"Why will you not let me go?" She asked one certain time, as the narcotics wore off and the terror sets in.
She asks you interesting questions time to time. Your brother, in turn, seems to only be able to lay in a foetal position and cry. You have always known him to be weak.
You do not know the answer, though. You would like to, as it would save you many sleepless nights, contemplating this entire operation, even if you have come much too far to ever walk back.
The answer is tantalising all the same, it is how an occult higher truth about oneself usually is. You are a cultured man, a respected intellectual in the sad little island you are all chained to, but, alas, there is one thing you do not know.
Her.
Love? Is it love? Do you love her? Maybe you love her. You insist on telling yourself you love her.
You do not love her.
The apple does not fall far from the tree. Father? You are just like your father. Well, almost. You sail your own Lunar Ferry, and you do not need to wait for a filthy rat to bring you a meaningless flower to indulge on your vice. Well, whether you are actually able to indulge in it or any other pleasure of the sorts would probably fuel many a drunken discussion, if it was ever widely known.
Regardless, you indulge, the way you are able. You indulge with your eyes, you indulge with your hands, you indulge with your skin. You care little for your twin brother, he is from detestable Yellow and he has made his bed, but you wish you could simply prescind of his role in this operation. You wish you could do it on your own.
Of course, there is that. Justice. The Primary Colours made you this way, and you are pleased to meet expectations. Oh, how you delight on attending Ishanaten, how you delight on the despair amongst the people. You look at Shura and her face distorted in outrage, you look at Jirgen and his concern about the long-term survival of their people, and your spirits elate as if the sun itself rose on his blackened heart, but Lord Douma is the best amongst them all.
You always knew there was something beneath Douma, a great loss. You knew it had to do with the Whites and the Red Calamity, thanks in part to the deathbed ramblings of Sozan of the Orange, your foolish father. When his "ward" disappeared into the night to never come back, you saw the face of a broken man, you have known what despair looks like, and it is beautiful.
Perhaps there was another way. Perhaps there was a way where you need not freeze the world in eternal darkness, but rather build it over from the ground. You are intelligent enough, ambitious enough, talented enough to be able to achieve such a thing. Perhaps you would, had you been a better leader and cared for the people of the Orange, had not this blight affected you, had you been able to have access to the medicine that could have saved your manhood. Yet, you did not.
You are destroyed as a man, and that small vial of colourful liquid could have saved your island, your society, your gods if it had met your lips other than those men. Yet, it did not, and so you are bent in destruction.
Destroy, destroy to never be built again. There is no point in building the world over because what you lost cannot be regained, regardless of the state of society. You are not one of these idealists, which seemed to flock around her, and you are not a hypocritical sycophant like Nagusa of the Jade or Amakusa Shirou Tokisada of the Green. You have known despair, and you want for others to know it as well.
Love? This is not love. Justice? This is not justice. Obsession? Maybe this is obsession. This is obsession.
Yes, that is it. You are obsessed with her, and you have always been. The magical sway of her hips held secrets from the nature of the sun, from their own existence, that are so close, yet so far. The way her lips move in the silence, the iridescent colours decomposed from her hair on the sunshine and salt water. How her eyes are pink and beige and gold and white.
How? How can you possibly deny when faced with overwhelming evidence of what lives in your heart? How can you possibly say that you are not infatuated? This is a joke, you tell yourself, because you are not like your father, but then again normal people fall in love and you… You…
You, Kanan of the Orange, are not normal, not ordinary. You are a lush orange fruit and you have fallen onto the roots of her tree and regrets. Regrets? You have none. Absolutely none.
You are obsessed with the spark in her eyes and the strength in her legs and the dream in her voice. You, no matter what you tell her, are not in love, and you will never be in love…
Of the Orange, you are the leader of the Orange, by name, by blood, and by choice, and you cannot feel love, just greed and obsession. You are just a scavenging rat, a printing press like the one you painstakingly rebuilt with your own hands, you live to make copies of others, of real humans, and built a tower out of them.
You are not real, as you are not born out of the Outer Worlds. You are just a flawed copy, and so is not human, and so cannot feel what real humans feel, cannot be what real humans are. Love is, as an expression of humanity, not an attribute you can ever place.
Love? Obsession? You are not in love.
You are obsessed with no regrets.