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[rebells]

[He listens to the whole thing, a look of increasingly intense skepticism on his face. When it's over, he reaches out and . . .

. . . pushes Dirk. Gently, and not in the "off the roof" direction, but he still pushes him.]

I told you not to be stupid.

[splinten]

[Dirk pushes him back because Dirk is a mature person.]

I set it out pretty logically, bro.

[rebells]

[What does he even do with that?? Pushes Dirk harder, for one.]

You did not. None of that even makes any sense!

[A lot of this could be solved if Jay wasn't too emotionally constipated to say I like you and think you're worthwhile even when you're not being manipulatively helpful, you total assface. Sadly, we have to work with what we have here. And so:]

I--Do you really think you haven't helped anyone in the last six months?

[splinten]

[He opens his mouth to retort, and then shuts it. Then he puts his face in his hands.]

I can absolutely flip this one on you. It proves that another shitty thing I do is discount other people's feelings about me and the events of our relationship in order to support my own narrative of self-loathing. That I was so entrenched in my own bullshit I ignored those things to suit myself backs my point that I suck.

[rebells]

[Crabbily:]

You're contradicting yourself.

[splinten]

Thanks, Geir. I didn't notice.

[STOP BEING SUCH A GODDAMNED DRAGON, JAY!!

Dirk mostly is tired and he knows he can't win the argument, but he still hates himself, so here he is. Being ironic. Defensively.

God, can he not even learn to stop that? He's such a goddamned disaster.]

[rebells]

. . . what?

[Jay has not come to think of this behavior as characteristic of Geir because he shut down the last time Geir tried pointing out contradictions at him, and so he's confused.]

Why are we even having this argument, anyway?

[splinten]

Because we have a fundamental difference of opinions on the subject of Dirk Strider.

[He assumes. Also, Jay is confused, which makes Dirk confused.]

You don't talk to him much, huh. Geir has a pretty powerful habit of pointing out inconsistencies in the things you say until you're forced to lay out the whole logic of it, including admissions to contradictions and inconsistencies.

[rebells]

No, he doesn't.

[Is the automatic response, which, he's pretty sure it's not that simple, but--he feels like he would have noticed that about Geir? It's not as though they never talk.]

. . . never mind. That's not the point. The point is that you're being ridiculous.

[splinten]

If he doesn't with you, either you're surprisingly consistent around him, or he's making a conscious choice not to. He's both analytic and curious by nature.

[Forget the point, Dirk is still a pain in the ass and is going to point out the mistake here.]

What am I supposed to do here?

[rebells]

[That's something to think about--but later.]

You could stop arguing with me about how terrible you are, or whatever point you're trying to make.

[splinten]

Sure, I'll stop. That doesn't mean I'm going to believe otherwise.

[Great. Now he's being even more of an ass to someone who cares about him and is trying to be a good friend.

He's not raising his face from his hands, ever.]

[rebells]

. . . why?

[When it comes down to it, what he really wants to know is why Dirk is so intent on convincing himself that he's a bad person. He doesn't understand that.]

[splinten]

[There's a moment of silence.

And then,]

Once you actually get to talk to yourself, even or maybe especially if it's yourself as a supercomputer in a pair of sunglasses, you end up developing a fairly comprehensive set of feelings towards yourself. Three years with my AI clone was enough to give me a good idea of everything I hate about myself.

[rebells]

[There's a lot of that explanation he doesn't get, not being from a world with supercomputers in pairs of sunglasses. But something about it strikes a chord.]

. . . did I ever tell you about the black mist?

[splinten]

[He glances over at Jay. Small headshake to indicate no, Jay did not tell him.]

[rebells]

It's a threat we dealt with on my world. We never figured out exactly what it was before--well. [Focus. This isn't the point. He's not entirely sure what the point is--he's not quite sure where he's going with this, but he keeps talking.]

It takes the shape of the darkness in people's hearts, and drives them to despair.

[splinten]

Did you get in it yourself?

[rebells]

[He's about to say no. But then he remembers that night, the night before he gave Shirley over to Solon: how hopeless he felt, how sure he was that no one would miss him if he disappeared.

The Oresoren would miss him, wouldn't they?

Would Dirk?]

. . . maybe. It never manifested--it tends to take the shape of the person it's targeting. But . . . .

[splinten]

[He doesn't push, but he continues to watch him. The shades are a mask but it's the same way Dirk has been at other times when Jay has been unsure about saying something: he waits and listens.]

[rebells]

. . . I might have encountered it the night before I came to the coven.

[Feeling that conviction--you are not a person--like a certainty. The sense of hopelessness accompanying it. Had that been the black mist?

He can think about that later. This was supposed to be about Dirk.]

That's not the point, anyway. The mist . . . pushed its targets towards different things. To give up on a long-held dream, or to walk into the darkness and never return. And then--

I traveled with a girl called Chloe for a while. She'd lost her parents to a murderer several years before we met.

[splinten]

[Dirk has an intuition of what might have happened that night. What Jay said before had indicated that everything was incredibly fresh.]

It targeted her.

[rebells]

Yes.

She was an heir to a noble house, but she left her claim to it and became a knight after that. She traveled the world searching for her parents' murderer. To take revenge.

Finally, she found him on the Legacy. But she found herself hesitating at first. There were mitigating circumstances. The mist pushed her to forget about those and give into her hate.

[splinten]

[Dirk thinks that mist like that wouldn't be out of place as a game construct.]

She didn't, though.

[When a story is told like this, they don't.]

[rebells]

No. In the end, she turned away from her parents' murderer and faced the black mist instead. It had taken the form of her younger self.

[He struggles to articulate why he's telling this story to Dirk, what he wanted Dirk to get out of it. It just--feels relevant.]

. . . before she did that, she said something interesting. That from the beginning, she'd never really wanted revenge. [ . . . ] I never asked her. But I think--her quest for revenge wasn't really about her parents' murderer. It was about herself.