Once Sardonyx unlocked her apartment door and spotted Brennt’s familiar figure, countenance became awash with pure surprise. Having not seen the fallen celestial in months, she hardly expected him to appear now of all times. Plus assessing from his deformed tail, shortened ruffled and dirty quills, it was easy to comprehend that these prolonged weeks had not shown any mercy on him. Seeing the cat nuzzle him affectionately however, evoked her to make her way towards his owner in dubious steps.
“My guess is you teleported in...” her words were caught betwixt throat and air mid-sentence, as when rounding the corner towards Brennt rubies bared witness to a rather gruesome sight.
Only gaping holes of blackness stood, where they had once been. Shock carrying faint hints of a worried note, became evident upon countenance as hues grew wide like saucers. For the longest time Sardonyx just remained there, stunned to complete and utter silence. First his wings, now this!? Great stars above, this being was loosing more abilities each day! Nevertheless that would not stop the sentient clone from having sympathy arise in her heart, towards his plight. Brennt might not accept it, claiming such emotions to be minor pity from a woman who couldn’t care less about him. However the vigilante at least must try something, so opting for a different approach she then finally forged some careful reply.
“Do you... want any tea, while your here?”
Her eventual response evoked cold laughter. Tea. Tea. He entered her apartment uninvited once again in this absolutely repulsive state--she doubtlessly had spent some of the silence disgusted by his appearance, contemplating how it would enter into her nightmares as she slept--and all she could do was ask if he wanted tea?
He could not see her face, but he could hear the traces of pity in her words--how he hated to be pitied. Pity was a false sense of love--an illusion. It was shallow and loveless, not like the genuine care provided by a friend. To love someone was to hurt when they were hurting. To bleed when they were bleeding. It was more than Sardonyx had ever given him, or would ever give. All she offered was that false attachment forged by pity--but she truly couldn’t care less. Outside of what she felt sorry about, she only ever found him to be a pain in the neck. She knew very little about him on a personal level; she never asked those questions.
Love asked those questions.
He was tired, so tired of being pitied. The world either hated him or pitied him--it never loved him. There were mangled, filthy, fleabitten stray dogs that were better accepted and loved than he.
He’d always been under the impression that Sardonyx paid attention to the news--the papers. He knew that press release about his ‘terrorist attack’ and execution sentence had gone far enough to reach Kuro, who he hadn’t expected would ever hear of it. Kuro and her feathered companion were the only two reasons he was even here right now. At some point before, when his hopes had been higher, he might have given her the benefit of the doubt--that she had missed the article and the other various forms of media that repeated it. But now, he felt that even if she had missed it, she would have consciously ignored it had she not.
Well, she was offering him tea. That did suggest she hadn’t known--if she had, she would have responded to his appearance within her dwelling as he’d expected her to earlier:
For a murderess, she was always quite hypocritical. At least, when it came to him. Even just the mere fact that he had attacked Arrow would set her off against him, if she came to find out. She loved her other, better friends more than she could ever have the capacity to care for him. In a hypothetical scenario where one of them wronged him instead, he was certain she would have shrugged it off.
‘You probably deserved it.’
At best, a neutral, ‘I’m sorry about that.’ But no reprimand to them. He was always the one who was wrong. The curse of the earth.
He supposed it came with being a demon.
“...You just don’t get it, do you?” His hand dropped away from Poet’s head, to the floor. “No, I don’t want tea. It can’t do a bloody thing for me, but worry not. There seems to be a chance of my eyes growing back in--so there’s nothing for you to feel sorry for... I did this to myself. Anyway, I only came to see Poet. I’ll be gone again soon... In fact, I’ll just leave now.”
He stood, carefully sensing where the door was located and walking up to it. Poet moved to follow him, but he held his hand back behind him, as if to tell him to stay.
“...How come you love me so little, when I love you so much? ...What makes me different from the others...?”
