Pale eyes focus on Lavi, hands shoved into his pockets and guilt clawing at him. It'd been so long since he'd been back here. He'd just gotten off the train, luggage still in hand, and here they are. Face to face for the first time in what seems like years. Had it even been that long? Maybe he should just move along and pretend like he hadn't even seen him, but perhaps against his better judgement, the ginger opens his mouth to speak.
"How're y'holdin' up?" His voice is quiet, expression tired as he looks him over. "Y'been eatin' well?"
If there’s any face he didn’t intend on seeing, it was that one.
Hands shoved into his pockets, he’d been adrift in his own internal musings, few of them very positive ones.
In his head, he’d been ticking off different names that had been called in over the gollums to headquarters. Most of them were the names of Finders, some of them he recognized and could call upon their faces in his memory, some were just names. All in all, the standard, not just in this war, but in all the others he’d recorded throughout his lifetime.
In his head, he was tallying the casualties that kept pouring in, one day after another, one battle after another. Civilian casualties too, at least the ones that could be solidly counted. Akuma made body counts so damn hard to track, when it was already hard tallying the dead in any human-fought battle.
In his head he was recalling all of the other reports throughout the years, tallying those up. Hundreds... not hundreds of bodies. Hundreds of incidents.
Always counting the damn bodies.
But at least most Akuma did their work quick. They were efficient killers. At least it wasn’t a field of people just suffering and bleeding out. He supposed in that way, these battles were sometimes better than human war.
But how long? Before the casualties were...---
He blinks out of his haze at the voice and the whistle of the train in the backdrop, expression not changing much as he observed the other redhead. Longer hair than his. Shorter than him. Older than him, but probably the same amount of tired.
Not the kind of tired a few hours of shut-eye fix. No, its something a lot deeper than that.
It doesn’t unsettle his nerves to see him anymore, at least. No explicit spike of agitation or an impulse to knock his teeth in. That’s an improvement from the last time they spoke, at least, but to say his apathy for Reno would be reserved only for him would be giving Reno too much credit.
He’d call it growing up. Others would disagree. He never really made much of a point to care about how others felt about his detachment, and there had been distance with people he liked a lot more than Reno since the last time the two of them were in each other’s company.
Allen, Yuu, even Lenalee... all of them were... fleeting. They were temporary. Allen may as well have been a lost cause, with the circumstances surrounding the Fourteenth. Yuu was hardly the force-of-nature he used to be these days. And Lenalee...
War wasn’t fair. He’d like to think she’d surpass all hardship to ever come her way and live well past Bookman’s old age, just as she’d defied so many odds before, if he allowed himself to have such hope...
The side-eye that fixed on Reno for several beats didn’t leave as he properly swiveled his head around to follow, but there’s no warmth to him. Everything about his body language and expression tells that he’s only sparing Reno the absolute bare minimum of his attention, a small hum in his throat to say he’d heard him.
❝ Well enough that I don’t need to be checked on by the likes of you. ❞ His tone, perhaps thankfully, lacks any edge or venom. Its just... flat. Uncaring. Not even worth the energy to detest him, much as they butted heads before.
It was behind them, and frankly he was probably a better Bookman for it, but he wasn’t about to muster up any sort of ‘thanks’ for it either.
