Work Text:
Essek’s mind works very quickly. It’s part of being a prodigy, he supposes, the speed and complexity of his trains of thought, the way he can pursue two or more thoughts simultaneously, and carry on a conversation besides. It has always been so, and normally he’s very glad of it. But sometimes…
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Beauregard asks, and immediately Essek has about a dozen different replies to choose from, and can feel himself thinking of even more, and he wishes, for once, that it would stop.
His first thought, immediately discarded, is I don’t know, how about locking your friend’s husband up in a dungeon for over a week with no food? And from there – how about any of the things I’ve done to any of the other people whose cooperation I’ve coerced over the time I’ve been in my position? He can’t say any of that, he knows, but even as he dismisses the thought, his mind continues, at a hundred miles per hour, to remind him of his various cruelties, and now that his mind is wandering the halls of the Dungeon of Penance, it finds other avenues to travel. Avenues like you know you’re lying to yourself when you try to believe it’s kinder to use arcane mind tricks, dominations, manipulations, and simple things, like hunger, thirst, lack of sleep – that you’re better than the other interrogators, just because you don’t leave them bleeding. You tell yourself that but you know it isn’t true, which makes you a hypocrite on top of a torturer.
While he sorts through these thoughts in a split-second, Essek rakes his eyes across the faces of the Mighty Nein. They sit, waiting on his answer, and he gets caught, for a second, on Caleb. How about the way I let him go into that cell with that Scourger, even though I’d seen the state he was in after his first conversation with her? How about the fact that I weighed the well-being of a man who had just recently called me friend, and found it weighed less than the value of the information he might be able to gather from her?
How about the fact that I weigh every decision I make, including this one, right now, because I can’t ever just do something without first calculating the pros and cons and figuring out which path will give me the best possible outcomes?
He has about six reasonable ideas that he might say, and like calls to like, and Essek can tell that there probably isn’t a single one of the Nein that has a functional relationship with their father, and even as he bares something terribly personal, terribly genuine, terribly true, the calculations are still running in his head that this is probably safe to mention, that they’ll probably relate to this, and they probably won’t judge me too harshly for it.
And then, even if I want them to.
And then: Do I want them to?
And to that question, Essek finds, he has no answer at all.