|.:Feeling/ \Drained:.| [phunke!]

all we need is a little momentum
break down these walls
that we've built around ourselves

breakdown and tell
breakdown and tell

Katie stood still for one horrifying moment as Gage Cooper turned and bolted out of the door. But she'd gone after him once, and she would do it again. Taking a deep breath, she prepared herself physically for what she had to do. Another brief moment slipped by before the girl flew through the door, her shoulder colliding with the cold metal before it yielded and she was able to pass through. The girl's feet whacked against the unforgiving floor, creating loud slapping noises that drew many eyes from their jobs at the various machines in the main work area. But she was blind, blind to all of their surprise, exasperation, and intrigue - blind to all but the retreating figure of the man she had to follow.
Katie had no idea how long she ran, only that everything inside her was screaming - mind, body, heart. Mostly body; the girl had done very little running in her life. For once, she was determined to ignore the pleas of her abused muscles and brain. This was something she had to do; going after Gage was not a choice, it was a need. A need as great and desperate and irrational as any other need experienced by a human being.
By the time they had reached the top of a long and brutal slope, Katie Morven's legs were moving mechanically, without expression, as if they were the legs of a robot - pulled up and down, back and forth, by a series of gears and pulleys that had been installed but never used. The girl's mind was numb and devoid of thoughts so that she could focus on need. This absentmindedness caused her to trip on the now-rocky soil of the mountaintop and she nearly fell sprawling on the ground, but was able to catch herself in time to see that Gage had slammed to a halt. Breaking to a jog and quietly approaching, the girl noticed that there was no visible trail going down the other side of the mountain - was it just hidden, or-
The mountain, as it turned out, was a cliff. A cliff atop which Gage Cooper was standing in the moment before he ceased to stand on it. He fell and was falling, and accordingly Katie threw herself forward, skidding to a stop before the cliff's edge. Eerily, there was no scream as the young man fell - only the much-more-frightening complete lack of sound his body made as it tumbled down through air. Meaningless noises and babble came out of Katie's mouth, syllables that were part of no language but the most primordial form of verbal communication. She pleaded, lamented, half-screamed, and pleaded still more. He had to stop, he had to stop, he was falling, falling - falling still - these moments were passing far too slowly. Katie fell to her knees the moment Gage hit a ledge, and the force of the girl's horror, surprise, and relief nearly pushed her over the edge [literally]. Her knees crumpled backward so that the girl was laying on her stomach, head and shoulders protruding over the bitter tip of the cliff, giving her a full view of the boy's mangled body. In her struggle to scoot forward, the girl found that she could not - cottony fibers on her tank top were catching gently on the sandpaper-rough surface of the clifftop, and her stomach was doing flips, so much that Katie nearly barfed; all of this kept her from advancing any further. There was nothing she could do, she wanted to fall off the cliff but couldn't, wanted to join him but wouldn't. Still, the tension built inside her, twisting every internal organ into an uncomfortable rope, causing her physical pain, and it was far too much, there had to be something she could do - there was nothing, nothing, and she had to release it or everything would surely burst out: finally, it did in a shrill, drawn-out shriek that tore her throat into fiery shreds and echoed through the uneven landscape, ricocheting down the sheer cliff-wall with all the insanity of Katie herself.
"GAGE!"

---

Katie stood still for one horrifying moment as Gage Cooper turned and bolted out of the door. But she'd gone after him once, and what had it gotten her? The boy had simply run again, he'd flown away and now was not the time for Katie to give in to an impulse and fly after him. Taking a deep breath, she prepared herself psychologically for what she had to do. Another brief moment slipped by as the girl ran her consciousness of the memories of the past few hours like a child dragging tentative fingertips across the surface of a pool of water. Absorbing them in a superficial way as she skimmed through the recollections, she savored one last feeling of temporary joy when she remembered the kiss - no, kisses - and giggled quietly before sighing. Exhale. Exhale. Katie expelled the memories, allowing them to seep out of her body with the stale air of the factory - she'd already gotten small happiness from them the way her lungs had extracted oxygen from the air, and now it was time to let go of what remained. The happiness would be gone too soon, she knew that, but it was far better than any great mixture of emotions the girl would've experienced had she allowed herself to savor these memories.
Despite the fact that Katie had not endured many horrid things in her life, she'd endured enough - enough for her to know that holding on to feelings and thoughts and memories was borderline idiotic. Those things were meant to be fleeting; pretending that emotion was made to last was a farce, and the girl was far too fragile to go along with it. Better to forget, better to prevent memory, than to bring pain with you like a backpack full of bricks. Every bad thing in life, Katie figured, added another brick to your backpack; and not being particularly interested in carrying that with her, she carefully and delicately removed each brick until she was light. In fact, she was so light without those things weighing her down that she could've just forgotten she'd had any bricks at all - but there was always the gaping, empty backpack, reminding her of things that had been. That was a bother, but it wasn't close to the anguish she would have experienced had she been able to process Gage Cooper, the only person she'd ever lied to to keep them safe, running away.

Katie Morven smiled and walked back to her work table. Though her fingers flew nimbly over all the wires and switches at double the speed of before, her gut felt twisted and painful - the backpack was still there.

---

Casting reluctant, distracted glances at her, the ambulance workers must have found Katie Morven rather strange. Copious amounts of hair had fallen from the girl's ponytail in her desperate run up the mountain, and they now clung weakly to her cheeks, cemented there with sweat and grime. Her denim-clad legs were splattered with mud, and the little of her tank-top that wasn't drenched in sweat was smeared with light-colored dust. Even with unimaginably red, splotchy skin, Katie's shining, pleading eyes were still the most prominent thing on her face. They bugged out slightly and flitted back and forth between Gage's destroyed body and the stoic, weathered face of the only ambulance worker which had deigned to pay attention to her. "Do you - would it be possible for me to come with him, in the ambulance?" Haggard and exhausted from hours of working, the ambulance man was finding it difficult to put up with the requests of a teenage girl who was clearly crazy; she'd probably only disrupt their work. "No." With that, he turned around and helped his colleagues hoist the broken young man's stretcher into the back of the vehicle.

Defeated, useless, Katie Morven stared blankly down at her hands, looking for the familiar scars there that always comforted her. Instead, she was jolted into acute conscious thought by a juxtaposition: her hands, instead of being marked with scars and dirt, were practically shredded with small lacerations from which blood leaked, staining her palms. For a minute, this odd sight only confused the girl; suddenly suspicious, she looked up and surveyed her surroundings. She was in a lightly wooded area, same as before, with sparse trees on one side, an ambulance in front of her, and a cliff to her left - a cliff? Startled, Katie craned her neck to the left. About ten feet up was a protruding ledge, on which a tiny smear of blood was barely visible. Many feet above that was the top of the cliff.
Apparently, the girl had found a way down the cliff and its treacherous, winding paths - without realizing she was doing it. Her hands began to hurt terribly, burning and stinging and sending wave after wave of pounding pain up through her arms. It was as if they'd been stuck in a fire, and just that feel of stinging heat brought back one faded, blurred snapshot of the inside of a shower, being pulled in by hands much more powerful and dexterous than her own. Katie looked up, eyes narrowed slightly in determination at the ambulance worker who was about to close the door to the back of the huge truck.
"Sir? Yeah, um, sorry to - you have to let me on that ambulance." Ignoring the man's aggravated head-shaking, Katie insisted, the lie coming easily. "Yes. You have to. I'm his sister. Please."
Despite the slight similarities in appearance - brown hair, brown eyes, lanky build - the worker was far too experienced with people to believe the untruth. But he saw the desperation on her face, the pleading in her creased eyebrows. "Alright. Get in back, you can sit or stand just don't knock anything over. If you purposefully or accidentally do anything that disrupts our work, so help me..."

There was no delight or relief on Katie's face as she nodded fervently. The girl simply climbed through the open door and sat against the cold wall, wincing slightly as the door of the ambulance was slammed shut, trapping her in darkness with a Gage Cooper she barely recognized. Hugging her knees to her chest, it was several moments before Katie began to feel hot blood seeping through the worn denim. Gage's hand hung over the side of his raised stretcher, limply reminding her of her own loneliness. With difficulty, the girl managed to pull one hand reluctantly from her jeans - it had been stuck - and tentatively, tentatively slid her damaged fingers through his pale, unresisting ones. It burned terribly, but during the course of the ride inside the ambulance, Katie's grimace of pain came to be replaced with the soft smile of a person at peace.

---

"Where is Gage Cooper?"
"What?"
"Gage Cooper. The young man assigned to work with you? Both of you were supposed to begin your new assignments making showers for the Capitol today? This is very important, young lady."
"Oh. Well, he- he...ran away." Katie glanced around nervously; her hair was pulled back, clearly revealing widened eyes and the expression that she would've rather been anywhere but standing awkwardly next to a work bench with pliers in one hand and several intricately twisted long wires in the other, trying to avoid her boss's demanding gaze.
"He wh-"
Daringly, she cut off the middle-aged woman. "Yeah, I don't really know either.
...Can I still make showers? I re- I really like this assignment..."
Her boss, a crisp woman in her 50's whose name Katie could never remembered, sighed through her nose and rubbed her temples, finally breaking eye contact with her employee to stare at the completed shower (which Katie had managed to assemble on her own after her co-worker's mysterious disappearance) and muttered to herself, frustrated words of which the girl only caught a few - "first m'husband...now this...with his flippin' secretary!...can't believe it...too much fuh one day..."
Watching the boss mumble, Katie grimaced to herself. It was a lost cause; she'd have to go back to the light-switch factory, re-adjust to the constant pressure of an assembly line...
"Fine, kid. You can keep making showers. Can't train anyone else t'do it anyway. No time. Just go 'head. But work fast and don't mess up, kay? If you start screwing up and we get complaints from Capitolites who are getting freakin' pansy fragrance flyin' outta their shower-heads instead'a lilacs, so help me...you'll be the one held accountable. Kay?"
Katie nodded fervently, a smile lighting up her features with hopeful optimism. Gage Cooper was forgotten and she could keep her job.
That night, she came home in high spirits and had a nice dinner with her father; in fact, she didn't even have a miniature breakdown after knocking over the pepper shaker twice. For once, she was able to join her dad in light laughter over the slight blunder.
Breakfast the next morning went much the same way, with the exception of two things: Katie did not knock anything over, and her father, who was immersed in his morning paper, noted with slight interest an article describing a young man by the name of Cooper who had apparently fallen off of a small cliff, sustaining major injuries. Katie raised her eyebrows; it sounded like a rather awful ordeal. Deep within her subconscious, the name Cooper had triggered a vague sense of recollection, but the memories were indecipherable, like a radio filled with static, and thus the girl was easily able to suppress this feeling of uncertainty as to whether it concerned her personally. "Oh? I hope he's in the hospital - that sounds pretty bad..."
"Yeah, he must be. Luckily, there's that hospital just a couple miles from here - I get the sense that this happened not too far away, so that's probably where he went...hmm." Her father returned to absentmindedly sipping his coffee, flicking to the next page of the newspaper so that he could read up on the latest Games speculations.

Tuesday and Wednesday churned by uneventfully that week. Katie Morven fell back into her regular routine: Wake up, eat breakfast with father and feel concerned about the latest news story (and quietly check the papers for any updates on a young man by the name of Cooper), go to the few classes she hadn't dropped, go to work, return home in the afternoon. She loved it, the routine, and it was wonderfully normal, as if her whole life had been a simple repetition of that schedule. Yet there was something slightly off, and it took those two days of feeling unusually tired at work before Katie realized that strangely, she had been forgetting to get her daily coffee during lunch break. So on Thursday, after finishing a fairly good two showers that morning, Katie Morven crossed the street into a cozy little coffee shop and ordered a coffee with a shot of caramel. Just smelling it made her feel content, and she was about to walk away from the counter when the cashier tapped her shoulder. "Uh, ma'am, I'm going to need you to also pay me for a cup of coffee and a cup of hot chocolate you ordered two days ago...you and some guy...never paid..." The cashier's voice trailed off, because Katie Morven had fixed him with a blank, uncomprehending stare, and Katie's stares tended to unnerve (if not silence) most people. "Shit."
Grabbing a few crumpled bills from her pocket, the girl shoved them onto the counter and fled, forgetting her cup of hot coffee sitting next to the cashier. She flew across the street, and every frenzied step back toward the shower-room brought back more memories, more stifled screams from her subconscious that she'd somehow managed to muffle for days...
Gage Cooper had run away. She'd kissed him and he'd run away and fallen - or jumped - off of a cliff. And it was all her fault.
Somehow the girl managed to scribble out an apologetic note to her boss; some bullshit about a family emergency. Perhaps the next day she'd make something up about having a brother. Either way, it was unimportant. Flinging the pen back down onto her small work table, Katie slipped out of the room and glided swiftly down the hall and out onto the street, managing to catch a bus home just before it closed its doors.
Her father wasn't home. Though Katie didn't realize it then, she was immensely lucky; the man walked to work, and as such, she was able to grab the car keys from their usual spot and drive uninhibited to the hospital. She was a good, steady driver; yet today, her foot felt unsteady on the accelerator, and the wheel seared her hands with a fiery pain the girl could hardly stand.

---

Please wake up. Please wake up. Please, please, Gage, wake up. I need you to.
Whispered words left Katie's lips without her choosing to speak. After being separated for a few agonizing hours during which several doctors had attended to Gage's most immediate injuries, she'd finally been allowed to stay with him again. That was how she'd gotten there: sitting in an uncomfortable chair, pulled as close to Gage's bed as possible, with one hand interlaced with one of Gage's. She'd long since peeled the caked blood from her fingers, though they remained rough with myriad scabs. His, by contrast, were smooth and sturdy; she could easily feel life and sinew beneath the skin, reminding her that Gage Cooper was still physically there in the hospital, lying next to her. Katie shuddered slightly and more whispered words of the same nature as before slipped from her mouth. Hadn't the doctors told her that the morphine would be wearing off soon?
Luckily, it did.

Maybe she hadn't prepared herself adequately for the moment his chocolate-brown eyes would wrench open, because Katie found her own eyes filling with liquid. Unshed tears bothered the girl; they completely prevented her from seeing, from watching this miraculous occurrence. Never had she imagined that she could feel such relief at one point in time. He was awake, alive- Gage was breathing, he was there- the terrible ordeal was reaching an end. Never had she imagined that her happiness could depend so much on one person. Never had she imagined that she would find herself leaning forward, staring desperately into Gage's eyes, willing him to recognize her.
"...Katie?"
An enormous smile cracking her features open in pure joy, the girl wrapped her hand more securely in his and leaned forward even more, the ends of her bangs nearly touching his forehead. "Gage. ...You're okay. You're okay!" At last the feeble tears escaped, easing out of the outside corners of her eyes and winding down her jaw. After those two individual tears, though, she cried no more. What could there possibly be to cry about?
Cringing with the effort it cost him, Gage raised his hand - the one that wasn't imprisoned in Katie's - and gently pressed a thumb to the girl's cheek, catching the small drop of salt water and wiping it away. "I could hear, you, you know. When I was in my coma."
"You could...?"
"Katie, I...love you."
Blinking, she absorbed this new development with a surprisingly small amount of shock. It seemed...natural. As though they'd been in love from the start, and it had only taken a desperate, harrowing ambulance ride to make both of them realize it. Fate had decided, but circumstance had brought them recognition. It was because of this that Katie no longer felt confused; Gage had wiped away her tears and now the world was clear as crystal. Without another shred of hesitation, Katie allowed herself to lean down the few inches it took to bridge the gap between her mouth and Gage's. She lingered there for a few seconds, not closing her eyes - it was imperative that she store this moment so that she could never force herself to forget it - and felt Gage pushing back. Finally, she pulled up and voiced the words that barely needed saying. She'd already spoken.
"I love you too, Gage."

---

When had she become such a skillful liar? Katie had no idea. It was so easy, so ridiculously easy, to convince people that she was the sister of a young man by the name of Cooper. In the case of the woman seated behind the receptionist desk at the local hospital, it wasn't even convincing, really. The girl merely stated that she was Cooper's sibling and received a room number in return. After a minute of surveying a map of the hospital's four floors, she was able to locate an empty escalator and travel to the third level. A short walk down an entirely white hallway brought her to room 323.
Katie Morven was unable to even bring her hand to the knob.

Standing there dumbly, lacking the willpower to move an inch, she slipped into a daydream. For the first time since her co-worker's disappearance, the girl allowed herself to imagine what would have happened if things had been different, if she'd only done the right thing and run after him...

But there was no use in daydreaming. She quickly silenced her mind's whispering and took a deep breath, blinking rapidly. Gage Cooper was in the hospital for falling or jumping off of a cliff and she had put him there. Now it was her job to take responsibility, the same way she would take responsibility if she ruined a shower. Yes. It was time.
Katie's hand finally found the doorknob and she slipped in quietly. There was a small, hard chair a few feet from the bed, but she resisted the impulse to attempt to play out a silly fantasy; instead, with much hesitation, Katie Morven took faltering steps forward until she had reached the foot of Gage Cooper's hospital bed. She was studying the thing stream of blood seeping from his mouth, adding to a conglomeration of dried blood already on his chin, when suddenly it became more of a flood, because at that exact moment, Gage Cooper opened his mouth and screamed.

Having a relatively scant knowledge of hospitals (and medicinal science in general), it took Katie a few seconds to locate the source of a shrill, rhythmic beeping she somehow hadn't noticed before. Twisting to the left from her position on the edge of the bed, the girl found it: a small, dark monitor - displaying, apparently, the findings of the large machine it was a part of - with a yellowish thin line that shot down, up, and back very quickly to a steady beat. As she pondered the purpose of this machine, Katie felt herself become vaguely unnerved by the high-pitched beeps, as if there was something ominous about the mechanical sound. Nevertheless, as her brain adjusted to the noise, Katie was still almost frightened, and she began to hear her quickening heart-rate in her ears, growing faster than even the beeping...Oh. Looking more closely at the wire running from the machine to a smallish clamp on Gage's fingertip, she realized that it was a heart monitor. After realizing this, it seemed like a rather obvious conclusion; and identification made the sound and sight less scary because their unknown qualities had diminished.

Returning her attention to the skinny, damaged boy laying next to her, Katie shifted her weight and twisted her fingers in concern. He'd only confirmed what she already knew from the newspaper article, but somehow hearing Gage say the words I jumped off a cliff both frightened and saddened her immensely. Though she wanted to feel pure compassion and understanding for him, the girl couldn't ignore an urgent idea in the back of her mind that maybe Gage Cooper was unstable, maybe he was beyond help, beyond fixing. Immediately she felt herself mentally pulling away from him; the action certainly wasn't voluntary - she rather liked Gage, for a number of reasons - no, stop thinking like that, it will only endanger you more - he needed help and perhaps there was something she could do. The pushing and twisting and wringing of her hands grew more intense, more frustrated, as she contemplated these things. Eventually she reached the conclusion (well, more of a 'notion that most of her brain supported', not so much a legitimate conclusion) that the best thing she could do was continue to be there for Gage, give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was lying in a hospital bed with serious injuries - how could Katie abandon him at a time like this?
Maybe there will always be a part of me that can't be close to him. A part that will always remember that he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and maybe that was a huge mistake. Will we ever be close? Is there even a possibility of us being friends?
...Maybe it's not just a part. Do I honestly believe I'll never feel comfortable around this boy after that...that...experience?
I don't even know.

'Crap' wasn't exactly one of the words that the young woman would have used to describe Gage as he laid there broken. Having already sat down while mulling her reply to these words and being confused about things between them in general, the words no, you look fine formed in her mind and shaped her lips soundlessly. No noise escaped, however; Katie's lack of surety about her wording compounded with the fact that he had already begun a (rather long-winded) reply to her question about his current state. His words were harsh with uninhibited sarcasm. Each one caused her to flinch; then she'd forcibly relax her face again, hoping he wouldn't notice, only to flinch again when his cynical, apathetic voice intoned another sardonic phrase. It was then that a startling realization hit Katie Morven: she didn't really know Gage. In fact, she didn't know him at all. Looking back over the paltry friendships she'd worked to cultivate in school - friendships that took years of patient work, and yet gave Katie little sense of emotional support - what was one day of working with one person she'd never seen before? Nothing. It was nothing. The fact that their (apparently crazy) teenage hormones had gotten the better of both of them in a moment of beautiful, impulsive weakness only served to showcase their total lack of any meaningful bond. Sure, Katie wanted to know Gage; in their little time together, she'd found him rather intriguing, if not exactly amiable; but she'd never gotten the chance to know him because for reasons still unclear to her, he'd jumped off of a cliff. That was it. No awkward small-talk they'd push through for weeks until it became a comfortable rapport; no idle chat as each one worked on their separate projects, simply using conversation as a nice way to fill the silences within and without of themselves; no brief moments of deep secret-sharing after months of gaining the other's trust. All these things she wanted had been cut short, changed irreversibly, by the inscrutable actions of a possibly disturbed young man.
How could she forgive him for this? How could she just try to set a possible friendship back on track when it had been derailed so dramatically? And now here he was, scorning her attempts to help, practically mocking her. It made Katie want to say stop, made her want to say please don't talk like that, I want to help you, I really do.
Don't make this harder than it already is.
Of course she did not say any of these things. Speaking should always be delayed by several seconds of careful contemplation to avoid anything which could be misinterpreted. Yet the problem remained: she didn't understand him, and at present, it was laughable that he should want to understand her. (For all Katie knew, Gage could be the type of boy who regularly made out with girls he'd just met. Her first impression was not of this type, but she couldn't exactly rule it out...)
"And I can't remember anything except for the things the doctors can tell me. Not even you."
Stunned by these words, for a moment the only thought Katie could formulate was that's okay, I don't remember you either. There's nothing to remember. But that was not the right thing to say right now, and she knew it. Like a freight train, the true damage of Gage's falljumpwhatever was making an impact on her mind; not only had the boy brushed death physically, wrecking his body and sustaining injuries he was lucky to be healing from, but he had also impaired his own mind. Missing an entire chunk of history - of memories... With a start, Katie realized that she did understand this, she did feel his pain. Katie Morven knew what it was like to lack a significant amount of recollections, of experiences, whether they were of something or someone. Granted, her particular form of memory loss was self-inflicted; but that hardly meant it was easy, or that it was not painful.
So in this way, she understood at last. Truly empathized and knew that even if this boy was unstable, it was for a damn good reason, and that she could help him: really help him. "Gage," she whispered quietly, so quietly that even as his name pushed past her lips and into the air he had begun to speak again and she doubted he'd even heard the soft word. And that was okay. What was one word, one simple expression of a name - they had hours to talk, hours and maybe days or months to talk and be something more than a messed-up girl stumbling over her own words to a shattered boy. Though she decided his questioning concern for her well-being was forced - which was completely understandable, given the recent revelation - it did not sound faked or (god forbid) mocking. His lips jerked up into something Katie recognized as a feeble smile, and she returned the smile encouragingly, contemplating her response; timing her thoughts to the steady beep, beep, beep of the heart-rate monitor. Within seconds, though - Katie had only just opened her mouth to tell him she was fine - the beeping grew more urgent. Some of her earlier fear (was that only just minutes ago?) returned at the foreign machine's antics, but it was a few more moments before she realized the implications of these antics: a beating heart, beating faster, more urgently, more and more and more, and as doctors ran into the room and Katie mechanically pushed off from the stiff white linens on the bed and stood against the opposite wall from that horrible beeping she knew that Gage Cooper was dying. Again.

Sounds and shouts and hurried orders rebounded through the room until they faded into a single monotone, a blurry landscape of noise from which only the beepbeepbeepbeepbeep rose clearly. Standing stiffly against the whitewashed wall, the young woman blinked and struggled to control her own breathing and heart-rate, which had suddenly become at once more precious and more worrisome to her. In concern she fixed her vision on Gage, blocking out the white-coated drones around him; they were as drones, they were not important to Katie. One of the drones was suddenly near her, asking her something like what were you doing what happened his heart something happened-? (although it was more coherent outside of Katie's mind) and she couldn't reply, couldn't formulate or speak, so she blinked hard and shook her head slowly. Receding into the bland background, the drone left her and the girl cast one last futile look at Gage before closing her eyes and slumping back against the wall in fatigue. Focusing on the beeps to ground her to reality, she eventually found she could slow her racing emotions to this steady metronome, and as the beeping slowed, so did her absolute panic. Even as the background slurred and died down, the girl remained in her cocoon of a reverie, cherishing the time alone in her skull. Many minutes later, when all was silent again, she opened her eyes and stared directly at the little black screen.

It looked just as it had when she'd struck up her conversation with Gage so long ago - had it been an hour? - and the beep, beep, beep was somehow calmingly regular now. Sighing in relief, Katie did not feel quite able to move from her slouch against the crutch of a wall, but she was now able to stare at the young man laying in the bed with wide eyes: eyes that had seen Death walk by that very bed, pause for a moment, and then resume his walk to another destination, claiming this life-force for another day. Hopefully, thought Katie, a day far in the future.