whispercr:
she swallows hard at the other’s words , her eyes staring directly at him as she tries to figure out what to say next . the girl forces herself to take a step back , her hand moving to push her hair out of her face as she shakes her head , ❛ What do you want then ? just tell me and i’ll do it . ❜ her heart was racing in her chest as she looks back up at him again , waiting for his response . she knows that at this point , nothing was going to take back what had happened but she wanted to at least try and help it .
🔫 Want? He gave a slight shake of his head, a quick aggravated breath leaving him. It had to be about what someone wanted, didn’t it? Not what someone else already did. This girl wasn’t the problem, and Carl hardly knew a thing about her to say how deeply involved with any planning she could have been. She was with them though, and there absolutely a pang of anger he felt when he saw her here. Unlike the others, she didn’t seem aggressive, but Carl’s chances of trusting strangers ever again the way he used to had potentially decreased beyond repair.
“From you? Nothing.” He could hear it in his voice - how ice cold his tone had fallen. So many times he told himself he wouldn’t let himself get to this point... and yet here he was, watching his family grow even smaller. “I’m not here to make decisions or decide what happens to you. Maybe you were innocent. But when it comes time for us to deal with your people, what’re you gonna do then? Still what we want? ‘Cause from where I stand, your people just started somethin’. Whatever you do - whatever they do - we can’t get back what we already lost. You tellin’ me you wanna take some kind of responsibility for it? ‘Cause that’s a damn lot of responsibility for what happened back there.”
Truth was, he didn’t care about diplomacy. He was backing off for the sake of letting Hilltop decide what to do about its leader, but when it came to him? His feelings? What he wanted? He knew how to control his anger, and that might have been the only thing stopping him now from walking out and taking back the body of one of this girl’s people and telling her that’s what he wanted.
