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can you cry for lost memories you can't seem to regain?– xenon/aran.

Following the sound of faint, muffled weeping he picks up purely by chance, Xenon finds himself looking down at a tanned woman with long, white hair tied back curled up in a dark, dusty corner. At the sight of him she quickly wipes her eyes dry with the back of her calloused, scarred hands and tries to stifle her sobs, but Xenon has already seen everything.

"Are you alright?" he asks, as is customary of human manners.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm good," she mutters and her very voice contradicts her statement, filled with tears and rough with held-back sobs. Her eyes still remain red and puffy though, and her large, strongly-built frame occasionally shakes with the hiccoughs that escape her control.

"Would it make you feel better if I cried with you?" he asks her. This tactic of mimicking the crying human worked the last time he tried it, and humans like it if others 'emphasize' with them. That's what Roo-D said.

She gives him a smile that he estimates to be a bitter one – the kind humans give when they are in pain, both physical and emotional, but feel that it is necessary for a smile and end up twisting the results in their attempts. "Can you cry for lost memories you can't seem to regain?" she says hoarsely in a tone that's almost one hundred percent sarcastic. Ninety-nine-point-seven, to be mathematically precise, but he rounds it up to a whole number.

"Yes."

Now the white-haired woman with the strongly built body is surprised at him. "Oh."

And then it seems to register with her. "Oh. My goddess, I'm so sorry."

Her body has stopped shaking from sobs and her eyes look like they won't be shedding more tears now. Xenon feels that his responsibility as another fellow human has been completed. However, he hasn't been given the signal that it is sociably acceptable for him to leave.

She offers him a hand. "My name is Aran."

He returns the hand and shakes. "I'm Xenon."

This is a greeting, not a signal for his leave.

Aran starts talking. He responds.

In the end the subtle signal giving him leave doesn't come until after Aran forgets her previous sorrows most likely related to lost memories and laughs several times, after Xenon demonstrates his missiles and after they spar together for the sake of Aran's training.

She shakes his hand again – a signal for acceptable leave. "It was nice meeting you, Xenon."

"It was nice meeting you, too," he responds and feels his spirits lift a bit from their previous downcast state after learning that Rien's Mirror of Desires does nothing for a generoid.

They've both lost their memories, and they don't look like they'll be recovering them anytime soon. It clicked.

(That and the whole black hair, white hair thing.)

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