That's the thing. It might be a poem from another world, but it hits the same feeling— the same deep dark wistful ache— as the one in his head. That must mean something, right? That they're out here with nothing but poetry and the awareness that it means something big, something he isn't able to think about.

"It was many and many a year ago," he begins, and this comes as easy as breathing. He knows this rhythm better than he knows his own name. He gets to "I was a child and she was a child," and there is something on the tip of his tongue, so sweetly out of reach he could cry from it.

His voice goes funny on "To shut her up in a sepulchre," twisted aching in his throat. The sound isn't an ocean, he's thinking, it's a lake— cold, black, with little pinprick stars above— and the blood's back at the corners of his eyes, wet in his ear canals.

If Ariane had any question where all the blood had come from, this should solve it. His voice breaks again at "the demons down under the sea," and he has to raise clumsy, sandy fingers to wipe fresh red out of his eyes. He has to sniff back an ugly heat in his sinuses, impatient. He's so close to getting it.

"In her tomb by the sounding sea," he finishes, breathing harder than when he began. It's fine. The headaches never last long, and the bleeding's done as soon as he quits pressing at it. The breathlessness is a choke chain: worse the longer he strains against it, gone the moment he relents.

He relents. Into this second silence is the impatient rustle of John scrubbing at his face again, the hitch and steady of his breathing.

"Sorry. Tears unshed would be less gross, here." Ha ha.