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.”
@Agetta