[The reply comes faster this time, but mostly because the first four minutes are just Quentin breathing and moving around. The noises filtering through the message might sound like hands on cloth, rustling and Quentin's hitching breaths, erratic and unsteady as they are, he's still breathing.

Which is weird and stupid, because they're all dead.]

Oh shit!

I-- [there's a watery kind of laugh] Yeah, no. Eliot never really agrees with me on anything? I think it's just something he does now. Disagree with me. Maybe it's, uh, maybe he's trying to prove a point. I don't--[a deep sigh] I don't know.

[And he's revealing too much to a voice on the network. More than Eliot would want him to ever say, maybe just by the tone of his voice or the implied familiarity. But Quentin is tired, so fucking tired. Like someone ran his brain through a tenderizer and squeezed it out like toothpaste.]

Who? Who else do you need to think about? Is it someone who's afraid of the list? I didn't even-- I didn't think it through, and. And yeah, maybe some people are right to keep that part of themselves a secret? I just never thought it would be-- that it would be an issue in the afterlife?

[How to even begin explain the feelings of finding out that so many different places existed, with so many different kinds of powers. The differences that also felt reassuring because underneath it all, they were all people, with feelings and fears. How could he ever explain the feeling of being on the outside always looking in, and how he'd had to be protected from himself so many times in the past. And the one time no one looked carefully enough, he found a way to end it all.

He can't, not yet. Not without giving away things he'd rather keep to himself. Quentin sighs again, swallowing hard enough to be heard on the message.]

And yeah. Yeah, maybe we do. Sometimes.