Scene #9089: Sad Rooftop Conversation

Owner	Pose
Rita Ma	The Trideag complex's tallest building has a beautiful rooftop garden, reachable by elevator. The plants are coming in wonderfully. Often there's people tending it. Right now there's nobody. That's probably why-- "Ms. Xion. Can I talk to you sometime? It's okay if not, but . . . I haven't been very good to you. That's all." marita03@mmail.com: Is this Xion? marita03@mmail.com: I'm at the rooftop garden. But it's okay if you're busy Rita's legs dangle off the roof's raised lip, facing away from the sunset and towards its stretching-out shadows. An unsteady queasiness rises in her chest. That was dumb. Now she'll spend the next however-long uneasily braced for something that might never come. Xion's seen Rita as the girl in the white dress before; angelic from a distance, a little sickly up close. The dress merges with skin at the collarbone and scatters light like flesh, not like cloth. A river delta of tentacles flows across half the garden, meeting its headwaters between Rita's shoulders. Xion's seen that, too, though more rarely, and never so limp and still. It's hard to tell whether this is 'relaxing' or 'biting the bullet'. One of them, curled nearer the edge where Rita sits, obediently holds a plastic shopping bag full of treats. If she hears the elevator ding open, she doesn't turn, but takes a deep breath that settles her shoulders and a fidgety double-handful of her skirt.
Xion	The not-so-soft magic of smart devices and social connectivity is that it's hard to fully disconnect, even when you want mysteries, or vagueities, or deniability. Rita sends a message, after gathering snacks, and hopes for favorable response. Favorable weather, the turning of atmospheric signs from 'Sent' to 'Read'. There's not a response via messenger or mail, though. The only satisfaction available for the wait is that the messaage is received. And Tridaeg is busy, busy enough for the elevator to rattle and operate and tension-glide up and down on oiled tracks. Divining who enters and their destination is difficult, the rise towards the rooftop garden happening in potential and aborted again and again as travel simply happens through the association. Rita has a little while to wait in that state, before finally the elevator rises as it must've several times before, and rises, and rises, and, ding! Sound spills, as inside air, from the opening of the door and a woman in blacks stands framed in the interior lighting of the box. Taking a step to the line between carriage and roof and a second across the divide in black boots, the open-coated noirette blinks and stands still as the elevator doors close behind her. Xion's bright blues are dimmed by the shade of her hanging hood, and a kind of uncertain tension backing her expression. Her gaze falls down the riverflow of tentacles across the garden, down all the draping to see where the roof ends and the Rita begins, and then looks away, off to the right over the roof. An intake of breath begins what sounds like words, but the breath goes no-where, does no-thing, and Xion remains breath-quiet, pacing the garden rows instead, to walk to a planter and crouch besides it, kneeling down and settling from poised to sitting as she lifts gloved hands to touch and turn over leaves, inspecting for pest and pit. This she can do silently, not knowing what to expect, but more to the point - utterly unsure of how to proceed, with Rita showing more-completely of herself. Was that good? Was that bad? It wasn't given for the Nobody to know.
Rita Ma	Rita's tensely braced breath lasts for seconds. Tendrils curl in on themselves at the tips like fiddlehead ferns. But nothing braced-for comes. For a moment she feels stupid- was that not Xion?- and turns to look back, startles a little when she does see Xion crouching by a planter after all, and whips her head back around to look at the long-shadows cityscape again, embarrassed. A second later the delta of tentacles shifts to her left, away from Xion, except the one holding the shopping-bag. Scooting over to offer room to sit beside. "It's really nice up here, isn't it," she finally starts. "I don't know if it's a symbol. But it sort of is. Everybody coming together to..." She tapers, and her tongue clicks softly, and her mouth shuts, posture drooping. No, it's mean to Xion to keep dancing around it. They've danced long enough. A tentacle wraps around her own body to self-hug, bolstering against that sinking feeling, and then she tries to build up momentum again. She can't manage the usual blank demureness she weathers stress with. "... I'm sorry I hated you, Ms. Xion. And said those awful things to you. It was for a really bad reason. I don't, really, expect you to like me now. I probably wouldn't like me, after... that. But you're here helping Ms. Rook. So- so I don't want to make 'being here' any harder." It's a long way from 'all', or 'enough', judging by the uneasy inconclusive way she's postured. But it's hard to throw a lot into silence.
Xion	Sitting by a planter, not looking aside, Xion sees the motion of tendrils in her peripheral vision, feels them shift in her expanded proprioception. Her closed-off heart does not reflect in the cross of arms, but she has a hard time looking at Rita or addressing the 'topic', the ask, the... Whatever it is that's going on. Rita looks, and sees, and turns back, and in that time Xion just stares diligent at the flower she ministers to with her hands. A dry leaf is gently pulled from the stem, and curled in hand before being crumpled up and crunched. She doesn't have a bucket to discard the green waste, so instead she presses the leaf into the soil and flicks off the loose dirt from her fingers with the side of her thumb. Finally, she looks, and the river delta that has shifted in its fall to flow to one side of the low table-lands of the roof garden. Save for snacks, there's a clear path to the wall, and besides Rita, and... It takes Xion a moment to stand again, patting off her coat and legs. She walks a few steps towards Rita's back, hands at sides, then behind her, then in front, palm over knuckles slowly rubbing the fore of her hand. "It's okay." Xion states, and then bites her lip, and then focuses on the horizon of the City. "I think a part of me loves the whole City, but... not for the reasons I would normally. It's a place of violence and sudden danger, but it also makes a kind of sense to me. And then, I became friends with Garion, and, I had wanted her to see something like this again, even if it's just 'okay'." "It's okay." Xion repeats, looking down at the bag full of rustling snacks and gains a further conflict to her look. To look at her and see it, long calculations and hard math were being done, a great shifting to answer just what the meaning and motive snacks were. . . The hard way. Just making a guess without knowing - when she could. "I don't know if it's a symbol yet. Not in the way people say they are. But it is important to people I care about, and that's good too." Xion answers, finishing her thought on symbols gargoyling over the bag at a loom. 'Cururnch' goes the sounds of paper and plastic and air-puffed things, Xion reaching in to draw a bag of chocolate pretzels from the store loot and taking the last few steps to the edge. Palm to edge, she lowers herself to half-sitting, a knee still up and bracing her chin as she sits around it. Heel to the edge, her boot-toe hangs out over nowhere and the City, and her other leg dangles and sways. "It was all for Lilian." Xion states, looking out over the City. "Even being here, it's for her. Because..." Xion's smile isn't weak or strong - it is utterly empty, as her eyes reflect the City and she stares middle-distance at nowhere. "... She'd be put out, if we fought. And it'd be harder for... everything--" She hadn't really expected to get here. It stops up the clever with the noirette usually employs, detached from the cause and effect from feelings slightly. "Everyone's come together to make this... difficult. Because I'm not really allowed to 'not like' Rita, either. It seems like everyone loves you but me." "It's something that made being everyone's hero impossible." Xion says, to the city and not the woman besides, and she does not smile even emptily.
Rita Ma	'Garion'. Binah? The Binah who killed Kali? Kali, who's so nice? Probably there's something to like about Garion. Rita, in her softly surprised look back, betrays that she doesn't know what that is. "It reminds me a lot of home," she says, about the City, instead. "Home before home got better. So... I have to feel like it can get better, too." Her knee draws up for her cheek to squish-rest against it, eyes up-and-off at the sky. Chocolate-pretzel-bag-rustling draws them back down, and then she smiles self-consciously, and a tendril puts the plastic shopping bag down on Xion's far side before it politely withdraws. There are eight different chocolate bars in it, from eight different brands, chosen by someone who has never eaten chocolate and never will. One or two are probably good. "For you, but... I don't know what you like." Listening sympathetically is easy. Rita is bad at sorries, but good at that. She drinks it in solemnly, eyes on the red sky, until-- "Because I'm not really allowed to 'not like' Rita, either. It seems like everyone loves you but me." "... Huh? Is that true?" Her doubt isn't sharp, but when she lifts her head again, she looks bewildered. Her dangling leg stops its swaying. "I mean-- I knew you were 'putting up' with me, for her." That's a way she was a burden, so it's obvious. "But if you said you hate me, wouldn't everyone understand?" (Wouldn't they turn on Rita?) Her lips squiggle uneasily. The tentacles behind squirm a little, like an extended expression. Eyes track down to the city. "I... I guess that's true. Not a lot of people hate me right now. Ms. Tamamo doesn't like me, but she's nice even when she doesn't. Ms. Meika hates me, I think, but that's confusing. Besides that..." The thought What if everyone just feels like they 'can't' hate me? fires, and then is swallowed. Not the time. More relevant is that Xion wasn't gracefully choosing to tolerate her. And... "Oh. That's really, really bad," says Rita, softly nauseous. A new kind of harm. "How can I fix something like that...?" The question's sincere, but she doesn't really expect Xion to know.
Xion	Xion had felt awkward even taking something from the bag, accepting offering in such a way. Worse, somehow, than fighting over the check after or grimly splitting the bill - for a moment she had felt tested, and now she just wasn't really hungry. Despite knowing the cheat code, down to the bag, left and right to open, up hand to mouth and bite to release the wicked-sweet enjoyment that made everything easier. Sweet sugar and its chemical sisters to set to light her tongue and right at once her mood, because that is simply what chocolate did to the body and she was helpless before it. "This part reminds me of Twilight Town," Xion considers, squinting out over the cityscape, the skyline challenging the sky in colors and shapes across the distance so much safer in its distance than what is besides her. Difficulty. Something that can't be swung through or avoided or opened or closed or changed in locking. No quest but 'the' quest, the only quest of a life. The chocolate in bag shifts. Xion withdraws the first chocolate pretzel from Rita's selective bag and lifts it to her mouth, chewing, crunching against molars. 'I don't know what you like.' "We've never really talked." Xion admits, not satisfied with that either, as salt and sugar mix with baked pretzel crunch. '... Huh? Is that true?' Xion frowns, under her hood, and gaze tracks away. She doesn't have that great of an answer to the question posed. Rita continues, the smallest of mercies, but does not move one bit towards seeming to understand. "Existing around other people is something you have to get better at, to live in a world." Is instead her airy decision of a statement. "And I understand hate pretty well." But, it's not exactly about her hate. Squinting, staring forward, Xion slowly bounces her dangling heel off the rooftop behind. "If I said I hated Charlotte, I think people would understand. But then again, 'people' would be the people we know. The Watch. And they don't have a reason to listen to or understand me, not any more." Clinical, reading off details from the back of a carton. The ingredients, in their scientific form with the same dispassion of recitation. "I worked with the Watch for five years, and when I left, nobody asked if I was coming back. When they asked 'what happened', it wasn't like they didn't know. 'Tell me now', they wanted. 'Explain to me', but there wasn't anything. I can't put it in them to make them get it." Xion looks down, to her dangling knee, and below, the precipitous fall past the edge. "They like you." Xion states, murmur-quiet. "So I'd have to explain why, and I'd have to fight them to make them understand. And at the end, I'd be no better. What's the point? If I said 'I hate Rita', not one of them, not one, would say 'oh. I understand'. They'd all want to know why." The clinicality no longer is present. Feelings, thudding behind her neck, fill her mouth with heat and so Xion clenches her jaw for a moment. This belligerent heart was too much to bear the cost of, sometimes. "It hurt, what you told me." Xion murmurs, shuddering back to somber statements. "It hurt worse, for you to be so firm and direct on it, so clear that was what you meant, and... No-one else cared. And afterwards, it seemed like it didn't count."
Xion	"It was like a dream only I remembered. Because it was the latest worst day in the Watch, but only for me. But," Xion puts her pretzel bag aside, crumpled into the shopping bag with the rest. She's lost all appetite, even for sweet. "What form does hate, can hate, even take?" Xion asks back, a quarter-color of the corner of her eye around the lip of her black hood. "I don't even know what this thing is that I feel. I've never known, not really. A twist in the stomach, a coldness all over, a tightness, a lightness in my head. Do I hate you? Do I hate this? Do I hate everything?" Xion's right hand crosses her chest to clench over her heart, as if squeezing could stifle still the thing inside of her. "So I don't know. I don't know what this is, even. You said you don't regret it. So is it just me? Is this regret?"
Rita Ma	Rita lowers her leg, both dangling now, so she can slump elbows to thighs. Her tentacles behind counterweight the slouch, keeping her from tipping over. She soaks it up like a morose little sponge, until-- "You said you don't regret it. So is it just me?" "Huh?? I-- did I say that?" Soft bafflement again, but she's aghast too. It's been long enough that she might have. Rita darkens with contemplation, slumping back down. "... I've regretted it a lot. I remembered. For a long time. Long enough there's no excuse I didn't reach out. Ever since I asked Ms. Rook 'why'." "She didn't want to say a lot. But she told me... you were someone who a lot of people thought shouldn't exist. Who had to justify it." Every time her tentacles shift a little, they're shrinking inwards by degrees, like she wants to curl up in a ball. "I thought the person I was hating was, mostly, me. I didn't realize it was you so much, too." One tentacle glides down Rita's held-out arm, twines around it, and slithers over her palm like a pet snake. Hindbrain talking to forebrain, clammy against warm. Or demonstrative, like her palm's making an exhibit of it. "... I feel like that's wrong," she says after a pause to chew on everything Xion's said, but takes a second to explain: "They wouldn't ask you why. They'd be wrong, but they'd think they know. 'Gross', 'dangerous'." "It wouldn't be hard. It was easier back then, but you could still do it now." Rita tilts her head to look up, legs idly kicking, like she's reading from a well-familiar map in the sky, or old memories stirred up like a snowglobe by the tilting of her head: "Wait for me to do something bad, or pretend to be nice while hurting me until I yell. Go to my friends' friends who don't like me, Ms. Tamamo or Meika or Hibiki. Point at what I did and make them feel scared. Get them all together, go to my friends, and say 'she's not safe; us or her'." Little 'pfuh'. She rocks forward, tired-smile, arms over her belly. "So, I thought, you were 'taking the high road'? I've never felt safe, so I didn't think... I could make other people feel unsafe. I guess you're not the kind of person to see the low road at all." ... Rita's eyes snag Xion's again, from the corner of her hood, as she looks up from the city beneath. What were the symptoms again? 'A twist in the stomach'. 'A coldness all over'. 'A lightness in my head'. "It sounds like you're scared," she says, gently-morosely. "We are both sort of messed up, aren't we."
Xion	It's hard to sit, even at a place she belongs, and look out at 'nothing so specific'. If the Nobody's somewhat storied disinclination towards parties was known, the root was in something kin to what she felt now: Distance. Restlessness. Having to keep choosing to be here. Having to keep choosing this situation, over any other. Xion's cycling breath lingers until called for, called to, called up and witnessing. 'Huh?? I-- did I say that?' To Xion it remains clear, for to her what she listened for was the rest of the character around Rita to discern truer feelings. Was Rita just like that? She hadn't been, and if the Watch saw a different face than everyone else, wouldn't it have been truer? "It was, I think, back when we were with Lilian's sister and that settlement. Someone asked you - I don't remember who, maybe one of the Agents? - about regrets, and you said. . ." Xion tries, deeply, to recall, but fails to pull the whole of it. The substance wasn't so important to her as what it was not. "-something about 'Bota'." She delivers, vague. Hands at her sides, right slipping from chest to and falling to be so, gloved fingers closing about the roof-lip to either side of her, Xion then confronts that Rita has known- Since when? -back at the Tridaeg party? -earlier? Her heel bounces harder against the roof - 'donk', once, and her tension-tightness warps the wobble by still being forced taut to surface, hunching. She had talked about it with Lilian, a little after cutting ties with the Watch - a process that even kindly to her former allies had taken achingly long and startled everyone in the support netwoork - had Rita known since then? Known and regretted it and--? Xion makes a tight noise, a 'tch' with the parting of her lips. "They'd think they know. For whatever reasons they liked, or pick at me until they were satisfied." The slithering of the tendril across palm, arm, and all the rest - the skirting, the grand and shifted-aside river delta - is something that the Nobody takes the statement of, feels-as-much-as-sees and only peers out the sides of her hood at to confirm. "It would be hard." Xion murmurs, certain. "It would be a war. No-matter what, it would be a war. Worse than the stupid one on right now because it'd be everyone thinking they could swoop in and fix it, too. Like on the radio, between Lilian and Sarracenia and every other person. And all my friends would... prove themselves." She makes it sound like a trial, like a funeral. A grave and terrible thing. "It's easier to be that just-passing-through kind of hero. Everyone's reliable..." There's no single word for what Xion had been reliably. "... but it works as long as you don't need anything, want anything yourself. It works as long as you're invincible, as long as the only stress you feel when two directions is that of a cloth doll or young rubber." "If I needed them to help me, help me for that..." Xion doesn't have the faith to call on her friends at all, for the topic. "I told Lilian, but nothing really happened, and I realized what was really true." "The limit of 'everyone's hero', was everyone. And what happened between us, isn't even really that important after the next day. Nobody else remembers but me. They moved on, and I can't. I've moved on from being stabbed, but," Xion takes a breath, and then another, and looks at her lap, and the zippered coat over her stomach. Breathing after talking for so long, talking and talking, Xion peels fingers from one of their gripping-perches to lift to neck and fit them around zippertop to draw open her coat. After, she stares down into the spot where the belt around her black shorts ends and there is a bit of pant before tank top. At this meeting-of-three, Xion touches her lower belly, and then higher, and around to her side, and again, under where a rib might be, and--
Xion	"Even being 'struck' before, it's different." She murmurs, lost while she probes old wounds through cloth on a body that doesn't scar. A deep breath cycled, Xion sits up, and rolls one leg over the wall, and then the other, and reverses to sit the other way, sprawling out onto the roof with back to City. Hand to thigh, and other hand pushing back her hood and rubbing gloved hand through her hair to unsticky it from the faint sweat she feels on it - cold, and frustrating, and too still - Xion looks at elevator door instead, and reaches for a chocolate bar. One of eight, unwrapped without looking and peeled like banana, wrapper and then foil beneath, Xion takes a bite sidelong into the end and chews irregular brique-and-extra with a slow crawing process. "Before I 'was'," She begins. "Something that could be me was caught as a chorus of voices, in the bottom of a deep well. And the voices wished, and wailed, and wanted, but they were undecided, so they could not 'were'." A pause, and a nod, as if this all makes grand sense. It does, to her. "They 'were' not. Because some, trapped in chorus, wished to live, and others wished to die. And nothing can exist split up like that, so the voices put it to choice:" Turning up empty hand, Xion relates: "To die, some voices ceased." And a turn-flourish of the chocolate bar. "To live, the rest remained. And then they were, and then a while later they were me." Xion looks back at Rita, over a shoulder, a little chocolate melted on the corner of her mouth, her mussed hair antenna-ing slightly. "I started existing as a 'Nobody', which is... what happens when people lose their Heart and somehow keep going. Zexion, one of my friends in the Organization and a scientist, told me I came about different than usual after I noticed the other Organization members arrived by being found or showing up in the World that Never Was, and I came out of the basement of the castle." Taking another bite of chocolate, Xion pulls the bar past nose and drops the candy to her lap. "That was why it hurt. Because - Nobodies are 'taking' from someone. I have a girl named Kairi's memories, because my friend Namine didn't want them any more. They were too painful for her, to see the end and..." Xion is taken with a memory - perhaps Kairi's, because she looks for a moment so very far away, and a tear rolls down her cheek before she rubs at her face again. "-to me, they were, they are, precious things I needed to understand what so many things are. Them, and all the little bits I've borrowed from everyone else, and..." Raggedly, she exhales, the absolute rollercoaster she had set herself on barely levelled by chocolate-sweet. "... if that meant I deserved," Death? Pain? Whatever it was that Rita had wished on herself. "... I couldn't bear it. Not to have to smile that much and not mean it at all. And you were so sure you meant it, and..." Xion hangs her head and sighs and does not rise nor continue. Emotionally she is spent. "I'm scared, yeah. I could be anywhere else, but I'm here, doing this. Feeling this. I don't want to." But, she is here.
Rita Ma	Rita's heart has a little rhythm to its undercurrents, a 'beat': I wish-- stop, her blood-- stop, hungry-- stop, just a bite-- stop, I wish I-- stop. Well-practiced arrest, steady-and-always, internally unremarkable. It probably hurt more, once. Over that, it's clear: queasy, vertiginous guilt. But you could get that from her face anyway. Her smiles have limits too. "Someone asked you - I don't remember who, maybe one of the Agents? - about regrets, and you said. . ." "Oh." If there's any wind left in her, that knocks it out. "I said something dumb like, 'my only regret', didn't I." There's not really anything good to say about that, and she knows it very keenly, but she can manage something mediocre: "... the part of me that talked, and the part of me that regrets, were in different spots. I did know then. I'm sorry." "It would be hard." "I'll... try to believe that." Better for both of them if she can. Nobody likes a bully who plays victim, she knows. This is a new degree of distress. Normally she can be sincere and tender or she can lock down and get stiff. This is a held note of not-quite-bad-enough melancholy, seeming finely dialed-in. Drooping like this is rare. Xion swivels. Rita doesn't, but leans back, to have the option of glancing over sidelong. "The parts of you that wanted to live... you said something like that, once. And you also said living is still hard. Even without 'the parts that wanted to die' weighing you down. Right?" "... Ah-!" That's a tear, on top of the chocolate-smudge. One of Rita's tentacles reaches over the edge of the building, down three stories, opens a window, and comes back up with a small gym towel. It goes in Xion's hands. "Um, sorry," she says dumbly, about maybe-anything. "... making yourself useful, and small, and never being a burden. Yeah. It does work great. As long as you don't want anything more than 'not to be pushed away'. I really wanted to be everyone's, something, too. But I'm a jumbled-up person. One day there started being 'too much' of me. And some parts weren't loveable at all. And I hated them. I wished they'd die, but they wouldn't come out. And I hated..." A quiet, and a little pause in the breeze, where the loudest sound is Rita's lips parting but saying nothing else. "Hup-" and she does pivot, to face the garden, and her tentacles wind around herself as she stands, and with a little squelch-fwoosh of flesh and chromatophores it's normal Rita, in her normal dress, with an almost-normal smile. A very normal hand reaches out to help her surely-normal friend up. "I was really awful, Xion," she says, and her voice hasn't changed at all, even though every single other thing has. "But... I'm glad for all the parts of you that are here." 'Here'. "The parts of you that feel sadness... they chose to be here too, right? Even though that must have been hard. Please tell them I said 'thank you'. I want to be kinder to them."
Xion	The chocolate is pretty good - she picked the fancy gourmet kind of bar from the supermarket, which since it's broken up into bricks is naturally better than chocolate not broken up into bricks. That's a chocolate fact, didn't you know? (Toblerone, sticks of triangles broken into bricks, being among the strongest of all chocolates.) The simple correlation between better chocolate and that presentation had no bearing. It was chocolate facts. Curious about what the shift in Rita means, Xion finds herself receiving a towel for her face from the gym. Accepting the remote towel service with a slow nod and carefully cleaning up, Xion considers the sugarsmear that she leaves and folds the towel back from balling it up in her hands. "Living's plenty hard." "It should be easier, I think," Folding slightly dirtied towel and setting it on the shopping bag, Xion continues to think on the elevator, wistful for the memory of it in the facility, and her focus on it almost when she was there. "-but other times I wonder if it were any easier would we be as active? Maybe reality is just the high-difficulty mode of things, since all the gods and everything still show up here unless they're really smart and just exist as a tree or a force or a breeze. Breezes don't have problem with people, and trees..." Xion sighs, and hangs her head with a shake, and this time it's a soft little laugh. "Maybe before I become a giant tree I'll remember to scare some respect for forests back into people. It's dire in a lot of places, for trees." Creaking that look back out to Rita, and the City beyond, the irony of that observation sets in and Xion emits another amused 'eheh'. "Being everyone's anything's is hard, hard work. I'd believe you did it for a while." 'And I hated them.' "I've known hate more than anything else. I met someone, a long time ago, who hated completely, and so from them I learned how precious, how useful hate was. Hate can be anything. Hate can be love, several kinds." Xion reminisces over foilwrap like a well-nursed wineglass now, satisfied to smell it as a focus for her feelings. She needs to talk anyway. "I'm sorry you've struggled, with there being too much that you hated, because it's the worst to want something attached to you to die. Words don't... explain it right." Xion eventually returns, not satisfied with that and dipping eyes back towards her lap. 'Hup-' Xion looks up at that, again, Rita in her shortest skirts and the sky above. An outstretched hand, and, the restatement of why she was brought to the roof. Xion considers Rita's hand, and then down it to her own, closest, holding candybar. Ah. A logistical problem. Shifting treat away, Xion decides to take Rita's hand, allowing herself to be pulled up and helping an equal amount by shifting leg under herself and rising. "Well, I dragged them here, so, they've probably heard you, but I'll tell them again if it comes up." She asides, still... awkward. She'll be processing this for a bit with that belligerent thudding thing in her chest, bucking and raving the whole time. "I'd... rather talk it out than anything else. I had given up on being someone important to you at all, but, well, maybe I'll just decide nothing and see how it goes."