[At the stated desire not to hurt him, Emet-Selch makes a breathless, slightly pained sound that doesn't even approach a laugh. Any time any of those Warriors said something like that- it felt that bit more absurd. And how hard it was to deny the impulse to protest or retort, to ask why now was she at all concerned about hurting him with words, when she was willing to apply her sword with a far more lethal intent?

Besides, it wasn't as though Irhya's description of him had been wrong. That was why it had hurt, after all. That's why he remembered it, that's why it had an effect.

At one point, not even all that far into the past, he would've ignored the mi'qote's question entirely. It was still tempting to reject it outright, if not out of spite- but because there was nothing he could think of. Nothing they could do, less that they would do- and he couldn't even ask to be left alone because he didn't want that either.

Not that he was sure why not. It wasn't as though they brought each other anything but pain. It wasn't as though they would ever, ever remember him.

But Emet-Selch pauses instead, silent, nearly still apart from his breathing. But eventually he shakes his head, barely perceptibly.]

--What would you do in my position? Were our circumstances reversed? [This seems to be something he ends up asking every Warrior in the end. But they were all different people; if he was ever to find any sort of answer for himself, he needed everyone's thoughts.] Could you forgive everything? Could you forget it, and live alongside those who--

[But what if there was no answer? No conclusion, no means to tidy away this mess of grief and resentment and solitude. It wasn't as though he'd ever learned to cope before, and he just sighs in the end. What if this was it, this uncertainty was the best he'd ever achieve?

A fitting capstone to a lifetime of futility.]

It would be easier if we despised one another. We both have more than enough reason for it.

[And yet here they were, lying together like this.]