This Augustine is too young. Too young to get it, too young to know it from experience. He'll remember, at some point, and then that'll be the end of this earnest fumbling. John can't lean into the hand which hovers uncertain by his shoulder, waiting as he is for it to fall.

He misses this Augustine. He misses the man who got shot. He misses his Augustine, the one with God's handprint seared into his skin by moonlight, who already knows what it means to languish in the wreckage of something you can't take back.

"It'll change," he agrees, but it sounds rote. "We'll change it... you and me, and the others... we'll build something here, but it won't be—"

He breaks off, in choked frustration. Annabel stirs a little in her sleep. John scrubs the hand over his face again, then drops it, and looks at Augustine with pain tight in the lines around his eyes.

"Do you know what I hate," he says, with that same too-human plaintive note to it, "the worst part of it, really? It's still spasming. It's never felt all the way dead. You only ever knew the death... but I remember the dying."

They are abruptly in the shadow of another conversation: this bewildering cartography, this invasion force.

"I can't ever stop remembering."