[ promises. heine speaks steadily, offering just enough scaffolding to allow rin to fill in the terrible details.
and he does fill them in. heine's reluctance - or inability - to give him a specific age. genetic experimentation. he must have been born in a lab. treated like a rat in a cage.
--he remembers, suddenly, the way he'd described heine to zack. like an albino bunny rabbit. like an albino lab rat.
more than that: heine speaks with a kind of detachment that rin can't understand. can't define as anything other than mechanical, as if he's ripped away his soft underbelly only to reveal an endoskeleton of steel. it would be in keeping with the theme, after all.
they wanted to see real flowers.
what is heine's colorless account of his past leaving out? what else has he suffered? how many times has he taken life as a child, as a tool to be fitted to the hand of a nameless evil? maybe heine's lack of embellishment means that rin comes away with a worse picture: he paints it all in that brown-red stain that had remained with him even after he'd cleaned heine's - now his own - knife in the grass. ]
Sorry.
[ the details about the "dog" - as heine calls it -- seem negligible now. if he'd been through all that heine is describing, maybe he would have walked around with his hatred apple-red in his cheeks for all the world to see. maybe he wouldn't have been as strong as heine is now, folding years and years of pain into gruff silence.
he doesn't realize he's crying until he hears the dampness in his own voice. he swipes at his cheeks, too disquieted to be embarrassed. ]
About the flowers.
[ he'll hear the rest of heine's story, but -- he needed to get that out. ]
so mUCH PAIN
and he does fill them in. heine's reluctance - or inability - to give him a specific age. genetic experimentation. he must have been born in a lab. treated like a rat in a cage.
--he remembers, suddenly, the way he'd described heine to zack. like an albino bunny rabbit. like an albino lab rat.
more than that: heine speaks with a kind of detachment that rin can't understand. can't define as anything other than mechanical, as if he's ripped away his soft underbelly only to reveal an endoskeleton of steel. it would be in keeping with the theme, after all.
they wanted to see real flowers.
what is heine's colorless account of his past leaving out? what else has he suffered? how many times has he taken life as a child, as a tool to be fitted to the hand of a nameless evil? maybe heine's lack of embellishment means that rin comes away with a worse picture: he paints it all in that brown-red stain that had remained with him even after he'd cleaned heine's - now his own - knife in the grass. ]
Sorry.
[ the details about the "dog" - as heine calls it -- seem negligible now. if he'd been through all that heine is describing, maybe he would have walked around with his hatred apple-red in his cheeks for all the world to see. maybe he wouldn't have been as strong as heine is now, folding years and years of pain into gruff silence.
he doesn't realize he's crying until he hears the dampness in his own voice. he swipes at his cheeks, too disquieted to be embarrassed. ]
About the flowers.
[ he'll hear the rest of heine's story, but -- he needed to get that out. ]