Noah and Mycroft know caring is (notanadvantage) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-03-02 15:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | arthur, mycroft holmes |
Who: Noah and Cory
What: A sleepover
Where: Noah's apartment
When: Recentish
Warnings/Rating: Nope
Cory arrived on Noah’s doorstep off a very late bus at about 11 PM. He had just gotten off work, and with his red vest loose in one hand, he hoisted a beat up LVHS duffel bag over one shoulder as he knocked. It wasn’t the best neighborhood, but Becky had lived in a place that wasn’t all that different from here, and Cory was too tired to be scared. He stank of cigarette smoke and his fingers were sore, and all he wanted to do was get somewhere safe and sleep. Lately he’d been sleeping a lot but he hadn’t been able to get any rest, a situation that was so frustrating he felt lucky he could blame it on the eerily silent Arthur that had to be lurking in the back of his mind somewhere.
Cory really hoped he wouldn’t have to deal with Noah’s mom. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her in the casino, at least not well enough to remember her face compared to the myriad of other cocktail waitresses, so he didn’t know if she was still at the casino or not. He had a weird feeling that his first assumption there hadn’t been wrong, which just creeped him out. He tried not to think about it. Thinking he hadn’t been heard a second ago, Cory lifted a hand that felt like lead and knocked again.
Noah didn’t hear the first knock. He was in his room, trying to wipe away some of the dust that indicated disuse. He never slept in the room, really, and it showed. He mussed the comforter as he heard the second knock, and he called out loudly. “I’ll be there in a moment.” Said moment was used to text his stepmother, informing her he had a friend staying over and that they’d be spending the night in his room. His stepmother, thankfully, was unconcerned. She’d just have the landlord over for the evening, and Noah could only hope they’d be quiet for once.
The apartment was better inside than out. Pale wood furniture and a sage green carpet made it somewhat homey, and only the beers on every surface indicated the family was not quite so aboveboard. Noah padded across the carpet on bare feet, in denim and a black, long-sleeved tee that was too warm for the Las Vegas spring. When he opened the door, music wafted from the back room, and he grinned that still-young smile at the young man in the doorway. “Come in,” he urged, nodding toward the back and the music. “My room’s rather crowded. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve been acquiring books on history and music since I was young, and my father built the shelving to accommodate.”
“Hey,” Cory said, relieved he’d found the right apartment and doubly-relieved he’d get to sit down soon. “That’s totally fine, I’m not claustrophobic, my room is tiny too.” He stepped in and gave Noah a small, grateful smile out of one side of his mouth. He let the bag fall off his shoulder and to the ground while still keeping his grip, dragging it in behind him. The music sounded cool, nice and black and sad but still new. Cory didn’t have anything quite like it on his iPod, but for now he let it fade into the background. He looked around the apartment with natural curiosity as he came in, but he was obviously too tired to really take much notice. “Rough night, man,” he told Noah, informatively, dropping his bag and appropriating the end of Noah’s bed.
Noah watched Cory’s face, attempting to determine if the other young man noticed the dust coating places he’d missed, but he grinned easily when there seemed to be no indication of it. “Work? Or the hotel and the dreams?” he asked. He was honestly concerned about Cory’s dreams, which seemed something beyond this entire mess with people in their heads. He considered mentioning therapy, which he’d always longed for himself but never been allowed to have, but he refrained; he didn’t want to give Cory the impression he thought him mad. He sat down on the edge of the bed ramp, and he turned his face to watch Cory as he spoke to him. “Are you hungry? I can order something,” he offered. He’d never had a sleepover, and he was certain they were too old for it, but he thought food was a requirement. Drinks, perhaps?
Cory’s room had a lot of dust in it too, and he lived in it. Chances were good he wouldn’t notice the dust even on alert. Arthur did, but that made little difference to anyone concerned. “All of it. The hotel wasn’t so bad until this... this guy showed up. If I’d known he was going to show, I never would have gone.” Cory leaned over his lap and rubbed his tired palms over his face. He could almost hear his bones crack.
The guy in question, Noah thought, wasn’t the one in Cory’s mind. At least it didn’t sound like he was talking about someone in his own mind. He took the non-answer about the food to mean Cory wasn’t hungry, and he leaned back on his elbows and watched his new friend’s face. It was odd, having a friend. His father had always worried friends would lead the police to their doorstep, and his stepmother was merely possessive. But Noah found he quite liked it, having someone around to talk to that might actually listen. “Who showed up?” he finally asked, ensuring Cory had finished his sentence before asking his own. “I met a man named Dominic, and his door was rather terrible. And then we met a girl named Raegan. She was quite nice.” He grinned.
Cory might have said yes to the food, and if you asked him he probably would have said that he did, but that was because he was too tired to notice one more question among many. He looked up blankly at Noah’s relatively cheerful description of his experience, and smiled. “Oh yeah? How nice?” Cory glanced over his shoulder and scooted back on the covers of the bed, falling backwards onto his back with no sign of discomfort. All of his friends had been Becky’s friends from school, and they’d all kind of drifted off into post-high school ether after she’d died. It was cool to have someone to talk to about his stupid problems.
“She was cute,” Noah said with a shrug. If Cory was paying attention, he might notice that his voice dropped to a whisper. The last thing he needed was his stepmother hearing that admission. “Rather out of my league, but cute. You never said who showed up at the hotel,” he reminded Cory. He was beginning to realize that Cory was not terribly good about answering questions right off, but that didn’t bother Noah very much. He was patient enough to repeat the question without becoming annoyed, and quiet enough not to care if things went unanswered entirely. “I can introduce you,” he added with a grin. Somehow, he didn’t think Cory was, as they say, getting any.
“If you’re not interested. But unless she’s like a rich princess, I bet she’s not out of your league. You have an accent, girls love that.” Cory put his hands behind his head and watched the ceiling for signs of life. “Figures that you ran into some hot girl and I run into Evan fucking Hampton. There’s not many people on this earth I hate, Noah, but that guy, he’s number one.” Cory closed his eyes, obviously quite serious.
“It doesn’t matter,” Noah said with a shake of his head. “I’m seeing someone.” It was true, after all, and he didn’t add any details that might make Cory uncomfortable. “It’s a lie, by the way, about the accent.” He’d never had any particular luck because of it. As a child, when he’d first moved to the states, it had been the cause of a new round of bullying that had worried his father endlessly. Luckily, the anger against this Evan Hampton kept Noah from becoming too lost in his own thoughts, and he reached for the flute behind his head and tugged it forward as he spoke. “What did he do to you? You don’t seem the hating type, no.” Because Cory didn’t - not at all.
“He’s a murderer,” Cory said, matter-of-factly, squeezing his eyes shut harder as if keep it in. He made his eyes go really wide a second later, deep brown, and then rolled up onto one elbow to look at Noah. “And a real jerk with issues. But I wasn’t there that long. Still tired. I couldn’t even get the dumb door open, and his was just Winter Wonderland, which figures, the crazy bastard.” Cory rubbed his hand over his forehead, and then rolled back onto his back again, mouth open in a half-yawn that never ended. “What’s your girlfriend like?”
Noah sat up at the mention of murder. Thankfully, he didn’t panic or associate it with himself. It was all about Cory just then, and the flute was set aside in favor of this new, bad news. “He’s a murderer?” he asked, just to be sure he’d not heard anything wrong. “Should we report him?” he asked, aware of the hypocrisy, but unable to keep from making the suggestion. He wasn’t certain Cory should be around a murderer, not when he already had a madman in his dreams. “We can go back and open your door,” he offered, just as he’d offered to the impossible, crying girl on the journals. “She’s,” a pause, “older.”
Cory wasn’t exactly hoping for ‘older’ as a girl description, because a) it didn’t sound like a good thing and b) it didn’t ease that feeling in his stomach about the woman at the casino. He let it drop. “No, he is out of prison so they already know. Nothing to report. I don’t want to go back in case he’s there, and besides, my door was locked. I couldn’t get in. How come this whole deal is different for me? Everyone else is speaking tongues and... you know. Making friends with their voices.”
“Mine didn’t speak to me until the hotel, so not everyone is having wonderful experiences,” Noah assured. “It was quite terrible at first. He tried to make me do things, and he didn’t say a thing, so I was certain I was going mad. I went to three doors, though, and no one had a locked door that I know of.” Of course, that wasn’t as worrisome as a murderer who was out of jail, and Noah sat up straighter and moved closer to the edge of the bed. “We should visit the police station,” he said, though something in his mind screamed loudly at the suggestion (for once, it had nothing to do with Mycroft), “and take out a restraining order. We can go come morning.”
Cory opened his eyes again, once again closer to awake than sleeping. “A restraining order? Why? Oh, on Evan? Yeah, no. He’s not going to hurt me. He’s crazy but he didn’t like axe murder somebody. He hit... someone with a car.” Cory didn’t like defending Evan in any sense of the word, but he didn’t want Noah to freak out and call the cops, either. “And your voice thing person made you do stuff? Like, against your will?” Cory was horrified by that idea, obviously. Mind control, zombies, aliens, demonic possession.
“Oh,” Noah said, suddenly terribly confused with this entire conversation. “It was an accident?” he asked, wondering if he’d merely misunderstood before. “Wait, but you said murderer.” His voice turned more serious, his expression more somber. “Who died?” he asked, with the blunt tactlessness of youth. It seemed more important than his being puppeted by someone from Sherlock Holmes.
“Yeah, I did say murderer,” Cory said, defensively, his mouth pressing flat and bloodshot eyes rolling downward to read Noah’s expression. People always seemed to think that because it was an accident somehow that made her less dead. Sometimes Cory wondered if it wouldn’t be better if Evan was actually an axe murderer, because then people wouldn’t just act like it was unfortunate that Becky decided to be in a car like a normal fucking person. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it, waffling back and forth in his mind before finally relenting in voice and expression. “This... girl in the car with me. Her name was Becky.”
Noah understood (thank you, Mycroft) that he was missing something in the tale, but he didn’t know what. He didn’t ask, though, because Noah never pressed or pushed. He was the sort to sit silently at someone’s side as a show of loyalty, rather than pressing them to speak. “Was she your girlfriend?” he asked, assuming Cory would have phrased it differently if the woman in question was a relative. His gaze dropped to Cory’s leg, where he remembered something of a limp. “Were you injured?”
“Yeah, she was.” Cory glanced down at his leg, too, following Noah’s gaze. He lifted his right leg, bending it to bring it to his chest. He was wearing the stained, faded black pants he wore to work, and everything he wore smelled like cigarettes. The limb bended easily and Cory let it hang in the air, his frayed shoelaces swinging in front of his face. “Yeah. My knee. But they put it back together, it doesn’t even hurt anymore. They said it might when I get older, but still nothing.” Cory shrugged, or as best as he could manage lying flat. “Ironic, huh?”
“How long ago did it happen?” Noah asked, watching the movement of Cory’s leg with a strange curiosity. It wasn’t that he’d no one in his life who’d died or been injured. He was accustomed to the ailing, really, and death was something he’d experienced before most children even realized people could die, but he couldn’t imagine walking away like that. “Do you have nightmares? Before this mess with the hotel.” He wasn’t certain if it was ironic, but it definitely wasn’t good. Did you keep loving someone after they’d died, he wondered. It wasn’t precisely like a break-up, but perhaps it was. He wasn’t sure.
“About four years ago, now,” Cory said, finally giving up on the leg and letting it fall awkwardly sideways before curling around it and letting his eyes fall shut again. “Some nightmares, but they were confused, they didn’t make any sense. Becky saying things, the car flying, things exploding that didn’t explode... that kind of stuff. Not like these.” Cory opened his eyes to mere slits and then looked down so he could toe off his sneakers without dropping them on Noah’s head.
Noah figured Cory’s eyes drifting shut was a good sign, as was the dropping of the shoes. He didn’t want to harp too much on the accident or the nightmares, not when it looked like the young man in the bed might manage some sleep (at long last). Instead, he picked up the flute again and played a snippet of a lullaby, stopping to comment between notes. “They can’t hurt you,” he said of the dreams, because surely this was true, even with the madness that was about these days. “The dreams, I mean.”
Cory mumbled a reply that was vaguely affirmative. He opened one eye a little when he heard the flute, just because he’d not seen Noah actually play the thing, but he was too tired to do anything but listen, and the interrupting words derailed that thought. Cory let his eyes fall shut again and wound his arm into a circle under his head. His last thought was that the dreams hadn’t ever hurt him before; and they wouldn’t as long as he could wake up.
Cory was asleep within seconds, betrayed by the fact that his mouth fell open and he had a loud exhale when he was deeply asleep. The little twitches of his eyes under his eyelids was evidence of a dreamer, but a calm one, and the patterns started at only a minute followed by deep silence, lengthening over the next few hours.
The room had been silent for some time before Cory’s breathing pattern changed. There wasn’t any immediate movement, just a shifting of the neck and a deeper hitch of the breath. After another thirty seconds, Arthur opened both eyes to slits to see if there was anyone around to see him sit up.
Noah wasn’t in the room. He’d stayed a few minutes after Cory fell asleep, and then he’d made his way out to the kitchen and heated soup. Despite Cory’s lack of appetite, he was hungry, and he hummed to himself as he mixed milk in with the Campbell’s tomato. He sat on the couch with the warm bowl once the soup was prepared, and he turned the television on to a documentary about the serving class in historic England. He watched it on mute - a habit from tending to his ill father and not wanting to bother him - and he was equally quiet about washing the bowl and setting it aside to dry.
A shower came next, and once Noah was done he walked back to the room where Cory slept, intending on grabbing his laptop and bringing it out to the living room with him. He’d left the laptop on, open and unprotected, thinking Cory unlikely to wake and attempt to sign on. After all, there was little to be concerned about on the laptop. Some inappropriate emails and pictures of his stepmother, some compositions in progress, some recent research on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but nothing worth anything.
Cory wasn’t observant and Arthur was no Sherlock, but the latter knew that Noah didn’t sleep in this room often, and he didn’t hear anything in the rooms beyond immediately, so he sat up in the dark. He didn’t have a complex mission, but Cory was deeply asleep, and he needed to check the resumes that he had posted to the occupation-specific forums. It wouldn’t take long, and he didn’t want to wait another night.
Arthur looked up from the glow of the laptop as Noah came in, the device open on his lap and his feet flat on the floor. He hadn’t bothered with searching Noah’s personal files; Arthur didn’t look for information for the sake of information. His expression was one of intense attention, something Cory never wore, and it dissipated immediately as Arthur put on a relaxed smile. “Oh, hey.”
If Noah hadn’t seen this shift in demeanor before, he might have been confused. But he remembered this exact thing happening at the casino, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at the man who looked like Cory, but who wasn’t Cory. Well, he was 75% certain of that, really. But he was a betting man, even if he was abysmal at the whole mess. “You’re not Cory,” he said, figuring he could always say he’d misspoken should it turn out to be sleepwalking or something equally mundane. He glanced toward his laptop, then back at the other man’s face. “What are you doing?” He was the picture of distrust, and he was considering using the umbrella, which was leaning near the door, to knock not-Cory out, should it become necessary.
Arthur wasn’t threatened by Noah, but he considered faking it anyway, for Cory’s sake. But no, this was Cory’s friend, and he was almost sure he could convince him to keep quiet. The smile disappeared, replaced by the sober, serious expression that was not at all Cory. Arthur didn’t put the laptop aside. He worked his lips together and shifted his spine back. “Checking my email,” he said. “Hello, Noah. I’m Arthur.” He lifted his chin a few millimeters up in a quick jerk of greeting, eyes observant. “Who’s your friend?”
“Arthur,” Noah repeated, and he very much hoped the man in his head didn’t go around having conversations without his knowledge. He didn’t think he did, but he supposed it was possible, and it made him frown and forget Cory’s entire predicament for the moment. “You shouldn’t do that, you know. He has rights, and you shouldn’t trample them.” It sounded like he was standing up to a bully, the same tone that would be used by a child trying to be brave in a schoolyard. “Friend?” he asked a moment later, looking around the room for someone he’d missed.
“The one with the umbrella.” Arthur hit a few keys and closed the browser before gently picking up the laptop and setting it to one side. He was still on the bed, but he didn’t sit or flop on it; it looked almost like a perch, one leg stretched out toward the door where Noah was standing, the other drawn up close with his ankle bent out to one side. He was the picture of repose, but it was not a picture Cory would have ever taken. It was too composed, too structured. Arthur was controlled, even if Cory’s hair and clothing wasn’t. “...I’m not trampling him.”
“He’s not my friend,” Noah said, slightly defensive, “and you are trampling him. He’s not given you permission to walk around in his body, as if he doesn’t exist. Would you like someone doing that to you?” he asked, truly thinking about the ramifications of this for the first time. He’d felt so much better about everything since the hotel, but this was a whole new level of discomfort, the realization that he could simply stop being himself at any point, should the man in his mind decide to make it so. “Is he in there? Or does he simply not exist when you do this?” he asked, and it was clearly he didn’t like it, not even a little bit.
Arthur took his voice down a little softer in an attempt to soothe, an honest attempt. He sat up and forward to show that. “He exists. He’s asleep.” And, more intensely, “I exist too. I’m trying to deal with that, and I don’t want Cory hurt or upset if it’s not necessary.” Arthur was leaving out the extreme solutions he’d discussed with Eames, it would be stupid to do otherwise. He wasn’t going to tell Noah he might be a dream, that was beyond stupid. “The body isn’t as important as the mind, Noah.”
“You’re a character from a book, or a television show, or a movie. You’re not real, and it was Cory’s body first. You’ve no right to do what you’re doing,” Noah insisted. “It’s wrong, and I’ll tell him once he’s awake.” Not that he was certain Cory could do anything about it, but he would tell him all the same. “I’ve not heard anyone else saying this happens to them, but perhaps they just don’t know.” There was fear in that statement - the kind of fear that led to action. Noah, luckily, was not terribly heroic, but he could make quite a lot of noise.
Arthur took in a breath and let it out. Calm. “You and Cory are just characters to me, too. I’m coming from the same place. If you tell him about this it’s going to make him panic. I was trying to avoid that. He has enough problems already, and I don’t want him panicked and afraid. I’m not going to hurt him. I don’t even do anything except type.” So far was what he didn’t say. “He’s asleep, dreaming, and he’s fine.” Arthur lifted one hand and tried to flatten the hair off his forehead. It itched.
Noah moved back when Arthur lifted a hand, as if he thought the other man would strike out. “If you don’t want him panicked and afraid, then you’ll stop this,” he insisted. It was fairly obvious he wasn’t going to back down. “He’s not asleep, you sick bastard. You’re using his body like a suit. Get out right now, or I’ll tell everyone I know, and the first thing they’ll all do is find a way to stop this, to stop you.” Mycroft, in Noah’s mind, wanted to shake the idiot in the room with them. This was precisely what he’d been trying to avoid, and here they were.
This was why Dom managed the cons. Arthur was too real to be a good liar, and good liars made people feel better about things. Arthur just made them worried. No longer so sure he could talk Noah down, Arthur dropped both of his hands and gave Noah a sober look all lowered eyelashes and waiting. “I can’t go anywhere. If I could, I would. You’ve got to believe me, I was trying not to interfere in Cory’s life. That’s more than I can say for most of the others.” His eyes shifted to the umbrella and back.
Noah’s gaze dropped the umbrella, and then it came back up to meet not-Cory’s eyes. “As far as I can tell, he doesn’t make me disappear,” he said in defensive of the man he didn’t like terribly much. It was a defensive statement, truly, because if he thought about the fact that he could cease to exist, well, he’d fall to pieces. Noah was comprised of tape and glue and things put together after childhood. He was private and a little odd, and the idea of someone walking around as him was entirely disconcerting. In short, he didn’t like it.
Frustrated, Arthur sighed and stuck his fingers into the hair at his temples again. “I didn’t make him disappear! Nobody could do that. And I wouldn’t.” If I could help it. If he’s real. Having two conversations made Arthur a little uneasy, but he had worked with the government long enough that he didn’t feel it like a moral transgression, just as an extra burden he was more likely to mess up. “Look, if you really think he can handle it, I’ll talk to him about it. I could probably talk him into helping me, but he’s going to freak out, and you know it.”
Noah couldn’t argue that. He knew Cory was quite a bit older than him, but Cory didn’t act it, and it put Noah in a rather impossible spot. He dropped down to sit on the bed, uncomfortable with keeping the secret, but equally uncomfortable for driving Cory mad. “He’s tired all the time, and he doesn’t rest. He’s here because he can’t handle the nightmares that you doing this is causing him. He says you always die in the dreams. You’re going to drive him quite mad if you keep this up,” he argued - well, as much as Noah argued anything. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said, perfectly aware he was terrible at betting and deals, and that he was the last person who should be involved in such things at any level of importance.
Arthur frowned. “Yes, I know. But I’m not doing it on purpose. I’m not sure where the bleedover comes from. Those are my own experiences, but I can’t dream, so maybe he does. I’m not a great architect at all, I’m actually pretty bad at it, but I don’t build in deaths.” He turned to look at Noah, eyes dropping to examine his face from chin to forehead before finally resting on his eyes. “Deal?”
“You let him rest in the evenings, and I’ll help you with whatever you’re trying to do.” Because clearly he was trying to do something. It was dangerous, frighteningly heroic, and Mycroft didn’t want anything to do with it, this offer to help. No gain, was the other man’s annoyingly British repetition in his mind, but Noah felt slightly empowered by the decision, once made.
Arthur was silent for a long while, staring at Noah. The other man (if he could be called that, more boy than man, Arthur guessed) didn’t strike him as particularly trustworthy, nor especially capable. Arthur, military trained and entirely sensible, saw Noah as a flighty peculiarity that didn’t know how to grow up. There was still a chance that he might know an architect, though. After a few moments, Arthur made a decision. “I still need to be up to check the correspondence,” he warned, “but it doesn’t have to take long. I’m trying to recruit a team that can construct and infiltrate dreams. I and my friends have been trapped in them before, and I need information and experience to find out if I’m in one.” Arthur felt this was probably a bad idea, showing his hand like this.
Noah wasn’t actually expecting success. He wasn’t particularly menacing, and he wasn’t particularly good at making deals, and he still had reservations about the morality of it, but it seemed better than this. He nodded once, agreement without words, and then he sighed and rubbed his eyes, messy brown hair falling into his face. This was all such a mess. “Alright,” he finally agreed, aloud. “He’s delicate,” he added, which was an odd way for someone like Noah to perceive anyone other than himself. “It won’t do you any good if he’s declared insane.” Which was, undeniably, true.
Arthur rolled his eyes to the ceiling and dropped back into the curve of his spine. It was a spontaneously boyish movement, and made him look more like Cory. “I’m not trying to make him insane. I know he’s delicate. I can’t help it if he’s dreaming my dreams. Like I said, I can’t dream naturally. We’re in uncharted territory. I have absolutely no idea why this is happening.”
Noah flopped onto his back, and he dragged hands through his messy hair as he looked at the ceiling. There was no real answer, he realized. The man in his head, he seemed disinclined to play body-thief, but this man seemed to think it was a necessity of sorts. “You can simply wait. Use your influence to make him go through the door, rather than doing this here. It’s what the others do. Why should you have a right to be different, just because Cory is weak?” he asked, and that was it, wasn’t it? Cory’s weakness. I hope this causes you to appreciate me more, Mycroft insisted in Noah’s mind.
“I haven’t been through the door. I doubt Cory would take it well. I started this project before I knew about the door, but it’s still relevant. It makes the door more dangerous.” Arthur knew very well how this all sounded, but he’d explained it so many times to so many people, people who looked at him like he was nuts right up until they were on the PASIV minutes later. He was tired of trying. “I can do this on my own without your help. Just don’t alarm Cory. You won’t be doing him any favors. Are you going to let him sleep in the bed?” Arthur’s sardonic quirk of brow said he knew that Noah didn’t habitually sleep there.
Noah was not particularly schooled in recognizing sardonic expressions. “Yes,” he said, taking it as a request to move, rather than a comment about anything else. The front door opened just then, and his stepmother called for him (a slur in her voice), and he sighed as he stood. “Let him rest, and we’ll speak more after you’ve been through your door,” he said. He decided that he didn’t much like Arthur, and he certainly didn’t trust him. Noah felt himself the only divider between Cory and madness, and he wasn’t certain he could bear the weight upon his shoulders. “A moment!” he called to his stepmother.
Arthur sighed. He didn’t much like being disliked. He was usually the stable one, with Dom running off with his crazy ideas and Mal... well, nevermind. He was the crazy one now, crazy making other people crazy. Arthur settled back on the bed and flattened onto his back, taking in a very deep breath and, without another parting comment, letting his (Cory’s) eyes close.