of the two of them getting up to any sort of shenanigans laughable given that they were both gay and neither was the other’s type. The fact that they were the only ones who knew that made it all the more amusing given the rather prudish Anaxi setting they were in.
“Shall we? Do you uh… mind if we go to your room? Just- I don’t want to have a run in with my umah yet if I can help it. And if you have a bottle… well, I’m not adverse to one drink…”
If I stick to one… she added silently.