As always, he carried with him an excess of metaphorical baggage. Many of them were tagged with labels like curiosity and grief and insanity defense. Nemisis's relationship with Donovan was as foreign and obvious as a Martian volcano. It's vast mouth spewed black smoke. It choked him. The ash turned up in his food, in his mouth, in the water he drank. 

The smells are thick and overlapping-- they exude the distinctive warmth that a body leaves on the bed after they wake up. A wrinkled mattress, still bowed in from whoever's weight. Donovan. Nemisis. The vague, dark scent of strangers. And most of all, confrontation. He wasn't surprised. He suspected that Nemisis saw a gun barrel that was smoking more often than it wasn't.

They are two shadows on the red sand, one taller and lighter than the other. He kneels, one hand on a footprint, with the same solemnness of someone righting a tipped-over gravestone; not so much a practical task but a personal one. A state of being.

The mismatched gaze observes him. A boy, hard and heavy-set, the consummate loner. On the surface there should've been, might've been, a handsome smile, but what's there is nothing but an intense blank. The head moves, the chest rises and falls with each breath, but the eyes are ever-fixed.

A long and viscous pause. Hi. And as if for a moment, all social structure and ettiquette has left him, Colin nods, mute.

He catches himself. "Hello." Simple. Disyllabic. Patient.

"What is your name?" He grinds his heel into the footprint, ruining the shape. It looks just like any old puncture wound in the ground, now. 

Riley. Yours? 

"Colin." A pause. "Forster." Something reptilian about the blink-- the cold and deliberate swipe of an eyelid going sideways. 

Sentence fragments, the vague outlines of words, they float in his head just out of reach. "How did you get here?" More breath than actual vocalisation, a question so thin you could see through it, like spun tulle. He, Riley, still so young. Colin almost can't bear to look at him. This is what Theo would've looked like if he-- if he was alive. Complete with the dark hair and off-kilter gaze. Complete with the black bitterness. His gift from God, gone, buried so many miles away from home.

He tears his gaze away and swallows, but there is no relief.

At Riley's artless answer, Colin allows himself to show an imperceptible sigh of relief. After Finley's scrutiny and Derg's casual mention of sparring, its almost reassuring to know that Riley, like him, had simply been found.

He lets the thought spool and unspool inside his skull.

"Me too." Then, "So you weren't looking for anything. Or guided by... anything." The intonation is awkward-- Colin blindly shoots at something between a question and an assumption, two things both contradictory by nature. Neither of them were skilled orators, nor particularly perceptive of body language. Like laborers at the Tower of Babel's base, they skim by meaning and understanding but never actually touch it.

I mean, if you want things. Again, his voice is inflectionless. It is so close to being a fully-formed question, and without the uptick, it seems comically downturned. Someone you want to stay with, somewhere you want to go...a god to worship.

He looks over at Riley again when he feels he's ready to. The imagined knife in his torso, it twists.

Nothing behind the eyes. He feels foolish for even suggesting the possiblity of wanting. There were boys that came straight out of the womb with sailor caps or a telescope already set far beyond an electric horizon, filled to the brim with juvenile but ultimately pointless hopes and dreams-- and then there were boys like Riley, moribund. 

Dementia patients had more pipe dreams than he would ever hope to have (provided that hope was in his limited arsenal of neurological chemicals.)

If there was any perfect opposite to childhood innocence, it would not so much be violent depravity than the inversion he saw here. 

Then again, there was a candidness in his answer he found difficult to deny. The flat absence of guile is almost reassuring. Riley seemed utterly immutable and wasn't that enough, to have that one constant in a life? Maybe it is. He concedes. But there's nothing stopping you.

He doesn't pretend as if he can get through to him. He's tried his best his whole life to mince everything down into dystopian little cubes, but this is where he can give up on trying. It can help, whenever you are lonely. Doesn't it get old, being lonely. 

As if on cue, a hot wind wails through the canyon. It's gone as soon as it appears.

Though he doesn't have to think much to provide the answer, Colin lets the silence linger. Yes. There was not much point in lying. You?

He wonders what Riley saw in his face-- would it be the furrow splitting his forehead in half, which Ruth would constantly try and rub out to no avail? His greying hair? The scar on his lip? Or were faces simply another object to him, something without hiatus or nuance that just happened to move and convey an apocryphal language? There were many questions, and Riley was, to put it lightly, not a generous giver of answers.

This time, he is quiet out of necessity. He rolls words around in his head until they all sound the same, worn down to their phonemic roots like river stones. I had someone I wanted to stay with. And now she's gone. He explains patiently, with the same methodical and lacklustre tone of a math teacher at his chalkboard, traces of long division on the green.

He thinks to say, there are places where a pack just can't fill, but it's too abstract, too evasive. Too smoke-and-mirrors.

He notices far too late that Riley had dodged his question, but doesn't chase after it. Why go down a tunnel when you're not sure that there even is an end?

Again, the abrupt honesty of his questions. He frowns thoughtfully at the minimalism. She just left. She.... What? Thinks that I killed our son? ...didn't want to be with me anymore.

His frown darkens. I don't know where she is now. Most likely happier than him, though he can't muster up any bitterness for that. It felt like a lifetime ago, now. Grieving put every thought into a funhouse mirror, even the feeling of time. He would wake up and expect her to be there beside him but at other times, like this, he was a few moments before forgetting her name--

Ruth. Her name is Ruth. And she had blonde hair, and she was angry more often than not, but in a different way from me. And she'll never forget me, but not in the way I'd hoped to it to be.

Colin wasn't sure what he had expected. Not comfort, not any strain of sentimentality. Most likely silence, or a grunt that fell in line with the rest of his brutalist architexture. 

A bitch. Some small part of him-- once microscopic, now noticeable-- is tempted to agree. It is crude, spiteful, ugly. He's dismayed at this part of himself, and stamps it down, buries it deep. His haggard eyes find Riley's. No expression on his face, other than a slight tension in his lips, on the verge of saying something and then changing his mind.

With that, he collects himself and leaves to continue his aimless walk around the canyon, as if the conversation had never taken place at all. Only his mangled footprint remains, like someone had put out a massive cigarette in a red ashtray.