feel kinda dead inside, don't know why

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He sat alone, hands clasped with one wrist folded over the other, palm pressed into palm. How he fit his chin comfortably among the pieces of gold decorating the backs of his gloves was anyone's guess. Maybe he didn't; maybe it hurt just like everything else did. But there he sat, simply...simply brooding.

"Keep remembering...things."

He said it aloud, because if he didn't say it then he'd just keep thinking it, and forget all the things he'd remembered, and then the thought he'd thunk too, and then he'd think about that for another few minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and then where would he be? Probably lain futilely in bed trying to locate the brittle bases of the synapses keeping him locked up half-asleep, half-dead.

"Minoth?"

So purposefully did his eyes look anywhere but at and into hers. And yet he was still, quite genuinely, distracted. There wasn't room for any more input. Other things had put out, and put him out, far and away way way way too much already.

"Don't know what. Just things."

The things on the table just then were knitting needles and counter gauges and scraps of paper and bits of yarn, all aside of the notebook lying suspiciously open and suspiciously clear. He counted them, and reconciled them, and furrowed his brow and recalled something and forgot it and felt it slither out from between the cracks in his teeth and out from the hollows of his eye sockets and behind the swallowing muscles of his ears.

"Do you feel alright?"

Mhm. He swallowed.

"Feel like dying."

He still didn't look, but now her gaze was locked onto him, no longer just a passing concerned glance. No longer was he so normal.

"Like wh-...?" She was too old, which is to say too set up and into this dead world's ways, to actually be surprised, but it was more blunt than his usual. He spoke in shorter sentences, when perturbed, perhaps because he hadn't the energy and perhaps because he hadn't the confidence.

Perhaps because those were the same damned thing. Oh, so many questions and equivalencies. Too many questions. Not enough answers.

"No, not like that. Just. Like."

He waved a hand, and hardly saw its trail before it tucked back in and his chin lunged down and he saw in his mind's eye the needles come crashing up in violence from the table. Like I'm here. Like I'm there. Like I'm already gone.

"Like I'm already gone. Like I must be. The way my head feels. Maybe I've been away from him too long. I dunno."

The cock of her head was all gravity, and then again no pull nor push nor shove.

"Him? Why, Addam's just outside, and he's only been for a matter of minutes. Are you sure you're alright, darling?"

He hadn't said he was. But, one supposes there is a difference between feeling alright and being so. And maybe he wasn't, or maybe he was. But that didn't matter if he didn't feel it. Right? Right.

"Not sure how to feel about the fact that I, ah...exist."

Because as he existed, he didn't truly exist separate from Amalthus, but to Flora the Quaestor-turned-Praetor wasn't even a passing thought, as she repeatedly smoothed out the tube of a sock half-spiraled on the table and picked irritatedly (as the sinusoidal shape went, on her way to irritably soon enough) at stitches creeping open and loose. She wasn't calling him silly, and she didn't even think he was being silly (or, was silly, rather), but she didn't understand.

True to learned form, she answered: "I'm not going to sit here and tell you, why, I like you, so you shouldn't worry about it, or I see that it's fine, so you should too, but I can't say that I agree with you. I can't say that I see where you're coming from."

The heels of his hands were already pressed to his forehead, and soon enough his fingertips came around the top of his head to make complete the frustration. "Too many things in here. Don't know how to count them anymore. And I just wonder if it would be better if I'd refused him." Backwards independence you didn't have, but nevertheless. "If I'd never tried to leave."

Because then I wouldn't know all these things I know. My head wouldn't be full of all this excess information. It's not that I wish I didn't remember, not nearly that I wish I'd died, just that...

"Well, I do like the things that are in there. I like knowing your thoughts."

"Really? All of them? Even the ones about how I forgot the hyphens in that dictation I took for Addam to inquire about what's happening in Tantal, and it's been bothering me ever since, and I have a whole notebook dedicated to noting down those things on lists, lists, interminable lists and lists of lists, so I don't kill myself thinking about them over and over and over and over again?"

Such a long sentence. He felt winded. His eyes swam. None of this mattered. None of it could hurt him, or them, or anyone. But it felt so dangerous. It felt so defeating.

But Flora was strong. "Especially those, actually, because my knowing them is what helps you deal with them. But I like your stories too, you know. Don't think just because you don't tell them to us so often anymore that I don't think of every one I have heard so fondly."

Oh, this again. "I don't tell them because they aren't good."

Oh, that again. "Nonsense. I think they're lovely."

"A million others could do the same, and a million times better."

"But they wouldn't be yours. I know you want to be great, but isn't it enough, at least for now, to be ours?"

"Flora, that's..."

Useless defense, in all world fora. Nothing has any value except that subjective, but if the artist hates his art for being less subjectively praised than that of others, the art is objectively garbage because no one enjoys it completely. Horrible rodent wheel. You can never bring everyone up at once. You can only bring yourself down, down, down.

"Selfish, I know. But we're both very selfish about you, when it comes down to it. You could be anyone's. But you chose, at least once, to be ours. So I hold onto you very tightly, in the hopes that you won't slip away."

He wanted to slip away. He needed to slip away. How could he ever manage, like this? Would anyone ever even understand this pale, oblique, hungry sort of all-consuming stress? "Once I finish...then I'll be fine." That was one way of expressing it, anyway.

"You'll be finished when you're dead, love. I know you better than to not know that."

"Maybe so. You're very sweet."

The door opened at a wholly moderate pace, and Addam entered, steps slow as dirt crumbled down from the tips of his fingers. "Somebody rang for me?"

"Never," said Minoth, at the same time as "Always," said Flora, and then they looked at each other and found it within themselves to laugh, so freely to laugh, because on any other day it would be a toss-up who would say which, but they'd almost never agree - almost.

Addam took the third seat, shuffling it closer to Minoth's just as Flora did, and with their weight on his arms and shoulders the Flesh Eater felt some of the pressure, fuzzy and scuzzy and filthy and grimy and nasty and ugly and augh, Architect, so painful, drain down out of the base of his skull.

"It's very quiet, all of a sudden." He shouldn't have said so, because then that'd be a hell of a jinx, but it was worth a try at normalcy, anyway.

"We needn't always be loud," mused Addam sensibly. "Are you tired?"

Easy question. Always too easy. Not one that deserved to be asked. Better people were answering more direct and pressing ones all the time. "Not tired enough to get up now."

Flora smiled, head leant into the curving space just between collar and shoulder. "Doesn't that make you too tired?"

Oh... "We always do this."

"Do what?"

"Argue about nothing, and then not-argue about nothing, and then argue about not-arguing about nothing about nothing. Always." Nothing. Always. Nothing.

There it was again. Why do we always talk of nothing but self-serving nonsense in this house? Who does it help?

And is that even the ultimate goal? To be agreeable? Or maybe that's...

"But do you feel alright?"

No. Never. Never have, never will. Never have thought it possible for long.

"For the moment, I suppose. Before I start...remembering things again."

"Well then," Flora cut in to take up the reins of the conversation. "I won't tell you that remembering things doesn't become you, but if it hurts you, try the nothing again, won't you?"

"Flora, you're silly."

"That's right!" And a kiss for his right cheek and a kiss for his left jaw, and things were quieter still. She paused a while, to study up her incipient platitudes. Addam moved his arms to circle about Minoth's neck, and hold him tighter. In the middle of it all, he just closed his eyes and tried to take deeper breaths.

It's okay that I exist. It's okay that I'm alive, that I take up this space and breathe this air. For now, anyway. And when tomorrow comes and tries to beat me, I'll try to fight back all over again.

"But you're not." Not fighting? Not okay? No, not silly. "You're Minoth just the way you are. You shouldn't change, if you can help it, and you shouldn't not change, if you can't. Right?"

He sighed, breathing out as fully as he could when he was being compressed from both sides by warm, sleepy bodies. "I think what you mean to say is that if I like myself the way I am, I should try to keep that man, and if I don't, I shouldn't."

"And do you?"

"I...I don't know." Of course I don't. And that's the whole...gah, Architect damn it.

False promise. Dyke-plug solution. And what use is a wall, anyway?

Now she sighed, and her hands moved to circle his waist. "Oh, Minoth, I'm sorry. I wish I had answers. I wish I knew. I wish Addam knew, even if he couldn't know so well how to tell you."

A low murmur came: "I'm afraid I'm all out of answers tonight, anyway, even if I ever had yours. My mind, too, is full."

The fourth chair, yet, was empty.

"Don't know how I can keep living, being so broken. Don't know how you two do it."

No one spoke. There were the sounds of several choked, unsatisfying swallows.