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"Something," he said flatly, by way of answer. "Definitely something."

"Who has time to be bored?" he snapped. There was a manic, perhaps slightly insane gleam in his eye now that had not been there the last time their paths had crossed.

"They keep taking it from us. The only memories you have are the ones you make here. If you've got the time to be bored you aren't trying hard enough to fill your head up. What do you think happens when they take them all? Maybe we end up like that." And he pointed where the thing had fallen and was no more, where they'd callously scooped up bits of things suspiciously like their own cores. He wasn't sure if he was right, but he didn't want to gamble on it.

"Not boring," he repeated, incredulously.

"I don't ********' know," he said, losing his patience. "Only the things around here that aren't people have any history anyway."

A rusted-out roller coaster and an ancient pianoforte.

"I'm not saying I know anything, I just know I'm not hedging any bets. And maybe not all memories hurt," he added, finding to his dim surprise that he had to force the words out.

Because it did hurt. Even the good memory he had hurt. He didn't know what he'd given up at the pedestal but suspected that had been a memory too--he just remembered being in pain--and he remembered being in pain at the Wall but begging anyway. And he was clinging to this one singular memory desperately. He needed it.

"Maybe hurting's important," he corrected. He sounded defeated. He didn't want hurting to be important. He felt compelled to go and do things that he knew would bring him pain--plunging into fights and crawling through machinery and god knows what else--and he followed those impulses, but he hated it, because all he wanted to do, really and truly, was crawl into a dark spot somewhere in the Ruins, some shattered bus stop, and curl up in the shadow and go back to where he'd been before they'd woken everyone up.

But every time he told himself that that's what he'd do, something rebelled, and then it was off to go claw his way towards another meaningless goal and stubbornly fill up his head with new memories, the ones he was making now. The first blessing he'd been given had been the curse of curiosity. It hadn't gone away.

"Hurting is important," he said again, like someone trying to believe his own lie.

Making? Somehow the thought hadn't even occurred to him. Why would she need them for anything? Surely she just took them. To keep them. To have them. Same way he kept taking blessings. Just to have them. Without knowing what they were good for. He thought about the Wall. The wall she'd claimed kept the bad things at bay, where she'd taken a memory from him she'd said would only scare him.

He wondered if there was some way to scale it.

His hand jerked uselessly up to his mouth, and his fingers felt strangely empty, and he shook it away like he'd gotten stung.

"I don't know," he repeated finally. "And I don't care. They're not hers to make anything with. They're ours."

And that was something to think about. Another little piece slotting into place, put there by this stranger whose path he kept coincidentally crossing.

He turned to go, shoulders hunched up with his thumbs in his belt and his voice suddenly thin and fragile. "Don't," he said. "Have faith," he said.

It was easier that way.