( @hyperionknight continued from x )
That text-book answer garnered him a purse of lips that entirely lacked amusement, brown eyes fixed on his face accusatorily. “Oh,” a single middle finger lifted to push imaginary glasses back up the bridge of her nose in an exaggerated gesture, “~excuuuuse me, my mistake.” But she knew in some way he was right — what was normal even? Some part of her supposed it was basically anything that wasn’t this, as conditioned by the brain under duress.
She watched him pluck the flower, some part of her wanting to stop him from punishing a life that dared to reach out beyond its boundaries, but some part of her watching with a guilty sort of satisfaction to see that there was a sort of cosmic order to the chaos; even flowers were subject to societal constructs and punished for stepping out of line.
“So... do you stay just because you pity them?” She questioned him curiously with a tilt of her head, wondering why a Seifer Almasy that could go anywhere in the world would choose to stay behind with the rest of them — if even in his fantasy. How did he justify it?
She hadn’t realized it, but fingertips were plucking up the little balls of petals, carefully unfurling them as he spoke and laying them out on the stone wall beside her, bit by bit reconstructing the radial pattern it once represented.
“Where is your favorite place to go, when you escape?” she prompted him to continue further if only to distract herself with his voice, and him with deeper and more probing questions, knowing he was like her in that the books brought only a small, temporary solace, at times feeling too much like a microcosm of bigger struggles — yet more worlds like their own they could never venture forth into, no matter how beautiful and immersive they seemed.