Ben can't help smiling, then, just at the corner of one mouth. It reminds him so much more of the sort of thing that Klaus would say - has said to him many times - rather than Cole. But maybe that's the whole point. Even someone like Cole, who can see inside of people, to all the complications and weaknesses and squashed hopes and failed efforts... even he believes that some people just hurt other people because they don't care.
Ben has hurt a lot of people. So many he lost count. But he never didn't care.
There are times when it's hard to tell when his own confusion is due to Cole's poetic way of speaking about people and the world, and when the things he's referring to really are just capital-f Fables in a way that Ben doesn't quite grasp yet. Fortunately, he's buzzed and it's easy to just accept the concepts Cole is introducing without worrying too much about analyzing exactly what the meaning all is. He'd known a guy who was the concept of a wolf. Why not?
And maybe in some world, people could be big bad wolves and could be Dr. Jekyll. Ben is getting better at accepting anything is possible, in this strange mixed-up multiverse.
"That's pretty crazy."
The fact that Cole had known someone who knew a version of a character from a book Ben had plucked off the shelf for the first time when he was only ten or eleven years old. Ben turns the book over again in his hands, thinking about the copy that they had had at the Academy. It was much nicer than this one - one of those very fancy 19th-century printings, maybe not the first edition, but certainly the second or third. When he'd read it back then, he hadn't really picked up that it was about denying a part of yourself. He'd been young, and because of various circumstances, he'd of course just seen it as a story about somebody who let his darkness get the better of him. Who hadn't controlled it well enough, the way Ben was supposed to control his...
An idea bubbles up, sudden, unexpected, and Ben, impulsive and less inhibited than usual, asks:
"Do you want me to read you some of it?"
Cole had mentioned how much he liked it when a friend of his back home would read to him. Between Drift Fleet and this place, it had probably been a long time since anyone had taken the time to do that...
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Ben has hurt a lot of people. So many he lost count. But he never didn't care.
There are times when it's hard to tell when his own confusion is due to Cole's poetic way of speaking about people and the world, and when the things he's referring to really are just capital-f Fables in a way that Ben doesn't quite grasp yet. Fortunately, he's buzzed and it's easy to just accept the concepts Cole is introducing without worrying too much about analyzing exactly what the meaning all is. He'd known a guy who was the concept of a wolf. Why not?
And maybe in some world, people could be big bad wolves and could be Dr. Jekyll. Ben is getting better at accepting anything is possible, in this strange mixed-up multiverse.
"That's pretty crazy."
The fact that Cole had known someone who knew a version of a character from a book Ben had plucked off the shelf for the first time when he was only ten or eleven years old. Ben turns the book over again in his hands, thinking about the copy that they had had at the Academy. It was much nicer than this one - one of those very fancy 19th-century printings, maybe not the first edition, but certainly the second or third. When he'd read it back then, he hadn't really picked up that it was about denying a part of yourself. He'd been young, and because of various circumstances, he'd of course just seen it as a story about somebody who let his darkness get the better of him. Who hadn't controlled it well enough, the way Ben was supposed to control his...
An idea bubbles up, sudden, unexpected, and Ben, impulsive and less inhibited than usual, asks:
"Do you want me to read you some of it?"
Cole had mentioned how much he liked it when a friend of his back home would read to him. Between Drift Fleet and this place, it had probably been a long time since anyone had taken the time to do that...