'why i am the way i am? you had a choice, and you chose betrayal. i am an old man giving up dying pieces of history. There's fewer and fewer survivors trustworthy enough to hold them with me. so i'll hold em to myself until im cooling in a six foot hole, shaped like january, by myself and for myself.

I loved you; I loved the man I thought you were. I thought you were my brother, but now I see you're just another one hiding in the shade, and I never even asked god for the sun to shine on me. But here we are, and things got hard. When it came to be the tough or the dead, you couldn't even have the sand proper to choose dead--'

he huffed the rag again, voice wavering, arms relaxing. The Sick was getting into his blood again, strolling through an old and hollowed form, legends deep and skin too thick for a world spinning too fast. A husk grown so inenviably calloused it was bound to cave in on itself oneday, a someday that couldn't come to soon. Until then, purpose was a trade that we've only ever known between sunsets and winters filled with the only things we knew.

this was the embodiment of Left: here, now, and regrettably. 
the mirror is a hero he'd ought not to ever meet.

'so im givin' you exhile. you got three hours to skip town.'

with a cold, tired glint in his iron eye, it was the first time I knew
round christmas, his tear ducts ran dry.

'three.'

he swallowed and turned away, breathing in deep: the ether, the kerosene, the scent of her on a shred of a pillowcase.

'please..'

too quiet that i'm not sure who he spake to.
I turned into the howl, half-opening door before I returned the favor, a voice bruised and wheezing into my lapel:
"this ain't over."
'then i'll see you later, Brighteye. Come Hell or Valhalla.'

he cheeked up his rifle and perched it on the windowsill against the infinite grey -- the void, the howl -- and I could feel his bones sinking back down into forever. His stare, static, ten thousand miles away as I paced in opposite, over the horizon, each step sisyphean as the last until my problems chased me home.

2 hours left.