[She's parroting him, she realizes; passing her hands over her legs in the same nervous tic, the same expression of a knotted stomach, if for different reasons. She forces herself to stop and rest her hands where they fall. She needs to be the calm one.]
... A king?
[A flat, bemused-sounding echo, one she tries very hard to keep free of judgement. She also needs to be the one to make sense of this, which is no easy task for someone still struggling to accept each link in this chain of logic. If demons are real--if the multiverse is real--then is God? Satan? No. No. Better to keep her focus and existential crisis trained on the link in front of them. It's enough of a stretch to believe the glassy-eyed thing she's seen convulse and drool on itself, the thing that had talked to her with all the personality of an automated messaging system, is supposed to be some kind of evil demon king. For real?
But the rest... She'd known his family was a painful point to linger on from the moment she'd first seen him flinch from pictures of them and refer to his sister in the past tense, but it's something else to listen to him color in the blanks. A seance? Their lives are competing for "worst B movie plot line." It still makes her shiver on the inside.]
Are you okay? [If she didn't live with him, if she wasn't around him so often, it might be easy to lose sight of the most important person standing in the shadow cast by his family's colossally unsettling nightmare. Her tone starts out strong, but ends on an uncertain note.] You seemed... like you were better. For a while.
[And then it talked to me. But she isn't so crass as to say what he must already know.]
no subject
... A king?
[A flat, bemused-sounding echo, one she tries very hard to keep free of judgement. She also needs to be the one to make sense of this, which is no easy task for someone still struggling to accept each link in this chain of logic. If demons are real--if the multiverse is real--then is God? Satan? No. No. Better to keep her focus and existential crisis trained on the link in front of them. It's enough of a stretch to believe the glassy-eyed thing she's seen convulse and drool on itself, the thing that had talked to her with all the personality of an automated messaging system, is supposed to be some kind of evil demon king. For real?
But the rest... She'd known his family was a painful point to linger on from the moment she'd first seen him flinch from pictures of them and refer to his sister in the past tense, but it's something else to listen to him color in the blanks. A seance? Their lives are competing for "worst B movie plot line." It still makes her shiver on the inside.]
Are you okay? [If she didn't live with him, if she wasn't around him so often, it might be easy to lose sight of the most important person standing in the shadow cast by his family's colossally unsettling nightmare. Her tone starts out strong, but ends on an uncertain note.] You seemed... like you were better. For a while.
[And then it talked to me. But she isn't so crass as to say what he must already know.]