Onas shook his head, exhaling dryly. The ones who couldn't heal. Himself... the woman with her eye... the warrior out there. He could see the haunted shadows just barely hanging behind the way he stood and walked. There were shadows in his closet that hid the skeletons.

But he wasn't the one willing to pry that open.

---

Xevon shook his head lightly. At the least, Lily understood. That much he could be grateful for. She took a step back out of the ring of fire, so to speak. Callisto hardly moved at all, but unsurprisingly... Finn had not.

Finn seemed to refuse to destroy the locket. He was so focused on the fact that the locket was something 'good' and not the worst thing to grace his presence. Xevon knew he wasn't fond of the wings.

But Xevon also knew where the locket had come from, how it had gotten there, what it had been a reminder for and, perhaps more importantly, who it had been for.

A betrayal wrapped in darkness.

How dare he keep it?

"What if something goes wrong?" Finn finally asked, drawing him from his thoughts. "What if something goes wrong if we destroy it?"

"... what could go wrong?" Xevon scowled darkly. "Huh? What?"

The other man hesitated. "Like it could explode... or it could have another curse in it--"

"Give it to me," Xevon held his hand out for the locket.

Finn stared back at Xevon, blood red meeting the faded rusty red. "I don't want you to lose yourself."

"Then get rid of it," Xevon said shortly.

"How?"

Xevon shook his head and stepped forward, fast enough that Finn did not have time to think about leaving. Or running or anything. He had expected an actual verbal answer not... movement.

Xevon pried the locket from Finn's fingers, despite the young man's protest and desperate cling to the golden pendant. "Let go--"

"No--this isn't right--"

"Not right?!" Xevon snarled in return. "Not right?! How about going out to war? How about fighting for what you believed in and watching others fall for that same cause? Look into the eyes of someone who's just like you on the other side of your barrel? Buy a locket while you're there, lose everyone else and when you come back, you find the one person you loved more than anything... tangled in the arms of some Joe? This isn't a locket of everything we have done, this is a locket of betrayal, of pain and grief," he kept the young man pinned against his side. "I know you're smarter than this and I know you've done some thinking."

Finn's eyes looked up at the locket and then to Xevon. "You're losing it," he said quietly, "you're shaking--"

"Because I'm angry, Finn," Xevon replied, letting go of the other young man as he made his way to the gate. His arm drew back before he chucked the locket as far as he could away from them. The faintest glint of metal flickered in the light before it faded from view.

Finn shook his head lightly and watched as Xevon came back toward the group. "Next time, when I say something, I'd like it to be taken into consideration, not cross-examination. Understood?"

Finn nodded silently and slipped inside, after Renissa and Lily.