Welcome to Gaia! ::

A longer pause this time.

"No," he repeated finally, quietly. "Didn't get a single ******** thing, besides confirmation that I'm totally, totally ********."

"We're totally ********," he amended finally, exhausted.

(He did not know this man and even if he did there was no one he could tell: not one person with whom he could sit down and say: this is a thing I need to do. That I want to do. That I crave doing. And I can't. And it hurts people and it thinks it's real, and I can't do a goddamned thing about it.)

He knew it: that there was nothing unusual, that he was not special, that he suffered no more than anyone else and vastly less than some or even most, and to say that he was ashamed did not even begin to cover the emotional ground of acknowledging it.

He'd come back from the Sahara profoundly broken, unable to cope, and seen in the infirmary beds next to him rows of Hunters returned from the same destination, their skin peeled off, their faces maimed, their bodies ruined, their psyches undoubtedly subjected to stressors far more grueling than being made once in a while to lap water out of a bowl, or left for just a single day in an empty room with a crawling floor, of nearly but not quite choking to death. They'd gotten up, moved on; Bix said they all had nightmares but he had a hard time believing--knew it for a lie, in some cases--that they became as mired in trauma as he did. He had a hard time believing that most Hunters had developed hair-trigger terrors of things as mundane as being abruptly caught out in the rain, of having the wind knocked out of them (the most frightening, the most crippling). On his first leave day he'd realized he was as terrified of unsupervised freedom as he was of being touched, and these were petty, human scars, minute in scale next to the sort of trials a Hunter was subjected to every day.

If he was ever given to introspection maybe he'd try to think backwards, tracing time in reverse, find out when it was that he'd started being unable to leave things behind. His heart was a hoarder's attic; his emotional scars were impossible to discard.

Everyone around him, it seemed, went through so much worse than what he did, but he was the weak one, the trembling pathetic wreck forever brought low by the mildest of blows. His skin was worn thin by the beatings rather than callused. Edith had said it was good that he had not become distanced from the world outside, but maybe this, at the bottom of it, was the reason he was wracked with infinite aftershocks: he did not feel as though he was a Hunter first, and a human (small and frail) second. He had never learned to wear the requisite emotional armor, forged of pride and willpower, the way he'd learned to wear the coat. He hadn't earned his promotion. He'd never even earned the recruitment.

After another moment he stuck his cigarette in his lips and reached to shake Mary's hand. "What's your name?" he asked, not offering his because Mary already knew it.

He paused, couldn't control the urge to raise his eyebrows, but Obadiah Ezekiel Habakkuk Thompson knew what that was like, and said nothing. He just shook his hand, as solemn-eyed as Mary was smiling, and said: "Thank you."