"...I'm sorry." How often is she this soft? More often than she likes to admit. She cares and it's this--weakness, all the time, this thing she can't dig out or erase or cover with any amount of spite. There's no place to run here, either, like she used to. So Libby cares and not even just because it's her story, sort of.
No. No, she realizes, with shocked horror--it is her story. She lost Nikolai and Syg right now, and they mattered, but long before that she used to have a sister to. And she closed her eyes and woke up without one, and before she can think about it she has a tiny hand on his shoulder. See, what Libby believes and won't say is this: the people who go missing never really come back. The ship copies them, maybe. Brings them back without memory or with it. But they aren't the same people. She's a clone. She knows it better than anyone what it means to be a different duplicate, a variation on a theme that's never the original.
"I'm--wicked sorry," she blurts, uselessly. "I just--I lost some people. Too. Fuck, James. Fuck, I hate--I hate this stupid place so bad, I'm sorry. What do you want? If there's just--of I can do something I wanna know, 'kay?"
It's not the loss of a month in her voice. It's the loss of a childhood. A sister. Yeah, she knows, and she's rubbing a circle with her thumb on his shoulder helplessly because it's just not fair. It's not. And nothing she can do will make it better.
no subject
No. No, she realizes, with shocked horror--it is her story. She lost Nikolai and Syg right now, and they mattered, but long before that she used to have a sister to. And she closed her eyes and woke up without one, and before she can think about it she has a tiny hand on his shoulder. See, what Libby believes and won't say is this: the people who go missing never really come back. The ship copies them, maybe. Brings them back without memory or with it. But they aren't the same people. She's a clone. She knows it better than anyone what it means to be a different duplicate, a variation on a theme that's never the original.
"I'm--wicked sorry," she blurts, uselessly. "I just--I lost some people. Too. Fuck, James. Fuck, I hate--I hate this stupid place so bad, I'm sorry. What do you want? If there's just--of I can do something I wanna know, 'kay?"
It's not the loss of a month in her voice. It's the loss of a childhood. A sister. Yeah, she knows, and she's rubbing a circle with her thumb on his shoulder helplessly because it's just not fair. It's not. And nothing she can do will make it better.