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He'd been focused on the metallic noise and heat-distorted haze of the Forge, but the Infinite Path had been a quiet and tempting distraction, and so he'd slipped in and was almost positive that he was now lost. Not that he minded.

He moved very slowly and very deliberately, and paused before one of the paintings to examine it. Some lingering instinct of self-preservation kept him from actually touching it, although his hand twitched in a restless need to do something.

He stood back, hands resting gently and nervously on the handles of the pistols at his hips, and looked at the painting like he was trying to memorize it. And each time a person passed, he glanced up, but his concentration broke only for a moment.

He seemed alarmed at being spoken to, and then instantly suspicious. He didn't actually recognize her, but then he'd had a different outlook until recently. He stared at her too much. He stared at her the same way he'd stared at the painting.

"Hell if I know," he said finally. But he was distracted. She was armed. He asked her the same thing he'd asked others, by now: "When you got that," he demanded, blunt and without segue, "did you ask for it? Was it a gift?" His voice dripped with derision.

The question actually stumped him for a minute. Why did it matter? He knew, but he didn't know how to articulate it.

"Because," he said, after a beat, voice subsiding but still undeniably grouchy, "every time I end up in a fight someone says 'thank the Goddess' for being armed, without realizing it's their ******** fault we're fighting in the first place."

Not that that really answered the question. Why bother asking? Why bother demanding to know if they'd felt it was a gift? So he could rub their noses in his obviously-superior viewpoint?

Possibly.

Rage flared up instantly and it felt like an old friend; it felt familiar the same way the restless jerking of his hands felt familiar. He wanted to say that no, he wasn't, and how dare she--

But she was right, wasn't she? He was going out there. He was finding the blessings--he was chasing them actively now, desperately. And as time went on he was becoming convinced that he was doing their footwork for them, and that they'd take these, too.

But maybe they couldn't, not always. In the Ruins, at the Jukebox, she'd tried to take something from him and he'd said no, and he'd walked away and he still had that memory of his mother singing to him. Maybe he'd learned some sort of power over them.

"I'm doing that for me," he snapped. A weak argument, since he wasn't sure what benefit it had. "I don't owe them anything." And he didn't. The hollow void before the first "blessing" was the fondest memory he had, he realized. And he'd wanted desperately to have the blind faith of the "sheep," as she called them, but he couldn't.

Anger was still there. But it was being overtaken with relief so intense that it embarrassed him--relief at the idea that he wasn't the only one who felt this way. She had the pendant, too. One day he'd figure out what that meant, too.

He was quiet for a long minute, and then, exhausted and defeated and with the rushing, tumbling words of someone who was sorting their thoughts as they went: "I want that too. And I keep thinking if I get more of them maybe I'll know. And if I don't, if that's not how it works, then I--I keep thinking, well. Maybe this is me now. And maybe if I keep doing these things and I keep making more things to remember I'll be more... myself. Like I have to fill myself up with memories and maybe I have to make new ones, instead of trying to get the old ones back. I want to know who I am and then I want to..."

What did he want? He wasn't even sure. What he wanted more than anything was to not want to know. But if he couldn't kill the curiosity, maybe satisfying it would make it stop gnawing. Maybe then he could go back to thoughtlessness.

He made a helpless, meaningless movement of his hands. They went to his pockets as if to draw something out, an old habit, and he looked at them in bewilderment like they belonged to someone else.

"I don't want to... give up anything," he said suddenly. "Everyone acts like everything they have belongs to someone else, except you."

"Why should I help you?" he asked finally, flatly. "One more person to make me into a pawn when she finds her way?"

No. There was enough of that in the world already.

"If I see you on the street hurting, I will help you. If I see you fighting and failing, I will help you. But I'm not going to help you become one of them. There are enough of them as it is." He paused, and he added despite himself, from some well of human sympathy he didn't know he had: "I'd help you become you, if I thought that I could. But I don't think I can."

"I didn't want help," he said tiredly. "I wanted answers. You didn't have any."

"Good luck," he said, with sincerity. "I hope you manage to do whatever it is you think will get you where you want to go. But I can't help you."

He couldn't even help himself. "I have somewhere I need to be," he said, stirring himself to action again. "I got... sidetracked. I'll help you find a way out, anyway." He hesitated. "What's your name again?"