oh, a man ain't a man unless he has desire )
Her apology is unnecessary and, as such, easily discarded.
Apologies had always made him uncomfortable anyway.
Just the whole concept of taking responsibility for his own actions. Or, if he was the one being apologized to, absolving someone of guilt. If he had palms, surely it would make them itch. As it stood, though, they merely made him want to crawl out of his own skin.
So, he moves past it as quickly as he can. Doesn’t bother to acknowledge it. Hopes that she’ll follow suit and not try to force him to tell her that she was forgiven. He’d known plenty of women like that in his day. Women desperate for reassurance. Or, even more specifically, women deadset on finding reassurance in the very last place they’d ever find it. Antidote had never been built for stroking egos or soothing broken hearts or making anyone feel like they were worthwhile. How he’d managed to maintain a herd for so many years was really anyone’s guess because he had never been what you’d call personable or even mildly pleasant. Quite frankly, he’d been an asshole and that was one thing, at least, that had not changed.
She mentions a gate. He doesn’t remember hearing anything about a gate. It had been like he’d kind of just blinked and he was awake in the meadow in a place that reminded him of Beqanna but certainly was not the Beqanna he’d known. The corners of his dark mouth turn down in a frown as he considers this. So, she’d walked through a gate and hadn’t been in the river. Which meant… what? The dead were allowed to just mosey their way back to earth?
“That’s interesting,” he says. But he asks her nothing further. Instead, they exchange names and she smiles, which is a relief because she’d been starting to look like a damsel that he was going to need to reassure. He hadn’t meant to be funny, but she seems deeply amused and who would he be to stand in the way of that? So, he offers up a kind of sideways chuckle.
“No, there’s no one left who’d remember me,” he tells her. In fact, most everyone who would have remembered him have probably been dead as long as he has. How long has he been dead? Centuries? He doesn’t know how to go about drawing up that kind of equation, so he skirts around it. “But I’ve never been known for my creativity, so Antidote works just fine.”
She looks awfully alive for someone who’s just returned from the dead, perhaps invigorated by her own realization. “And who and what do you want to be this time around?”
