"Oh, dear," he says flatly, walking up behind the Hero with his hands clasped behind his back. "It's dreadful in there, isn't it?" Rummaging in her mind does little good, the song drowning out anything else. Anything useful.
But he knows that song. It is an old song, a terrible song. Not one originally sang by humans, even the desperate ones. He has heard it in the minds of so many. There is little he can do to help, but realistically, he isn't even really here to help, is he? Ever.
So he tuts, and shakes his head.
"Very little that can be done about that," he says. "Not nothing, but... you know, little." And there it is, that spark of hope that he relies on in the desperation, to remind these petty little mortals that they still have a choice.
"Can't be destroyed, after all, but it can be... transferred, as it were? I might even be able to help with that, so your hands don't have to get so terribly bloodied.
"But who would I send it to?"
And, more interestingly, would she tell them? Would she try to warn them? Would she try to help them?
Put Stuff in my Inbox, I Dare You || Always Accepting
As he talks, Inara draws a slow breath in, and releases it even slower. She does not jump, she does not turn her head as if she is panicked. She turns slow to face him, hands well away from the hilts of her weapons, as if his presence is of little consequence. Or better, none.
Her face is sculpted into a mask of indifference, her eyes flickering over the demon choice spirit clad in the vestiges of a friend memory. Her brow bends skeptically, as if she's contemplating this idea for the first time. As if she hadn't wondered if the things he'd told the Red Templars were true.
He offers freedom from the encroaching Blight. Release from the sick black veins that constrict her spirit tighter with each passing year.
She lifts her head, if only to lower her eyes at him.
"You're not the first to pretend you have an answer for my condition," she says. "What do you want from me, Ishmael, that you would even pretend?"
Calling people by the wrong name never hurt, when you were pretending they were nothing.
