Togusa is briefly stunned, her reaction is at once unexpected and less of a slap in the face than he was perhaps preparing himself for. He wants to interject, to say he doesn't care if she is mad at him, but she continues, and he keeps his silence.
It's a memory, unbidden. His own, and he knows it, not something that Retrospec has shoved into his mind. They'd been at the house of a friend of the family, put all the kids in a side room so the adults could be free of them. There was exactly one thing in the room that was at risk of being broken, so of course it had absolutely captured little Hitori's attention: a plate with the face of a black tiger on it. One moment, he was just trying to get a better look at it, to analyze it in his way. And then it tipped over, and even now he can see every detail of the fall, the crack right down the center of it, in slow motion.
Twenty years later, and he feels exactly that same feeling, that he just passed some kind of tipping point, lost in enthusiasm, and his punishment is to watch something break in front of him.
"If you're not mad at me, then who? Her? It's not fair that her choices are echoing back and affecting you."
"It's not fair that even she hasn't gotten what you wanted."
A pause. "If you had your say." I mean, if I had my goddamn choice, you know what I'd like to be? "For either life, what would you want most?"
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-03-01 04:29 am (UTC)It's a memory, unbidden. His own, and he knows it, not something that Retrospec has shoved into his mind. They'd been at the house of a friend of the family, put all the kids in a side room so the adults could be free of them. There was exactly one thing in the room that was at risk of being broken, so of course it had absolutely captured little Hitori's attention: a plate with the face of a black tiger on it. One moment, he was just trying to get a better look at it, to analyze it in his way. And then it tipped over, and even now he can see every detail of the fall, the crack right down the center of it, in slow motion.
Twenty years later, and he feels exactly that same feeling, that he just passed some kind of tipping point, lost in enthusiasm, and his punishment is to watch something break in front of him.
"If you're not mad at me, then who? Her? It's not fair that her choices are echoing back and affecting you."
"It's not fair that even she hasn't gotten what you wanted."
A pause. "If you had your say." I mean, if I had my goddamn choice, you know what I'd like to be? "For either life, what would you want most?"