Okay so now Rory was mocking him. Wasn’t that fantastic? He scoffed and narrowed his eyes, turning away from his friend and looking at the floor. “No, but something happened that sort of made me react. Getting caught up in the moment tends to make things that you wouldn’t expect, happen. If I’d known it was going to happen before it did? Then yeah, I’d have controlled it. So, yeah it was beyond my control,” he spoke, defending himself and refusing to allow Rory to make him feel any worse than he already did. “You know me well enough to know that if there was anything I could have done to stop it, I would have. Or, at least I thought you did.” The last part came out without bidding, Eisen’s hurt overtaking his ‘protect my best friend’ instincts for once.
And then, just like that, he felt like something on the bottom of someone’s shoe again. So that’s what the issue was, was it? Frowning, Eisen turned his eyes to Rory again and sighed. “Oh,” was all he said at first, while he gathered his brain and tried to come up with an appropriate response.
Eisen had been there before, too, though in a slightly different way. Losing Cait one of the many times had called into perspective a lot of things that he’d been doing in his life, and brought out a fear in Eisen that he never thought had existed, a fear of losing those he cared about. This was a different case of the same feeling. “I get it now,” he spoke, not a single hint of anger in his voice anymore. It was completely forgotten, left in the dust for worry and the want to make things better for his best friend. Except, what did he say? Was there anything to say? For once, Eisen was at a loss for how to help Rory and it bothered him more than it should have.
So, instead of that, he decided to ask a safe question. “Are you afraid you’re going to get left behind?”