biegenalsbrechen:
Her expression soured as he spoke and she drew her hand away from his. She stared at the window, palming her knuckles restlessly, skin shifting over bone. What she heard was the guilt that had gnawed at her for decades, for over half a century. Endurance. That’s what knowing her had been to Margherita. She had suspected it all along, after their tentative rebuilding of burnt bridges. It was, and always had been, the only conclusion that made any sense —- no matter the amount of times she had tried to fool herself otherwise.
He called it patience and trust. Liese thought it sounded more like cruelty. She wondered what Gitta thought of it as. Expelling a heavy breath through her nose, she bowed her head and raked her fingers through her hair, hands linking behind her neck. “ Of course I’m going to apologize. ” Liese had known as much from the moment she had returned her friend’s affection. She knew she had to face her again, if only to correct her wrongs and then leave her be. What it was exactly that had moved her to confess her sins to her brother before she set out to complete that task, though, she couldn’t pinpoint.
Remaining statuesque, she whistled a contrastively chirpy two-note melody. Soon after an excited pitter-patter could be heard on the wooden floor of the hallway, and a relatively small curly-haired dog came trotting in. Frieda sniffed at Gilbert’s legs and flopped down between the two of them, nose nudging Liese’s ankle. Liese’s gaze softened as she looked at the dog, but stayed silent.
The words didn’t seem to comfort her much, and Gilbert wasn’t overly surprised by that. Frieda’s presence was probably more welcome than his own right now, but he didn’t care. “It sounds more cynical to you, I’m guessing,” he mused, shifting the hand Liese had dropped to gently ruffle Frieda’s fur, soft and warm. “But we don’t get to make the same choices as regular people, you know that. We can’t just cut someone out of our lives, just because we think they deserve better than us.”
Keeping his eyes fixed on Frieda, he continued, though part of him almost didn’t want to. “... And I think that’s a good thing, for a few reasons. For starters, it means we have no choice but to deal with our shit, in the end. Some people keep making mistakes they don’t learn from, messing up people’s lives and then dying without ever apologizing. It’s rotten. We generally don’t have that luxury.” He drew a long breath, sitting perfectly still. “We can’t just decide to never have anything to do with someone again, as long as that someone is one of us. And even if we could... I think it would be cowardly. It’s the easy way out when you don’t want to change into someone they do deserve to keep in their lives. If you want to make them an enemy instead, that’s fine and all, but they’re gonna keep existing alongside you whether you like it or not. Might as well make it clear what you want to be to them, before they decide something you don’t like first.”
