"I'm not sure. I'm just guessing, honestly. It's the earth, and nature, but it's also burial. Going into the ground is pretty final for most of us and I'm trying not to think about that. Pretend that it's a good thing so I don't start screaming." He wishes he had something more reassuring to say to Beckett. He rubs his dirt-encrusted fingers together, trying to feel exactly where he stops and the earth begins, but can't. "This place messes with us. Always. Even when it gives us something kind of...not terrible, it's still terrible somehow."

Like the hunger and isolation. The blindness. The occasional terrible, dizzying feeling of suffocation. Even from that moment in the office building when Rhys realized he had a tail and horns, he knew that this place would always find what was personal and then cut to the quick there.

he stares out into space with his blank eyes, trying to formulate what to say. Beckett's miasma of disease doesn't bother him, he's barely aware of it, but he knows the vampire got a raw deal. And that just sucks.

"I hope there's a way to undo it, but I don't know. We just gotta get each other through as best we can until someone finds an answer, that's all that I can think of right now."