She smiles at his laugh, as he says whoever she wants to kill must deserve it more than her, but has no words to contradict him or confirm. How could she say whether that was true? She felt the weight of what she knew, and she imagined it was the same for the stallion with her now. Agetta wishes she could ease his worries about who else might know about this part of his history, but she can’t. And she feels freshly furious that this piece of her friend had been put on display as if it were nothing at all - as if it did not matter.
(Just think of how mad she would be if she knew how the others had reacted to that scene, how many of them had attacked him.)
When he calls her kind, despite her willingness to commit murder, she cannot help the smile and the quick joke. “Well I don’t want to kill you.” She whispers back with a small touch of laughter before she sobers at the darkness of her own words. Agetta doesn’t know when she became who she is today, someone who can joke about murder, speak about it, and condone it. Has she been slowly turning into this version of herself? Has it been lurking beneath the surface of the Gates Queen all along?
She supposes it’s foolish to think she would not change after the years she has lived, the deaths she has experienced and the resurrections that followed. How fractured does a soul become when it rises and falls as often as hers?
The sigh that escapes her at his touch is subtle, the ghost of something that should not exist. She turns her head slightly so she can touch him too - but where his was brief she lingers and speaks her next words in the infinitesimal space between them. “I mean every word, you know. You’re more than what she made you, what she named you.” And she believes it - oh how thoroughly she believes those words.
Because she needs them to be true for her, too. Needs to believe it’s possible for them to be more than the sins inflicted on them, and to gain forgiveness for the ones they will commit in kind.
@[garbage]