[SE] maybe then you'll get a little heated too

JACK

Scoffing at that and offering a nod of acknowledgement - cakewalk indeed - Jack gives Vesper's shoulder a rough squeeze before letting his hand drop back to his lap. "Be that as it may, this sort of magic is its own baggage," he says, and the boy goes onto explain just as much. Vesper says all the things Jack has carried for years with the succinct weariness that only comes with someone who knows it intimately; all the things he'd taken to heart in his youth, things had morphed into swaggering, reckless arrogance in the years that followed before burning out into the jaded indifference it is now - mostly.

"Makes you real tired, doesn't it?" he says softly. "Takes the shine off bein' alive, too, if you let it. But I dunno if you gotta tell the whole fuckin' world about yourself to find someone. I didn't have to, even if it blew up in my fuckin' face in the end." But that hadn't been his magic's fault, not entirely, not all by itself. The man it had carved him into had contributed, certainly, but just knowing about him hadn't been what had ended it. No, it was that Jack hadn't been enough, plain and simple.

"Not everyone's Colt," he says. "The way she thought 'bout you, the way shit would've gone if you told her about you - there are people out there that'll take it in their stride." It's more a matter of whether he's got it in him to want to look for them after this.

believer, believe it or not you'll know
when it ends and how it goes