[ Like a tentacle, like a stain. Like a creature with movements so unnatural as to be uncanny, as to disturb. That whip of black slithering. Gaelio watches it hasten, understanding the direction, not indifferent but without tension. A manifestation that comes for him, but he has already died, and he has fought too often in these dreams.

He does think it hate.

The most direct answer, a simple cut through, as if by a razor.

He thinks it, staring, until McGillis speaks. Understanding without hating, and Gaelio's chin falls as if shoved from a shelf, his eyes severed from snake and sky, catching first on that bruise newly swelling harsh, and second on that bruise, and third, and only there. Without eyes to hold, there is only that inexplicable contusion, and another. ]

But you are angry.

[ He'd lived his life in it, Gaelio remembers well.

How to make sense of this, how to understand what McGillis understands best, and not at all. The boy knows hatred, but doesn't hate him, but he kills him. Muscles tighten in his face, down his arms, curl his fingers in restraint. ]

So you must have, or you will. You'll hate me. Or...

[ Gaelio swallows, wrenching his eyes away, not toward sky, not toward anything at all. Nothing at all. Why should that, should absence, more undo than hatred? ]

Or I didn't mean anything at all.

[ That's why, that's the how of it. Easy and swift. How quickly he'd fallen, and how easy it had sounded. None of that in his voice, though Gaelio's contorts, as though his tongue, too, could tense. If not hate, then that, only that, and wretched conviction in it. But there's no point in demanding solution and solace from this child, until he next demands, and he won't again lay his hands.

Laid hands. It blurts, reedy with strain and a frantic impulse to veer into another, if no less dangerous topic. ]

Who did that to you?

[ Don't you know? Doesn't he, who else, shouldn't it be obvious -- can remember, can't remember, can't, won't. ]