The affirmative noise Jingyi makes is encouragement as Tidus speaks, the rest of him settled into listening. Which, depending on circumstances, he was good at; it just required patience and a lack of people arguing with him or attempting to kidnap him or anyone he cares about, which one would think wouldn't be often, and yet.
Here they all are, on a train in want of a crew, and abduction is something of a staple in all their lives. Crossing that chaos of a river beyond description, colours a shock to the senses, and the pull, the current. He has to shake that thought off, the sudden, visceral memory of anchoring in and out of place.
Dream lives, dream people, a dream: not having to know what the world had lived through after, preserving something longed for, a part of a past that had ceased, at some point, to be the present.
Jingyi has a problem about asking over certain things, not having it occur to him as often that he should; he reaches out to press a hand to the back of Tidus's shoulder, and he'd only check that if Tidus flinches away. Tactile reinforcement was one of the things he'd grown up with, not so much as indulgence as reminder: we know what it is to face heavy things, and none of us have to be alone.
"At least you weren't the nightmare," he says, a half smile for a jest that's not entirely jest, but is bad, either way. "Is that what you're kind of... I don't know, and I suck at being reassuring, so I'm telling you that up front. I'm sure you haven't noticed," he says, allowing himself to sound a touch dry, "But I'm pretty blunt. So I apologise, because I'm going to be a jackass even when I don't know it, and... also sometimes when I do." Disclaiming himself, because he doesn't know how much translates well, and he doesn't have all his fellow juniors, and he doesn't have a world that understand him or what he is or what he does. He's just one more oddity stuck here, with more people in all their varied circumstances. Dream men, dead men, avatars of death, who knows what else?
"Testing that thing out, is it seeing how long you'll stay whole, before the dreaming unravels? Have you... ugh, I don't know. Have you been looking at other anchors?"
His dreams, the river of fractured rainbows, the voices, the SCA. Anchor. Maybe that's where his brain was going, on some level.
no subject
Here they all are, on a train in want of a crew, and abduction is something of a staple in all their lives. Crossing that chaos of a river beyond description, colours a shock to the senses, and the pull, the current. He has to shake that thought off, the sudden, visceral memory of anchoring in and out of place.
Dream lives, dream people, a dream: not having to know what the world had lived through after, preserving something longed for, a part of a past that had ceased, at some point, to be the present.
Jingyi has a problem about asking over certain things, not having it occur to him as often that he should; he reaches out to press a hand to the back of Tidus's shoulder, and he'd only check that if Tidus flinches away. Tactile reinforcement was one of the things he'd grown up with, not so much as indulgence as reminder: we know what it is to face heavy things, and none of us have to be alone.
"At least you weren't the nightmare," he says, a half smile for a jest that's not entirely jest, but is bad, either way. "Is that what you're kind of... I don't know, and I suck at being reassuring, so I'm telling you that up front. I'm sure you haven't noticed," he says, allowing himself to sound a touch dry, "But I'm pretty blunt. So I apologise, because I'm going to be a jackass even when I don't know it, and... also sometimes when I do." Disclaiming himself, because he doesn't know how much translates well, and he doesn't have all his fellow juniors, and he doesn't have a world that understand him or what he is or what he does. He's just one more oddity stuck here, with more people in all their varied circumstances. Dream men, dead men, avatars of death, who knows what else?
"Testing that thing out, is it seeing how long you'll stay whole, before the dreaming unravels? Have you... ugh, I don't know. Have you been looking at other anchors?"
His dreams, the river of fractured rainbows, the voices, the SCA. Anchor. Maybe that's where his brain was going, on some level.