Quintessence of Dust (Digital Devil Saga, Roland/Argilla) Title: Quintessence of Dust Author:puella_nerdii Rating: PG-13 Warnings: language, meta meta meta Wordcount: 5050 Prompt:Argilla/Roland. "'What a piece of work is man', and all that--I don't expect you to know the rest, but the first thing humanity did was wonder what the fuck it was." Summary: Our deeds make us who we are. Roland, Argilla, and the kind of late-night discussion of Hamlet that can only happen when it's the end of the world.
“Well, it’s about a prince.” Right, she doesn’t know what that means. Roland sighs, tops off his glass; the whiskey burns his throat when it goes down. Cheap shit distilled in a half-rusted footlocker stuck in some hollowed-out building. God what he wouldn’t do for Jack Daniels, but Lynchburg is gone, baked black under the sun. “A prince is—a prince is the leader of a tribe, only the rest of the tribe doesn’t choose him.” Wait. “If you guys, uh, do you choose who leads you?”
“We just know,” Argilla says.
“Right.” AI. Fuck, he’s so—“Anyway, Hamlet’s the prince of Denmark. Denmark is a country. Was a country. They’re all probably dead now.”
He anticipates her question before she opens her mouth. He’s crap at teaching, always has been. His advisor—back when there were colleges and dorms and mornings spent under sun-dappled blankets and girls roaming the campus in packs laughing and chewing gum—his advisor told him not to go for the education minor after all. Stick to English. Well, look where he ended up. Same place as the engineers and aspiring politicians and budding geneticists and the rest of them. Maybe even a better place, if you call scurrying away from the sun and holing up in whatever damp crevice you can find, knifing rats because it’s better than the alternative food source—if that’s a better place.
“A country is where a tribe lives,” Roland says.
“You have so many words to describe things,” Argilla says. She presses those perfect lips of hers into a kind of frown. “How do you remember them all?”
He shrugs. His left hand starts to tremble. He tries to pin it under his knee and hold it still. “You just pick it up when you’re young. It’s not programmed in, exactly, not the way it is for you. We don’t—we don’t have the knowledge right from the beginning. But we absorb it before we’re aware enough to realize what we’re doing, and then our brains just stay like that. Most of the time.”
“There are exceptions?”
“Aren’t there always?” He cracks a grin. She doesn’t smile back.
“I think you’re right.” She bites her lip, chews on it a little. He watches her teeth: blindingly white, blunted, small, neat. Human. For now. Then again, when Prithvi comes out, her teeth are—
He downs another shot. Coughs, sputters on it. “So this prince, this leader, his father dies. And this prince, Hamlet, he’s been away from home, he’s been studying at a university in—well, it’s not important where the university is, the main thing is that he hasn’t been back to Denmark in a while. Got all that?”
“Father,” Argilla says. She nods. “Like Lupa. Lupa remembered a boy who called him by that name.”
“Like—” His chest burns, jerks like someone rammed a live wire into it. He doesn’t know why. “Like Lupa, sure. You, uh, you had kids running around in the Junkyard?”
Argilla shakes her head. Tendrils of her hair curl around her ears, sway from side to side when her head moves. Medusa, he thinks, because the world’s one big myth these days, vengeful gods turning flesh to stone and demons wearing the skins of men and people—if you can call the Embryon that, and he’s not sure you can, not sure yet—springing fully-formed from the head of. Someone. They aren’t too clear on who crafted them, who shaped and arranged and composed the code, that’s the word, laid out who they were and how they thought and gave them rules. If condition X is met, then condition Y follows, or something like that; he flunked computer science and that was years ago, anyway, back in a time when the sky was blue and people breathed and laughed and walked and kissed. Back before some big cosmic pencil erased the old rules and scribbled in new ones. And did the same pencil create them? Did that author decide to remake men in a new image—his image, his true face, not benevolent and wizened and bearded but monstrous, slavering, hungry?
Hell if he knows.
He’s rambling again. He can’t articulate anything right these days. Then again, neither could Hamlet, not when it mattered.
“Anyway.” He presses his glass to his forehead, feels the chilled droplets of condensed liquid sliding down his skin. Do AIs sweat? He looks at Argilla through the glass, but her skin—he doesn’t even know if she has pores, she’s so smooth and even, sans crack or flaw. Except for the scar over her eye, but he doesn’t know if that’s a flaw, really, not when the scar draws you in like that, invites you to ask questions, to wonder. Even when the curvature of the glass distorts her shape, she’s so…
“He returns home and everything’s different,” Roland says. “It was a big enough shock when his father died, you know, he was fooling around in Wittenberg and staying up all night drinking and philosophizing with his friends and now he has to lead a whole country.”
“But wasn’t he created—born—to lead?”
Roland shrugs. “You know, I don’t think he was. I think he—he thought about it, obviously, he had to have, but it always seemed like such a distant possibility to him, the idea of kingship. Of ruling. Of responsibility. See, that’s the thing about Hamlet,” that’s the thing about people, “he doesn’t have time. Everything just hits him, everything just kind of falls on him and he doesn’t know how the fuck he’s supposed to shoulder all this, all this weight. The weight of the world. He’s supposed to be Atlas but he’s just a kid, he hasn’t figured out how to do it all yet, and he does his best but his best isn’t enough. That’s why it’s a tragedy.” A dull ache gathers just beneath his temples, starts to pulse and throb.
“Tragedy,” Argilla says slowly, sounding it out. When her lips shape the word like that, it’s almost musical. “That means—sad, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He leans forward, props his elbows up on the inside of his thighs. “It’s the whole world, it’s destiny conspiring to crush you, and you can’t do a goddamn thing about it. Fate just steamrollers you.”
“Karma.” She brushes her fingertips over the scar running down her eye. “Our actions in this life determine our fate in the next.” She pauses. “I think that’s tragedy,” she says. “Because if we can’t change what will happen, if God has cursed us to be this way forever, that’s sad.”
“Are you crying?” he asks.
She presses her palms to her eyes. Sighs softly. “I think so. It happens.” She pulls her hands away; tear tracks glisten on her cheeks. She rubs her fists over them, blends the moisture into her skin. “It—takes over me. When I think about her.”
Her. The words get stuck in his throat when he tries to ask. Instead he says, “They’re hard to control. Feelings, I mean. The—the demons inside us.” Or the demons inside the bottle. He gives his whiskey a long hard look but it’s clear and it’s strong and he isn’t and fuck if he doesn’t want that right now, want something burning in him. Just. Something.
“You’re sad, too,” Argilla says.
Most alcoholics are, he thinks. What he says is, “Well, a sad sack, anyway.” A sinner. Destiny’s whipping boy. He’s come up with a lot of names for himself. He can still create that much, even if he can’t create anything else, nothing that matters.
“Is it because of Fred’s father?” she asks, stares at him with those eyes; the dingy light doesn’t catch them quite right and the color’s almost flat, uniform.
“Yeah,” he says, but his throat gets raw so he changes the topic. “How do you—” He almost says you AIs but he remembers the pink lines stretching across Argilla’s skin and decides not to piss off the woman who can rip off his head any more than he has to. “How do you guys know all this?” Computer programs can make deductions based on logic, he thinks, but this shit about sadness…computers aren’t sad.
“We’re not stupid,” she says. We. Do they all speak for each other, he wonders?
“No.” Roland swallows. “You’re not.” He sighs, and because he’s a shitty excuse for a writer he borrows from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. “What a piece of work is man.”
Argilla blinks. “Sorry?”
“Hamlet again. I don’t expect you to know the rest of it.” Maybe he could teach her the rest, someday. Yeah. Right. He leans forward again. “So you remember where we left off?”
“Hamlet’s father died,” Argilla summarizes. “And he doesn’t know what to do.”
“Right. Good. That comes up a lot. Him not knowing what to do. He finds out that his mother married his uncle. His father’s brother.” He hopes she has some vague idea about what marriage is. That’s going to be a pain in the ass to explain. But she doesn’t ask him about it or frown or anything, just looks down at her left ring finger. “So now his uncle’s the king of Denmark, which probably breaks the laws, but Hamlet’s too depressed to protest.”
“He let his uncle steal his Tribe that easily?” Now Argilla frowns.
“He doesn’t really have a choice. His uncle’s stronger than he is.” That she should get. The strong eat the weak. “So he feels like—he feels like his mother’s dishonoring his father.” Honor they get. He knows that. Gale’s words still sting in the back of his mind.
“Because she’s forgotten her husband.” She stumbles over the last word a little.
“Yeah. Anyway, Hamlet hears about a ghost haunting Castle Elsinore. A ghost is—”
“Disembodied data.” She smiles. “We’ve fought them.”
“Really?” He guesses it isn’t that weird, considering everything else, but he keeps on thinking of Argilla in one of those outfits from Ghostbusters or something and he can’t help it, he cracks a grin. “No shit.”
“They’re weak against force attacks.”
Roland sinks deep into his chair and looks up at the ceiling. “I swear my life gets goddamn weirder every day.”
“Is that a bad thing?” It’s not quite flirting the way she asks it. She really wants to know.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder if I know anything anymore.” He shakes his head to clear it, because something’s going foggy up there. “So Hamlet decides to investigate. Turns out that the ghost is his father.”
“His father was a ghost?”
“Not quite. You turn into a ghost after you die,” he says. “If you have unfinished business. That’s what some legends say. You and the Embryon, you believe in reincarnation, right?”
Argilla nods. “What do you believe in?”
He doesn’t want to say I don’t know again. “I don’t know.” Hamlet. He just has to keep talking about Hamlet. “His father’s data comes back to him, but it’s not in a body anymore. And his father tells him that his uncle Claudius poisoned him. Hamlet senior.” Roland hates pronouns. “The uncle poisoned the father and took the throne for himself.”
She growls; the sound travels up from the earth and through her bones.
“So Hamlet—the younger Hamlet—has to kill Claudius to avenge his father’s death.” He scratches the back of his neck. “That’s the way justice worked back then. You avenged your own. Family is everything, tribe is everything. You do them honor even after they’ve died.”
“It’s right,” Argilla says. She looks at her nails, curls her hand into a fist. “I think. You can’t follow a leader who’s betrayed one of your own. That part has to be true, doesn’t it?”
“No. I guess you can’t.” Or you can try to forget about it, he thinks. You can drown yourself in booze and wallow in it, wallow in the misery and the pity and everything black and ugly and vile about yourself until the alcohol makes you too numb to the world outside of yourself. But he doesn’t tell her that. “But that scares Hamlet. I mean, first of all, he’s not even sure if the ghost really is his father.”
“You said the ghost was his father.”
“I know that, and you know that, but he doesn’t. Hell, I got into an argument with my professor about it in grad school, whether or not the ghost is supposed to be his father or the instrument of fate made manifest. Diabolus ex machina.” He laughs. “The devil in the machine.”
Argilla blinks. Politely. Goddamn, he has to stop rambling. But he can’t stay up all night talking Shakespeare with anyone else in the Lokapala. Fred’s never read Hamlet—well, neither has Argilla, but Fred doesn’t want to, never even looks at the few books Roland’s managed to scrounge from the surface. (He keeps them in a box under his bed, wishes he could case them all in glass, but beggars can’t be choosers.) But Argilla makes no motion to leave, just sits in his old three-legged leather chair with her arms folded across her chest, so he keeps talking.
“So Hamlet’s worried that the ghost’s a demon sent to lead him astray. And if the ghost told him the truth, then it’s the end of everything. The end of his youth, the end of everything he’s ever loved or enjoyed, because nothing else can compare to this, nothing else matters in the face of this horrible revelation. He can’t think about anything else. This has to become his life.” Roland rests his face in his hands. “And that’s all his life will ever be,” he says, his voice thick. Bile gathers in the back of his throat. He tries to choke more words out but they stop—words, words, words and that’s all they are and is it enough, is anything ever enough—so he reaches for his glass again, for the whiskey to burn everything away, but Argilla’s hand stops him, seizes his wrist. There are no calluses on her fingers, but her hand isn’t soft, it’s more—it’s like touching heated glass, smooth and slippery and unyielding.
“Why do you drink poison?” she asks.
“It’s not poison,” he lies. “Not in moderation,” he amends, “anything’s poison if you take it in excess.”
“It makes the—” She gestures to her stomach. “Your organs rot away. What’s it called?”
“What, cirrhosis?”
“No. The organ that gets scarred the most. I knew its name once, I think.” She frowns, pulls her hand away from his. The residual warmth from her skin touching his lingers.
“Oh. The liver. The liver—” Shit, what does the liver do? He’s forgotten almost as much as she claims to have. He pushes his glasses up to rub his eyes and gropes around for an answer for her. “It governs the, ah. The sanguine humor in ancient medical theory. An excess of the sanguinary humor—of blood—makes you courageous, hopeful, amorous.”
“Blood makes people brave?” she asks.
“No, not exactly, it was more of a disposition than a—never mind,” he says. She’ll just get confused. She has enough to learn about the world; he doesn’t need to complicate things any further by telling her outdated theories. The world’s moved on. Silence stretches out between them. Argilla looks at her nails (where did she get nail polish?) and Roland looks at his glass, wills himself not to reach for it, not to fall…
“What does Hamlet do?” Argilla finally asks.
Roland gives her a crooked smile. “Well, Hamlet isn’t very good at doing things, at taking action.” At taking up arms against a sea of troubles. “He’s left with two choices: he can go mad with the knowledge he’s received, or he can avenge his father’s death and kill his uncle. But he hesitates. He doesn’t commit. So he decides to feign madness, see if he can catch his uncle’s court off guard while he comes up with a plan to see if his father’s ghost—what he thinks was his father’s ghost—spoke the truth.”
She nods once. “He pretends to be something he’s not. I know what deception is,” she adds. The mark on her chest pulses once, slowly, and the pink lines flare up and curl back in on themselves in the space of a heartbeat.
“Do you ever wish you didn’t?” he asks.
“It was simpler then,” she says. “Before we learned about deception and sadness and pain. But I couldn’t go back to the way I was before. I can’t live without anything at all.”
“Oh.” He swallows. “No. I suppose not. It’s hard to go back.”
Argilla taps her nails on her thigh. “Like—Hamlet, right? He couldn’t go back, either.”
He smiles at her. “You’re good at this.”
“I’m just trying to understand.”
“We all are.” He stares long and hard into the bottom of his cup, looks at the dregs of whiskey clinging to the sides of his glass. “No,” he says at last. “Hamlet couldn’t go back, either. So he goes crazy instead.”
“I thought he was only pretending to be crazy.”
“He is, sort of. It’s complicated.” He rubs the bridge of his nose; an ache builds up there, steady and dull. “When do you stop pretending and start being? Hamlet might not be as mad as he pretends to be, but his obsession, his depression—that’s a kind of madness, that’s a kind of unsound mind. I mean, he keeps a lot of his rationality for a while, even when he’s contemplating suicide, and there’s a logic to how he thinks, but he’s not well, and I think he’s telling the truth when he tells his friends that. Or as close to the truth as he dares to get. See, his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been summoned to Elsinore by the king and queen to spy on Hamlet.”
“Why would they betray their friend like that?” Argilla asks, crosses her arms again and leans back in her ratty chair. Pieces of the foam lining slip out from the tear in the upholstery and land on Argilla’s shoulder. She brushes them off.
“They didn’t think of it as betrayal,” he says. “They wanted to help, but they got in over their heads. But Hamlet’s suspicious of everyone and everything because he doesn’t know who or what he can trust, so he refuses their help, rejects their friendship. He pushes everyone away, because it hurts too much to let them close.”
He stands up. He has to grip the back of his chair hard to do it, has to lean on the creaking furniture and rest against the grime-streaked wall because his head’s sloshing around and that sort of thing fucks up your balance. “He can’t trust people because people are—humankind is flawed. Fundamentally. I don’t mean that humans are evil, because they aren’t, not in the conventional sense, just hungry.”
“Hungry,” Argilla echoes.
“For knowledge, for power, for everything.” He fists his hand in his hair, pulls tight. “We’re a species of devourers, and we were punished accordingly.”
“And you still think you’re better than we are,” Argilla says quietly. She looks out the window, out onto the bleak streets below.
Roland clenches his glass tighter, tighter until his knuckles turn white. “Well, we’re arrogant. The fall. It’s an enduring motif, and it plays out in—this.” He sweeps his free hand across the room, encompasses the grubby window and the sagging couch and everything that used to be new and whole and right and now isn’t, because nothing’s like that anymore. The words tumble out fast, feverish. He thinks the glass slips from his hands, shatters into glimmering shards on the bare floor. “Mankind is capable of great things, beautiful things, testaments to—” His mouth feels fuzzy, like it’s been packed with balls of cotton. “Testaments to truth and beauty and love. But in the end, they’re nothing. Nothing lasts. It’s a quintessence of dust.” His chest hurts. “That’s why humankind is flawed, because we’re impermanent, because the good we do dies with us. And we hope that it won’t, but in the end—”
Argilla’s behind him, somehow, steadying him, her hands firm on his shoulders. She half-steers half-carries him to the couch, and he sinks into her arms a little. There’s a core of strength to her; an inhuman one, obviously, but he feels the earth shifting under her skin and he appreciates it, almost, appreciates how real her arms are. Like pillars of stone, anchoring him.
“Thank you,” he says. Mumbles, more like it.
“What kind of world is this?” she asks him. Her voice doesn’t quite hold steady.
A dead one. A damned one. “A cursed one,” Roland says.
“Cursed,” she echoes. She straightens, walks across the room and rests her palms on the wall opposite him. “So nothing changes, after all.”
He swallows around the lump in his throat. He’s going to have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. “You can—do you want to go to sleep now?” he asks when his throat works more or less properly again. “Do you remember where your room is?” Does she sleep? Do AIs dream of electric—no, he’s not going to go there.
“I want to know what happens next,” Argilla says. Her hands curl up as she turns away from the wall, back towards him. A streak of dirt runs across her cheek; he stares at it for a while, at the smudge marring her otherwise flawless features. He should tell her about it, but he doesn’t want her to wipe it away.
He nods, his head almost moving of its own accord. “Hamlet hires a troupe of actors—they’re storytellers, sort of; people who pretend to be other people. Is something wrong?” he adds, because she bites her lip again.
She shakes her head. “No. There’s something familiar about the concept, though.”
He leans into the couch, sinks into the depression formed by one of the hollowed-out seat cushions. “Hamlet hires a troupe of actors to stage a play—a story—he wrote. The play tells the story of his father’s murder, the story the ghost told him. He plans to have it performed before the king and see if the king picks up on any parallels between the play and the events surrounding his brother’s death. If he does, if he reacts to it, Hamlet will know the ghost told him the truth. If not, well.” Roland shrugs. “Hamlet was visited by a demon after all, and he doesn’t need to trouble himself with thoughts of vengeance.”
“It’s a hidden message,” Argilla says.
“Meanings within meanings, yeah.” Roland glances up. “Is that familiar, too?”
“I think it is.” She pauses, sweeps a lock of pink hair away from her eyes. “Who wrote this? What kind of man was he?”
“Shakespeare? Nobody knows. We have guesses, conjectures, but it’s been centuries. Most information about him is lost. Some people think he didn’t write the plays in the first place, that it was someone else publishing under his name.”
“Oh. I see.” He’s not sure if she does, but he’ll take her at her word.
“The king and queen, meanwhile, attribute Hamlet’s odd behavior to lovesickness. He has a—I guess you could call her his girlfriend. Her name is Ophelia, and her father Polonius is one of Claudius’s advisers. He forbade Ophelia to see Hamlet, because he didn’t trust Hamlet’s intentions.”
“Did he think Hamlet would hurt her?” Argilla asks.
He’s not sure he wants to start a discussion about the role of marriage and sex during Shakespeare’s time—he isn’t really qualified to, for one—so he says, “Yes. And he wasn’t wrong. Ophelia is a dutiful daughter, so she stays away from Hamlet until her father orders her to see him again. Polonius and Claudius hide during the confrontation and try to assess if Hamlet’s madness really does spring from his yearning for Ophelia. Nothing in Hamlet’s world is private; everyone’s always watching, observing, spying.”
“That hasn’t changed, either.”
“No,” Roland says, “it really hasn’t. Hamlet contemplates suicide. Doesn’t go through with it, of course. He can’t put thought into action. It’s only when he doesn’t think that he’s able to act.” He glances at Argilla’s atma almost reflexively and thinks he hears a faint rumbling emerging from it. “He thinks Ophelia’s betrayed him, betrayed him just as everyone else has. He loved her once, but there’s no place for love now. So he abuses her, rails at her, calls her a whore.”
“Why does he do that to her if he loved her?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I think he wants her to hurt as badly as he does, and he doesn’t take betrayal well.”
“Did she mean to betray him?”
“No.” He scratches the side of his nose, right where the ache’s the most intense. “She has her duty to her father, just as he has his, and in the end, their obligations are stronger than their love.”
“Then their love must not have been very strong,” she says. “If you love someone, you should—”
“You should what?” he asks when she doesn’t complete the thought, just leaves the words hanging there.
“I don’t know.” She wraps her arms around her chest, shivers. “But it shouldn’t end like that.”
It shouldn’t, he thinks, but sometimes it does. She’s still now, standing with her head slightly bowed; her eyelashes flutter, and her chest rises and falls with her breath, but that’s about it. He should ask her if she’s all right. He ends up saying, “Hamlet’s plan works. Claudius stops the play. His conscience can’t endure it any longer.”
“Does Hamlet kill him then? Now that he knows that the ghost was right?”
“No,” Roland says. “He doesn’t. Not yet. It’s only the third act.”
“But he must want to do something,” she says. “How can he do nothing?”
“He’s not strong enough.” Roland tries to stand up but just ends up sinking further into the couch. The springs dig into his legs, scratch them, gouge them. He still can’t stand. “He thinks about it too much. He has to plan his vengeance, has to exact it in just the right way. So he waits. And when he does act, when he visits his mother in her bedchamber and confronts her, he ends up stabbing Polonius, who hid himself behind the curtain.” He laughs, or tries to. It ends up sounding more like a cough. “Someone’s always watching. And then everything goes to hell, because that one action had more power than any of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Our thoughts don’t shape the world. Only our actions bear us out.”
“Does Hamlet die?” Argilla steps over the shards of glass littering the floor and sits down across from him.
His chest collapses in on itself. The words—everything stops. That’s the point, isn’t it? How it ends. And it always ends the same way.
“We all die.” He rests his head in his hands.
“I know,” Argilla says softly. He thinks he’s imagining her voice at first, but he looks at her through his fingers and sees—her eyes aren’t flat at all, the color in them shifts and shimmers.
He takes a deep shuddering breath, feels his lungs stir themselves again. “Ophelia goes mad after her father dies and kills herself. She does what Hamlet couldn’t do. Her brother Laertes tries to avenge his father’s death. Claudius helps him rig the duel with Hamlet. He poisons his blade. He cheats, because nothing’s fair and nothing’s right anymore. The queen dies after she drinks poisoned wine intended for Hamlet. Poison everywhere. It fits. It’s the—the whole atmosphere is poisonous, life at Elsinore is poisonous, and everyone dies from it. Hamlet, too, after he kills Claudius. It’s a hollow victory, but that’s tragedy for you.”
“Did it have to end like that?”
“It wouldn’t be tragedy if it ended any other way,” he says. “So yes.”
“Well, why does it have to be tragedy?” She leans forward. The smudge on her cheek is still there.
“Because Hamlet tried as hard as he could, and in the end, it wasn’t enough,” he says quietly. “That’s what tragedy is.” He looks down. “A foreign prince, Fortinbras, comes in at the end of the play. Conquers the whole nation. So Hamlet might have died anyway. His suffering, his quest for vengeance—it didn’t matter, in the end. He couldn’t save his country, and he couldn’t save himself. So what was the point of it all? If everything leads to death…”
His head drops. Swims. His vision blurs, gets hotter.
“Serph told me something when I asked him about that.” He hears the fabric of Argilla’s skirt swish, and then she stands in front of him. He brings his head up slowly, raises his gaze past her legs and up her hips and over her chest until her eyes meet his and hold them there, fix them in place. “He said that we live to determine how we die.”
“Oh,” Roland says. No other words come to mind.
“I think he was right.”
Her hand rests at her side. He reaches for it, slowly, feels her skin slide under his fingers. She lets him for a few moments, lets his hand soak up the simmering heat rising from her. He breathes out, closes his eyes. There’s sweat on her skin, a sheen of it; some of it clings to his palm. She smells like freshly-tilled earth and new clay and nothing like metal at all.
Argilla draws away.
“Good night,” he says.
“That play.” She pauses, her hand on the doorknob. “Is it in the computer archives? Could I read it if I wanted to?”
“Yes,” he says. “You could.”
“Oh.” She nods once. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he says. Do you trust me now? he wants to ask, but she slips out the door before he can.
Our deeds make us who we are.
Right.
He stares long and hard at his hands, then clenches them.