He follows, and he listens to her, the tales of the spectacular children and grandchildren. He feels a strange ache in the hollow of his chest when they speak of children, and he wonders, not for the first time, if he has any of his own. If he was good to them, and what they’re doing now, if they’re even alive.
They make it to Ischia, a kingdom unknown to him in all lives, and they find Agetta’s daughter – Beyza, she had said her name was. The magician. Garbage smiles at her, still feeling that gnaw of hope, and though a strange look crosses her face when she sees him, he tries not to ponder on it.
He greets her, and they explain his plight, and he locks eyes with the magician. There is something still in her gaze, something he cannot put a name to but feels it on his skin, and he wishes she would articulate it. Perhaps he is unfixable, after all, and she is trying to find the kindest way to tell him.

Are you sure? Beyza asks, and there’s something in that tone, too, but Garbage doesn’t dwell on it. He’s too damn hopeful, the taste of his old life on his tongue, and he, so blissfully unaware of all the sins in that old life.
“Yes,” he says, and his voice resonates with surety, because he thinks, in his naivety, that there could be no worse life than one lived without a past.
“Please,” he adds, “please, I want to be whole again.”
The magician sighs – or maybe he just imagined that – and she touches him on the forehead. It’s a kind touch, but it does not ignite him in the way Agetta had, and he wonders, briefly, why that is. He feels a sense of opening, recesses of his mind waking, and then the memories hit like earthquakes.

He remembers his mother, her screams, he remembers the way she had broken beneath him, his own skull breaking, eyes on the sand, is this enough, is this enough--
He remembers the magician making him whole and loving him until he didn’t, leaving him with that magic-got son who he raised alone until it became too much—
He remembers the boy, too young, shivering in the cold, and him, too old, saying I could keep you warm--
He remembers dying, seawater in his lungs, following a dead woman to the bottom of the ocean and thinking finally--
He remembers bodies, so many, and some love him and some think him only a passing fancy, and he deserved none of them—
He remembers her. That kindness. That forgiveness.
And she does not remember him. He knows this, now, too. Hindsight is so glaring in its obviousness. He doesn’t know why she doesn’t remember him – maybe she’d died, too – but he knows she doesn’t. She had brought him here out of that same kindness that had made him fall in love with her, but not because she felt anything other for him. And perhaps that is for the best, he thinks now, fully reacquainted with his host of sins. It must have been a burden, to love him, and he is glad she is free from it, even if he doesn’t know how he can look at her, because it will be obvious now, surely, writ plain upon him.
His eyes have been closed as the inundation of memory took place, but now, he opens them. Looks at the magician. Wonders if she knows. Surely she does.

He looks at Agetta. How could he have ever forgotten her? He manages a smile, and maybe it’s genuine enough, because how can he not smile when he looks at her? He doesn’t need to be remembered to love her.
“Agetta,” he says, and oh, what a treasure it is to say her name with memory behind it, “you have a wonderful family.”
He looks back to the magician.
“Thank you,” he says, and maybe his voice breaks, and then he catches Beyza’s eyes, and thinks: don’t tell her. Please.

He doesn’t expect Beyza to reply. He doesn’t know what he expects, really – he is still reeling from the shockwaves of his revelations, still reeling at the sight of her. Everything is shifting and unsteady - like sand, he thinks, and suppresses a shudder – but he is doing his best to hold his ground. To not wear his new knowledge so nakedly, the memories that already seem impossible to forget.
Maybe not so impossible. Because Agetta forgot, too.
She wanted it, the forgetting, and how could he blame her? For this is the new revelation – he is the cause of it. He shouldn’t be surprised – he always knew he would disappoint her.
He wants to apologize even though she wouldn’t know what he’s apologizing for. The apology still sits ready on his lips, as familiar as breathing. He did not mean to hurt her – never, never – but just because there was no intention behind it - no knowledge, even - doesn’t mean that she didn’t hurt because of his actions. His awful words.
(Because he remembers that too now, doesn’t he? Those stupid words. You’re nothing to me. A stupid, inadvertent cruelty. And he can read the true depths of her pain as he plays that memory in hindsight, knowing what he does now. He’s such a damned fool.)

Be kind to her says the magician in his mind, and he thinks, of course, always.
He wasn’t kind to her on the riverbank though, was he? How could he possibly atone for that?
(He wonders if he could have fought harder. If maybe he had tried harder, thought on it more, visited every inch of Beqanna trying to spark some memory – could this have been avoided? Could he have known sooner?)
(But no. He had only just died when he cut her to ribbons with his words. Some cruelties are unavoidable, maybe.)

Beyza leaves them with the promise of a sunset and for a moment Garbage wants to beg her not to go. He isn’t sure how to be alone with this woman he so deeply loves.
“Thank you,” he says again as she leaves, and then they are alone beneath a sky that has barely begun to change and Agetta asks how he is, a question he has never been less sure on how to answer.
“Yes, better,” he says, then takes a breath, “there was…a lot that I had forgotten. More than I thought. Some of it was wonderful. Some of it was…difficult to remember.”

There is a pause before he answers her, knowing what he does now – what her daughter has done for her.
(He will think, later, on the irony of this – how they have gone to the same magician with their pleas, how she has removed and put back memories on the both of them.)
“Yes,” he says, “it’s better, to know who I am. What I’ve done.”
And it is. Even as he’s seen these sins unravel, he knows, at least, that they are a core part of him. An ugly, rotting part, perhaps – but still part of him. He would not want to go about his life without knowing what he has done, because he must be repentant for it, he must be better than he was.
This is not to say he judges her at all for what she did. He is glad she has done it. He is used to pain – he will always hurt, he thinks – but he knows now that he would die to keep her happy. An excision from her memory in exchange for her happiness is a wonderful bargain.
(He thinks she is happy. He hopes.)

She begins to move, and he follows without hesitation. It’s risky, probably – he doesn’t know how to act anymore, doesn’t know how to behave like someone who is not in love with her – but he is helpless before her. It is a familiar feeling, and he thinks it’s worth it, the knowledge of his sins, because he knows things like this, too.
“No,” he says, when she asks if he’s been here before, “I was always a nomad. The only kingdom I knew was the Deserts, and they’re long gone.”
He’s glad for this. He’s glad that that particular place can only exist in his memories.
“It’s a lovely place, though,” he says, though truth he told, he hasn’t noticed much of it. But any place where she’s present is a lovely place.
“Do you visit here often?” he asks, a banal question, but it’s either that or say once you saw me in the deserts, saw the worst part of me, and you spoke to me about forgiveness and maybe that’s when I first loved you or maybe it was before that, even, and of course he can’t say that, but maybe she knows about the deserts and maybe that’s enough.

He smiles at that, although a bit ruefully. He had known she was once Queen of the Gates – he recalls her telling him this, once, but it had been in passing, not something they had discussed in depth. He had not dwelled on it much, he had not known any of the other kingdoms, had not cared when they crumbled into the sea.
“My mother was queen there,” he says, “but I didn’t stay in the Deserts long.”
A bit of an understatement. He only visited there twice, and then again, decades later, in that strange dream that hadn’t been a dream, the quest that had brought Agetta to him in the first place. The thing she no longer remembers.
He wonders, in a horrible way, how much Beyza had excised from Agetta’s mind. If he’d told her his mother had been Craft and if, god forbid, the two had met, what would Agetta say? Oh yes, Craft, wasn’t she murdered by her awful son? Such a shame.
(In truth, Agetta had been kind to him when she knew the circumstances. She had offered him forgiveness and he can still remember that feeling, like birds taking flight within him, a kind of beautiful weightlessness that he had not known he was able to experience.)

There is another hesitation when she mentions Mazikeen. He wonders how much their daughter knows of the events that transpired. He has not seen her since his accident, of course, and the news she may have had a child of her own causes a sort of bittersweet joy. He had not known any of his children long enough to see them have children of their own. He should find her, he supposes, though perhaps she hates him now, for what he did to her mother. Or maybe Beyza wiped him from Maze’s memory, too.
“Are you close with all your children?” he asks, thinking, again, of is own. He hasn’t seen Bad, either, not since before. He’d gotten the sense Bad was bored of him, or disappointed in him, so when the boy began to wander off Garbage had made little moves to stop it, until one day, Bad simply hadn’t come back. Garbage thinks, not for the first time, that he is a terrible father and the children are no doubt better off without him.

The sky, like so much else, has begun to change.
Garbage watches it as she talks. He watches the horizon because he still feels exposed when he looks at her too long, sure that his devotion to her would be writ plain upon his face. For all his sins, he has never been much of a liar, and deceit – even if it is for good – does not come easy to him. But his ears flick as he listens, not missing a word, as she talks of her children. They have shared this information before, and it’s not much he doesn’t know (though he had not met Beyza before today, he had met some of the others, and he particularly remembers the rainbow-sheened filly, when he had come across them, a mirror of the way she had come across him and Bad).
“I think all your children are lucky to have you,” he says. It’s not quite a response to her comments – it’s vague – but he also believes this, because he saw how she was with Mazikeen, saw how she was with Holler, and he has no doubt she extended that same kindness to her other offspring. He looks at her when he says it, notices how the changing light reflects in her blue eyes. He has always loved her eyes.

She asks of his children, and he hesitates. He looks back at the horizon, at the ever-lowering sun. It will be dark soon, he thinks, and then what? He will have to bid her goodbye at some point – her good deed was done, after all – but he cannot yet think too much on that.
“Some, in my younger years, but I didn’t know them well,” he says. There were dalliances, and he supposes children came from some of them, but he didn’t know them. And there were the children he had with Tabytha – the twins they left on the beach, especially – but that is too much to bring up.
“Magic let me birth two sons, as well,” he says, “but one I haven’t seen in years, and one...I don’t think he cared for me.”
You met him, he wants to say, and you loved me anyway.

The way the dying light reflects on the water is striking. He doesn’t take his eyes off of it because it’s romantic, this scene, and here he is trying not to love her and telling her what an awful father he is. He could have a thousand chances and never get this right.
“It’s beautiful,” he says, “the way the light hits the water. I didn’t think I’d like the water, after drowning in it twice now, but from here…it’s lovely.”