Jingyi's fingers twitch, and he ends up returning the grip after a beat, tailtip shivering on the floor before he curls his tail over his feet, catlike.
"It changes people. Maybe not the train choosing to, or anything like that, but it changes people." Death. Dying. He isn't crass enough to say, ask Tidus, ask any of the people only alive here, ask Xue Yang, who he would never point a friend toward, not someone as unhinged as he is on a fundamental level, so broken.
Ask everyone in debt they didn't ask for, ask them. They're all alive now by sufferance of the train, and he swallows that thought down too, because in this one thing, he doesn't believe there is malice. The train is foreign and difficult to read and cruel in its silences, but he does not think it is malicious in the treatment of their lives. They're fed, watered, quartered; the train is a measured, accommodating overseer, if overseer it must be claimed. There's no true choice if the other answer is to never respond to the situations they're brought to face. If they could steel themselves to inaction, that's no choice worth making, anymore than be yanked around, week to week, month to month, by a force they can't extricate themselves from.
"No choosing to die for this." The train, he means, to prove a point, separate in his mind from what Tidus dares, from what Tidus wants, control over a fate the train has taken over for him. How a-Qing had been alive here, how Xue Yang persists in his plaguing of existence, the complications of each person here who had died but did not remain that way.
Choosing to die for other reasons, for other things, yes. But not for this. Not to test limits. Not when death is sacred, permanent, heavy, to both of them, for different and similar reasons. Not when Inigo had been watching his world die at the claws of something immensely powerful.
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"It changes people. Maybe not the train choosing to, or anything like that, but it changes people." Death. Dying. He isn't crass enough to say, ask Tidus, ask any of the people only alive here, ask Xue Yang, who he would never point a friend toward, not someone as unhinged as he is on a fundamental level, so broken.
Ask everyone in debt they didn't ask for, ask them. They're all alive now by sufferance of the train, and he swallows that thought down too, because in this one thing, he doesn't believe there is malice. The train is foreign and difficult to read and cruel in its silences, but he does not think it is malicious in the treatment of their lives. They're fed, watered, quartered; the train is a measured, accommodating overseer, if overseer it must be claimed. There's no true choice if the other answer is to never respond to the situations they're brought to face. If they could steel themselves to inaction, that's no choice worth making, anymore than be yanked around, week to week, month to month, by a force they can't extricate themselves from.
"No choosing to die for this." The train, he means, to prove a point, separate in his mind from what Tidus dares, from what Tidus wants, control over a fate the train has taken over for him. How a-Qing had been alive here, how Xue Yang persists in his plaguing of existence, the complications of each person here who had died but did not remain that way.
Choosing to die for other reasons, for other things, yes. But not for this. Not to test limits. Not when death is sacred, permanent, heavy, to both of them, for different and similar reasons. Not when Inigo had been watching his world die at the claws of something immensely powerful.