Title: You and I
AN: Both a drabble and a short young!Jade character study. Disclaimers hold true.
"Monsters are made of oscillations," he insisted, toneless and without empathy, "Of notes under absolute tension in space-time."
"Jade—" Gelda made a vain attempt to persuade him, "they still feel."
He arched an eyebrow, and turned his gaze on the oozing, throbbing mass of skin, bone, and blood—it twitched at his feet, eyes sinking into the gore and carnage, "Sound does not feel, Professor. You're being irrational because you feel sympathy for it . . ." he trailed into mystified silence, Gelda left to fester in her frustration, "I wouldn't recommend doing so. It doesn't have a 'soul'— it lives on purely instinct, and has no mind."
"They're animals, Jade—and they didn't attack you!" Her voice trembled in her desperation, "You can't just kill them because you think they're useless!"
Silence hung over them like a ghost, and he eyed her down like a scientist above a cadaver. She knew he was listless and distant, feeling no need to explain himself, "The townspeople are 'afraid' of monsters. I was merely helping them."
"Those poor creatures didn't come after you," Gelda added sympathetically, crouched against the snow to look into his eyes— they burned red, a reflection of her own, "Please, understand."
Jade's answer bordered on impatient, "My actions are morally sound. Anything that cannot think deserves to be killed."
"Jade!" She breathed, suppressing the urge to slap him— to plead that he separate himself from the disease growing inside his psyche. Gelda's façade cracked and shattered, and Jade stirred uneasily, his face disturbed albeit fascinated, before rippling back to placidity.
He frowned, the action an awkward display of confusion, and murmured an emotionless, "I don't understand. You, Professor, said that idiots should be murdered if they have no merit to others."
"I—" Gelda couldn't string together a coherent response, recalling her words about the theocracy and its hypocritical claims to control, "I was angry. That was different—Yulia. . . it was different—"
"No," Jade's reply was mechanic, and he removed his glasses to brush away the snow, "it was the same."
'Dear, Lorelei, no.' Memories—saturated pictures of masses of corpses, their blood seeping into the soil and decomposing— flooded her mind, and she blanched. It was monsters like them-- like him, like her-- that twisted swords until the enemy screamed, long after the stomach ruptured and the lungs filled to the brim. Standing upright and alarmed, she managed a broken, ". . . No, Jade. No, it's not the same."