[Loved ones. If it was as straightforward as that, would it make this any easier? Would it make him more or less inclined to seek out the answers for himself instead of skulking about on the periphery like a spectre, some pale ghost. The feelings in him, they're fierce and strange and convoluted, poised always somewhere between love and hate, fear and longing, adulation and despair. He feels them all now with added sharpness, the old emotions honed down to a knife's edge quality now that he's faced with the possibility that it could all have been turned to wrack and ruin.
Not so very long ago, he'd thought it was only a matter of time before he came apart, piece by fractured piece. How absurd it seems, to think that he could be the only survivor, now.
But much like this stranger's thoughts on his lost friend, unknown to him as such thoughts are, it seems preposterous to think of Mother contained somewhere in here, frozen in place, sleeping beneath a shield of glass. She's too big bright all-encompassing to be held at bay by anything so mundane...but on the flipside of that, it seems just as absurd to think she could have been destroyed.
As for Heine. Well. That's different, but if he doesn't have that point of reference against which to define himself, if he no longer has the promise of a final reckoning to keep driving him forward, then surely he has nothing at all.
It's too much, all of this. It fills up his head and knocks against his ribs until he finds it difficult to breathe, metal bands snapped tight around his lungs, constricting him. As such, there's hesitation in him when the stranger makes his suggestion (if that's what it can be called), and almost he doesn't respond to it, almost turns sharp on his heel and walks away.
But then the moment breaks, and with that same somnambulistic quality, as though his body doesn't quite belong to him (it never really has, has it?), he instead finds himself moving forward, hot on the stranger's heels. The interior of the stasis unit rises in acres of metal and glass and sleeping bodies in terrible alternation, the distance between him and everything else seeming uncrossable, somehow. But he tails the green-haired man all the same.
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Not so very long ago, he'd thought it was only a matter of time before he came apart, piece by fractured piece. How absurd it seems, to think that he could be the only survivor, now.
But much like this stranger's thoughts on his lost friend, unknown to him as such thoughts are, it seems preposterous to think of Mother contained somewhere in here, frozen in place, sleeping beneath a shield of glass. She's too big bright all-encompassing to be held at bay by anything so mundane...but on the flipside of that, it seems just as absurd to think she could have been destroyed.
As for Heine. Well. That's different, but if he doesn't have that point of reference against which to define himself, if he no longer has the promise of a final reckoning to keep driving him forward, then surely he has nothing at all.
It's too much, all of this. It fills up his head and knocks against his ribs until he finds it difficult to breathe, metal bands snapped tight around his lungs, constricting him. As such, there's hesitation in him when the stranger makes his suggestion (if that's what it can be called), and almost he doesn't respond to it, almost turns sharp on his heel and walks away.
But then the moment breaks, and with that same somnambulistic quality, as though his body doesn't quite belong to him (it never really has, has it?), he instead finds himself moving forward, hot on the stranger's heels. The interior of the stasis unit rises in acres of metal and glass and sleeping bodies in terrible alternation, the distance between him and everything else seeming uncrossable, somehow. But he tails the green-haired man all the same.
For the moment, he says nothing.]