[Ren's apartment.]
And largely he used his powers around people that he trusted. People he didn't think were going to look at him differently. Every time he'd used them recently, it had been something like that. And it was more true that he was afraid of becoming whatever it was his parents had so feared. He didn't even know if it was right to fear that. They didn't know him, not really, they'd never taken the time to try. "What do you think?" He looked over at her, brown eyes intent on her face. "You know me as well as anyone probably. Should I-" he paused, trailing off. Could he even expect someone else to take that responsibility of telling him what to do? His parents and his Uncle certainly had, but it had been what not to do. He started a different track. "Would you use them? If you were me?"
He listened, perhaps a little more sober, as she described him. There were things he wanted to protest, things he maybe wanted to push back against, but he wasn't entirely certain that they were wrong either. He didn't want to be involved, he wanted safe and quiet, maybe not even so much because he wanted it, as because he didn't want to do the wrong thing - quiet was safer and kept him from possibly making desperate mistakes that he couldn't walk back from. He was haunted, pressed by fears of failure, or possibly even worse - succeeding in the wrong thing. And all of the easy going, good-natured, he knew that was a role he played most of the time. And it kept him friends, but not always people who knew him. Maybe it'd be nice to be the person being chased and charmed and wooed rather than be the person who was the one doing that. Maybe he'd feel less like he had to perform to keep them interested?
Ren reached for the bottle he'd abandoned before, and he took a long sip from it and then he shifted again, half leaning into her, half putting his head on the back of the sofa, and his eyes cast around for a focus, landing finally on a sconce across from the sofa, against the wall, and he stared at it in silence. "My grandfather was magical like me and he fucked it up. My mom has magic too and she never used it. My Uncle also has it, and he uses it, but with this strict code around it. They always told me it was dangerous, that I could mess shit up like my grandfather did. There was an accident with my grandmother." He didn't want to talk about the details and so for a moment he fell quiet again. "Every time I use it, it's on my mind, unless I'm helping someone, and then it isn't. Like with the AI Fair. But sometimes it shifts, there's this undercurrent where I can feel that I don't care who gets hurt, and that was there at the park - it's not strictly true, cause I would never hurt you, or Louis - even now - but everyone else, I'd have shredded them, and I could feel it. It is dangerous, still. I'm dangerous."