Hope is a four letter word. Hope has fucked Krouse over more than anything else ever has, a toxic weed threaded through his chest that choked out every part of him that might have ever turned into anything better. He thought it had finally died when there was nothing left to latch onto.

So whatever the sharp, spiked thing opening up under his numb ribs is must be something else. He looks away from the stranger's clear grey eyes with a slow and steady exhale through his nose.

"I've never heard of a power like that before," he says, looking back, "But it's not the strangest thing I've ever heard, either."

Dead is dead. It's one of the only rules that he's never heard of being broken. Some people can bring back copies, or things like ghosts, but it's not the same person. Krouse doesn't know that this is any different. He doesn't even know if it's true. He'd be out of his fucking mind to even start thinking about this as a possibility. What he should do is forget about it. Slip back into the indifferent haze he's only been temporarily tugged out of.

"Did you ask about it? How they did it?" There's a leashed quality to his voice, now, the studied casualness of his tone a shell over intensity like a coiled spring in some disastrous mechanism.