Forty-Fifth Drop: recovering [video]
[The device is sitting on a hospital table, and Sorrow is lying in the nearby bed. He's clean -- fairly miraculous, considering the way he looked before -- and thus is about as white as the sheets as he stares into the ether from his vantage point against the pillow. There's an impressive train of stitches across the left side of his face, where the surgeons took out the bullet and then had to repair quite a lot of tissue and bone inside. His eye, impressively enough, is intact, except for a blood spot on the sclera that will clear up soon enough. He takes a deep breath, then sighs, fangs showing a little.]
I thought you were supposed to kill me. Or Buffy was. I wish it worked that way here.
[He rubs a little at the stitches, then winces and pulls the hand away.]
But it doesn't. Wounding really is the best strategy, here, as the dead are often reborn. Not all of them, though. Oddly. Perhaps the deities don't care enough about some, or perhaps they care too little for our sanity.
[His fingers move to one of the fangs, scratching at it a moment.]
I assume I'll have a trial, or at the very least some kind of judgment. I am prepared. But if there is some way to turn me back to human, to rid me of these instincts...I'll be no danger at all. I wish there were a way. Is there? Is there anything that can be done? I'm not often so lucid these days, and I must ask before I can't think well enough to do so...
[The hand falls away, and though he's smiling, it's a rueful and joyless expression.]
Thank you, Ken, and the others that were there. Apologies are never enough...but still, I regret all of this more than you know.
I thought you were supposed to kill me. Or Buffy was. I wish it worked that way here.
[He rubs a little at the stitches, then winces and pulls the hand away.]
But it doesn't. Wounding really is the best strategy, here, as the dead are often reborn. Not all of them, though. Oddly. Perhaps the deities don't care enough about some, or perhaps they care too little for our sanity.
[His fingers move to one of the fangs, scratching at it a moment.]
I assume I'll have a trial, or at the very least some kind of judgment. I am prepared. But if there is some way to turn me back to human, to rid me of these instincts...I'll be no danger at all. I wish there were a way. Is there? Is there anything that can be done? I'm not often so lucid these days, and I must ask before I can't think well enough to do so...
[The hand falls away, and though he's smiling, it's a rueful and joyless expression.]
Thank you, Ken, and the others that were there. Apologies are never enough...but still, I regret all of this more than you know.