"Well, there’s two kinds of sorry, I think." He folded up the paper bag of birdseed, empty now, and stared out at the birds for a moment, thinking. "There’s the dramatic pitying kind, which is pretty bloody empty and useless most of the time. And there’s just a wish that someone had a bit of better luck. Comes with the proper hope that they’ll get some, next time around. That’s what I meant, really." There was always something warm and fuzzy about making a stranger smile, and Reese smiled back at Warren genuinely for once, though he wasn’t sure if he still had the knack for it anymore. "The grieving are easy targets, that sort of thing kicks you shitless and leaves you wandering blindfolded, practically. I don’t offer what I can’t give them with my ability and sometimes…" He sighed at the memories that that thought stirred up, shaking his head. "Sometimes you have to go telling them to stop, to go to therapy and move on for their own good, for the good of the dead they want to stick close to. They don’t care for that sometimes, but I don’t like the idea of suckering people, I don’t want to be a crutch, y’know?" Warren probably didn’t know, most people didn’t, but he looked up at him all the same, the loose end of a half-rhetorical question dangling between them. "That’s the way with art though, that’s how you know it’s got you right and steady. I can go throwing words at why I love music, what it means to me, but none of them really go showing how much exactly." It had been a sort of useless question, he had to admit. He would have said the same if someone asked him what he liked to play best, though at least he would have been able to cobble a few song titles together. Then again, songs meant different things to different people. "Makes me think of something I read in a book once, a while back. ‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life’. It’s true enough, the more that you go thinking about it."
