TL;CR MEME

[retellers]

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.

Comments

[soulus]

I forgot that I had meant to finish this before the end of the year, so here I am half an hour later.

They had a respectable start where she asked what he was doing prior to their arrival at the Realm. He answered honestly, and she didn't make a big deal out of his bloodthirsty reply. Instead they struck up a deal to keep an eye on the Realm, so it was ideal as far as first meetings went for him.

Their circumstances frequently mashed them together and he was there for the maidenly moments that, while he could not relate, he could vaguely understand. He didn't hold being tossed in public view that one week against her, because of the extraordinary effects in play at the time, and was inwardly pleased that she didn't seem to harbor a grudge like a sensible person.

Many of their encounters went back to something Jeanne said early on: "I understand, but I disagree." They disagreed a lot. He knew this would be the case from the time she first said it: His goal was, coincidentally, the same as hers in that he wanted to help and work toward collecting nova to save everything, but they departed in that he wanted to do it with as minimal socialization as possible due to the recent revelation of Tristan's betrayal that had inflamed his trust issues.

Jeanne stressed that she wasn't so naive as to think everything would be dandy, and even mentioned that she'd crushed dreams in the past to know that helping can cause harm elsewhere—and that that wouldn't stop her from continuing to try. It was a conflicting answer for Rufus, who once was on the receiving end of such harm, because she was acknowledging the consequences of her actions in the same breath. He couldn't disavow her for that. She would say that things with which he inherently disagreed, only to follow up with more things that would turn the former halfway around, and this was rather illustrative of their overall CR throughout the weeks.

After a point, it felt like she was being contrary every time he said something, which was when he started defusing his annoyance by leaving. At the same time, she would always ask after him and encourage him to forge friendships with other participants, which he honestly could not fathom for himself amid his trauma's haunting. In a competition where stakes were high, he felt watching his faith be torn into shreds before him would be inevitable and refused to let that come to pass. One of the reasons he never walked away for good was Jeanne's demonstration of her belief in fairness by backing off after saying her piece.

He was also conscientious of all that she'd done for him, like preparing food during their curfew in the cafeteria. Were it anywhere other than the Realm, he would've helped himself to the free servings immediately. He hesitated for the aforementioned reasons, but in the end he gave into the conditioned desire not to waste food [that had been prepared for him, no less]. The contrition she felt from him was his guilt for relentlessly pushing her away, born from his inability to trust her or anyone else in the Realm for that matter.

Let's rewind for a bit, though. Jeanne could be vocal and downright aggressive in her persistence, but she wasn't the sort to bemoan the unfairness of the competition. She was one of the more level-headed participants in that respect, and he knew it by the time she became Kano's executioner. She returned to the site "to think and to ponder," and he let her have his silence in deference to her appreciable ability to do what must be done. Dirty work never feels good; in fact, it's suffocating and heavy. But she endured it, and he respected her for it.

He just wished that she would stop fixating on his happiness, on which others had previously trampled and he himself had thrown away so many years ago. She understood, but she disagreed. While the things she said were kind, some had an insidious effect in that he felt increasingly ignored, triggering his learned reaction to clam up and soldier on in order to preserve precious time and energy—a twisted coping mechanism built on the learned helplessness fostered by his mentors, who had written off his outbursts over their manipulations at every turn, all the way to present day.

Even so, the week they experienced each other's memories solidified the image of Jeanne in Rufus' mind. He, who withheld personal details and resented the attempts of others at filling in the blanks with their imagination, could empathize with the plight of the saint. He had also killed Hikaru by then, which made Jeanne's refusal to cry all the closer to his heart. He didn't think her pitiful, because he didn't think himself pitiful. They were just two people who chose to live in the reality of their decisions, and he liked that about her. He liked that she wouldn't try to justify her actions by pulling the justice or saint card. He liked that she was grounded—how real she was—and could then infer the depths of her hurts.

Living in that reality, he didn't begrudge Jeanne for removing Fiora. It was premeditated murder, but they were both guilty of that sin. And they both knew and bore the weight of that sin on their own. There was no reason to kick up a fuss about losing Fiora; there was only reason to work harder to ensure the retrieval of the lost, even if that wouldn't erase what they'd done.

Toward the end, he was weary. His faith had been shredded by comedy, and he poured what energy left that he could muster into stabilizing the Realm, letting Jeanne have her way with his arm at the first aid station. He was uncomfortable, but too tired to care and didn't rate his comfort to be worth the trouble. Better Jeanne than the majority of the participants. For all the essential similarities and how much he respected her, he believed what dissimilarities they had between them rendered them somewhat incompatible.

Does any of this make sense.