I have been sitting here for hours.
Some days it feels probable that I'm going mad, others, certain.
I beat my head upon the table, drum my fingers, tap a leaky pen. All those things that I should be attending to--the lamplit piles upon piles of hollow fon machine chassis in the corners of my room, the old work journals that hold my aborted attempts at the professor's data, a shower and shave, my torsional digestive system, going now on two days without food--are completely neglected.
The indignity of my situation, the humiliation I feel and...and the hatred on top of self hatred on top of despair...It's all his fault, it's all his fault, the painful littany in my head insists...He did not care about the professor, about me, about a noble cause, he did not...until the voice of my thoughts changes from something more like Jade's, cool and collected, to my own voice, spoken more lispingly and childishly than usual...He didn't neeeed her like I did, he didn't waaaant me, he doesn't want me at all.
Is this the way he heard me whenever I tried to sound mature? I wonder, leaning up and passing one sweaty and inky hand after another from cheek to hairline. I don't even know who is to blame here. Jade provided me with a childhood of careless mockery and equally careless fomicry instruction. He never seemed particularly interested in me when we were children. I was a lab partner for him, an extra set of hands, a guinea pig sometimes, and, though he'd never admit to it, an ego boost when he needed one. I quickly adapted to that role, however--I brought him his tea and his reagents and his ass-lickings and I was only too happy to smile while I did, even when he didn't smile back. There was no gun pointed at my head. I could have left him at any time. His departure was fraught with the same callous indifference I had seen of him his entire life. A small laugh escapes me. My tale is truly pathetic and the endless obsessive recountings of it that my weekend nights turn into is even more so.
When I failed miserably, and expectedly, at the most basic of artes and began to discover my affinity for fonic mechanics at about 10 years old, a fleeting compliment from him could send me into a paroxysm of love and gratitude. Perhaps it's because I'd gone so long without feeling good at much of anything. It's occurring to me, at the moment, that he never really showed a lot of interest in my mechanical talent either. Or perhaps he recognized that your machines, especially your robots, have had high failure rates in the past and he thought he could do it better, Timid Saphir puts forth. Or perhaps he was jealous. Confident Saphir feels good, that blame-gaming, that abdication of responsibility. It's Jade's fault for being so petty. Then a feeling of guilt overwhelms me, leaving me feeling like a puppy that has just thought of biting its master.
Facedown on the table again. I have no one left. Father and Mother are both gone, each in their own special way. The professor is dead, and whose fault is that? I slide slowly back off the table, until my head is at my knees, then down to the floor, arms out, and lay on the cold stone. Peony continues to send me one letter after another...one noncommittal and cheerful, one pleading and depressing, one lecturing and irritated. He seems to think that Jade and I can "make up" despite the fact that we have an ideological rift the size of the Tataroo Valley and neither of us can look the other in the face without some kind of mask.
If only I could stop dreaming of his hair, his scent, his face, his frame. Sometimes I worry that I'm not remembering it correctly anymore, much like I used to worry about the professor. All the qualities I associate with him....that particular shade of blonde, the nape of his neck when his hair was parted over it, shrewd eyes, a biting sarcasm with his identifiable timing, humor, pitch, and timbre, his shoulder-shrugs and head-tosses...all of these are imagined well individually, but it's as though there are small but vital missing pieces where the puzzle is supposed to fit together, preventing me from recalling him as a whole person for even a second. I gave up after a while with the professor...simply grafted in an idealized image whenever the real professor became foggy, until it got to the point where I could no longer tell fact from fiction. I suppose I'll have to do the same thing all over again. It's painful to think of.
I can't stand this anymore. I was never particularly good at interacting socially, and the last 12 months in the Knights have shown me that I am slowly and steadily getting worse. Living here on Mohs' tentative invite further serves to set me apart from the soldiers and priests. I look borderline autistic at mealtimes now, the grease-stained guy with long shaggy hair, alone at table, that doesn't eat and sneers or blanches at everyone who approaches him. I'm constantly ricocheting from loathing to self-loathing, pride to shame, Id to Super-ego, and it's too much.
I'm unable to stop being in love with Jade, to stop grieving over the professor, to stop detesting Peony, to pull myself out of any of those juvenile, cyclical trains of thought which are all that I ever experience anymore.
I will do what I can, then. I will continue my search even if is futile or immoral or delusional. I will continue to ask his help, though I know in all likelihood what his answer will be. I refuse to torture myself over feelings I cannot help, and events which have taken place already. And if I feel like having second thoughts, well...I have plenty of time to rid myself of them. I don't feel I have any alternative.
Wrapping myself around the table leg until I am practically in fetal position, I reach one long arm to my pile in the nearest corner of the room and pull a smaller, barrel-shaped chassis, out from near the bottom of the stack. A slow cascade of metal, wooden, and in one case, plush, bodies begins, sending potential assistants and soldiers to roll and bounce along the floor. I snake another arm up onto the worktable and pull my smallest toolbag down to eye-level.
I need a new plan and a new name.