perpetual-calendar:

Yeah, put it down, Maira. You just don’t mistake a man like the Crowmouth for a thieving scrapmuncher, and by the time you’ll have thought of a better excuse for unloading the Mouse’s clip in his noggin’, he’ll be done bleeding your head from the inside with a bulletstorm of questions.

Let’s have a chat then, right? You, him and a cheap bowl of even cheaper noodles in-between to take the eyes away from the gun sitting on the table like a second course. It’s not like flapping your gums to chew on that still-slithering slop will satiate you any more than if you did so for the sake of answering Derek. Chances are good that the latter’ll be tastier anyway.

“Sometimes.”

He’s gonna want more than that, and that makes two of you. The difference being, unlike the Crowmouth, you prefer getting your answers from broken concrete, battered metal and frayed wires. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve ever given you any, mind you - but they fetch a good price most times, and that tends to satisfy you.

You could tell him that. Or you could tell him about the sleepless nights you spent sitting in your garden, soaking in enough radiations to kill most men in the Remnants thrice over, and wondering what the implications might be. You could tell Derek about the days you spent rummaging through Dad’s stuff after he bit it, in search of a map, a diary, of anything to tell you where exactly he brought you back from. About the instinctive sensation that drags your stomach down in a sizzling pit, whenever your travels lead you to pass by the ruins of some Ancient facility. The nagging thought that a few steps through the scattered pieces of a lost civilization, you might one day stumble upon your own corpse, or something resembling it too closely to be a mere coincidence.

You could delight the Crowmouth with the tallest tale he’s ever fed on: the massive tapestry of speculation that Dad left covering your past, like dust over a crumbled, purposeless building. It would take all of three words instead of the silent pause that followed your brief answer. Just those three words.

- Into the mirror. -

So why do you keep quiet, Maira? Ah, I see, I see. That’d be no answer, just a question without its proper mark tying it at the end. Disgustingly cheap, just like your noodles. Take a good sip…

“But I already have my hands busy with the present.”