Paladin Alexander Anderson was tired. He couldn't remember how many years it had been. He couldn't remember what a decent night's sleep felt like. He couldn't remember what it felt like to bleed, truly bleed. He couldn't remember what pain felt like.

He tugged off his boots and let them fall with loud, heavy thuds onto the floorboards.

God, I cannot even remember when it was...

The body came back together again but sometimes his memories, his thoughts... did not. Sometimes things were left incomplete. Time seemed to have no meaning to him any more. He didn't notice its passage. He could sit for days without even noticing that the sun had risen and fallen.

He removed his glasses and sat them upon his bedside table, rubbing his eyes with his gloved forefinger and thumb.

He didn't even need the glasses any more. He had, once, but the procedure, what ever it was they had done to him, had repaired it all as he slept. He dimly remembered terror, disgust (God, what have they done? What have they done, what's wrong with me?) tip of a gun in his mouth, on the tip of his tongue.

He chuckled darkly and lay back on the old, slightly musty mattress.

He couldn't remember what he'd been doing yesterday. The children... the orphanage... it all seemed to fade from his mind, leaving only the brightest or darkest of moments. A split-second of relief when he discovered that Dominic would be all right, wouldn't lose the arm, would be all right, thank Christ. A split-second of crushing despair when he'd heard of the attack on the Vatican, debilitating fury at seeing his much cherished employer and friend stretched out pale and ghostly on a hospital bed, insane glee at the vampire bitch's lop-sided agonising attempt to run...

He rolled over and faced the wall.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

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