She is the first one to touch him since his unwitting rebirth.
He doesn’t tell her this, because it seems like a burden, this confession – that she is his first, but not. He lets het touch him, he holds his breath, doesn’t move, as if she will startle if he does. He doesn’t want it to end, this touch, but it does, all too soon. Which makes sense – they are strangers, after all. The fact that he wants to close this distance, wants to touch her himself, is something he holds within himself.
(I like to think it would always be like this. That in every lifetime, her touch would set him ablaze, even without memory behind it.)
“Thank you,” he says. He means this for her response, her condolences, but maybe it’s for more.
She mentions a daughter, then – a magician. He feels a flicker of fear at the word, though, like so much else he feels, he cannot articulate why. He does not know, of course, that his mother was a magician, that Garbage himself has borne children to two different magicians as well, that magicians have been a great and horrible thing in his lifetime.
In this life, he has never met a magician. So why should he fear them?
“That’s very kind,” he says, then, “would she be willing to help a stranger?”
He can’t help the desperation that laces his words. He wants so badly so be helped.
@Agetta