"You'd be doing me a kindness, stranger." Because God knows he can't stand the rawness of sober awareness, if this is to be his fate. "I'll return the favor. We can toast to unexplored wrinkles in the fabric between heaven and hell."
He manages to keep all but a trickle of that same exhaustion out of the bone-dry words. Walter would have loved the unexplored part, naturally, but Matthew... Matthew would have loved the rest.
Try as he might not to let the pained tug on his heart reel him back into the fugue of thinking, remembering, missing, the man's response--an echo of a warning he'd received for prying into a future not his to know--makes the hairs on his arms pickle with uneasy deja vu, causing him to abruptly look at the other strangely. Almost wonderingly.
"You know, a friend once told me similar. He liked to talk about God, too. But I didn't listen on either count," he admits, the tilt to his head resigned. "I fear some of us only have the one way and there's not much any higher power can do about it."
And the damned have little to lose.
Straightening up from his perusal, he sighs as well, though his comes from a place of some resolve, as if an internal matter has been settled.
"Wait a moment. I'll go ahead." To look first--and perhaps if some otherworldly mischief lies ahead, he can provide first warning. What does he have to fear when the worst has already happened?
no worries!
He manages to keep all but a trickle of that same exhaustion out of the bone-dry words. Walter would have loved the unexplored part, naturally, but Matthew... Matthew would have loved the rest.
Try as he might not to let the pained tug on his heart reel him back into the fugue of thinking, remembering, missing, the man's response--an echo of a warning he'd received for prying into a future not his to know--makes the hairs on his arms pickle with uneasy deja vu, causing him to abruptly look at the other strangely. Almost wonderingly.
"You know, a friend once told me similar. He liked to talk about God, too. But I didn't listen on either count," he admits, the tilt to his head resigned. "I fear some of us only have the one way and there's not much any higher power can do about it."
And the damned have little to lose.
Straightening up from his perusal, he sighs as well, though his comes from a place of some resolve, as if an internal matter has been settled.
"Wait a moment. I'll go ahead." To look first--and perhaps if some otherworldly mischief lies ahead, he can provide first warning. What does he have to fear when the worst has already happened?