Yeah. 

You still good to figure out what year it is? I think my ignorance is probably bothering me more than my injuries at this point.

Yeah, but we'll have to get closer to the city.

Yeah. I'm mostly OK now, but we can wait until tomorrow if you want.

You're the one time matters to.

...I guess. Let's go now, then.

He puts out the fire with handfuls of dirt, examines it a minute, then turns unhappily toward the city.

She follows. People start staring at them when they get into more populated areas. She supposes they do look kind of weird. Luckily, she's really much too done with everything to care about this. It doesn't take very long to run into someone reading a newspaper. 

It's incomprehensible to him but he'll bounce it to her.

April 12th, 1860. A hundred and fifteen years before Macalaurë becomes a priest, a hundred and thirty-six before we're supposed to meet.

Well. Slavery's legal in America for another five years, and next year they're going to start the bloodiest war in the nation's history, but I guess there are worse times to -

- this is the year Drusilla is turned.

Who's that?

Sorry. Girlfriend of the vampire who beat me up.

None of this makes any sense, you know.

I didn't say it did. Nothing that's happened to me since I was called has made - any sense is perhaps overstating it, but not by very much. We live on a portal to hell, normally, and it makes a bunch of ridiculous nonsense happen all the time. Our record most bullshit event we've had to deal with was the time that this little kid fell into a coma and started astral projecting and somehow caused the nightmares of everyone in town to start manifesting, which among other things led to you and Macalaurë having to kill a bunch of people for this hallucinatory dream silmaril, including an interlude where you guys offered a demon some babies to eat if it would give it back to you. Also you shot me and I came back as a vampire and then I had to save the city by climbing this suddenly-appearing snowy mountain barefoot and then explaining to this kid that missing a ball while playing kiddie league baseball is not really the sort of thing you should give up on life over.

So yeah, at this point I kind of skip the 'this is pretty bullshit' step, but yeah, I agree, this is pretty bullshit.

But you think this vampire that tried to kill you had something to do with it.

Yeah. It's way too coincidental otherwise, and random time travel is in fact pretty high on the bullshit scale. Don't know how he fits into this, but he must.

I - think there's a decent chance that Drusilla isn't actually dead yet? And I - kind of feel like we should be trying to find her and prevent the vampire who kills her from torturing her to death, though I am not immediately sure how.

Why her in particular?

Just because - it feels like if you fight an evil person who's working with a different evil person who's been tortured into insanity, and then you get thrown back in time to just before the person is tortured into insanity, then - you should be considering that maybe you were somehow thrown back to this point in particular because you're supposed to stop it? 

Plus, like, according to the books we have, Drusilla is a seer who gets visions of the future, and - I don't know if that's actually directly relevant to time travel, but it feels like the sort of thing that might be, you know?

Does she have superpowers too or will we have to carry her everywhere?

...well, that depends on whether we get to her in time to prevent her from turning into a vampire. And on whether she wants to go anywhere with us, we're objectively kind of suspicious people.

- and it's not like you have to help, or anything. You can just - hang out by some recognizable country church, or return to it every few weeks, and I can meet up with you there if I find out anything that seems probably useful to you, or if I wanna know how close you are to independently inventing boats, and - if you don't want to do stuff then you don't have to, OK, but if I don't have anything to work on right now then I am just going to - start crying, and not have any reason to stop crying, ever, so - so I'm gonna try to do something. I guess.

I'd say you'll grow out of it but I guess you probably won't.

Yeah. I guess. 

- I'm sorry. 

For what? If I felt like leaving I would, you can't have missed that.

For being - I'm usually more tolerable. As a person. I think it's the everyone I know ceasing to exist.

I have no reason to think you're a particularly obnoxious human. I just don't like company, it's nothing to do with you particularly.

Yeah, but I'm being obnoxious, and I can feel it but I can't stop being it and it sucks and I'm sorry about it.

Anything that would particularly improve your situation from here?