Obsession

When we take to drinking, we take to talking. Which is why I found my half-drunk self in a corner of the bar with an inebriated Ice. We had drifted away from the others' loud boasting, for she and I are unhesitant to tell the tales that other Runners try their hardest to ignore. Stories of bitterness and defeat, of betrayal and prison and the truth behind legends.

Ice is in a constant battle to hide herself, more than anyone I've ever known. It is not simply a refusal to share, it is a denial of self. It has always seemed dangerous to pry at her origins as I would others, though I have suspected in the past that she rose fully grown from a drop of blood spilled out into the chill of space.

As we spoke, Ice's voice sputtered, tripped, and fell into an accent I could not fail to recognize. She could not hide that she had grown up, highly educated, on Mars. She watched me understand, and then I saw something I had never seen from her before: fear. Suddenly she became a warm-blooded woman, more hurt and alone than even I am, and turned fierce because of it. She spends her life hunting to hide the fact that she is hunted by the ever-constant, invisible reality she fears.

"We both know too much, Scout. We've seen too much. Not just you, though. Don't think I don't know…the secrets you tell. But I don't, I keep them safe. So you do the same, because they're not lies, only secrets. You're too truthful."

"And you're too drunk." And desperate, I thought, then poured her another sake. She left me to drink it myself, and wonder what she thought she knows. Or does know. We have progressed from suspicion to respect to grudging friendship, but always we have been kept wary by the piercing understanding that lies between us. She is not lying nor delusional, so what is it that she knows? What is it that I know?



Perhaps I was wrong when I said she is unscarred.