Song: Bite My Tongue, Relient K
Focal Character(s): Jade
Jade Curtiss was not a man who regretted his words. It was his actions, not his words, that were his stumbling block. For all the others around him might say otherwise, Jade was a person who chose his words carefully.
He did damage with the words he used, and it was intentional more often than not. Every now and then, something would slip out that would deal more pain than he intended, and he was quick to offer his apologies, flippant though they may sound. And that was why Jade had never imagined that his words would, in the end, trip him up almost as much as any of his actions.
The words he had used to so firmly talk Luke out of the idea of using his hyperresonance to neutralize the miasma were eventually what would condemn him. Jade had crafted a description that made the option as unpalatable as possible. And then he'd watched as every other option disappeared, and he saw it looming over them. He watched Luke choose to walk the very path that his words had made all the more painful. Right until the moment Luke was to give up his life, Jade could only watch as his words cut the wounds deeper.
Of all the actions he might have taken instead, there was none that he could have regretted more than those words.