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There's a toolbox at his feet and a socket wrench in his hand, and Jordan hands it over unquestioningly, because it doesn't surprise him at all that this is the kind of thing she liked likes and if she asked him for a wrench a moment ago he'll have already got the right size out and he would have liked to help if he was awake and she was there. "Worth it," he says, half statement, half question, and, "is it even possible to forget how," and, because this is a dream and in dreams you say things you can never say awake, "sometimes I feel like I'd be better off forgetting."

His hands are dirty, he observes, which makes sense if he's been working, maybe.

"She was happy," he says, and doesn't know if he's agreeing or arguing, and rubbed his hand absently over his forearm, feeling the muscles there. Spreading the smudged dark oil. "Oh," and, "yeah, I guess," and quieter, "yes, I understand."

He takes the wrench back and puts it carefully away, slots it back into its proper place. Takes the cloth and holds it, watching the stains spread up her arms. Remembers her hands, burned away and gone, and it's not like any of their hands are clean, is it. "I want," he says, and stops, and looks at the clean white cloth.

"I want to forget," he says slowly, "but I can't. I won't. I decided that already. Losing my memories is losing myself." He shakes his head. "It hurts," he admits. "I don't want to hurt alone." The cloth twists in his hands. "Even when I'm dreaming I can't get away from it," and there is anger rising in his voice now, "I'm so goddamn tired of it. I'm so tired."

"Good at people doesn't mean good at yourself." Jordan doesn't smile. The threads of the cloth strain under his grip, and he says, suddenly, "It wasn't your fault."

"I did," he agrees, the anger leaching out of him slowly, deflating like a pricked balloon. "I make a lot of stupid choices. I wish I'd talked to you more. I think you hurt alone, too." He wipes the back of his hand across his eyes and looks at her thoughtfully. "This is a dream," he said, "because you died. I saw the remains. So I'm dreaming, and there's three possibilities as to who you are. One, and not very likely," he laughs a little, painfully, "it's really you, you came back somehow to visit me and give me a little advice, maybe talk some, for your own reasons. You've probably got more important things to do, wherever you are. But I'm not discounting the possibility entirely."

He shakes his head. "Two, you're me; my subconscious using the face and voice of a trusted mentor to work through something. That's probable, I think, especially since I regretted not knowing you better. Three, you're neither you nor me, but something else using your face and voice to talk to me while I'm asleep. I don't know why or what. It's probably option two."

He offers the cloth back to Clarice, says again, softly, "It wasn't your fault that she died. She made that choice. She didn't want to live without you. I kind of get that."

"She went out knowing she was loved," Jordan says quietly, and moves to lean against the workbench nearby. It feels more personal, side by side, and they were never equals, and maybe that was why he didn't seek her out more and maybe it wasn't, but in a dream they can just talk, have a conversation that is weighty but not weighted.

"I'm used to numb," he confesses, "been doing that long enough. It's the intense s**t that gives me trouble. I haven't found my balance yet." He looks sideways at her. "I'm doing better," he says, then, "did you find it?"

A one-shouldered shrug. "Don't know. I miss you being around, so I'd like to think I'm not just talking to myself. I do that all the time and it's not that helpful."

Not loved enough, and he closes his eyes and doesn't breathe for a second or two, looking down at a dizzyingly long fall and a tumble of rock at the bottom and being pulled back by the wrong person, and feels again the sick exhausted guilt of being capable of having that thought. Guilt digs its hooks into his guts and pulls and tears, guilt over the fact that he hurts and wants, that he can't separate it out and put it aside, that he doesn't know how to control this feeling or even have it without burning up and burning out. "In her place," he says, gently, "I would have done the same."

He opens his eyes and looks blindly out at the workshop again, accepts the beer and pops the cap off and drinks too fast, a third gone before he lowers the bottle, and that's another thing he refuses to worry about even though he thinks he should, probably. "I think it needs to be some of both," he says, and drinks again, slower, tasting it this time. "To get it right. If there's a right at all." His eyes slide sideways to her, distant, meditative. "Maybe not even changing it so much as, as looking from another angle. You would have gotten it. If you'd had time."

His hand tightens on the bottle when the look in her eyes changes, all of him going taut, the muscles in his back not quite shivering. This wasn't an option he'd considered, not as such, and he doesn't like it at all; he thinks of Julie, of a hollow shell filled with a grey smiling ghost in the fog, a lonely specter still baking for people left behind, repeating what she'd done in life as a demented echo. Still herself, but something else as well. He thinks of Rin, of Melvin's stubborn insistence that she's coming back, of a body burned to prevent just that. To prevent this. He unfreezes his lungs enough to say, casually, cautiously, "If it's both, then, there must be a reason you came to talk to me." It's not a question. Not quite.

Only people who've left a door open. That was significant, it had to be, and Jordan reached for Ferros, wanting his weapon's input, but felt only a distant heaviness, a thick layer of sleep preventing him from proper connection. Remember that, he told himself frantically. Remember.

The question froze his gut again, a cordial, friendly inquiry, sympathetic, not at all threatening and loaded on every level. "Not yet," he said, "he will, he has to," a little desperately, and tried to rein in the tidal wave of emotion that the simple question provoked, worry and fear, resentment and irritation and anger, a deep and (over)protective love, all tangled and wound together inextricably and uncontrollably. "I guess his weapon's not here yet, maybe I should ... " He trailed off, looked at the beer bottle in his hand, took a drink and set it down before his anxiety could crush it.

Jordan doesn't have to count. With Ferros's heavy, stable presence strangely distant, his panic rises without a counterweight, fluttering mothlike in his stomach. "He has to wake up," he says, "I can't lose him again," and his nails dig into his palms, pain that should wake him up but doesn't.

Selfish, selfish. He thinks of weapons, of young creatures who aren't much more than children either, of the moral ambivalence of the promises they make, and is ashamed of how easily his ideals are swept away when the question is about his own family. Andy has to wake up. He has to.

(Later, he will go down to the pod room, not clearly remembering the cause of his anxiety but aware that he needs to check, aware that there's a clock ticking down with not much time remaining. He'll stay for ten minutes, saying not much, and leave feeling almost claustrophobic.)

"He has to wake up," he repeats, quieter, less certain.