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[survivra]

I need to learn how to make maps. Big maps—I know how to do towns and short distances between roads, but that's not big enough. And I want to know about trading ships. How far do they sail? Do their captains take passengers?

[ She rattles off her list of questions with no explanation, because don't these sound like any reasonable questions no matter why she's asking them? Katsa opens her mouth to say something else, stops, frowns, and then starts again with less of a demand in her voice. This is far more awkward for her, something she's unused to asking or even desiring, and so it's the more difficult request. ]

And... I don't wish to continue training on my own. I don't mean in magic. I've plenty of help. And I don't mean that I need teachers. I need someone who can challenge my Grace. Who can push me so that I don't stop becoming faster and stronger, as far as I can.

Comments

2/3 (im sorry)

[survivra]

[ Anger, warning, danger. Katsa knows all of these emotions. She knows how to deliver them, and she’s even seen them on Arno’s face before, but she has never seen them directed at her. It leaves her speechless, so utterly caught off guard she is and shocked to see it, and worst of all there’s a horrible feeling of deja vu at being faced with such a dear friend’s anger. Horrible, and of course she’d caused it, and even after all she has seen and done in the Drabwurld she has still managed to turn yet another person she loves in anger against her.

I felt you deserved to know. I thought you knew better to say anything. She winces with each delivery, but Katsa is determined to allow him his anger. She will not pity herself, she tells herself fiercely, for she has only herself to blame for her mistakes. It’s well within her nature to be this strange sort of friend, one who holds so tightly that eventually she herself turns to bite the hands stretched out to her in friendship. It must be the worst sort of friend, too, but it’s what she is, and she has no excuse for it. She ought to have been more aware, and she will not be upset for the feelings he is allowed to have for something she cannot take back.

Katsa’s first words would have been an apology, too, if he hadn’t asked his final question. She’d have finished what she’d started to say when she’d registered his anger, for that was anger she had deserved. This question, however—this is undeserved. And this is the one that hurts the most, for the look that he gives her when he asks it. It hurts because she knows that she has caused that expression on his face, the one that pains her to see in a friend. It hurts because she hates to see him hurt. But it hurts worst of all because he thinks that despite her mistake here, her lapse in attention and judgment in the middle of a conversation that she had thought was merely between them, he believes this is not the first time she would have done it.

Arno would think she would share his stories and secrets, the ones not hers to tell. Katsa does not think in that moment that he has a right to believe that if she would let it slip here then she could let her judgment falter somewhere else, too. She hasn't said anything, so she doesn't deserve the question as though it has already happened. Instead the realization of what the assumption in his question must be hurts so much that it makes her angry, because anger is easier to feel than hurt. It’s anger at herself, of course, for forgetting—but it’s anger too for the realization that she is not the friend she wishes to be, anger that he is looking at her with such an expression and she can do nothing to end it, anger that he would believe that his friendship could mean so little to her. Anger that she has lost his trust—and anger that she has no one but herself to blame. ]