Welcome to Gaia! ::

A long pause while he sucked down the rest of his cigarette, and with the same tiredness as before: "Yeah. You're right."

"And?"

He rubbed his face tiredly, and he longed to tell him that he got accused (rightfully, he was aware) of being childish as often as he was accused of being older than his years (also rightfully, in some way).

"The drugs helped," he said, more frankly than he was generally wont to, and far less irritated. "And, you know, the crushing weight of a series of poor life decisions besides that."

And so had the island. But despite the fact that he'd spent so much energy on dire warnings for Ever months before, none were forthcoming now. He'd reached the conclusion that there was something fundamentally wrong with him, some inability to recover from trauma, possibly from years of unlearning how to truly deal with problems. Instead, he said: "I've only been here a year. Go talk to Bix Wilkins, if you're afraid the job ages you. Or Allan. Or Dakota Rainstar, only thing that aged him was getting hitched."

"Just the regular kind of nutball," he said, choosing for now to disregard the rest of that, his eyes wandering distractedly over the middle distance, over nothing. "He's a good ********' guy. Bix. Not just nice, I mean all-around decent. He and Molly Finn, those are the names I try to keep in mind whenever I get--" a vague jerk of his shoulder. "I dunno. You already got my misanthropic cynicism spiel, I'll save you a repeat." This, too, was uncharacteristically straightforward, tinged though it was with very characteristic bitterness.