[ Markus happens to be a nice guy Simon would like to get to know better. Of course, that’s almost incidental at this point; that invitation could have been from pretty much anybody, and he would have taken it, just for the distraction from the pointless tunnel of rumination about Catherine up and vanishing. Did she wind up what she was before they got here, a digitized brain, strained to a flashing, smoking death in the Omnitool by Simon’s weaponized denial? Or simply where she was before — now human, teleported instantly to the bottom of the ocean with no protection from the crushing pressures of the abyss? Is she anywhere or anyone at all?
Why didn’t he say more to her when he had the chance?
And for as short as his time in PATHOS-II was, it left more than its share of pockmarks on his psyche. A mastery of the art of getting from one place to the next while dwelling on the feeling of progress instead of why you’re doing it or what’s actually going to happen when you get there has been one of them. Enough so that when Simon approaches the table (arms crossed; it passes a single-glance-from-a-local test), he just looks slightly startled for a moment to see that there’s food on it— ]
Oh, thanks.
[ —and to be remembering how they’ve only spoken or seen each other under weird circumstances and Simon doesn’t know why he was invited here. But Markus is acting totally normal about it, so he will too, offering him a small smile as he takes the seat across from him and plucking two of the fries from a pretty towering quantity of them. ]
How’s it going, Markus? Happy to be... [ not “home” but. ] uh, back?
[ Of course, Simon is prepared to discuss only the nightmarish weather on their trip rather than the actual nightmares. Not that Simon doesn’t also have some hardcore benchmarks to measure those against. ]
no subject
Why didn’t he say more to her when he had the chance?
And for as short as his time in PATHOS-II was, it left more than its share of pockmarks on his psyche. A mastery of the art of getting from one place to the next while dwelling on the feeling of progress instead of why you’re doing it or what’s actually going to happen when you get there has been one of them. Enough so that when Simon approaches the table (arms crossed; it passes a single-glance-from-a-local test), he just looks slightly startled for a moment to see that there’s food on it— ]
Oh, thanks.
[ —and to be remembering how they’ve only spoken or seen each other under weird circumstances and Simon doesn’t know why he was invited here. But Markus is acting totally normal about it, so he will too, offering him a small smile as he takes the seat across from him and plucking two of the fries from a pretty towering quantity of them. ]
How’s it going, Markus? Happy to be... [ not “home” but. ] uh, back?
[ Of course, Simon is prepared to discuss only the nightmarish weather on their trip rather than the actual nightmares. Not that Simon doesn’t also have some hardcore benchmarks to measure those against. ]