Jordan had only brought a bottle of beer out with him; accidentally falling off a cliff while drunk would be both stupid and an irony nobody would know to appreciate. He'd picked a spot not too high up anyway, a rise overlooking one of the more accessible beaches that he liked, and he sat on the edge, meditatively looking out toward the horizon, where the deepening blue of the sky merged into the deepwater blue of the ocean. Sometimes he missed shorebirds, he reflected. Even the stupid, raucous, thieving gulls. The Fear saturation of the island meant that it was quieter than other beaches, and the silence was both peaceful and unnerving.

He didn't know why the commentary about hormonal bonding had struck a nerve. It wasn't that Harrison was wrong; hormones and other brain chemicals played an important role in the cementing of emotional bonds, and Harrison hadn't even said that it was entirely hormones. But the discussion had bothered Jordan anyway, and bothered him enough that he'd given in and said something about it. He couldn't pin down why. He didn't like it.

Whether or not he liked a fact didn't change its veracity. There was more to it, of course. Mutual liking, common interests; and there must be some reason why every other version of himself who knew them loved them as helplessly and as fiercely, even in altered states and circumstances. He would probably never know why, and that didn't bother him, although maybe it should. He felt love in much the same way he felt anger, volatile and unpredictable and immense, a wild and uncontrollable emotion. Maybe he had never been in control of any of his emotions, and his sense that he was had been nothing more than an illusion, an expression of smug egotism. Maybe that suggested that it was all hormones and reflexes anyway, his conscious input no more than the afterthought of vast, submerged, interlocking processes. Maybe, after all, it didn't matter; whatever the source of the feeling, it was still present, his perception of it unchanged.

"Philosophy ******** 101," he said out loud to nobody, and took a long pull of his beer. "Mental masturbation. Would've still been a pretentious undergrad, but I guess I'll have to settle for just pretentious."

Ferros snorted, fondly amused. Jordan said, "And you can shut up, too," even though Ferros hadn't actually said anything and he wasn't particularly irritated at the weapon.

He'd commented on the discussion, a tweet he could admit to himself was passive-aggressive as hell, and gotten back an irritable answer from Harrison, and maybe it was sort of pathetic that he'd liked that, had felt a little swell of warmth at the response. Maybe he'd just wanted a response, like a kid acting out to get attention, no matter that it wasn't necessarily positive attention. It was still attention. It was still a response, and even a cranky response had done a little to soothe the empty space of absence that he still carried. It had been his own fault, he'd been the one who'd broken things off, he'd taken himself away and hurt Harrison enough that he really wouldn't blame the guy if he still wanted nothing to do with him, but the dull ache of missing him persisted. Harrison's voice, his eyes and mouth, his smile and frown, the cranky complaining that meant that he cared about what he was complaining about.

Jordan had lived with the ache this long, and he'd accepted that maybe he'd be living with it the rest of his life, as much a part of the background noise of his mind as Ferros's soft rumble. He would, if he had to. There was more to his life than that. He had other reasons to keep going, and most days he didn't want to stop any more.

He drank, and watched the sky darken and change colors, and eventually he finished his beer and decided that he'd go inside and see if the promised breakfast-for-dinner had ever materialized. But he sat there a while longer, thinking about everything and about nothing, listening to the ocean, to the rise and fall of his breathing and the steady beat of his heart.