Augustine touches him, and John sags into it, a moment of mindless gravity. He stays there, listening to the fumble and catch as Augustine does not quite remember. He shuts his eyes again; he looks back to the sea.

"She's heard it all," he says. It's an easy confession, and a cowardly one, because he's making it to the wrong version of the man. This young Augustine looks at him so differently than his, open and unguarded. His Augustine is only ever unguarded when there's the weight of self-destruction in the giving of it, desperation in the offer. "But she doesn't understand it. None of them would. It'd become scripture, and they'd pantomime the stories... but to really know it, they'd have to know the dying, not the death."

He leans, cruel as it is, against this Augustine's bony shoulder. Feels the living warmth of him, the furnace-intensity of his fused and broken souls. The ash won't take him, but still he can't have this for long.

"Better to let it be dead," he says, too softly. "This part is mine to keep."