[ when kaveh twists and leans over the edge of the couch, heine takes that as his cue to switch feet. it's nice, actually—gives him something to do other than just stare at his hands as he recounts the tale. he's not bothered by the telling, but it's goodto have somewhere else to focus than on the face of the person listening. ]

That's... complicated. [ his brow furrows, considering. ] I hated and loved her when I was a kid. She was the source of all my nightmares and also the only person who loved me, other than my siblings. I thought of her as my mother.

[ heine still remembers the promises angelika had made, before their death matches: i'll love whichever of you does well. heine had often done well, so he had often been loved. he recognizes now how fucked up that is, for a mother's love to be predicated on the kind of killing machine her child can be. (insofar as angelika was ever a mother and heine was ever her child; he knows, now, that he was never her child the way most people are someone's child. he was not born of her, except in the basest, most scientific way.) ]

When I killed her—did I tell you that? I killed her when I escaped the lab. When I killed her I felt almost sorry about it, but I had no choice. And then for the next... eight, ten years I thought she was dead, so there was no reason for me to hate or love her.

[ kaveh is, of course, savvy enough to notice that heine said he thought she was dead, not that she was in fact dead. ]