Quote:
Follows warm-blooded goods.
She stepped out before she grew pale. As she leaned against the wall downstairs, the only one that looked sturdy enough to bear her weight, Celadon sank down with a long sigh. She held out her hands, splaying them in front of her. She spotted a fine tremor, but it wasn't as bad as she expected it to be. Certainly it didn't betray how her heart fluttered with a song of anxiety with a harmony of dread.
She knew what Brielle had said. She knew that her Princess cautioned her about taking hostages, about all the ways that such an affair could go wrong. She understood that they seldom yielded information or leverage that justified the risk, or the consequences. And she understood that taking someone hostage inflicted damage that one couldn't necessarily see. She knew that Aelius would never forget these moments of his life, unless he died or purified and was spared such memories. His team would scarcely forget it, either, if they ever found out.
But those problems sounded far away to her ears. Cerebral. Distant as the future was intangible. Celadon wasn't a worrier – what affected her now wasn't the threat of consequences at some indeterminate point.
She just tortured someone. Hurt a man who was unable to defend himself in the moment. In her staunch quest for answers, the move made sense to her at the time, shrouded in a disturbing clarity that let her justify such actions. But that was not a state she could force herself into permanently, nor could she maintain it for long bouts. It served its purpose, but when it wore off? Guilt set in. Regret.
The man upstairs was an enemy. He was part of the Negaverse. He admitted to killing people for what amounted to an emergency medical kit and some trucker speed. Those, she understood, were justifications for her actions. They were what enabled her to label him a bad person. They excused how she treated him in the moment. And, as she sat with nothing but guilt in her hands and the ashen taste of remorse in her mouth, it was all she could do to remind herself that he would likely starseed her if he had the chance. Sentence her to death, even if it wasn't personal. Even if this wasn't her idea.
She understood that. Knew that like she knew the smell of fresh pine and rain-moistened earth and soft loam.
But two things could be true at once. She could consider her actions sound and rational, even justified, while also mourning what she had just done to another human being. Because beneath all of the Negaverse veneer, before this man was ever touched by that pitiful organization, he was human first. He had feelings, thoughts, goals, choices, and a history. Perhaps it was naïve, but she could consider no person completely rotten. No one was unsalvageable.
Even Aelius, who spoke of ceiling with a callousness so practiced that it wrenched at her heart to consider it now. He deserved her mourning as much as he deserved her interrogation.
"Þetta reddast," she murmured to herself. She would endure this. She would grow from this.
She had to. That was her choice to make.
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