Last night left a bitter taste in his mouth, frankly -- and not purely because he'd thrown up so many times, spiraling with one of his shittiest come-downs yet. No, because there was also the heat of Hazel's wrath, the burn of her shying away from his touch, the coldness of her words and the sureness of her disdain. He needed to get his shit together, she was right, but he'd meant what he'd told her. He didn't know how to feel or care for anything without a buzz in his veins. He didn't know how to escape the addiction once it settled in, and he didn't know that he cared to try. It was a stalemate, essentially. He felt vaguely compelled to make Hazel happy and yet barely had the energy to go about attempting it.

Still. He recognized that he had to apologize to Margy. He'd been horrible to her, lashing out viciously, and-- and he didn't even feel the anger any more. How the fuck was he supposed to just carry on, letting her look at him liked he'd stabbed her when he was no longer capable of feeling that anger and betrayal he'd felt? When he no longer even was capable of that hatred? No, he would apologize to her and try to make things slightly more normal. Reach some sort of truce before the kits came. And so he was headed for her room, contemplating how to explain that he was genuinely sorry even if he didn’t feel it.

The shift in auras was palpable. He could feel the tension in the air, think, vibrating with something dark and ominous — a clear omen that he recognized, somewhere deep in his core. With it was the whisper of voices at the edges of his conscious, the stories that followed in his paw steps, the discrete glances when they thought he wouldn’t notice, when they weren’t certain it was him or not. He’d felt this sensation before, he knew; the whisper of death, it’s echo brushing along his spine. He only had to step into the room, finally, for the certainty of it to settle in.

Often, they whispered about his birth, pointed to that moment as a clear omen of what was to come. “They say Death was born to death, with death,” the more eloquent might murmur, hushed, which was all such a nice, quaint way of saying his mother and siblings all died in labor. “They scooped him out of dead bodies. Shouldn’t they have known?”

What should they have known? Who was going to point to this one, defenseless scrap of fur and assume the worst? No, compassion was a compelling motivator. One didn’t look at the lone survivor of tragedy and think of darkness, of Death’s footsteps — they thought only in the moment, of saving that one babe. And what was he, even? Was he an ill omen? Death seemed to follow at his heels, but the truth was that Echo didn’t possess any special tie to death. He was no evil angel, no reaper, no banshee. He was just a mortal with bad luck and a habit of showing up at the strike of tragedy.

“The poor mother, though,” they said, soft, “So unlucky. How could she know he would kill her?”

The memories were heady, sliding over him at a sluggish pace as his ice blue stare drifted over the scene slowly. It ached with a familiarity that he couldn’t quite recall himself but knew should mean something to him. What were the odds, that his mother and siblings might die in labor just as Echo’s had? He had always posited that Fate worked in mysterious ways.

Perhaps they were more mysterious than he gave them credit for.

His gaze finally settled on Margy’s still form, and he knew he should be feeling something. Grief. Sorrow. Regret. Pain. Misery. This was a time for mourning, and there was nothing but the glimmer of something wrong. The only true sensation he had was the prickle of awareness in his spine telling him that he’d heard this story before. That wasn’t an emotion, though. That wasn’t what she deserved. That was… nothingness. Nothingness with a touch of deja vu.

His stare found Hazel, and he looked away just as quickly, turning instead to the cluster of papers. He slid them towards him, feeling out of place and at odds with the room, incapable of digging deep to feel something. Having something physical at his paws to focus on was a willful distraction, but he couldn’t even read her fucking note. The words were there and the sentiment behind them, but it felt like reading something foreign and unknown, when the emotional impact behind the words simply didn’t exist. One day, he might look back on this note and feel what he was supposed to. He might even be able to feel it with the right combination of pills in his system, that night. But as for right now, he took his and Hazel’s notes and held onto them, settling back beside Rad in silence.

He would have liked to see the children, the little beings he was supposed to help protect somehow, but that could wait. What was the point in drifting closer, into the midst of their grief, when all he could focus on was the sudden irony of Suiteheart always having been the one to remind him most of Frenchie.