garashir. I Things were weird. After my arrest and those six months in a holding cell... You'd stopped coming near the end there. There weren't any rushed excuses or excessive apologies of getting lost in work or the demands of your job like there had been before, when you'd miss a day or two and then come stumbling into the security office, spouting off like it had been the end of the world that you'd forgot. You just, stopped. Altogether. And I thought you'd finally decided you were done with me.
And then when I got out, our lunches were... polite, awkward, stilted. There wasn't any of the normal fire or energy, and I'd thought you were only trying to humor me, a doddering old fool who'd stopped serving a purpose in your life a long time before.
And then there was Tain and 371 and you. And it all made sense. It made a sickening level of sense, that it had never been you in the first place. That nothing had changed and that I'd just been taking in by a shoddy facsimile because I had assumed it had. And I thought things were going to be fine, that they would be fine, as fine as they could be with you having had to deal with all of that and knowing... all of that.
And then things weren't okay, and I thought... I thought what you'd found out, what you'd found out about me, had been too much, that somehow it had changed things. And that I'd lost you anyway. You'd already pushed me away. What did it matter if I was a little more callous with my jabs than I usually would have been?
I didn't think you'd care when you were already done.