08-17-2020, 03:57 PM
He wasn’t good at driving.
Of course not, why would Near have ever assumed otherwise? He wasn’t good at driving or persuasion or basic human conversation; and all of it was enough to make a person wonder what he was good at, if it was just the One Thing that Near wasn’t sure how to characterize as he thought this all out. And if it was just the One Thing, whether that was more a tragic state to exist in or an enviable one. Hell, it might be a pretty sweet deal to only have anyone expect One Thing from you, to be able to wave off everything else like “I’m not very good at that,” and here he was trying to get away from it. Somebody should have warned him that the world he thought he wanted to save would expect more out of him.
He wasn’t good at manners, either, for all the little displays of superficial etiquette, the delicate tea-sipping and wine-swirling. Like paint-by-number, he was filling in the colors without any apparent intrinsic capacity for art. See: bogarting the communal wine bottle and announcing his intention to wander into farther reaches of The Reaches with it.
“Hey, Near, mind if I take this bottle and walk away with it? Mind if I go upstairs?” Near recommended in conspicuous volume to Jude’s back. But he’d been headed that way himself (something to look up … he’d remember when he got there), so he hopped back to his feet, swallowed down the rest of his wine, put three--to-two odds on the kid spilling the contents of his glass all over the floor before he made it all the way up the staircase, and trailed him from several paces back to see if he owed himself anything.
Of course not, why would Near have ever assumed otherwise? He wasn’t good at driving or persuasion or basic human conversation; and all of it was enough to make a person wonder what he was good at, if it was just the One Thing that Near wasn’t sure how to characterize as he thought this all out. And if it was just the One Thing, whether that was more a tragic state to exist in or an enviable one. Hell, it might be a pretty sweet deal to only have anyone expect One Thing from you, to be able to wave off everything else like “I’m not very good at that,” and here he was trying to get away from it. Somebody should have warned him that the world he thought he wanted to save would expect more out of him.
He wasn’t good at manners, either, for all the little displays of superficial etiquette, the delicate tea-sipping and wine-swirling. Like paint-by-number, he was filling in the colors without any apparent intrinsic capacity for art. See: bogarting the communal wine bottle and announcing his intention to wander into farther reaches of The Reaches with it.
“Hey, Near, mind if I take this bottle and walk away with it? Mind if I go upstairs?” Near recommended in conspicuous volume to Jude’s back. But he’d been headed that way himself (something to look up … he’d remember when he got there), so he hopped back to his feet, swallowed down the rest of his wine, put three--to-two odds on the kid spilling the contents of his glass all over the floor before he made it all the way up the staircase, and trailed him from several paces back to see if he owed himself anything.