Two Crows Watch from the Gallows Tree (part 6)

(My family and I woke up very early to drive north; it's a 12 hour trip XD Glad you got some sleep!)

Lyra nodded in agreement. "Mother tries to get him to deny people sometimes, but I think he got soft where Uncle Gaius went rigid. It's strange to see, when they're around each other."

(Ahh understandable that is the exact reason that I am up this early — only I’m going south haha)

“No doubt.” Ky nodded, wondering how all the other kids from her township were holding up. Had they all gotten as pathetic as she did? “I heard an adage that’s like ‘the same water that softens the potato hardens the egg’.”

(Ayy nice! Have fun down there!)

Lyra smiled wryly. "Father is very much a mashed potato sometimes."

(Thank you! Have fun wherever you’re headed, too ^-^)

Ky laughed at that. “Good thing everyone loves mashed potatoes.”

(Thanks!)

"Almost everyone," she corrected. "There's always somebody out there with a weird palate or an allergy."

“Fair enough.” Ky inclined her head, then hesitated, resting her arm over her abdomen. Her voice was quiet when she continued, “And some people don’t like you no matter how much you try to please them.”

Lyra nodded, undoing her braid and starting over. "Best not to waste energy on people like that."

Ky nodded. “Yes… I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Thankfully.”

"Absolutely. You're among friends, now. Hopefully you will be for the rest of your life." She paused. "There will always be people that try to pull you down, but you can't let them. I keep telling myself that."

Ky nodded in agreement. “Some people would rather make you hurt more rather than working on themselves to make them hurt less. ‘Hurting people, hurt people’.”

"Mhm." Lyra glanced at the door. "Do you suppose Michael was hurting?"

Ky took a deep breath, then sighed and nodded. It was so hard to feel even a little sympathy for the monster. “Almost certainly… Septimus was kind of awful too, right? And… well, even if he wasn’t mean enough to turn Michael bad, maybe his own brain hurt him. Normal humans don’t do what he did.”

"I've thought about reading into it, but I'm not sure I want to see what he's written." Lyra shuddered. "There's a reason for everything, though." She knew Tarr had hurt, too. But that didn't mean she ever had to pity him. He was a brute; there was no excuse for what he had done, or for what Michael had done to her father and his siblings.

Ky cringed and nodded. She was going to read it, if Gaius didn’t explicitly tell her not to. Which he hadn’t. Yet. But it was going to be hard. Her own demons made it hard enough to sleep. She didn’t need to add Michael’s. And yet. “I doubt Aleth kept a diary… but I don’t think I’d want to read it, even if he did. He doesn’t get the privilege of having his side heard.”

"He must have been terrible," Lyra said quietly. "He was unnerving to me from the start; I guess I know why now."