It caught him off-guard, the mind thing, always did, this time not just the connection but the contents - and y'know, that was really the least sucky of the possible outcomes of this as far as he was concerned, but would it wo--
then it was gone.
And then the slap. He'd really expected that, really felt he deserved it - if not another one - and didn't react except to shut his eyes.
He slowly took the box she offered and looked at it helplessly before opening it almost against his will.
Dogtags. Blue'ns. With something on 'em that looked like - "'s some Asian language, ain't it?" They all looked the same to him - not from racism, but from the fact that he'd grown up being at war with every surviving culture that used that sort of writing - plus one of the cultures that wrote like that was no longer surviving. He just didn't have a lot of experience with it.