[It’s strange, the places this world takes them. Flickering lights, lost rooftops, a town destroyed into a soft living room—and yet none of it has felt quite so vast, so unfamiliar. Not anywhere visible.

[And Armin doesn’t know it.

[Aubrey holds his gaze while he talks; looks away only briefly, at the destruction he speaks of. There’s a half-formed thought on her tongue, an apartment she didn’t know, signs of someone else’s—

[Death. In the living, on his face; Aubrey recognizes it with a foreign intuition, and jerks back at the sight. (She hasn’t moved away from Armin since before it all went dark—if even then. Her skin immediately feels colder for his absence.)]

Armin, your… [Or is it “you’re”? She doesn’t want to say it. She wants it gone.

[But she traces the affliction’s path with her own hand, up her own face. The motion is almost involuntary. Shouldn’t she reach out…?]