[She says it softly, because it's hard to watch the way he treats the once-Speakers with such tenderness, such care despite what they've been twisted into. It unsettles her, somehow, for reasons she couldn't begin to pick apart here and in a place like this, and it takes her a minute to realize that her inherent rejection isn't on the part of the former Speakers themselves, but from a compulsion inside her that wants to reject the whole of this as wrong to begin with. She's dealing with it badly because it never should have happened in the first place; she wants it to have not happened, for none of this to ever have happened to these people of her culture and her kin. She doesn't want to have to know how to deal with this. It shouldn't be something that needs be dealt with at all.
But Trevor knows. Trevor, with his outstretched hands. Trevor, who knows Speakers without being one; Trevor, who already has a complicated relationship with Speakers as it is, so perhaps even this isn't all that much moreso.
It aches to watch. But she has to watch, because this is a story, too, and that of these Speakers should be remembered, no matter how much it hurts to take it in and carry it inside her. So she leans on Alucard more heavily, drawing on his support the way she's extended it through his own traumas in the past, and holds on to him with shaking hands.]
They still — they can still understand...
[Which means that the people they once were are still somewhere in there — trapped in prisons more grotesque and horrible than an ankle manacle and a magic-leeching sigil. It's awful to contemplate. She has to contemplate it anyway.]
no subject
[She says it softly, because it's hard to watch the way he treats the once-Speakers with such tenderness, such care despite what they've been twisted into. It unsettles her, somehow, for reasons she couldn't begin to pick apart here and in a place like this, and it takes her a minute to realize that her inherent rejection isn't on the part of the former Speakers themselves, but from a compulsion inside her that wants to reject the whole of this as wrong to begin with. She's dealing with it badly because it never should have happened in the first place; she wants it to have not happened, for none of this to ever have happened to these people of her culture and her kin. She doesn't want to have to know how to deal with this. It shouldn't be something that needs be dealt with at all.
But Trevor knows. Trevor, with his outstretched hands. Trevor, who knows Speakers without being one; Trevor, who already has a complicated relationship with Speakers as it is, so perhaps even this isn't all that much moreso.
It aches to watch. But she has to watch, because this is a story, too, and that of these Speakers should be remembered, no matter how much it hurts to take it in and carry it inside her. So she leans on Alucard more heavily, drawing on his support the way she's extended it through his own traumas in the past, and holds on to him with shaking hands.]
They still — they can still understand...
[Which means that the people they once were are still somewhere in there — trapped in prisons more grotesque and horrible than an ankle manacle and a magic-leeching sigil. It's awful to contemplate. She has to contemplate it anyway.]