[There's a reason why deception is an art rather than a science. Twisting your face into the right shape and shifting your voice into the right register could only get you so far. For better or worse, humans could tell when something rang hollow even if they couldn't place their fingers directly on it.
That's why you have to paint your emotions onto the canvas of your lie. The barest hint, a single stroke... enough to fool the other person into thinking that you're telling the truth when you say that you're not fine but you'll get better. A sad twist of the mouth, a shrug and a nod, all signposts of being shaken, but recovering.
And all the perfect lie to cover up the truth of the endless, empty ache inside.
Sayo is particularly practiced at this brand of deception, so when Sasha has that sad twist to his smile, makes that small shrug, she feels suddenly as if she's teetering on the edge of a vast abyss.
She doesn't know him that well. He was just her coplayer and Gideon's weird... uncle? older brother? figure. It's not as if they were close. Part of her says she should leave well enough alone.
The other part of her remembers all those small moments with George and Jessica when she made that exact same expression and plead to the heavens that they'd notice and was never, ever answered.]
The thing about ghosts... [she clutches her shoulder, looking away.] Once they've shown up, they're, er, still there even if it looks like they've disappeared.
Just because the poltergeist's stopped rattling its chains, um, doesn't mean it's not haunting the house anymore, or that it wasn't there before. It's just that the memory's fresher, especially if you convinced yourself that you already exorcised it before it started staring you in the face again.
And if you tell someone else the ghost story... it makes you less crazy, I think. Because it's real to another person now, and they can see it too, and they can go, "wow, living in a place with a ghost really sucks," and that means someone else gets it a little bit even though they're not the one haunted by it.
[A pause.] It might, um, turn out that they're haunted by something similar too.
[A longer pause.] ...shit, that was all hackneyed even by my awful standards, huh? [Sayo laughs nervously.]
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That's why you have to paint your emotions onto the canvas of your lie. The barest hint, a single stroke... enough to fool the other person into thinking that you're telling the truth when you say that you're not fine but you'll get better. A sad twist of the mouth, a shrug and a nod, all signposts of being shaken, but recovering.
And all the perfect lie to cover up the truth of the endless, empty ache inside.
Sayo is particularly practiced at this brand of deception, so when Sasha has that sad twist to his smile, makes that small shrug, she feels suddenly as if she's teetering on the edge of a vast abyss.
She doesn't know him that well. He was just her coplayer and Gideon's weird... uncle? older brother? figure. It's not as if they were close. Part of her says she should leave well enough alone.
The other part of her remembers all those small moments with George and Jessica when she made that exact same expression and plead to the heavens that they'd notice and was never, ever answered.]
The thing about ghosts... [she clutches her shoulder, looking away.] Once they've shown up, they're, er, still there even if it looks like they've disappeared.
Just because the poltergeist's stopped rattling its chains, um, doesn't mean it's not haunting the house anymore, or that it wasn't there before. It's just that the memory's fresher, especially if you convinced yourself that you already exorcised it before it started staring you in the face again.
And if you tell someone else the ghost story... it makes you less crazy, I think. Because it's real to another person now, and they can see it too, and they can go, "wow, living in a place with a ghost really sucks," and that means someone else gets it a little bit even though they're not the one haunted by it.
[A pause.] It might, um, turn out that they're haunted by something similar too.
[A longer pause.] ...shit, that was all hackneyed even by my awful standards, huh? [Sayo laughs nervously.]