[Closed] Offerings to the Living

In which Ezre and Tom spend a less eventful afternoon over at least one cup of chan after an almost too eventful midday.

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Ezre Vks
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Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:36 pm

Dormitory C
Late Afternoon on the 9th of Bethas, 2719
The raen was not ignorant; Tom's previous life as a human did not at all mean that he had not been educated in his own way, in ways that Ezre did not have access to by the nature of his birth and upbringing. The man was still capable of reading facial expressions and understanding social queues, regardless of the rift that had once divided their existences. As Tom sat up, as Ezre attempted to deflect his admission with a more distracting question, the dark-haired boy sank down, ducked a little behind his steaming mug, hiding his blush like the teenager he still was, like the galdor hardly experienced in the world outside the well-fortified walls of academia he still was.

His question had been too sharp, however, for the Hoxian couldn't help but see the hurt it had caused crease its way into the raen's middle-aged galdor features. His insatiable curiosity had been unfiltered by his usual careful thought, too complacent in exhaustion and guard down with the hot caress of chan in his bloodstream. He frowned, delicate features half-hidden behind warm wool, and Ezre's blush deepened into shame,

"I cannot imagine what choices I would make in your position, trapped between the relationship expectations of a life you did not build and the emotional memories etched into your soul by a heart you left behind." He murmured quietly, hushed by the realization that such depth of feelings were still so far out of his personal reach, so outside of his own life story thus far, short as it was, that he had little right to pry at the door with greedy, inked fingers. He blinked, dark eyelashes heavier under the consciousness-slowing influence of the bitter, purple liquid hot against his palms,

"It is different now, for my umah, but not always. The passing of Lreya Vks' soul from one body to the next has been a ritualized event involving personal sacrifice and traditional understanding since she found her way to Kzecka. Perhaps her first few experiences were different, were like yours, given her original existence was not Hoxian, but the choices that have been made in her Hexxos membership for the past century or so have not been made with the same emotional freewill as the kind of love I can see you experienced before your passing, that haunts you in the present if you can forgive the pun in Estuan. That is not to say her love for her family is not genuine, but I believe time has tempered her perspective while yours is still very new in comparison."

It was strange to detail the most secret and sacred of Hexxos practices in such simple terms, to summarize centuries of tradition with such a sense of distance, but as Ezre did so, he felt a keen awareness of his lack of understanding—

Oh.

The dark-haired boy blinked when Tom shifted the subject back, away from his own past and toward the young student's present, toward what the young student had spoken of as a desirable outcome for the future. That comfortable chan-induced haze, that blurring of hard boundaries between his exterior and interior self, made everything carry a heavier emotional weight, made everything the older man said have a much more tangible touch,

"I—well."

The Hoxian hesitated, unable to necessarily find anything worth a rebuttal in the older man's words, spoken as they were from the lips of a being who could now see behind them with a perspective Ezre knew he would not be chosen in this life to share in as anyone other than an observer. He seemed to sink a little deeper, to huddle a little more behind the soft physical barrier of the blanket as if the lowering of his more personal, emotional walls had truly left him feeling cold, exposed,

"I do not, uh, disagree with that sentiment. Perhaps superfluous was not the correct word. I am just—it is—there are things I have never—"

The further hesitation in his voice wasn't shame: the northernmost galdori of the Six Kingdoms did not share their Anaxi counterpart's dour view on premarital sexual curiosity, if only because the rather egalitarian and pragmatic Hoxian people made very little of marriage and ceremony anyway, preferring to favor compatibility and companionship over arrangements and perceived purity. It might have been the waver of inexperience, the realization that just because he was free to do as he pleased within the boundaries of consent with someone else, that hardly meant he had any idea of what that freedom was supposed to look like. Well, perhaps he had enough of an idea.

"—I suppose I am more afraid of complicating something that is pleasantly uncomplicated than I am about exploring what one body is capable of with another. Although, if I am already concerned, then I clearly have complicated things already. What I hear you saying—even in your hurt—is that such a risk is worth the reward?"

Ezre laughed, so very self-aware in the moment, and then immediately stared into his half-empty mug, warmth dancing along the back of his neck and traveling down the inked skin stretched over his spine, honest feelings far more intoxicated than any mixture of herbs, "There are so many layers. To a person. Hoxians confine them so purposefully. I doubt the sharing of oneself ever actually gets easier."

He looked up, not forming those words into a question and not particularly searching for an answer from Tom. Perhaps he figured he would be able to read the raen's face instead, but the now-shy still very much a boy smiled wistfully nonetheless.
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Tom Cooke
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Sat Sep 21, 2019 7:32 pm

Dormitory C Brunnhold
Late Afternoon on the 9th of Bethas, 2719
Emotional memories. A heart he had left behind. Tom was quiet, seeming to nestle deeper into the rumpled nest of quilt. He stared down into the purple froth, and when he shut his eyes, it left a velvety-faint, moon-shaped imprint in the dark. Emotional memories, he thought again, sounding out the words, trying to pair them with what he felt. Not emotions, not love – the memory of love. A loving memory.

Caught between a memory and what was real, what was physical. A different heart, beating away in his chest, always a little too fast. A wife. Two daughters. A good, respectable career, built on a foundation that’d been laid generations ago. A mother and a father, redheaded gollies. No brother. He didn’t know if it showed on his face; he hoped it didn’t. He felt himself squeeze his eyes a little tighter shut. He felt warm, scattered. His cup of chan was more than halfway down, and that didn’t seem like enough to make him feel like this; it was the tiredness, then, that had swept him off the ground and sent him floating away.

Lreya Vks hadn’t even been Hoxian, once. Lreya Vks wasn’t even her name. Personal sacrifices. Tom wasn’t sure he knew what tempering was, not in this context. Age could temper a man’s fire; he’d never wanted to grow old. Lots of things could temper your beliefs, but he’d known what was what, had Tom, and he hadn’t wanted to think about it.

Tom felt like somebody’d opened up a chasm underneath him. Curling both his shaky hands round the mug, he brought it to his lips, drank deep, drank it almost to the dregs.

When he lowered it back to his lap, he found he could look at Ezre again, and he could almost smile. “Oes, lad, everythin’s new,” he replied. Came out a pina quiet, maybe strained, with the rough edge of feelings he couldn’t quite cram down inside him. He didn’t say anything else, but he watched Ezre’s face, and when he saw his question’d hit the mark, his smile got a little more genuine.

Things Ezre’d never – Tom caught a wheeze of laughter before it came out proper, pushed it down with a husk of a cough. His lip twitched at exploring what one body is capable of with another, a little amusement warming his eyes, but he didn’t laugh, not this time.

Not with everything else Ezre was saying. This he understood well enough, like a familiar song in a different tongue. That sentiment, at least – begging your heart to keep it simple, feeling like the godsdamn thing was running away and dragging you with it, filling your thoughts with all kind of shit you didn’t give it permission to. More emotional memories, Tom thought wryly, folding his hands over top of his mug. He sucked at a tooth.

Again, he thought how hard it’d be for a kov like Ezre. Tom didn’t know for sure, ’course, seeing as he’d only known the lad for half a day, but that half a day and that never gave him enough suspicions. That the lass knew he liked her was a flooding wonder. He wondered what it was like, growing up in Kzecka, not that he could even begin to imagine it. Wondered what it was like, navigating all this, with your head full of stories from a ma who’d lived ten lifetimes.

It was Ezre’s last comment that melted away some of his bitterness. Layers, he thought, a wistful look to match the galdor’s flickering across his face; he had to shut his eyes for a moment. He wished he could’ve said he was new to such things, but he reckoned he’d always covered himself up, one way or another. He tapped a fingernail against the rim of the cup. “Listen,” he sighed, “maybe you shouldn’t be listening to a kov who died at twenty-nine, hey? Far as risks go, I reckon I must’ve taken one too many, and you can see the reward for yourself. But, uh…”

His legs were starting to fall asleep, so he uncrossed them tentatively, pushing himself up more in his seat. He rubbed his eyes, regarded Ezre tiredly.

“That’s not exactly what I meant, ‘even in my hurt’.” A faint, bemused curl of a smile. A shrug. “I think you already know, with all your already-complicated feelings about this lass.” It was an assumption, oes, but a safe one, considering. “Sounds like you might’ve already made a decision.”
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Last edited by Tom Cooke on Sat Oct 05, 2019 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Ezre Vks
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Sun Sep 22, 2019 9:49 am

Dormitory C
Late Afternoon on the 9th of Bethas, 2719
Ezre could not know the entirety of the not-Incumbent's previous life, of the life he lived as a human in Old Rose Harbor, breaking bones but not breaking hearts, apparently. He could not imagine the landscape of his emotional history, either, but what parts of it played out for a few moments on Tom's borrowed face spoke in a volume that his voice did not.

"Only it is not. New, that is." He smiled, making a joke in his own even-keeled sort of way, delicate lips poised over the rim of chan that was now a much more comfortable temperature to drink with less tentative liberality. Despite not normally allowing much of what he felt on the inside to be visible on the outside, the dark-haired boy was well-accustomed to recognizing the emotions of others as they played out across their faces, the mortuary sciences student trained in assisting the bereaved as much as he was trained in caring for the corpse,

"I feel the need to clarify, Cooke-vumash, that what you feel and what you remember is very much still in the present, even if those who were once part of your life as you knew it regard you in the past after your passing. I also feel the need to clarify that you, as a raen, are nothing like that flickering memory of an existence in Ghost Town—" He sighed, shifting in the leather chair, which groaned and squeaked in resistance while he huffed and winced in response. Settling again, sitting up more, his gaze drifted to the fire, taking a slow breath to gather his thoughts and how best to present them, turning them over in his too-knowledgable, too-young mind for another sip of chan,

"—a ghost is just a piece of someone: incomplete, broken, and unable to escape Vitan material existence for some reason or another that has yet to be understood or properly studied. Zjai, your former body is dead, but what you are experiencing is that you, your soul, Tom Cooke's very vibrant soul in its entirety, did not return to the Cycle as everyone else does to be washed back into the stream of being and await the next life. One unfortunate circumstance of this mystery is that while there is a slow, entropic decay of memory and mind as decades stretch toward centuries, everything is very much still who you were. It is a heavy burden."

That last bit was spoken as an apology, Ezre slowly looking back to Tom only to squirm uncomfortably under his returned jab, the raen quite capable of reaching past the Hoxian's thinly veiled personal layers that were already worn thinner still by exhaustion, by the privacy of his own dorm, and by the subtle intoxication of the warm drink they shared.

He smirked at the other man's admission of how early and untimely his own death was, one eyebrow raising just so in a visible expression of surprise, not expecting such an age coming from the lips of a middle-aged galdor's borrowed body. The dark-haired boy hummed something in Deftung into purple foam, shaking his head at the realization that he had such a limited understanding of time and how to spend it, both by the nature of his birth as a galdor and by the choices he'd made thus far in his own life path.

"Zjai. You are not wrong. I know my own mind."

Ezre breathed his words with unfiltered shyness, sinking a bit behind his cup, totally blushing under the more purposeful gaze of the not-Incumbent's pale but bleary blue eyes, "A relationship of any kind is more than just a one-sided decision, of course. We have a friendship based on many things in common, and while I would like to say I have perceived a mutual interest in more than platonic exchanges, I will admit my own reluctance to say such things out loud. I do not want—"

He had said it already, that he did not want to ruin a good thing by introducing something unwelcome. He had also admitted that he was somewhat confident that such advances would prove themselves welcome instead of unwanted.

So was it simply cowardice?

Inexperience was a frustratingly clumsy thing: he found himself at once enthused and eager and yet at the same time hesitant and terrified. The dark-haired boy wrestled with self-control and dutifully attempted to respect the privacy of others, and yet he'd come to realize how he lacked the desire to upkeep any of it in Lilanee's company.

"—I do not want to miss my opportunity, if I am being honest." Ezre smiled, somewhat stupidly in his honest revelation, boyish and open with a stranger he'd just met hours ago in the frigid quiet of a phasmonia of all places, unexpected but not entirely unwelcome. A dangerous surprise, perhaps, but it seemed to the Hexxos acolyte as though they'd both come to the same conclusion to trust one another not merely out of necessity but maybe—just maybe, the boy hoped without saying so aloud—out of an amicable enough sense of companionship, "I do not consider it as life-threatening a risk as you sound familiar with taking, but it is a strange sensation to feel so afraid of something that could turn out so pleasant—"

The Hoxian chuckled, almost coyly, before sighing and staring at the inked lines on his fingers wrapped as they were around his mug instead of meeting Tom's gaze further, "—especially considering my own risk-taking behavior has otherwise been established earlier today as a comparison."
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Tom Cooke
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Sat Oct 05, 2019 3:05 pm

Dormitory C Brunnhold
Late Afternoon on the 9th of Bethas, 2719
He reckoned Ezre’d seen it. He reckoned it’d played out on his face fair clear, and he cursed himself, ’cause he knew he was a fool to let it. It was the chan, maybe, blurring his head and making him feel all those buried aches; it was the stress of the day that’d strained them both gossamer-thin. Or it was the thinning of that line between the here and the there, the living and the dead, the way it felt like anything could’ve been possible. All the new words Tom had skittering round in his head, all the questions that pattered their feet just out of his reach. And the lad’s prying questions weren’t helping.

So all that hurt must’ve bled out into the air between them like so much sap. Ezre struck at the heart of it, and Tom found himself shutting his eyes again, his brow furrowed. It was pained, but not in the way it’d been before. It was just that he hadn’t expected a response at all, much less one that spoke to so much of what had been weighing on him for months.

The words very vibrant soul loosened the knot of his expression. He laughed a little, just a husk in his throat, frayed and tired. When he looked at Ezre again, it was with a smile, bemused and sad. “You make being a raen sound like a hell of a time.” His voice wavered, cracked just a pina manna. To smooth it out, he took a last sip of chan, finishing off his cup.

“I appreciate it, Ezre.” His tone was fair serious, that time. “I know,” he went on, careful-like, taking a deep breath and thinking what he could give Ezre in return, “I know there’s nothing – simple about it. I know I’m the same soul I’ve always been, but I can’t say if – even if I wore the same face I always did, I can’t say my hama would recognize me. I can’t say I’m still the man my hama loved.” He paused, even more careful, before that second my hama; he could’ve said he, but he didn’t think he was ready to give that piece of himself. “I was being a cranky erse if I took what you said to mean the life I used to live isn’t part of me anymore. But even if it’s part of me –”

He settled the cup back in his lap, nestled in quilt. Sucking at his tooth, he stared down at the tea-things on the table in between them.

“Maybe that’s why you Hexxos do it the way you do it – maybe it makes it easier to accept that – that the you from five years ago wouldn’t even recognize the you now. I don’t know if it’s possible to mourn yourself.” Still smiling that smile, bitter and grateful all at the same time, he looked back up at Ezre. “But I reckon it’s only natural that things change, right? Even with regular, living folks. Some doors close, others open, all that shit. It’s just hard to let go.”

Tom laughed softly when Ezre’s eyes darted away from his; he watched the younger galdor fiddle with his mug. He laughed again, harder, at the mention of Ezre’s penchant for a gamble.

It puzzled him, and just then, he didn’t quite know what to say. It wasn’t just because he himself’d never felt that kind of fear, but that was part of it. He reckoned it’d all come backwards, for him; love was a tempest, quick and wild and uncertain, and you grabbed on tight before life eventually swept you apart. He’d never thought there was any reason to hesitate, acting on desires, ’cause you might never get another chance, and none of it’d matter when you were sunk at the bottom of the Mahogany. He’d been too young, maybe, stitching up his heart for the fifteenth time, hiding it behind its scars.

Maybe it wasn’t too different, after all. “It’s easier, ain’t it?” he offered after a moment, wistful. “When the risks you’re taking are just about you. Somebody else leaps into the fray, shit gets all messy. You think you’re fair good at protecting your own heart, eh? Then, suddenly, it’s doing whatever the hell it wants to, and now you’ve got somebody else’s to think about, too. Ne, some kinds of risks are easier than others.”
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Ezre Vks
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Sun Oct 06, 2019 11:26 pm

Dormitory C
Late Afternoon on the 9th of Bethas, 2719
Having lived sequestered, sheltered early life, nestled in the Spondola Mountains far from anywhere even remotely resembling the Kingdom of Anaxas and having spent his earliest school years at Freckstat—which was, by all measures, a much smaller, much more isolated university than Brunnhold—Ezre's experiences far from home had all been mind-altering in some ways and eye-opening in others. His knowledge was esoteric, impractical, and spiritually abstract in comparison to what most young galdori his age here in this school and this kingdom considered important or even noteworthy. He was aware that he was stranger than most, but it was perhaps his strange sense of optimism even in the most unusual of afterlife situations that might have marked him as unique even among his own people.

The dark-haired boy chuckled over the rim of what was left of his chan, but he shook his head softly, slowly, "I am not unaware of the difficulties, though I suppose my perspective is influenced by my umah: biased by love, you might say. Umah is fond of saying that it is easier to remember your faults and failings than it is to remember all of your kindnesses and your successes, even as all the decades slip by. Of course things change, but that seems to be universal with the living as well as the dead. That does not make anything more or less simple for you than it is for me, however."

He smiled, noting the raen's hesitation over word choice, inferring from context the meaning of his Tek word for the lover Tom had been forced to leave behind. Did he make any attempts to discern further than that? Dru. It was none of his business, after all, and it was clear that lingering on what could no longer be whatever he'd once had hurt in this new present he now existed in. He'd already spoke of the family he grew up with, but this person he'd loved had not been mentioned along with children. Or in any other context. He was left to simply respect the obviouis depths of Tom's feelings, and that was more than enough.

"The Passing of Vessels is not taken lightly among my Order. Sacrifice, even among the willing, still requires the giving away of something one cannot ever have back."

The Hexxos acolyte offered quietly, glancing down into the last of his chan with a look of nostalgia sinking into his delicate features. He missed home very much, more so than he'd bothered to linger on until now—the unraveling of so many carefully-laid layers by so much chan exposing his innermost self to the Bethas chill like possession had brought a deep ache into his bones, "I do not doubt that the raen we harbor among our small, spiritual gathering would be better able to speak of mourning a life your are no longer supposed to be living. Should you ever wish the wisdom of those who have walked your path, I would gladly bring you to my home."

Ezre emptied his cup then, only to gurgle that last sip just to keep it in because Tom's laugh brought a heat to his cheeks, the warmth of very real embarrassment at just how much of himself he'd revealed in so few words burning its way down his throat. Other than what the once-human had snuck into the strange twists and turns of their conversations thus far, the dark-haired boy knew nothing of the man's life before he woke stranded as a hungry soul, desperate for a body to act as an anchor to his persistent existence. He'd clearly loved, and not simply in that romantic, idyllic sort of sharing of emotions that were slathered into books and whispered about in the cafeteria between lower form girls and their mediocre Anaxi cuisine.

Maybe his mind drifted a little. His dark, dilated gaze grew distant while the raen spoke of matters of the heart with an uncomfortable level of experience that was blatantly beyond his own. Lost for a breath or two somewhere in the thick of his own unspoken feelings that Tom's words had stirred from and the unrequited desires that everything the other man hadn't said dredged up by the liquid openness of a mugful of chan, Ezre sank deeper into his chair with a long exhale through his teeth, aware he couldn't hide.

"It is." He agreed with a breath, shoulders sagging while he let his head lean back against the well-worn leather chair. It was easy to take risks when it was just about himself—the healed layers of cuts that laced over the un-inked flesh of his palms spoke just as clearly to that truth as the deep exhaustion that gnawed into his joints and swam through his veins after possession—

Possession.

Ezre frowned.

He was distractedly intoxicated enough that his usually well-controlled, unexpressive face was full of so many emotions at once. It had been easier to offer his whole self to a ghost than it was to give what felt like even enough of himself to Lilanee Kuleda.

It felt like a strange kind of betrayal—but of who?

"By Bash's immovable patience—why are the difficult risks so exciting? There is so little I feel afraid of, and yet, zjai, my innermost self does what it wants—has done. Will continue to do. I cannot seem to help myself and yet—"

The boy waved a tattooed hand slowly, almost languidly in the raen's direction,

"—I hesitate to be transparent—with her. Yet not with you: a stranger who just so happens to be some kind of supernatural being who I trust purely based on my own specifically peculiar but isolated origins. But her? Well, we have known each other longer and she knows so little of this. So little of me. I will admit that now that I know just what possession feels like, perhaps I should really make better choices. Or at least take different risks with softer, warmer bodies than with cold, hungry ghosts."

Ezre half-groaned, half-laughed like the boy he really was, tilting his head to look back at Tom, dark eyes full of youthful indecision, full of a turmoil he didn't understand and wasn't yet experienced enough to sift through well. He smiled, though, amused and adrift in the open waters of feeling and thought that just enough chan had dragged him to.

Not that he would know what to do with a body, but he was quite sure he could figure it out if given the opportunity.

"I have Hexxos secrets to protect. I have beings like you to keep safe. I do not want to make a mistake and hurt this friend or end up hurt myself. I cannot see where my boundaries are because in her company, I find I do not want anything between us—"

Anything.

The dark-haired boy giggled again and tucked himself just a little further into his blanket.

"—I have had just enough chan to be ridiculous, I think. I am sorry. Today has been ridiculous enough that you do not need my childish burdens."
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Tom Cooke
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Tue Oct 22, 2019 5:07 pm

Dormitory C Brunnhold
Late Afternoon on the 9th of Bethas, 2719
He was grateful, in his way, Ezre’d not offered to pry any deeper into his old life, his hama. Grateful, in a sad kind of way, he reckoned – though the sadness surprised him, and he couldn’t figure a reason for it. The silence that followed saw him sinking deeper into the couch again, and this time, he couldn’t half recover himself. He watched Ezre levelly across the table, sipping his own steaming cup of chan. Nobody’d called him Tom in months, and something about the way the lad saw him – saw him proper – made him want to spill everything. But he couldn’t; there was too much pain in the way.

Another pause, and his eyes fluttered shut. He shifted in his nest of blankets, keeping his hand cupped over his mug.

The Passing of Vessels. He should’ve known, he supposed, they had a benny name for it. It didn’t feel much like a passing, to Tom; a wrangling, a strangling, more like. But then, the way he pictured it, the Hexxos and the raen both were readier for it than he’d been when he’d done it.

He thought he could picture it, almost. It wasn’t hard, with the smell of chan drifting up from the cup in his lap, wafting through the air. Images of torch-lit temple halls filled his head, heady with their own incense, thronged with shadows. With his eyes shut, with a strange, melancholy sort of warmth drifting through him –

He opened his eyes, squinting as the shape of Ezre came back into focus opposite him. “Would you?” He was all slurry with sleep; he forced himself to speak proper. “Oes, I think I’d like that. Hell, ’s’further… further than I ever gone, ever in my life. To think of tellin’ hama I went to Hox. I never left the Rose, when I was alive, and Brunnhold’s the furthest I ever…”

His words were getting away from him. Pushing himself up, he smiled a mellow smile at Ezre. “Thank you, lad. I’d like that fair much,” he repeated.

Never met another raen, he thought suddenly. The idea gave him a strange feeling, like moths flapping their wings in his belly. He didn’t know he liked it; he didn’t know what he’d do, if he met another raen. Before today, he hadn’t known they existed, and the knowledge hadn’t worked its way into his brain proper yet.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to think on it more, ’cause Ezre was talking again. He blinked his eyes open again – when’d he shut them? – and forced himself to focus on the lad’s face. His brow furrowed, at first, but then he burst out with a messy snort. “Some kind of supernatural being,” he grated, shaking his head, then resting it back on the couch. As the lad went on about softer, warmer bodies, and then about precisely how much he wanted between him and this chip, he let out another laugh; unexpectedly, he found himself shaking with it.

Ezre was quiet, after a moment, and Tom lifted his head up, regarding him through lidded eyes. “Ne burden, lad, ne burden. I miss talkin’ about shit like this. It’s been the last thing on my mind ever since I died, but I’m still a man.” He gave Ezre a tired, sad grin. “I reckon it ain’t easy, all those lines you got to walk. The Hexxos and your ma and all that shit you got to keep secret. I don’t blame you for not wantin’ to let anyone in.”

Shrugging, he nestled deeper into the quilt, pulling it up round his chin. He blinked out at Ezre from above it. He’d lost his train of thought; he found it again, but he found the thread of it frayed. His expression got serious, and his mouth moved for a few seconds without anything coming out.

“This’s – they can’t expect you to – I know what it’s like, now, to have a wall between me and everybody else,” he went on after a pause, “to have to – you can’t live like that. It ain’t livin’. You and me, we’re both flesh and blood men. We have feelings, and we, uh… deserve to… let people in.”

He barely knew what he was saying, and when it came out of his mouth, he couldn’t help but laugh. Mung chroveshit! It made him laugh again, and soon, he was shaking again. Somewhere along the way, he’d shut his eyes, and now he was wondering why he’d ever tried to keep them open. He settled his head back.

“I don’t know what else to say, ye chen? Trust yourself, or somethin’,” he murmured. He felt himself drifting on the smell of chan, such that he’d halfway forgot who he was talking to. Those two words, trust yourself, the mungness of all of it – he let out another snorting giggle, without knowing why.

He wasn’t thinking of much of anything when he fell asleep. It’d been a long, long day out in the cold, but it was warm, now, and he was bundled up on somebody’s sofa in somebody’s quilt. No ghosts, no broken Cycle, no silver pocket-watches and secret orders. He reckoned none of the rest of it much mattered.
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