andhiswife | (Reply)

"Yeah," he says quickly, flashing a rather nervous smile. He redirects his gaze out the window, looking over the uncomfortably empty streets. "Yeah, and it's..."

He gropes around for what he wants to say. He's been trying very hard not to think about all this, really, the implications and the questions it stirs up in him. A lot of tension and fear that's sort of always there, operating on a low enough frequency that he usually doesn't have to think about it.

It is terrifying, though, how little they actually know about this place that's taken them all. How arbitrary its whims. The seemingly unflappable native population has always felt like a fixture, easy to trust and easier to ignore, and now? It just feels like a reminder how tenuous this really is.

But he doesn't know how to voice all that. It feels too grim, too real, somewhere beyond his growing preference for honesty. In the end he looks down at his feet and coughs out an awkward laugh. "Sorry," he says, though he's not sure what for. He thinks for a moment, then says, "I feel like it's a lot harder to trust the whole... thing when there are visible gaps in the foundation right now, you know?"

He looks away, toward the more active center of the bakery. Wanting to pull away. With another, even more awkward laugh, he says, "Sorry, let's... d'you want to get some pastries, or something?"