Cold Comfort Arms
Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 280 words. As Kate has recently more than hinted, and as I have known far longer than she, she has hurt to give and not healing; to which I would add, rescues and not comforts. Here I feel the temper of her steel again, as she finishes comforting her possibly-insensible comrade as best she knows how - not well! - before she can think of asking the bystander for the news of her best beloved. Not willpower. Willpower would be thinking of it, and resisting. Kate simply doesn't have that thought to play with.
It is an odd kind of compassion, which a large swathe of my kinship would interpret purely and solely as hardness, even if they granted it were a good hardness. And perhaps it is so. If it is hard, then it is hardness of a very strange kind, deeper than even a habit of duty. Captain Carrot's "Personal isn't the same as important," in Terry Pratchett's Guards novels comes maybe closer, but not very far; for Kate, everything is, and has to be, purely personal. She has always been at her monstrous worst with moral abstractions.
A curious bit of enlightenment for me, from two sentences in a short linking passage.
