Summary: N is for 'nemaline', that which is, or is like, a thread.
Author’s Note: I can’t promise I’ll manage one of these a day, but I’m going to try to do one a day until I hit ‘z’. They’re all going to be short, and some will be from AUs, but basically I’m making a series of fics about Shi based around interesting words in alphabetical order.
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Truth be told, Shi's connection to other people is tenuous at best. He prefers to remain distinctly separate from the people he interacts with, and he assumes that others would feel much the same.
After all, knowing himself as he does, he wouldn't want to be entangled or in any way married to himself if he were a separate party, so why in the world would anyone else? It's always been very confusing to him when people he's only just come to know try looping cords of friendship around them, as if desperate to entangle them somehow.
It's frustrating, and plays no small part in how snarling and irritable he can be with new people. He does best with the fewest people around as possible; less underfoot, less complicated than trying to dance around appeasing a multitude.
But the fact remains that there comes into his life, randomly and without warning, figures to whom he feels a strange kinship to. What links them to him is nothing like a bond, nothing so sold or constricting.
More, it is as if from his core there comes a nest of threads, each strange strand trailing off to the core of another, linking them in however tenuous a manner. It's a strange union to think on, fragile and occasionally so tempting to break...
Yet it works. He doesn't question it, the strangeness of it or the way those threads over time seem to coil, drawing whoever is at their end closer to him. It is what it is, and that's fine for him.
