Doors Halloween (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} doorsween) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} doorslogs, |
"Why should you hide it?" Some things were better left unsaid, kept as secrets, but so far as he was concerned she merely had an opinion and had every right to feel however she liked. The assassin shrugged. Did he like the attention? Part of him said yes, and part of him said no. It was a struggle to choose between the two. "Not as much as you might think," he said, falling back on flippant humor in the face of uncertainty. That was better kept hidden.
He noticed the coldness of her skin and the trembling of her fingers, but he gave no outward sign of it. Either she pretended to ignore or was truly blind, but either way, he felt as though calling attention to it would do no more than upset her and he didn't wish to do such a thing. His gaze was drawn upward when her fingers touched his cheek, and the longing in her voice captivated him, a moment stretched out to feel so much longer, before the spell was broken and he blinked. "Of course. What woman would mind such a man?" He smiled, but his mind still lingered over her words. "Being genuine comes with vulnerability, no? Casanova never worries about giving too much of himself, of being hurt in return." His tone might have been casual, but his curiosity went deeper, someplace beyond this, where intimacy terrified him in a way that had nothing to do with inexperience.
Nothing was a pretty lie, but the assassin didn't push or prod or pry. He wanted to, because her refusal to tell him what was wrong reminded him of someone else, someone similar, whose stubborn independence often frustrated him to no end. "Illness cannot be cured if it is kept hidden," he pointed out. "Not to say that you are, that is," he added, a smooth sidestep of implying as much. "I could find her," he said of the woman, "if she wished to be found." Whether that was true or not was difficult to discern. The number of people he missed was few, yet he felt those absences more strongly than he would had there been dozens upon dozens he longed for. "Any point? No. But such is life. Love is not always returned, and those whom we miss do not always miss us in return." He said it as simple fact, though there was something like regret woven in the words.
He laughed at that. "What if we like the taste and have no desire for a new bone?" She might not believe it was possible, but he knew it was. "No, not so," he said of preferring to be out liberating the ship, with a shake of his head. "Good company is difficult to find, and I would rather be nowhere else aside from here." The assassin's demeanor changed at the mention of friends and family, and his expression sobered. "I do not have many friends, and my family is not here, no." He paused, looking down at his hands. "My father did, when he was alive. Now he is dead."