“Jesper…” it’s soft. Quiet. Part admonishment. ‘Stop it’, it says. ‘Not everything has to be a joke’, it murmurs. All just in the way his name leaves her lips. She nods a little. “Perhaps… but it can’t only be for the coin that you learn, Jesper. This is more than that. This is a part of you. And you have every right to feel as comfortable in this as you do with a pistol.”
Her heart constricts at the rare mention of a mother lost. She wills any tears that threaten to swell to stay at bay, it would only make the moment hurt when it was not about the pain of the loss of her, but the rightness of him, of the gift he had been given from her. “It is good. And right. And natural. It is anything you make it. The power does not make a person inherently evil, the choice a person makes with it— that is where the difference in the shadow and the light.”
She watches him, and for this second, for this moment, it looks as easy as anything he’s done his entire life could look. The splinters of rot tumble to the ground and he’s left with only a healthy plank of wood. Inej smiles up at him. See? Wasn’t she right all along? Isn’t it a beautiful thing?
She shakes her head, “it is not unreasonable, given everything we left at home. The battle may be won, for now, but there are many more to face in the midst of revolution.” And that, she thinks, is what it feels like: That to break away from all the ill conceptions of them, Grisha will have to rise and ask for the chance to prove they are not monsters the elder generations deemed them to be.
“Then talk to her.” She says, finally dropping her hands away to her sides again, moving to sit on the stone bench once more. “Nothing says you have to shout it from the rooftops. Just talk to one person about it, and move forward from there.”
She hopes he would feel comfortable enough to talk to her— and this conversation does seem to imply as much— though, she feels useless to do anything to help him with this part.
no subject
Her heart constricts at the rare mention of a mother lost. She wills any tears that threaten to swell to stay at bay, it would only make the moment hurt when it was not about the pain of the loss of her, but the rightness of him, of the gift he had been given from her. “It is good. And right. And natural. It is anything you make it. The power does not make a person inherently evil, the choice a person makes with it— that is where the difference in the shadow and the light.”
She watches him, and for this second, for this moment, it looks as easy as anything he’s done his entire life could look. The splinters of rot tumble to the ground and he’s left with only a healthy plank of wood. Inej smiles up at him. See? Wasn’t she right all along? Isn’t it a beautiful thing?
She shakes her head, “it is not unreasonable, given everything we left at home. The battle may be won, for now, but there are many more to face in the midst of revolution.” And that, she thinks, is what it feels like: That to break away from all the ill conceptions of them, Grisha will have to rise and ask for the chance to prove they are not monsters the elder generations deemed them to be.
“Then talk to her.” She says, finally dropping her hands away to her sides again, moving to sit on the stone bench once more. “Nothing says you have to shout it from the rooftops. Just talk to one person about it, and move forward from there.”
She hopes he would feel comfortable enough to talk to her— and this conversation does seem to imply as much— though, she feels useless to do anything to help him with this part.