[Mini Event] hands off your fate, child

Wessex's hand against his chest was not one he wanted to defy; if anything, he wanted to allow it to push him to the ground, to lay him flat on his back and peer up at the stars, but.. he had a feeling that would only make his coughing worse, so he met her eyes and promised nothing.

Then she was gone, and Rory blinked in the darkness. Rocked forward on his hands again. Coughed more. Grit and sandpaper and fire. He spat again, and when he looked up, Jigano was next to him instead. Able to see clearer he made out the familiar features, the sharp cheekbones, the way he held his shoulder and arm beneath a coat of dust and grime and defeat. Only the obvious pain they were both in kept him from doing something foolish, so in silence he held onto the roll of offered gauze, and then proceeded to do his best to help Jigano fashion the sling.

And all the while his mind whirred, like giving gas without a gear put in: wild and ineffectual, a frustration roaming beneath his skin. It lacked direction. It was just a building, growing, blooming emptiness—

Every part of him was lost and damned.

Everything he had thought that he was, he wasn't.

Jigano loomed above him, his reddened eyes foreign in his dusty face, the gaze of someone alien (or perhaps you've simply lost your comprehension). A shadow of someone who was free to be himself (or was he?).

Are you?

But in the blue, lurking among the bands of red, and in the voice, the words of a worried friend, was something (someone) that he knew. Rory remained sitting for a moment longer, his hands curling into fists against his thighs, bitterness as vile as the poison itself pooling in the back of his mouth. There was so much that was wrong, there in the shadow of the Spire, but surely this one thing was not..?

Surely caring was not? Slowly, Rory put himself back on his feet, rising unsteadily into the darkness. His eyes—for a moment forlorn—swept over Jigano's face and then onto Amalia. "I understand," he rasped in response as he looked back to Jigano, his heart breaking into a million pieces even as he made his painful choices. The calm in his voice was out of place, even for being him. "I'm feeling better by the minute, so I'll come with you, and look for him. Amalia?"

Is there any coming back from this?