You are the night-time fear
He's used to feeling inadequate. It doesn't make it easier to bear, but it doesn't come as a shock. It's just the way it is, sometimes, a heavy weight in your chest, and then it's up to you what you do with it. Aamu resolved, a long time ago, not to let it stop him. Better to try, and fall short of the mark, than to not try at all, right? He holds it for true even in that winding hallway with a once-dead girl tearing seaweed out of her tangled, salty hair.He worries she'll pull out her own hair, but he doesn't want to stop her and this first, angry step in what he thinks might be the right direction. Instead he reaches up to work some of it from the matted locks, far more gentle than she is—and the mystery of his own circumstances a far better distraction than any other he could offer, anyway.
It doesn't surprise him they all assume he, too, had died. It doesn't matter that for all intents and purposes he had, just that his soul never took that final journey to wherever dead Ascended actually go. Did Mort still take them?
He puts aside his own dislike of speculating. She needs it more than he needs to stick to principles.
"I don't know," he admits, helpless, hopeless, his fingers pulling the sea from her hair. "I don't think it was intentional." He frowns a little. Thinks. "I think I was going somewhere, and then..." He shrugs. "I woke up when the Voice needed me to go guide your souls back. As for how long I was shut off, I have no idea." He thinks of all the faces he can't recognize, the black Spire looming just beyond, the barren, ruined feel of the Settlement. "I suspect it was a very long time, though." A quiet, despairing confession in that desolate place.
You are the morning when it's clear
AAMU
