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Five (jumps) wrote in somerealityrpg,

As she spoke, he stilled, listening. He picked up not just her words but the cadence, letting her story fill the silence while he kept quiet himself. His eyes slid back to her as he spoke, and, while he didn't have the best mental references to pull from for each clique mentioned, he understand the words well enough to make a few educated guesses, not to mention simplify his siblings into each category. They all overlapped in his head, making it easier what she meant by being in one more than group. He could also understand, to some extent, what it meant when you couldn't easily be put into a box and how people reacted.

Taking another sip of his drink, letting the liquid coat his tongue and sit in his mouth before finally swallowing, Five continued to listen as she described this mean girl, this Nina. It made him wonder, very briefly, if either of his sisters could have ended up like her had they had any semblance of a normal childhood, with or without their abilities. The thought left as quickly as it had arrived, and shifted a bit to look just a bit more fully at Audrey when she trailed off.

Without missing a beat, Five twisted toward her, setting his glass on the step above him. In quick, efficient movements, he uncorked the bottle of Four Roses, refilled her glass, and set it back on the step between them, cork in place. Then he picked his own glass up and sipped, noting the haphazard pace, the quickening and slowing of her words and phrases. He watched her, letting her take whatever path she needed for the words to come out.

As she continued, his jaw clenched, though the grip on his glass remained loose. What felt like a day ago and also a year ago, his brother, Luther, had mentioned a code, that he surly had one when he'd worked for the Commission. He hadn't, but there were still things that crossed the line, even for him.

Taking a long drink from his glass, Five said, "History is filled with lots of moments, some big and some small, some good and some bad. And some are really bad, to the point that no one should have been made to live through them. 'The Great Leap Forward,' for instance. Mao Zedong pushed for a shift in China from a predominately farming society to an industrial, modern one in the span of five years. On top of forcing farmers into industrial careers, nature was not on the country's side. It led to mass famine. The Yellow River flooded in 1959, which contributed to starvation from crop destruction. And as what happens when rivers flood, people drowned. If that weren't bad enough, people were tortured to death for stealing food, and, in some places, they resorted to cannibalism just to survive."

He paused and finished his drink, licking his lips. "Meanwhile, Chairman Mao dined on French meals worth thousands of dollars and drank twenty year old Scotch. He even told his men that there would be many deaths but that, essentially, the ends justified the means. At least forty-five million people died between 1958 and 1962 in China because of his Great Leap Forward." Holding his empty glass between both hands, Five looked at her, willing Audrey to understand what he was trying to say without saying, that no one deserved to go through certain things, including her. That she had his empathy, though not his pity. He did not want pity himself, and he suspected she might not appreciate it, either.