Words: 549
Haven smiled weakly, and Coli tried to smile sadly in return. It was a hard thing, to carry pain without letting it consume you. "All right, maybe not everyone deserves politeness, but I still think you do," she amended, watching the slender Atte take a seat nearby. Sure, she could think of a few folks she wouldn't mind being rude to. This orangey fellow wasn't one of them, though. She dug a claw idly into the surface of the bar, scratching a little flower into the weathered wood. Right now, she was glad to have any company at all, and she had been lucky to find a gentle soul like his. They had much in common.
She smiled bitterly at the undercurrent beneath his words. Oh, she had just tasted her first glimmer of hope in such a long time, and her subsequent withdrawal was harsher than losing any buzz alcohol could offer. If she could find someone to love her, wouldn't her broken soul mend then? Wouldn't she be able to shed some, any, of her wild anxieties and nightmares? Now she would never know, because she wasn't even sure if it had really happened. Maybe she had finally snapped under all the pressure, and her mind had hallucinated a romantic encounter to appease her bottomless loneliness.
She tried so hard to hide her bitter, poisonous side, but sometimes disappointment hurt too much. "How does anyone end up like this? Everything's perfect when you're a kid, and then one sucky day it all crashes down around you. How are you expected to pick up the pieces, when you barely understand what happened?" She took a gulp of her drink, and tried not to cough as the liquid burned down her throat. This was way stronger than the Dahlian wine. She'd have to be careful not to swig this stuff.
The bottle clanked back down on the counter as she continued. "I wish I knew who my mother was, what she was like, but she died so long ago... I just want to know that I have some of her in me, that I'm not completely spawn of my father." She spat the last word, bright eyes glittering. Her father wasn't shy, not at all, but it was his fault that she had become this way. He was so shifty, inscrutable, unpredictable, two-faced... She tried her best to be a good person by hiding her anger, but sometimes it had to come out, and didn't that make her two-faced as well? What if one day she ruined someone's life like he did? What if she grew angry enough to maim, or kill; or cold enough that she could abandon every attachment at the drop of a hat? And why did she have to look exactly like him, too...? Sometimes that was worst of all, the constant reminder that she could never change herself, no matter how hard she tried.
"And... you? Is it anything like that for you?" Coli's cool voice grew soft again, regretful for having begun their conversation with such a venomous tone. It was true that as strangers, they could be anyone they wanted, but... in the off-chance that they might meet again, she did not want to be remembered as such a pitiful, hateful creature.
[/html]