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South Belgium - it was a small base in the Walloon half of the country, outside of Châtelet. Quaint, perhaps, despite being a relatively large city for the region.

It was beautiful, he thought dispassionately, both place and base. Well-equipped, it seemed to be made for the storage and redistribution of information - outside to in, he thought. The base had a small enough staff: Thierry, Franco, Mayumi, others, mostly from death, it seemed. He jolted out of his (admittedly bland) thoughts when Thierry tapped his shoulder smartly, a frown creasing the corners of her brown eyes. She spoke in a thick Belgian accent, something he recognized from his high school lessons. s**t, it hadn't even been a year ago. "Look, you've got two days free time before they've got you heading out. Acquaint yourself with the area, try to-" She looked him over critically, clearly disapproving of his piercings. "-blend in, if you can. Act like a tourist; you know the drill. You'll be coming back here between mapping projects. There's a lot of ground to cover, though, and I don't know how they treat you back on the island, but here you don't get breaks." Thierry smiled wryly and began to drone on about his purpose here. Horace listened attentively, writing everything into his notebook in neat shorthand. It was somewhat of a relief, almost, to be able to focus on work, to force his mind onto something important and not have it go spiraling off into sadness.

Horace still dreams, of course: great, nightmarish things made worse by their basis in reality. A change of location, a severed relationship (and ********, was it always going to hurt?) can't take the past out of him, can't heal old scars but only create new ones. Sometimes, though, the dream is different, takes a horrible divergence from what happened. Sometimes he's the one pinning Jan down, Jannisari's blade at his pale throat. In this dream, Horace presses forward, does not let up, and Jan, of course, bleeds as red as anyone else. He bleeds and bleeds and bleeds and Horace does not stop. He wakes shaking and washes his hands, once, twice, seven times over, but all he can feel is blood. He doesn't like this version.

Sometimes, he goes back to sleep and dreams again. Horace dies in this dream. He dies in the usual manner, and Jan thanks him for that, tossing his body into the wide, blue sea. (It's worse when Jan doesn't thank him, deems him not truly art, after all, not even good enough to be pinned to the refrigerator like a child's drawing.) His body, marked, mutilated by a hundred precise knife cuts, doesn't wash up onto the sandy shore, but sinks and sinks. The blue water turns black until not even sunlight filters down and Horace lies there, in the dark, dead, remembering what it feels like to be warm. He doesn't like this dream either.

There's other dreams his mind cycles through: other fights, or simple things like the way Jan's hair felt between his fingers. It's those he fears most, in a way, because everything ends when he wakes up and he's reminded again he was not enough. Waking, Horace thinks there never was a perfect ending. There is no outcome in which he would not fight with Jan, no instance in which he wasn't hurt, not once would he have won out. Jan had warned him not to make it a competition, but Horace didn't know that it was because he would lose.

He holds onto his phone like it's his lifeline, even when it only hurts him. He doesn't know why he talks to the clone, still, or why she's always thrown it in his face that Jan will always, always choose her over him. She types it again, from inside Jan's room, and it only hurts so much because she's right. He hopes she dies, or, sometimes, he hopes her body is used in research. It takes all of his willpower not to shout out this America Jones is not real. She's dangerous, just by existing, and Jan is too fixated to see. She's not even the real one, and yet... 'Don't make this a competition', he'd said, and Horace knew why now. It never was a competition - competition implies that he could've won, that he could have been important, cared for. Jan lies, he reminds himself, holding onto his phone as though it might fly away. Jan lies, but maybe everything could have worked, maybe Horace could have accepted it if Jan hadn't.

They talk about truth and lies, texting, he and Jan. It's surprisingly calm, docile-sounding, even. There's a certain degree of separation that's numbed him and that means he's able to put the phone down, to turn out the light, to crawl into his borrowed bed before he cries. Horace cries silently, shoulders heaving, and it's good that there is no one there to awkwardly pat his shoulder. It's good that he's alone.