Hayame doesn’t know whether he’s a fool or he thinks she is. She stares (glares) at him from where she half lays on the bed of shaved wood, her blanket at least accurately thin. She knows (she thinks) what he wants, but why… Why did she want it, too? Why was the idea of refraining from it so offensive to her?
She does not know, and so… she bites. Or maybe it’s just a bark.]
Will you not win the battle far more easily with someone different at your flank?
This battle is to save a downed ally, and that ally is you. So it would defeat the purpose if I went off to battle with someone else, wouldn't it?
[She's running with his silly metaphor instead of telling him to get lost, so he decides to put his neck on the line and opens the stable door, shrugging off his heavy cloak as he does so.]
Here, you can have this. [And assuming she doesn't get up to stomp him to death, he'll drape the cloak around her shoulders and along her equine flank. It might not be jinba-sized, but it's something.]
[The semantics are grit out as if even she knows how arbitrary it is to argue them, but she just can't help herself. She also... can't help but be shocked that he just lets himself in to her stall. Hayame had been raised in one without a door, and somehow... even though a normal human would surely blanche at how little privacy there was in her current living arrangements, it had been a huge step up for her to even have that half-height door.]
Wh-
[But because she's laying down, she can't... he gets the cloak over her before she can protest or move out of the way, and though she grabs it as if she's about to rip it off... her hand clutches the heavy hem instead.
[Claude crouches down so they're at eye level, deciding he's more comfortable with that than standing over her.]
But it'll make you feel a little better. Even if it's just to get annoyed at me instead of focusing on feeling cold and miserable.
[He's still cold himself, and the absence of his cloak isn't making much difference to that, but he instinctively crosses his arms and hunches his shoulders as if to huddle up and keep warm regardless.]
So why don't we hang out for a bit? You have your own personal nuisance to distract you.
The chill is in our shards, not our bodies. Take it back, I did not ask for it-
[It is belated, yes, but she still tries to do it, awkwardly trying to shuck off his rather large cloak and maintain an angry look his way while also suppressing how much she wanted to just wallow in her misery.]
The dryad cursed me similarly before, so do not tell me I do not know what I am talking about.
[The cloak flies awkwardly and weakly at his head.]
[He fumbles to catch the cloak, startled, and draws it back around his shoulders.]
So are you saying jinba shards are different too? I don't think that's how it works. But if you're so worried about my fragile little human shard, how about we try this?
[He scoots over and sits down next to her, wrapping the cloak around both their shoulders.]
[She snaps it as if it should be obvious that she means resistance to the cold. Throw a human naked into the snow and they'll be dead within the day, but a jinba could last a week, if not more, as long as they could keep moving...
But if she meant to say more, it changes immediately when he just... sits next to her, as if she'd allowed it, as if she wanted someone that close to her, touching her-]
Who the hell do you think you are?
[Her first thought is to shove, and she does, sending him tumbling further down her flank.]
[People do not... play in a jinba breeding stable outpost. Even as a child, Hayame had never engaged in the sort of antics most young people indulged in when learning how to interact with their peers and form bonds. Games, playing different roles, little performances... the closest thing were perhaps races and contests of strength. But when those were twisted into ways to observe their growth and rank them for Exhibition Day...
Needless to say, Hayame is not a woman who knows how to react appropriately to this sort of... playful banter or dramatics.]
If I wanted to wound you, you'd actually be wounded!
[... But he's warm. Even to someone like her, whose body temperature ran higher than a human's, which makes it clear to her that... it was an unnatural sort of warmth. Shards. Being shard-bearers. Something. Something she is tempted not to let go of, even though it should be shameful to let a man touch her like this, in her stall of all places-]
Stay on my flank if you're going to be so audacious!
[She evidently doesn't have a sense of humour, so he'll stop feigning classic Fire Emblem death dialogue and instead get comfortable against the warmth of her side. He can already feel a little of the chill subsiding, the feeling of being alone ebbing away.
Then, nonchalantly, like he's just remarking on the weather:]
You know, a bowstring can't stay taut forever. The same is true of people.
[Even this... is so much. To her credit, Hayame almost tries to pretend that it isn't. That she was such a shameless woman that she let men lean their bodies against her all the time, this was nothing new, but. She is not a good actress. The longer he leans against her flank, his body moving slightly up and down along with the breath in her larger set of lungs, the more she...
Blushes.
To the point that she has to look away and hide her face, not wanting it to be seen even though the red flush can still be noted on the tips of her ears and the back of her neck. It's a perfect position to see her long bow laying against the wall of her stall... unstrung.
Perfect.]
- the least you could do is tell an entertaining tale if you are going to force your company on me.
[As if he hadn't said anything at all. As if it wasn't like... she didn't know. She just had to make it to her goal before she snapped, she was supposed to only be a single night away from her end, but then it became months in Horos, months in Kenos...]
[The blush doesn't escape Claude's notice even as she looks away, but he's still trying to be as respectful as possible despite... everything, so it goes unremarked. He's keeping his hands to himself and trying not to fidget to avoid annoying her, besides drawings his knees up up to try to better keep himself warm.]
An entertaining tale? I have plenty. How about the time I crossed a desert looking for treasure, and got way more than I bargained for?
[It's such a wild story she might just dismiss it as invention... but then again, she's been around Horos and Kenos long enough that believability has surely been stretched for her by now.]
[She asks him for a tale as if she likes stories, when in fact, she does not. Even from a young age, Hayame had seen the falsehood and exaggerated magnificence of such things as pointless, longed for something real to aspire for instead… even when her brother had asked her for them, she had sent him back to his stall alone without one more often than not.
But it was something to do. Something to fill the air to make it seem like there could be a reason she was letting this impudent human who was suddenly six years older (older than her, now), lean shamelessly against her side. Something that wasn’t the weakness of craving another’s warmth in the cold loss of an Oracle they didn’t understand.]
All right then. [This is possibly the most unenthused audience he's ever had for a story, but at least she's asking. She might find it even a little bit interesting, so he launches straight into the telling.]
It started when I started reading up on the lives of the four saints of the Church of Seiros. You don't need to know the details, except to know that one of them was a renowned blacksmith, and a great warrior in his own right. He was said to have died in a war a thousand years ago, according to official accounts, but others said he crossed the sea to the east to search for new lands. I did a little digging and my research pointed me to a desert in the Sreng region.
That's east of where Dimitri's from. You know him, right? [He has no idea, but as a fellow shardbearer, chances are they've bumped into each other by now. But he's getting sidetracked, so he continues on.] Anyway, in that desert was said to be the ruins of an ancient temple, which was supposedly built to worship a great beast. I had a hunch that beast was connected to the saint, and if I went there, I might be able to find some of his weapons.
When I got there, I found the ruins, some bandits with the same idea I had... and the beast. It was huge, with great big wings [He spreads his arms for emphasis,] and a beak like a bird, but it moved on all fours. It even talked!
[… She might be the most unenthused listener he’s ever had, it’s true. But it isn’t because she isn’t listening. She might be paying more attention to… him, rather than the words, but. Each little shift and gesture is something she’s hyperaware of, each breath, even, and more importantly—-
This sort of thing just didn’t happen to her. People didn’t risk life and limb to flip down against her nere they please, and they didn’t tell her stories. She’d almost just assumed he wouldn’t. That was for other people… like Matsukaze and his family, like the orphans in the village who had huddled by the fire and told themselves stories after dinner.
So what is she supposed to do now that he’s actually doing it? She grunts belatedly about this Dimitri- she knew a Dimitri, but was it the same one? Surely not, that man was ghastly pale of skin with hair like straw, and this man was dark of hair with sun-kissed skin. Not from the same place at all. But she’s not debating or wondering out loud.
Until he pauses as if he seems to be expecting some sort of input from her. Still mostly not looking, she vaguely supplies-]
And then you slayed the great beast?
[She doesn’t even know if she’s supposed to think this is real or not…]
Not quite, although he did want me dead the second he got a sniff of my blood, as a descendent of Riegan, one of the Ten Elites. [A whole other story in and of itself, but he'll skip over it for now.] He said if we killed him first, we could have all his treasure.
Complicating things even further, a few thieves showed up with the same idea as us. They, uh... were pretty scattered, though, and the poor guys either got devoured by giant sandworms, or slain by the beast if they so much as got close. A few even attacked my own army.
[What a mess... He scratches the back of his neck and concludes the story with a grin.]
If you can believe it, though, after we fought the beast long enough, he just kinda got tired and dozed off, so we left him be and took his treasure. One of them was a sacred weapon. I can't say for sure if it was made by Saint Macuil, but we got something out of the whole expedition, either way.
[Thankfully? for Claude's storytelling flow... Hayame doesn't feel the need to interrupt and ask who the hell Riegan was, accustomed to the ballads and tales of her own world in which a warrior's lineage and achievements might be listed at length before they even began the story proper. ... Also, she barely is listening to the details, but.
Surely he knew that. She is more concerned with the unnatural chill that had come with their defeat... and the slight warmth of his form against her flank. The way his annoying insistence on forcing his company on her... has slightly eased her loneliness.
- She notes that he says "my own army", though. Just barely. Not "our army".]
You expect me to believe that it just fell asleep, after all that... ?
I guess it comes with the territory of being thousands of years old. You get all cranky and need to sleep more?
[He's just spitballing here, he doesn't actually know, and was just as surprised when it happened.]
I didn't want to kill him anyway, but it's a shame I couldn't get more answers out of him when I did all that research... Ah, well. Maybe when we're done here, I'll go back and find him someday. [Not if, but when. Like this whole mess is just a minor inconvenience that will be dealt with soon.]
As if you or I would know what it felt like being thousands of years old. What are you now, twenty?
[He'd seemed freshly a man when they first met, now he had a beard... but surely he was not older than she was? How intolerable a thought that would be, that he be her senior when he took things so less seriously...
She is still blushing, but. She does manage to look back at him a little.]
Twenty four, actually, but you were close! ...ish. It's a few steps closer to being a thousand, isn't it?
[And some people with Crests do turn out to be very long lived... He has no reason to think he's one of them, though, especially with only a minor Crest.
But now she's actually looking at him a little, and his suspicions are confirmed:]
You know, you're cute when you blush. Has anyone ever told you that?
[So it was intolerable that he chose! Twenty four... To think he really would somehow leap over her to seniority while acting like this? Fine, if she has to rely on the fact that her kind matured faster and lived shorter lives than humans to consider herself still the older between the two of them then so be it- !
But she doesn't expect him to suddenly say that.
Hayame has been called "beautiful", "handsome", and "elegant" ever since she blossomed from the leggy and tomboyish build of a yearling to a mature mare, and she has never doubted it as fact because... what prospective buyer would bother lying to her stable master about his property? But "cute"? Cute, like one would call a child, some innocent little maiden, or some tea waitress with loose morals?
She stiffens... and blushes more obviously, reaching back to snatch at his cloak and try to throw it off her flank and towards his face. (Not... a graceful move, from the somewhat limiting position of being a jinba on her side, but-)]
If you want to insult me, you can do it from outside my stall!
[Claude just... has the cloak smack him in the face. Did he deserve that? Probably, so he'll give her the W. He doesn't seem keen on budging, though, and smooths his cloak back down on her flank (albeit sliiiightly more out of reach this time).]
Okay then, if the c-word is off limits, what description do you not find insulting? How about, "your cheeks are stained as red as the blood of a hundred warriors"?
[Not a serious suggestion, but who knows, she might take it as one.]
[... He is foolish, or brave. If the latter, at least he has that going for him. Hayame seems poised to try and do the needed maneuvering to kick him (part of the reason why she didn't like letting people near her or even see her when she was laying down, jinba were so much slower and vulnerable like this-) but she is so...
She's so tired. And defeated, particularly vulnerable as she was to the unnatural weight of failure hanging over the Meridian city.]
I do not need your observations, either! Do you think I had forgotten since you arrived, somehow, that I was not born with a sheathe between my legs? Or that you yourself are a man sharing warmth with me?
[(... She did like that phrasing slightly less insulting, admittedly, but. She can't say that now.)]
I do not need you to remind me of my sex's failings!
I wasn't trying to remind you of anything! [He holds up his hands in protest, looking baffled at the conclusion she'd taken a mountain-sized leap in order to jump to.]
And I definitely don't think of you as a failure at anything. That has nothing to do with you being a woman or me being a man... I was just trying to tease you a bit. [He'd do the same to anyone, regardless of gender. He will, however, add a more serious point.]
If you ask me, people who look down on others for who they were born as are the worst types of people.
You obviously think I am a failure at containing my-
[Hayame chokes on the wording, her cheeks growing annoyingly brighter.]
My maidenly nature.
[... The blushing. He says he wasn't, he looks confused, but Hayame doesn't look confused at all, her conclusion one that made perfect sense in her own head.]
The worst types of people are the most common sort of people- if you ask me.
[If that was how he wanted to phrase it, she could do that. (She hasn't kicked him yet, she tells herself, only because it would look absolutely foolish if she had to roll on her belly and lash out clumsily to do so.)]
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Hayame doesn’t know whether he’s a fool or he thinks she is. She stares (glares) at him from where she half lays on the bed of shaved wood, her blanket at least accurately thin. She knows (she thinks) what he wants, but why… Why did she want it, too? Why was the idea of refraining from it so offensive to her?
She does not know, and so… she bites. Or maybe it’s just a bark.]
Will you not win the battle far more easily with someone different at your flank?
[It’s not an immediate “no”.]
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[She's running with his silly metaphor instead of telling him to get lost, so he decides to put his neck on the line and opens the stable door, shrugging off his heavy cloak as he does so.]
Here, you can have this. [And assuming she doesn't get up to stomp him to death, he'll drape the cloak around her shoulders and along her equine flank. It might not be jinba-sized, but it's something.]
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[The semantics are grit out as if even she knows how arbitrary it is to argue them, but she just can't help herself. She also... can't help but be shocked that he just lets himself in to her stall. Hayame had been raised in one without a door, and somehow... even though a normal human would surely blanche at how little privacy there was in her current living arrangements, it had been a huge step up for her to even have that half-height door.]
Wh-
[But because she's laying down, she can't... he gets the cloak over her before she can protest or move out of the way, and though she grabs it as if she's about to rip it off... her hand clutches the heavy hem instead.
It's warm. But her body is not-]
It is not that kind of cold.
[Idiot.]
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But it'll make you feel a little better. Even if it's just to get annoyed at me instead of focusing on feeling cold and miserable.
[He's still cold himself, and the absence of his cloak isn't making much difference to that, but he instinctively crosses his arms and hunches his shoulders as if to huddle up and keep warm regardless.]
So why don't we hang out for a bit? You have your own personal nuisance to distract you.
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[It is belated, yes, but she still tries to do it, awkwardly trying to shuck off his rather large cloak and maintain an angry look his way while also suppressing how much she wanted to just wallow in her misery.]
The dryad cursed me similarly before, so do not tell me I do not know what I am talking about.
[The cloak flies awkwardly and weakly at his head.]
You're the human, jinba don't get cold as easy.
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[He fumbles to catch the cloak, startled, and draws it back around his shoulders.]
So are you saying jinba shards are different too? I don't think that's how it works. But if you're so worried about my fragile little human shard, how about we try this?
[He scoots over and sits down next to her, wrapping the cloak around both their shoulders.]
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[She snaps it as if it should be obvious that she means resistance to the cold. Throw a human naked into the snow and they'll be dead within the day, but a jinba could last a week, if not more, as long as they could keep moving...
But if she meant to say more, it changes immediately when he just... sits next to her, as if she'd allowed it, as if she wanted someone that close to her, touching her-]
Who the hell do you think you are?
[Her first thought is to shove, and she does, sending him tumbling further down her flank.]
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Ahh, I'm mortally wounded! Woe is me. But I can't give up on my battle just yet...
[He still doesn't move, though. He's dying, Hayame. Have pity on him. (Also, she's warm.)]
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Needless to say, Hayame is not a woman who knows how to react appropriately to this sort of... playful banter or dramatics.]
If I wanted to wound you, you'd actually be wounded!
[... But he's warm. Even to someone like her, whose body temperature ran higher than a human's, which makes it clear to her that... it was an unnatural sort of warmth. Shards. Being shard-bearers. Something. Something she is tempted not to let go of, even though it should be shameful to let a man touch her like this, in her stall of all places-]
Stay on my flank if you're going to be so audacious!
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[She evidently doesn't have a sense of humour, so he'll stop feigning classic Fire Emblem death dialogue and instead get comfortable against the warmth of her side. He can already feel a little of the chill subsiding, the feeling of being alone ebbing away.
Then, nonchalantly, like he's just remarking on the weather:]
You know, a bowstring can't stay taut forever. The same is true of people.
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Blushes.
To the point that she has to look away and hide her face, not wanting it to be seen even though the red flush can still be noted on the tips of her ears and the back of her neck. It's a perfect position to see her long bow laying against the wall of her stall... unstrung.
Perfect.]
- the least you could do is tell an entertaining tale if you are going to force your company on me.
[As if he hadn't said anything at all. As if it wasn't like... she didn't know. She just had to make it to her goal before she snapped, she was supposed to only be a single night away from her end, but then it became months in Horos, months in Kenos...]
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An entertaining tale? I have plenty. How about the time I crossed a desert looking for treasure, and got way more than I bargained for?
[It's such a wild story she might just dismiss it as invention... but then again, she's been around Horos and Kenos long enough that believability has surely been stretched for her by now.]
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But it was something to do. Something to fill the air to make it seem like there could be a reason she was letting this impudent human who was suddenly six years older (older than her, now), lean shamelessly against her side. Something that wasn’t the weakness of craving another’s warmth in the cold loss of an Oracle they didn’t understand.]
That one, then. A desert.
[Not that she knew what that truly was.]
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It started when I started reading up on the lives of the four saints of the Church of Seiros. You don't need to know the details, except to know that one of them was a renowned blacksmith, and a great warrior in his own right. He was said to have died in a war a thousand years ago, according to official accounts, but others said he crossed the sea to the east to search for new lands. I did a little digging and my research pointed me to a desert in the Sreng region.
That's east of where Dimitri's from. You know him, right? [He has no idea, but as a fellow shardbearer, chances are they've bumped into each other by now. But he's getting sidetracked, so he continues on.] Anyway, in that desert was said to be the ruins of an ancient temple, which was supposedly built to worship a great beast. I had a hunch that beast was connected to the saint, and if I went there, I might be able to find some of his weapons.
When I got there, I found the ruins, some bandits with the same idea I had... and the beast. It was huge, with great big wings [He spreads his arms for emphasis,] and a beak like a bird, but it moved on all fours. It even talked!
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This sort of thing just didn’t happen to her. People didn’t risk life and limb to flip down against her nere they please, and they didn’t tell her stories. She’d almost just assumed he wouldn’t. That was for other people… like Matsukaze and his family, like the orphans in the village who had huddled by the fire and told themselves stories after dinner.
So what is she supposed to do now that he’s actually doing it? She grunts belatedly about this Dimitri- she knew a Dimitri, but was it the same one? Surely not, that man was ghastly pale of skin with hair like straw, and this man was dark of hair with sun-kissed skin. Not from the same place at all. But she’s not debating or wondering out loud.
Until he pauses as if he seems to be expecting some sort of input from her. Still mostly not looking, she vaguely supplies-]
And then you slayed the great beast?
[She doesn’t even know if she’s supposed to think this is real or not…]
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Complicating things even further, a few thieves showed up with the same idea as us. They, uh... were pretty scattered, though, and the poor guys either got devoured by giant sandworms, or slain by the beast if they so much as got close. A few even attacked my own army.
[What a mess... He scratches the back of his neck and concludes the story with a grin.]
If you can believe it, though, after we fought the beast long enough, he just kinda got tired and dozed off, so we left him be and took his treasure. One of them was a sacred weapon. I can't say for sure if it was made by Saint Macuil, but we got something out of the whole expedition, either way.
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Surely he knew that. She is more concerned with the unnatural chill that had come with their defeat... and the slight warmth of his form against her flank. The way his annoying insistence on forcing his company on her... has slightly eased her loneliness.
- She notes that he says "my own army", though. Just barely. Not "our army".]
You expect me to believe that it just fell asleep, after all that... ?
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[He's just spitballing here, he doesn't actually know, and was just as surprised when it happened.]
I didn't want to kill him anyway, but it's a shame I couldn't get more answers out of him when I did all that research... Ah, well. Maybe when we're done here, I'll go back and find him someday. [Not if, but when. Like this whole mess is just a minor inconvenience that will be dealt with soon.]
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[He'd seemed freshly a man when they first met, now he had a beard... but surely he was not older than she was? How intolerable a thought that would be, that he be her senior when he took things so less seriously...
She is still blushing, but. She does manage to look back at him a little.]
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[And some people with Crests do turn out to be very long lived... He has no reason to think he's one of them, though, especially with only a minor Crest.
But now she's actually looking at him a little, and his suspicions are confirmed:]
You know, you're cute when you blush. Has anyone ever told you that?
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But she doesn't expect him to suddenly say that.
Hayame has been called "beautiful", "handsome", and "elegant" ever since she blossomed from the leggy and tomboyish build of a yearling to a mature mare, and she has never doubted it as fact because... what prospective buyer would bother lying to her stable master about his property? But "cute"? Cute, like one would call a child, some innocent little maiden, or some tea waitress with loose morals?
She stiffens... and blushes more obviously, reaching back to snatch at his cloak and try to throw it off her flank and towards his face. (Not... a graceful move, from the somewhat limiting position of being a jinba on her side, but-)]
If you want to insult me, you can do it from outside my stall!
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Okay then, if the c-word is off limits, what description do you not find insulting? How about, "your cheeks are stained as red as the blood of a hundred warriors"?
[Not a serious suggestion, but who knows, she might take it as one.]
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She's so tired. And defeated, particularly vulnerable as she was to the unnatural weight of failure hanging over the Meridian city.]
I do not need your observations, either! Do you think I had forgotten since you arrived, somehow, that I was not born with a sheathe between my legs? Or that you yourself are a man sharing warmth with me?
[(... She did like that phrasing slightly less insulting, admittedly, but. She can't say that now.)]
I do not need you to remind me of my sex's failings!
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And I definitely don't think of you as a failure at anything. That has nothing to do with you being a woman or me being a man... I was just trying to tease you a bit. [He'd do the same to anyone, regardless of gender. He will, however, add a more serious point.]
If you ask me, people who look down on others for who they were born as are the worst types of people.
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[Hayame chokes on the wording, her cheeks growing annoyingly brighter.]
My maidenly nature.
[... The blushing. He says he wasn't, he looks confused, but Hayame doesn't look confused at all, her conclusion one that made perfect sense in her own head.]
The worst types of people are the most common sort of people- if you ask me.
[If that was how he wanted to phrase it, she could do that. (She hasn't kicked him yet, she tells herself, only because it would look absolutely foolish if she had to roll on her belly and lash out clumsily to do so.)]
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