Re: Shiloh & Kit: the B&B sitting room
Kit had, you understand, the benefit of months of Shiloh at what was undoubtedly his worst and at all the various thresholds of Shiloh above. It couldn't said that Kit considered he'd seen Shiloh at his best, because hospitals did not generally produce the best in their patients, and Shiloh had had the utter lack of fortune of what had been one of the most frustrating and madly unfair conditions to endure and otherwise tolerate the indignities associated with it, to go with it. So he understood that there had been no efforts thus far expended to be irritating, or maddening or anything out of the ordinary. What his opinions might have been on Shiloh's mother are pure assumption and hypothetical and thus known only to Kit himself.
"You probably would," Kit agreed with Shiloh, with equanimity, and added for good measure, "And do so no doubt with more style. Or indeed, wear them at all." He watched Shiloh's smile groove deeper, sharper than a knife and his own amusement blinked into being, sleepy though it was. "Other than of course, when you wish them to think of you and they do so as you like," he completed the thought to its logical conclusion.
Kit was giving rather more attention to coffee than Shiloh to begin with, and he thought a little about the question about advice more than perhaps someone else. "I could say it depends what counts as advice," he said finally, "But semantics give me a headache before breakfast. Are you going to have any?" If a door had been shut firmly on conversation, Kit appeared to have missed the slam.
But he had consumed coffee liberally, and he had nearly finished the mug by the time Shiloh got to moral sanctity, and Kit pulled a face that he probably hadn't been awake for at the beginning of the conversation. He brought one elbow down to the table, and propped his own chin in the cup of his hand. "All right, all right. Here's what I think. I don't believe in justice. I would believe in it, but justice only means anything in the hands of people who have no interest at all in enacting it. You're out. That's a good thing, for two reasons, the first of which is you never should have been in at all. But also prisons don't do anything at all for restoration, or rehabilitating people, which makes the whole idea of 'in' unjust. My father died, without ever having been out, having been in since he was younger than you."
He glanced upward at Shiloh, a brief, more shrewd sort of look. "And there's something in the Hippocratic oath about do no harm. You are, it could be argued, my patient. Or you were. If you were, I think sending you back there could be considered harm done. And I couldn't do that. I'm going to ask in a minute about whether your health is all right. But I think I should probably say, if it's not immediately obvious, I'm not particularly moral." He stopped, and he finished his coffee.
"Want one?" Kit inquired. He was about to get another.