( Every line manages to blur into the next, and now that he's finished reading the text message, he finds he's retained no information from it. Scrolling back up to run through it again, the second outcome is the same as the first, and he stares at the last sentenceβwhere Cain's apology is writtenβconfused. This behaviour cycles for a few minutes; he sits silently, thumbing his phone screen with a steadily sinking brow.
It's a bit like a loop, actually: Doing the same thing over and over again. Dry eyes sink, then raise, then blink when they begin to water, yet the conclusion remains the same. So, if his life is repeating itself with only slight differences from the previous one, he has to wait only a few thousand years for the butterfly effect to erase this specific reality by handing him a new, better one.
Because this must be a brief temporal smudge from an alternate Cain and an alternate Noctisβnot his.
Jonas, accustomed to the spiral, knows well enough that he's in a heightened state, and he anchors himself with a firm bite of a tooth into the inside of his lip. It's sharp enough to cut tender flesh and cause him pain, which means it's shocking enough to do its job, rattling him out of his deepest thoughts and into the present.
But when disorientation and surprise are gone, all that's left to him is anger. )
1/2
It's a bit like a loop, actually: Doing the same thing over and over again. Dry eyes sink, then raise, then blink when they begin to water, yet the conclusion remains the same. So, if his life is repeating itself with only slight differences from the previous one, he has to wait only a few thousand years for the butterfly effect to erase this specific reality by handing him a new, better one.
Because this must be a brief temporal smudge from an alternate Cain and an alternate Noctisβnot his.
Jonas, accustomed to the spiral, knows well enough that he's in a heightened state, and he anchors himself with a firm bite of a tooth into the inside of his lip. It's sharp enough to cut tender flesh and cause him pain, which means it's shocking enough to do its job, rattling him out of his deepest thoughts and into the present.
But when disorientation and surprise are gone, all that's left to him is anger. )