[A little bit wry - there is a reason she's so wary of touching him. But he's okay with it.
And sure enough, Dillon's perspective is totally distinct from Iris's. He's not an Empath, and he doesn't feel what Cassel feels except with the very mundane, human sort of empathy that echoes pain it sees. Because Dillon sees it.
Everything is fractal to Dillon, if he looks hard enough, everything is pieces that echo wholes, histories that unfold and replicate, futures on a tree of deep-ply possible forkings, not determined but still predictable, pathways and possibilities. He sees the world like the wide-eyed entranced tinkering nephew of some absent-minded Clockmaker God who wandered off before screwing the back of the world over the cogs again.
And Cassel is one gleaming intricate exquisite node of that watch, whirring and connecting, but there are pieces - this mood, that particular brand of reckless - that do not fit, that are patently and obviously wrong, that don't belong with the parts around them, that weren't built in the same forge or from the same material, no matter now skillfully or neatly they've been inserted in place of the pieces that should be there. It's wrong in the essence and the existence, soul and life that ought to be inseparable substrates of each of each other. It horrifies Dillon and it hurts Cassel, that discordant chasm, now that he's aware of it, or it would hurt him, if Dillon weren't pressing him with the equivalent of psychic anesthesia.]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
[A little bit wry - there is a reason she's so wary of touching him. But he's okay with it.
And sure enough, Dillon's perspective is totally distinct from Iris's. He's not an Empath, and he doesn't feel what Cassel feels except with the very mundane, human sort of empathy that echoes pain it sees. Because Dillon sees it.
Everything is fractal to Dillon, if he looks hard enough, everything is pieces that echo wholes, histories that unfold and replicate, futures on a tree of deep-ply possible forkings, not determined but still predictable, pathways and possibilities. He sees the world like the wide-eyed entranced tinkering nephew of some absent-minded Clockmaker God who wandered off before screwing the back of the world over the cogs again.
And Cassel is one gleaming intricate exquisite node of that watch, whirring and connecting, but there are pieces - this mood, that particular brand of reckless - that do not fit, that are patently and obviously wrong, that don't belong with the parts around them, that weren't built in the same forge or from the same material, no matter now skillfully or neatly they've been inserted in place of the pieces that should be there. It's wrong in the essence and the existence, soul and life that ought to be inseparable substrates of each of each other. It horrifies Dillon and it hurts Cassel, that discordant chasm, now that he's aware of it, or it would hurt him, if Dillon weren't pressing him with the equivalent of psychic anesthesia.]