He watched Albedo for a long minute, with a focus unseemly for a sick child. Silence threatened to close his throat, to thread a string between his lips, but Nigredo rejected the impulse and simply sighed. It required clarification, he supposed. Anyone would have reached the same conclusion.

"You can't always be trusted," he echoed. Nigredo shook his head. "There will be mistakes, I know." He still had his mind, after all. He still retained that perfection in memory, that hatred behind another's eyes.

But Nigredo was no puppet, no slave to impulses not his own. "This is my choice." Since the beginning. "I refuse to move against you and Rubedo."