Emotional Pragmatism

[Sorry, by the by, for leaving people hanging. The last couple of days have been ... Um. Yes. My apologies, and I'll try get back around soon? I needed to do this first:]

... I keep trying to write this, and it keeps not working. *shrugs* It doesn't coalesce the whole way, doesn't quite ... It's too intrinsic, and therefore too tangled. But. Alright. Lets try this, and limit the aim to being only minimally confusing.

On the subject of pragmatism, and rationality in the face of ... well, everything, but specifically emotional situations.

( I am, apparently, a ruthlessly pragmatic person. )

Small Fic Snippet

No idea what it's from. Just a thing that popped up for a prompt on comment_fic, for the prompt: Tread softly for you tread upon my dreams

Sleeping, Seeping

"All this," the man said softly. Kneeling in the ashes of a scorched earth. "All this, brother, just to rob me of my dreams?"

"Your dreams made you weak," the other answered. Cold and pitiless, his blank gaze falling over a shattered landscape without so much as a flicker of remorse. "There were none among us who did not see it, brother. They had slipped inside you. Poisoned you with foreign thoughts. Made you long for ..." A twist, emotion. Contempt. "For gentle things. For all their soft poisons." A lift of one lip. "You must see that. You must know what they did to you."

The kneeling figure shook his head, face twisted in a grieving mask. "You had no right," he whispered, soft and desperate. "You had no right. This was my dream, brother! They gave it to me, and it was mine. This was ... this was my dream."

His companion stared down at him. One fist knotting, a hard, cold clench of pain, as he looked down at the crumpled form beside him, and what remained of the brother he had once known. On his face, too, there was something close to grief.

"Your dreams were poison," he said, very softly, as he turned to leave. "Sooner or later, they would have killed you. They were poisonous dreams, my brother."

"... Yes," the dreamer whispered, to the fading echo of his footsteps, his hands digging softly among the ashes. "Yes, brother. But they were mine."

It is often said, you see, that the antidote to all poisons ... is a poison itself.