A/N: And now we have pathos, emotions. So I hope you enjoy this piece too. I don't think I will expand on this further as I have another multi-chapter piece I am working on. However, I am strongly considering doing a Rhetorics for Tony. Anywho, review if you like, Kit.
PATHOS
She learned at an early age that emotions were a burden. Tears made you weak, love was a possible liability, feeling anything at all could cloud judgment, confuse the senses. Allow yourself to feel, to sympathize, empathize, even try to understand and you die. So she locked up all her sadness, all her fears, all her love in the safe, impermeable confines of her heart and buried the key. And when she lost that key it no longer mattered, for anger and hatred and destruction had taken root and soon overwhelmed her, consumed her entirely.
She has been called cold, considered heartless, deemed inhuman, robotic, an ice queen. But she cannot be blamed for this because this was all she had ever known. She has seen what cold and heartless and inhumanity is and it isn't her, and she has seen where love and trust and happiness lead and it isn't her either. Opt for neutrality, simplicity, nothingness, numbness. Because they can't use what isn't there. Because she couldn't feel what is no longer so. Because it is safer that way. Less messy.
And it kept people away. Far far away. Because she was not stable. Her emotions were not there and anger and hatred and destruction are light and thin and they definitely are incapable of filling up the empty voids. Voids, vortex, black hole. So she was unstable, waiting for the catalyst to trigger her detonation. . . .
But now she has been handed a spare key. And now she knows love and trust and happiness are good things that make her stronger and better. For love can conquer all evils, or so is her impression. Because now people care about her, for her. And she is wanted and safe. And so she is happy.
For someone loves her despite her grievous faults, forgives her trespasses when she should be condemned. So love is contagious and it has infected her, ironically poisoning the poison weeds in her chest, allowing her dusty heart to flutter back to life and pulse with happy things like joy and sad things too. She was never allowed this before, to feel these foreign concepts, to nurture human nature.
And so they let her in, bathing her in love, reviving her dead heart, thawing the permafrost, and she let them in. And she feels and loves and breaths. And her hearts beats and thrives and family is all around. Love is all around.
And emotions are powerful and manipulative things that can be used and twisted. But they can spur on courageous acts, foolish acts, like nearly drowning in an hourglass for the sake of a lost soul, lost at sea. And then love triumphs over evil and hatred and destruction. Or that is what she hopes. Because hope is permitted now. And hope, she found, is a beautiful thing.
