Description: K' comes clean about a lot of things, despite the fact silence would have been a lot easier than honesty. Whip finds out her brother isn't quite as perfect as she'd expected, and she doesn't take it well.
The doctors were about ready to declare the mysterious twins-- who never came in with anything less than catastrophic injuries--nothing short of walking miracles. Yet again, one of them had made an inexplicable turnaround from an initial prognosis. A coma that had once been expected to last weeks, maybe even months-- if ever it lifted at /all/-- had suddenly cleared in the space of a night. The machines now registered the young man merely as asleep.
This didn't mean all his other injuries had healed, however. Those would still take time. As Seishirou promised, none of K''s pain was relieved; and so wakefulness brings with it a slow burning agony-- along with the new sensation of a relentless pulsing that pressed two points straight into his head.
Somehow, something seemed odd about the wounds in his head. Something foreign had seeped into him. It felt somehow familiar, but K' was too exhausted and hurting to think too much about it.
For the time being, his head pains him too much for him to do more than crack one eye open, a sudden gasping breath lifting his chest beneath the sheets. The young man shifts in bed, trying to stir. His natural instinct to bolt upright and swiftly survey his situation dulled and made impossible by the grogginess induced by the chemicals running in his blood, K' does little more than glance around: trying to see where he is and who might be around him.
It's easy to miss it in the dark. Even when awake, K''s sister by nature is a very unobtrusive creature, whether born or merely designed by the Cartel to glance under radar and brush past one's notice. She is simply a person who, by appearance and manner, is not meant to attract attention.
Whip is even better at it when asleep. It's easy to look past her and think she's not even there. But she is, curled up in a chair, her legs bent up and her head nestled against her knees, dozing exhaustedly and deeply with the barest of sounds. Some kindly nurse on her late rounds has covered up the young woman with a blanket, something the Ikari warrior was too fatigued to even notice, even with her omnipresent hyperalertness grounded into her reptile brain.
The fall of her dark hair disguises her face from any first glance. Whip does not stir. She sleeps like her brother's coma might've been infectious.
The first thing K' sees when he looks to the left is his sister. His restless shifting about immediately quiets when his gaze falls on her. His one half-open eye softens visibly as it looks her over and notices that-- other than the fact she'll likely wake up with a bad cramp-- she's all right. He didn't totally fail, then. He didn't let her get hurt. They still have a chance now.
Sighing out a breath, K' leans back a little and tries to relax. Not accustomed to being immobile-- too injured to move-- it's hard for him to quell his natural restlessness. To occupy his slowly-wakening mind, he sets about putting the pain out of his conscious thoughts. His tolerance, long since honed by copious experimentation, is more than enough to help numb some of the pain radiating through him.
Not wanting to wake Whip, K' says nothing. He doesn't trust his voice will work too well, anyway. But despite his attempts to be quiet, the mere fact he's awake means he's already starting to generate light noise. The faint rustle of sheets, the sound of irregular breathing... the slight, pained grunt that accompanies a shift to a more comfortable position.
As best he can, K' is beginning to shift all his efforts towards recovery. They will have to be quick about leaving this place. The very instant he is able to -move-, he must wrap all his affairs and run again.
Not even a handful of moments, Whip jolts silently awake. Not even she would be able to explain what exactly roused her. It could have been a dark turn in her dreams, or from the way her forehead was slipping haphazardly down the bone in her knee, or from those soft, incessant sounds she hears, or something else entirely-- but her head nods clumsily, and her exhausted sleep is gone. The young woman blinks her eyes, not quite realizing where she is, and exhales sharply when she turns her neck. Bad cramp.
Rubbing the muscle in the back of her neck stiffly, awkwardly, she sits up, reality slowly dawning on her when she makes out the darkened walls of the hospital room, the smell of antiseptic, and the breathing coming from her brother's wounded body. Breathing and more.
Whip's truly awake now. The expression on her face changes, and almost automatically she pushes to her feet, walking the four steps across the room to his bed. After a moment, her hands lower and close around the steel bedrail. Her fingers have bandages on them, strangely, the gauze standing out starkly in the unlit room.
She's got matching bandages on her face and stitches written into her temple, since treated from the early morning when the doctors found her strangely redelivered to the waiting room in dire straits. Whip was impatient to be mended. She just wanted to wait with her brother, who himself had seemed to grow two new, non-critical wounds to either sides of his skull.
Any other two people, and it would almost seem strange.
Whip spent the entire day restless but sure that her brother would make a complete recovery. That determination has not left her now when she leans down and over him, her dark eyes silent and searching for any evidence of life in her brother. It's hard to see in the dark, but she swore she saw him move. Whip's biting down on her bottom lip, her teeth leaving a hopeful imprint. She's too afraid to ask out to him. Too afraid that he won't reply her, like the many times before.
Having closed his eyes, K' doesn't initially see his sister has awakened up until the sound of her leaving her chair hits his senses. With effort, he half-opens his eyes to find her, his gaze casting around a little aimlessly trying to find out where she is. But soon enough, trying to focus hurts him too much; his eyes close again, and he's still by the time she comes to his bedside.
He can feel her watching him intently, and with an uncharacteristic, exhausted passiveness he waits for her to say or do something: perhaps expecting that she'd seen or heard him move, and knows he's awake. But her voice never comes. He can virtually smell the hope off her-- his sister's eternal hopefulness, if one knows what one is looking for, is painfully easy to detect-- and it tells him she doesn't yet know.
A few moments pass, and K' opens his odd yellow eyes again. He looks straight up into her face. "Y...you're here," he observes in a windy rasp, his voice practically gone from disuse. The phrase isn't meant much to imply that Whip would take off and run while he needed her, though self-deprecating as she is she might find a way to think along those lines. It's simply an expression of relief that so far, no one can gotten her yet. "You... taking care of yourself, or did you go and do something s-stupid again...?" Don't think he didn't notice those bandages.
She's still alive. A little battered-looking, but on the whole unpunished for his own foolishness. And once he gets past this, he can go back to his self-avowed task of making sure she is protected. That she's never hurt again, and especially not because of him.
The dead have arisen. Whip jolts backwards when K' replies her too-close, intense searching with suddenly just reviving on the spot, leaning back on her heels and just letting her eyes highbeam down on him in total surprise. He's awake. It worked.
...Thank you, Ryouhara.
Exhaling noisily, her shock at just hearing her brother speak finally gives way enough for her to parse his first words. It's a good thing for the distance and the dark room, because it hides the pang of hurt that resonates off her face. Of course Whip is self-deprecating enough to take that remark the only way it was not intended. Nonetheless, her own relief and joy are too potent for that feeling to last for longer than a twitch, and soon enough she leans back down again, nestling semi-comfortably with her arms crossed along the bedrail. She leans on her forearms and aims her bedridden brother down a tired, subdued smile. It sharpens appropriately in response to his next remark.
"Hmmf," Whip answers just as softly, reaching out to poke K' lightly but meaningfully in the centre of his forehead, the only uninjured part of him. "Stupid is as stupid does."
Her eyes hood. "And here I was hoping they would've at least damaged the asshole lobe of your brain. Oh well."
K''s eyes squeeze shut again, briefly, when Whip pokes him. Letting out a disgruntled, but not entirely intolerant, huff of breath, he tilts his head a little so that he won't have to turn his eyes to see her when he opens them again. He doesn't notice the look of hurt that pangs on her face, and even if he did wouldn't realize the reason for it.
A few bracing breaths later, the damaged ex-experiment opens his eyes to watch her again. The familiar intensity is already leaching back into his gaze as he tries a smile: an expression that, for once, carries no hint or sign of the smirk that usually infuriates his sister so. The asshole part of him, damaged? No such luck, he rasps amusedly. His demeanor is almost, if it could be imagined of such a cold young man, affectionate.
There are other parts of her brother that will also never die. His paranoia, for one; his overprotectiveness of his sister, for another. Both are concerns that are gnawing at the back of his mind even now. The forward-looking young man does not seem to find it as important to question how it was he recovered, as it is to question what they must do now that he is.
"Southtown isn't safe anymore," he eventually tells his sister, a more serious weight falling back into his voice as he slowly blinks at her in the calm, affectionate manner of a cat. "Once I can move, I have to leave. The Syndicate won't suffer me here any more." It's a little odd to hear him so quick to set aside his defiance. It makes onoe think there's something else at work here.
On the other hand, there's some part of Whip that seems strangely changed. The last time K' had found himself in a hospital bed, she could barely even look at him. The guilt was so palpable on her face that one could almost reach out and pick it up like a coin off the ground. She looked almost gutted by the reality that her brother, who seemed close to unstoppable in power, could be broken down. And compared to that, she seems to be taking this pretty well.
Whip looks tired, sore, but strangely solemn as she leans one elbow on the bedrail and watches her brother with a smiling, heavy-lidded expression that makes one wonder if a very wise nurse jabbed her with a sedative when she wasn't looking.
It soon changes. Leave it to K'; he's been awake for a couple minutes and he's already got his sister uppity. That demeanour transforms almost immediately, the young woman's gentled exhaustion ripped apart when just about every skeletal muscle in her body tightens up. Whip fixes K' with a sharp, confused look. "The Syndicate?" she asks, not understanding.
His eyes having slid shut again, K' senses more than sees it when his sister tenses up. He'd tense up himself, in response, if he weren't aching all over. A long breath sighs out of him as he tries to figure out how to frame this. He isn't exactly sure whether she'll be upset, or angry; nor does he know the degree to which she'd react, if she does at all. And that uncertainty is a pretty good metric of just how little he understands the wrongness of what he did when he fell in with Southsynd.
Though then again, it wasn't entirely his fault; it wasn't entirely a willful thing. He was first approached by Geese, after all... and it's kind of hard to turn down the King of Southtown once he takes an interest in you.
Whip's brother finally rouses to speak after a few moments. One eye slits open to watch her reaction. "Well... pissed them off pretty good, didn't I? Messing up their operations like that." He starts to visibly hesitate as he gets into more treacherous water. "I got a personal visit from Geese Howard, Whip. We don't get his protection here anymore. If he ever hears of me being in Southtown again, he'll kill me. And you. Shurui. Anybody I knew here."
It doesn't add up in the least. Why should Geese Howard have any reason to so personally enact such a stringent punishment: to revoke his protection? Especially on a relative nobody like K'? For that matter, why should he have extended that /protection/ in the first place?
When he opens an eye to look at her, Whip's looking as predictably confused as she sounds. She's staring down at him, her dark eyes creased, an expression in them like she's not understanding anything he's saying, and that she doesn't like not being able to understand. He's seen this look on her before. It's dangerous.
"Wait, wait," she finally interjects, taking one hand off the bedrail to wave it bemusedly. "We? I... didn't realize I was being protected by the Syndicate!" There's a sharp barb of offense lurking in his sister's voice, but the expression in her eyes remains a searching one -- as if she hasn't decided just who to blame yet. After a slight pause, Whip gives her head a visible shake to dismiss whatever thoughts are going through her hear, and corrects herself very briskly, "No. This doesn't make any sense. The Syndicate wouldn't have any idea we're related. They wouldn't be after you. I'm the Ikari Warrior; they'd be after me. Geese Howard did this to you?"
K' is already starting to feel uneasy under that look. But there's no going back on his words now. No biting back the truth. She's going to want a reason why he's suddenly banished from Southtown, and he's tired of lying about it. Moreover, they're all things she'll have to know, if only so she doesn't do something foolish and incite Howard while her brother's already, so to speak... in the doghouse.
K' looks Whip dead-on, both eyes opening solemnly on her confusion. "Not that we're related, no. But that I know you ought to be clear enough." And here it is. The really difficult part. To his credit, K' talks as coldly and succinctly as if he were one of the surgeons that'd worked on him. "He has his own problems with me, beyond just you. Geese Howard was my teacher. He taught me since long before I knew you were my sister. But once you were captured, I couldn't do it anymore."
If her brother didn't look tired and burdened enough before, he looks just short of exhausted when he admits that to her. A wry breath eases out of him as he concludes, a little obviously, "...he didn't like that. Came to visit." And if Whip looks closely enough, she might see in her brother the first hints of a guilt to potentially match her own.
Whip stops cold at that. She stares at K' uselessly, blankly like she doesn't know what to think. She's always kept a thinking, purposeful type of fury, one that needs to rationally decide that it's justifiably angry before it lets any temper get lost. The look in her eyes is like the turning cylinder in a game of Russian roulette, and not even K''s sharp eyes know whether or not the chamber she decides on is empty. She's looking right into his face, his eyes as she decides how she's going to take it.
"...Teacher?" she ends up echoing, rather anti-climactically. Whip is still confused. "I don't get it. How? When did this happen? Why would..."
She grows very quiet. Finally an emotion registers across his sister's face. She looks hurt. Truly, openly hurt. "And you kept that from me? All that time?" Whip bites out, her strained words broken up with an airy sort of outrage, needing to inhale deeply just to breathe past all of her confused anger. She squints her eyes, staring down at K' like she's been suddenly forced to see him in a new light. And it's visibly hurting her to do it.
"Just tell me it's not like what I'm thinking. You're not... "
K' watches Whip's eyes and expression carefully as he proceeds. He wasn't sure from the start how this would be taken, but the direction doesn't look promising. It's unfortunate, but K' has never been a particularly open or trusting person; and so, the direct, searching quality of his gaze makes their interaction into something more calculating and wary than honest.
"He approached me months ago. Like I said-- before I knew we were related. He sent Billy Kane to track me down. He told me he'd teach me to control these flames--" and to be able to match Kusanagi: something which K' elects not to mention, "--that he'd teach me to use what I'd been given if I did things for him." He shrugs, and regrets the movement a moment later: grunting an irritated sound of pain, he leans back. He looks... uncharacteristically spiritless. Almost tamed. Like he might not even argue this time if his sister opts to go off at him.
When questioned about his secrecy, her brother just turns his head aside. There's barely enough blood in him left to do that much, much less match his sister's outrage. "The longer it went on, the harder it got to get out," he explains in a murmur. "The more I knew you, the more I wanted to. Just like I ran away from NESTS." After all, knowing Whip had reminded him why it was he'd run away from NESTS in the first place; it'd given him a confidence that he could do things himself which he hadn't had when he'd agreed to Geese's whims. More than that, knowing Whip gave him something to care about. Something worth being careful and staying alive for. "So I thought if nobody knew about it, nobody would get hurt except me when I left."
And then Whip's imagination, apparently, starts to run away with her. Tiredly, K' shuts his eyes and replies, "I don't -know- what you're thinking, Whip." He's not going to answer until he knows exactly what he's answering. For now, however, there is at least one thing he can assert: "But I sure as fuck didn't know you were going to get captured. I didn't set it up."
K''s sister just stares at the floor as he tells his story to her, staring at a fixed point in a way that raises the question whether she can hear him at all. Whip just looks hurt. She's got that brokenhearted look children get when they figure out fairytales aren't real, and that big, exciting world they've always known is gone. Her world's a little fractured, the one where her twin brother could do no wrong -- where he was her hero.
Looking just as dispirited, halfway through her brother's words Whip just shuts her eyes and rubs gingerly at the stitches in her temple. She shakes her head as though she were dismissing the lot of K''s explanation as meaningless. She's quiet to allow him to finish not because she's particularly eager to hear him out... she is just using the strength to argue. She can't believe any of this.
When he finishes, at first she is quiet, simply spending her time rubbing the bridge of her nose. Soon enough, her voice raises, tired and partly muffled through the movements of her hand. "You didn't... answer my question." Whip's strained tone of voice reveals that her patience is being forced. It's being held on a tight, tight leash. But she presses on, needing to know: "Were you working for the Syndicate? Were you their dog? Their hired gun?"
K' is quiet for a long time as his defensive words get mostly glossed over. Were he stronger, less injured, and less tired, he might almost have gotten angry over his explanations-- such rare concessions, from a terse and assertive person like him-- going largely unacknowledged and unheard. His eyes narrow slightly on his sister, trying to figure out what she's thinking behind that hurt look.
Were he aware of just how much she'd built him up in her head, how much she was convinced he had no flaws, he might well have laughed a little and said it's better she find out the truth sooner than later. But he doesn't know just how high she built that castle of hers on the sand, and so he hasn't got anything to say that might alleviate the shock of discovery.
Instead, he just pauses audibly when she presses her question. He's quiet a very long time. "I've never been anything but a dog, Whip," he finally replies tiredly. "NESTS, Syndicate. No difference. Both of them had their ways to keep me working. Both of them I had to risk a lot to leave. And in the end, what'd I get from either? NESTS gave me shit I don't want. Geese never showed me anything but evidence why his son's so fucked up."
This next part is exceptionally hard on his pride, but he forces it out anyway: "You think I don't regret it?"
Her hand falls from her face, revealing briefly the miserable expression she's been hiding under her palm. Then it just twists up into a sarcastic expression againt K''s last question. Whip glances at her brother uncharitably. "You even care what I think?" she asks back, her voice serrated.
"The fact remains," Whip continues, going forward with her opinion anyway, "whether or not you 'knew me' shouldn't bear on your choice to sign your soul away. And don't feed me that bullshit about it being difficult to get out." Her voice darkens with the core of her very beliefs, "There was a choice; there's /always/ a choice."
Soon enough, she decides she can't even look at her brother's face any more and turns away, retreating back to that chair at the corner of the room. Whip sits heavily down on it, looking simultaneously tired and restless, unable to sweat out the nervous energy that coils through her limbs. She's so disappointed in him that it hurts. "I just thought you were better than that," she muses out of nowhere, stooping forward to brace her elbows against her legs. She leans her head tiredly into her left hand, her face hidden from him. "After fighting so hard for your freedom, I didn't think you'd ever be so stupid to hand it over to someone else."
Whip pauses dangerously when a new thought strikes her. The tension doubles along her body. "--And every day I felt guilty thinking that by being an Ikari, I was bringing shit home. You have no idea the sort of things you could've brought on Shurui. Did you realize that?
"Months, K'!" she blurts without looking at him. "We were technically /enemies/ under that roof. And you /know/ what I am. You knew the entire time what I stood for."
Whip is silent a moment. And she's rubbing nondescriptly at her hidden eyes. "And I didn't even have the first clue. They taught you well."
K' makes no response to her first serrated retort. Perhaps he really doesn't care what she thinks. Perhaps he's just too tired to rise to the clear barb in her words. Either way, he never says a word. He just lets her go on to berate him. It doesn't matter what she thinks; he's going to finish saying his piece, and he's standing by it.
There's one thing she says, though, that he just doesn't get. It's the first thing he turns to address, probably because his lack of understanding makes it easiest. "What do you 'stand for,' Whip?" Her brother looks over at her, and there's no comprehension in his eyes. No recognizable hint that he might ever have been taught anything but the amoral, murderous creed of NESTS. No sign that he ever received the kind of guidance she did, to even make him aware there was such a thing as the 'right thing.' He just looks tired and uncomprehending. "I don't even know what you're talking about." How could a three year-old mind, never exposed to any learning, socialization, or moral influence, raised to murder, really understand honor? Doing the right thing?
His head turns away. He's visibly struggling, still hazy-minded from only having woken up a short time ago, to even form words to articulate what he thinks of all the rest. "Always a choice," he echoes eventually. "At the time? I made mine. I didn't have anything to lose. Nothing mattered except becoming something. When Geese made me that offer, I wasn't anybody. I wasn't anything. I was a mistake. I had freedom but I didn't mean anything. I could die and nobody would notice." Some strength seethes back into his voice, an odd honesty infecting his tone. This is the most open he has ever been about his particular issues. "He was the first person to ever think I could be something. To ever spend that much time on me. Yeah. It was stupid--" an admission Whip may never hear again, "--but I wanted to prove something."
His eyes shut. It's visibly tiring him to talk, but he keeps on with a deadened sort of determination. "Knowing you was the -entire- difference, Whip. Everything was a lot easier to decide when I didn't have anything to lose. But then you came, and you made me somebody-- and you did this--" he twitches his right hand, showing her. "You made me realize it had to end. He never showed me control. You did."
Whip accuses him of not even thinking about Shurui. From the way his eyes suddenly flare, it's clear K' doesn't agree in the /slightest/. "I realized just -fine- what could have happened to her. That's why I never so much as let her -path- cross that Syndicate. I spent weeks trying to figure out a way to get out without getting either you or Shurui hurt. There was no way up until you getting caught forced my hand." He stares at her, wanting her to understand this fully. "There isn't ever a choice for me when it's your life, Whip. Is there ever a choice in your mind when it's mine?"
It's a risky question. But, masochistically enough, K' suddenly finds himself curious to know.
That first question is more than enough to earn her eyes. Whip is too shocked not to. K' questioning her on her very morality seems to go against every preconception she's ever kept about her own brother. It floors her to hear such a thing spoken off his lips. And it hurts her to realize, miserably, that he truly does not know. He doesn't understand. She thought she did. She thought that, despite all his anger, all his thirst for horrible revenge, he would at least know the difference of right and wrong... he would know her well enough to understand the person she tries so hard to be.
"I stand," Whip begins to explain, unable to restrain the choked-out sharpness in her voice, "for being able to sleep at night. I stand for having that chance someday to examine my life and know in my heart I became more than some murderer for the Cartel. I stand for being able to live with myself."
Her head lowers again, the gravity of this truth weighing visibly on the young woman. She rubs a little dispondently on the back of her neck as she half-heartedly listens to K' explain himself with as much honesty as he can muster. Fortunately, this time Whip seems to be listening. She gives him that much respect. But she doesn't reward his candidness with any sort of compassion. She replies firmly, dryly, "You're not a mistake, K'. You just make them."
Whip looks back up at him, her eyes cold and black with disapproval. They have a particular gleam as though she's been crying. But one wouldn't know it to listen to her; her voice could be carved out of ice. "Knowing me shouldn't make a difference, not when it comes to doing the right thing. You don't keep your humanity in someone else. You were somebody long before you ever met me, and you always had something to lose. I can give you roots, but not your god damned soul." She exhales deeply, a mirroring exhaustion infecting her gravelly voice. "You need to realize the consequences for making a choice like that, and it goes beyond your broken bones or whether my life was in danger. It's bigger than that. Helping people like that ruins lives. You don't have to kill to still destroy. Do you realize what the Syndicate does to innocent people?"
Too restless to simply remain sitting, Whip antsily pushes back to her feet, her movements fierce and purposeful. "Open your damn eyes, K'. For once, just look at the world past all the pain of having your life taken from you. Rejoining it is the only way you'll ever be able to get anything back."
Once those angry words are scratched out, she seems let on uneasily lingering a moment, before her mind is quickly set on something else. Whip needs to get out of the room for both their sakes. He's plainly hanging on and she's too angry and disappointed to think. "Get some rest. I need to go check on Shurui."
Whip begins moving briskly for the door, giving K' no further glance or remark -- until his last question stops her one step from leaving. She pauses, one hand raising to the doorframe. Then, slowly, her brown eyes slant towards the direction of the bed. The expression on her face is distant and ominous. "...You're awake, aren't you?"
And she disappears through the door.
K' just looks at her. The expression reflecting in his eyes is that of a child that doesn't understand because it's never been taught. For all he speaks haughtier words and looks more adult than Kula, he's really only a few steps removed from her. A cold mind of metal and wheels, one with no time for idealism, personal enlightenment, or abstraction. He says nothing. There isn't much for him to do but try to understand what little he can through his creeping temper.
Doing the right thing. Having an intrinsic humanity. A soul. Some cognizance of his own worth, long before he found it in his sister. K''s limited experiences in life have given him none of those. Have never taught him that. Have never given him the chances she got. "It's easy for you to say all that..." he starts, sitting up slowly with a complaining creak of equipment: temper coiling audibly into his voice. "Real easy from your position. You said yourself so many times I went through shit ten times worse than you. That you had it so easy compared to me. You want the truth? I agree. You had the Ikari to teach you all that shit, and now you feel pretty great preaching it to me. You're like Kusanagi. And like him, you can preach to me when you got any idea what it's really like."
His throat catches on his own snarl, K' struggling a moment before his body finally rebels against his forced movements and he impatiently smears a line of blood from his mouth across the back of his hand. Tell the truth, most of the acute hurt he's feeling now is from having been honest, and having that honesty thrown back in his face... and spiteful as ever, he wants to throw some of that pain back even as his sister walks out. "F...fuck off, Whip," he hurls after her, before he lets his head bow: totally missing the implication in her last comment through his own anger.
Verbal venom isn't enough for him. It's not enough to slake the anger pulsing in his blood... an anger that's more than half made up of a sudden and acute fear that his mistake will cost him his sister. Will cost him everything they've become together. The rage gets so unbearable the IV needles in him start to throb with pain; in a spate of sudden self-loathing, he tears at the needles in his veins and the monitoring equipment on him, ripping it all off in a sudden surge of noise as the machines go haywire in alarm.
She didn't get anything he was trying to say to her. Not a thing. She was too fixated, too blinded by her own opinions. That's probably what frustrates him the most... her inflexibility. Her expectations he can't and won't meet: expectations all predicated on her own experiences... when she KNOWS they weren't anything like his. Her disastrous blindness to the fact he wasn't the perfect brother she made him out to be. That he wasn't the moral mirror of her she expected.
It's another notch for him to cut, added to the total sum of all his other defects. Ignoring the alarm of the machines around him and the sudden onrush of nurses, K' thinks tiredly that he should stop recording-- because he's long since stopped trying to count.
Log created on 17:04:07 01/04/2009 by K', and last modified on 23:06:54 01/18/2009.