The pod's glass was not frosted, but clear, and Horace wondered if it might have been better cloudy and obscured, like a mirror warped by time and disuse. That would've better fit his state of mind, he thought - perhaps would have better fit the man inside as well. His blue eyes peered through that glass, brows drawing together, lips pressing thinly against each other to keep in words that Jan would not hear anyway. Jan looked softer there, the hard lines of his face more relaxed, as though he slept and would simply roll over in a moment and mutter something in some unfamiliar accent (familiar in its very unfamiliarity). He wondered how many people had heard him in his sleep, wondered what parts of Jan he could claim as his own. Horace didn't understand Jan anymore, he thought, and he wondered if he ever had. Maybe, something whispered, he didn't need to understand. Jan had bound him with more than just ropes, cut into his flesh, would've let him die... No, no, Jan had said he was coming back, had come back. Everything had to have been some sort of aberration, brought on by Horace's own line of questioning, by his jealousy. And even now, that slick curl of jealousy lay heavy in his gut, that insidious thought of why wasn't I enough? He rubbed at his eyes with one hand, the glare of fluorescent lights on glass too bright. Horace shoved his hands in his pockets as if he were afraid they'd spring forward of their own accord and try to pry the machinery apart.

"Did you know, Jan," he wanted to say conversationally, as though he remained unaffected by anything Jan had done or said. (A lie - he was anything but unaffected.) "-that I wrote down every word you spoke so I could remember them? Because I didn't wanna forget, because I thought by writing them down I could take them out later and turn them over and shake them like a middle school bully collecting lunch money and shake and shake and shake until some semblance of love fell out." That was what he'd wanted, out of everything, out of every lie that couldn't be true. Horace had hoped that Jan would love him, after all. That somehow, in the great emptiness that lurked behind glacier-pale eyes, there was room for him. "Don't be afraid," he'd said, and his voice had been as warm as the thin arms that had wrapped around Horace. "I can't love perhaps but isn't this so close? Isn't this more?" And maybe it was more, maybe Horace was wrong, maybe everything and everyone was wrong and this was the only right thing in the world. He didn't know, he couldn't know and couldn't ask. Dr. Morris had said he just needed to try, to persist; even monsters could love and love so deeply they wondered how they ever lacked it before. "This is something else-" He didn't want something else; he wanted the one thing Jan said he could not give. But maybe, maybe, Horace could take intensity instead. He would take what he was given and be glad of it. "-my darling, my pardner. Something that defies love and resides where love has been excised."

There was the crux of it, Even after everything, he somehow still loved Jan in a sweet, shivery way that mingled apprehension with affection until he couldn't tell the two apart. Horace had fallen in love with his lie, with Jan's 'pardner' and sly smiles and whispered 'I love you's. He loved the man from Florida who liked cats and was a pet psychic and only read books on religion. But he'd also fallen for Jan's silences, his repetitive movements, his secrets and the silence behind his eyes. And that second half was what made it difficult. It was the void in Horace's chest: an empty circle; it was the black of bottomless pupils and the spaces between cruel words. Horace had stretched his hands out towards it, wanted to wrap himself in Jan's night. If he was a monster, inhuman, everything America said, then what did that make Horace? 'You have to understand that he's a bad person, right? That he's bad for you? People who actually love you don't hurt you like this.' Of course they did. Love was only a hair's breadth away from hate and bearing the brunt of that emotion was better than nothing at all. And Jan loved him in his own way, right? Jan hurt him because Horace mattered enough in that way. The opposite of love was never hate, but apathy. It wasn't enough - Horace wanted, how he wanted.

There were words he wanted to say. "Did you know, Jan, I could've forgiven anything if you'd just told me I was enough?" His tongue was heavy in his mouth - the words he couldn't say, the ones he wasn't sure he should ever say tasted like ash, cloying and drying. He was only given what he deserved. His eyes burned. Horace drew in a shaking breath and ignored the technician who shot him a funny look. He could feel her dark gaze judging him, wondering why he was there. He was a moment away from whirling on her, snapping out the bitterness he'd started trying to hide. Of course he'd visit, of course he'd be here, of course. Jan, of all people, Jan had been the one person concerned with him in the cave, after the cave. And how ******** up was that? His comment had been spoken to goad America; Horace wasn't stupid, but he had said it and no one else had. Taym had gone up to Horace, ripped at the rags of his shirt (he remembered now how part of his wound had torn open then, the salt stinging again, piling pain on pain), and apologized to America as though he were nothing more than an inconvenient bag of groceries that had sprung a leak. How was he supposed to just smile and nod and thank them? Maybe it would've been better if he'd been left, if he'd died.

"Did you know-" he'd say, his tone as light as last month, as though he were chattering at Jan as usual about how Dylon had a billion sisters, about how he couldn't fathom a family like that, about how he wasn't sure if he wanted to reorganize his notes by hunter surname or by division and what did Jan think? "Did you know," he'd say and fall silent for a moment. "-that not one of them asked me what happened?" And they still hadn't, not until goaded on Twitter. And what was Horace supposed to say anyway that could assuage their curiosity and paint Jan as the demon they wanted him to be. "I let Jan choke me because I felt I wasn't good enough that there was no room for me and when I awoke in the cave I still wasn't good enough and maybe I would've let him chop away enough pieces of me, make me small enough that there was room for me inside his chest. I thought maybe I could carve out a hollowed place there where I could live. And I thought maybe, in this way, he'd love me more."

But of all the things he'd say, the things he'd ask, Horace wouldn't ask why. He didn't know if it was because he knew the answer (you deserved this) or because he was afraid of it (this is what you wanted).

He reached forward and pressed his hand to the clear glass as if hoping it wasn't there. Hoping to cup his hand against Jan's face again, to feel him shift and turn and press his thin, smooth cheek into Horace's palm. But, of course, Horace's fingers met glass instead of flesh. They twitched against that slick coldness, disappointed. He hadn't expected to feel like this, hadn't wanted any of it. This is what Horace got, this is what he deserved. Like Icarus, he'd tried to soar too high, wings melting under the sun. But it would be the ocean that killed him, stealing breath from his lungs. Closing his eyes, Horace exhaled slowly, once. His hand dropped back down to his side and, after a moment, he turned around and left the room.