You Are A Weakness I Cannot Afford To Possess - Aventio/Ratiorine Snippet
[You are welcome to yell at me and demand monetary reparations to pay for your therapy because I'm not sorry]
Every risk was cautiously considered and weighed, every move carefully calculated. Obviously, emotions were something based on a much less stable basis than mathematical calculations but...
Veritas Ratio was not blind.
He wasn't a fool either, despite feeling like one at that very moment.
“...What do you mean no ?”
The man looked at him, a bittersweet smile on their thin lips, even as one of their poker chips twirled nimbly between their graceful fingers.
"Before you ask a question, why don't you consider whether the answer has already been determined ?" Aventurine responded softly, their eyes drifting to gaze outside as they wearily parroted Veritas' own words. "It is better for everyone if such questions are not asked... Don't you think, my good Doctor ?"
These words, Veritas uttered them regularly. To his colleagues, his students, Enid, his superiors, strangers even.
To be the recipient was... painful.
"I don't understand," Veritas whispered, his voice hoarse and his throat tight. "You love me."
Every risk was cautiously considered and weighed, every move carefully calculated. Veritas Ratio would never have risked a move if he had not been absolutely certain that his feelings were returned.
“I do,” Aventurine laughed airily. “Gaiathra help me, I do.”
The chip was strangely warm in Veritas' palm as his hand instinctively gripped around it, the smooth edges digging into his palm. Aventurine's hand was soft against his cheek, barely a caress, ghostly and fleeting presence.
Their lips were soft and just slightly wet as they kissed him, for barely more than a heartbeat. The faint caress of their sigh as they retreated felt as icy as the incessant blizzards of this planet of eternal winters, to which Veritas had accompanied them only weeks earlier.
Where he had warmed their frozen fingers between his.
Where they shared laughter and kisses as light as the snowflakes that ended their fall in their pale eyelashes.
Where a cheerful “Why not, Veritas?” had met his cautious questioning, where only a silence heavy with lost words now met this same question, this "why" trembling with dashed hope.
"Because... All or Nothing only works because there is nothing left, Veritas. Nothing except myself, which is nothing in itself,” the Stoneheart confessed in a breath, in a plea that sounded more like a condemnation. “I can’t…”
They closed their eyes, taking a deep breath.
When they looked at him again, the heat of their gaze was not that of an inviting hearth, but that of a raging fire.
A heat of desert wasteland bathed by a blind sun, of an age-old drought that a cataclysm would not be enough to repair. A heat made of prayers as numerous as the grains of sand of Sigonia-IV and as sticky as the blood that had stained it.
“You are a weakness I cannot afford to possess, Veritas Ratio.”
"And for what little it's worth, I'm truly sorry."
