Carter was lost.
Things were going way too fast for his liking; first, he got sent here, then was frightened by an entity that mimicked his parents in an unfamiliar place without information and rules, and was informed by his death with blind spots in his memories and when he asked a question, other random information got dumped into his brain.
Now, he was faced with the fact that a normal title had the authority to get his soul from the dead and reincarnate it into a world where that sort of power isn’t something that only a god, but also lords can have.
This isn’t the normal type of trope you get from those eastern shows, I feel like. Carter lamented, still lost on what to say or ask.
If anything that came out of his mouth would earn him twice the amount of information he could handle or expect, he could only but play with the information he had, stay quiet or change how he handled the conversation.
He didn’t know anything about Noir who was staring at him, whom was still a bit dumbfounded by the ignorance of the curly-haired man frustrated about him.
So he instead went for one subject, shutting down every branch that stretched too far from it or ignore the excess information, opting for a targeted branch of the ones he got until he was satisfied.
In other words, a normal talk.
Did I overthink? Or or was I too curious? Carter tended to overdo what was fairly simple when put in a tense situation.
He retracted his arms respectively from the table and his chin, resting them in his lap while he leaned backward and, reluctantly, put the eye-shaped medium to the back of his brain, labelling it as not too important to talk right now. He did the same with the other eye-catching stimuli of his surroundings, obvious enough to not forget.
He closed his eyes preparing to have a normal and hopefully continuous conversation.
Carter picked up on the last thing that caught his attention and that he could reply on.
“Why are you choosing me as the one who can ‘free’ you?”
Even though he was purely against living another life, he needed something to pick onto, and it was also the closest to Noir talking more about the young man in a roundabout way.
He responded to Carter with a playful voice.
“You know the other two went insane, Carter. And not anyone who has a dream of waking up in a new world deserves to wake up in a new world, less if you take in account the qualifications for one to be able to free me.”
Carter wasn’t really interested in freeing him, but he picked up onto something.
“Qualifications? That means that you knew we were ‘qualified’ to do the job? Or are you having an interview with these people?”
The sun looked smug.
“Yes and not what I’d call it, no need for any interview since I already knew everything about you.” Pausing to look in the medium, Noir continued.
“I didn’t search long and had no patience left to, so I picked the most promising souls that died in one area and applied a final test to the two of them.” He continued. “The first one didn’t last long and went insane, the second more or less the same, only she lost her mind the instant.”
Carter had a little suspicion about something. He wanted to clarify it now.
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“That eye seems to be like a camera or a direct connection to my world… Is that how you observed and qualified us?”
Noir took the hand-sized glowing eye shaped camera, which had perched on one of his shoulders at some point.
He looked at it and at the scene in it; Carter couldn’t look the first time, but now he couldn’t help but pry into it, he had marked that the inside of the eye could be seen in opposite sides of the face.
“Right again Carter, not only that, but I pulled those people from the scenes that appeared within this very eye.”
He played with the medium a bit and made it spiral around itself like a spinning object.
Carter didn’t really watch the spinning that happened in front of him.
Despite the distracting ‘toy’, both of them didn’t break their look to each other, Noir’s one hand moving the levitating spiralling object around, his other on the armrest resting his head, he had his legs crossed unlike the young man opposite him; Carter had his legs spread and had leaned forward, elbows on his laps, and hand in between them like a focused student.
His face was stoic, eyeing the fiery human, his head a bit below Noir’s.
“You must’ve watched us for a long time and had seen our deaths with your own two eyes.” Carter guessed with a confident tone.
“Yes, if ten or twenty years is a long time, and, yes, I know how the three of you died; the first guy died in a car crash, the girl was kidnapped and you know the rest, as for you…”
Ignoring the first two, Carter focused on the third.
The young man waited, he was pretty curious about how he died as it was one of his objective in this conversation.
It would’ve been fine if he couldn’t, but the growing urge in his chest and his curiosity got the best of him.
Curiosity is every human’s base of growth, but also a killing feeling that needed to be satisfied, a growing powerful need that not many human could suppress.
Noir finally uttered the words Carter wanted to hear the whole time.
“… Carter, you just died, in your sleep, from exhaustion.”
The young man closed his eyes, processing the information.
Then he chuckled softly.
Well, that was underwhelming. He thought as he lowered his gaze.
It is… understandable though.
He couldn’t argue about his disappointment.
Deep within him, he had the childish thought of a death that would glory his efforts, or that whatever he did or had done, he would see the fruits and eat them himself. Unfortunately, he had overworked his mind and body to the point where headaches and migraines were a part of his daily life.
He was young, but for a leader, duties and responsibilities didn’t know age.
The only thing that he finally hoped was that his friends and the few people that followed him would eat the fruits in his stead.
Carter’s eyes were unfocused.
Then they locked with Noir’s, where the humanoid sun’s eyes were supposed to be.
He wanted to distract his mind from his disappointment, thus thought about what was said before.
Then the information he had just gotten so swiftly registered in his mind making him a bit sick.
Finally, Carter broke the silence, by asking Noir a question.
“Don’t you feel empathy towards dead people? Especially…” Thinking about how the information was delivered, Carter paused, studying the person in front.
Unexpectedly, Noir looked at him in a rather satisfied way.
Before the young man could say anything else, he responded.
“I could say the same to you Carter.” Redirecting the underlying blame to Carter who was taken aback, Noir continued. “And, as I said multiple times, I am a lord, not a god, only gods would fully feel apathetic towards the deceased.”
Carter ignored what he said about him, and just tried to make sense of Noir's words.
“Your posture and body language contradicts your statement” Not sure of it, the young man explained not only to Noir but also to himself. “I feel like even though you’re not apathetic, you’re so close to it I could say you are.”
Noir responded as soon as he finished his sentence.
“You’re maybe right, I’ve already lived for hundreds of years, death is just common. There is no need to really feel so much as a thought to it.” Smiling widely, he asked the more and more frowning young man in front of him. “Wouldn’t you think the same, Carter?”
As Carter thought about it, he felt something move in his stomach and added with a bit of a surprised tone.
“Even for that girl whose twenty years of her life you watched and got herself that sort of treatment before her death?”
“As I said Carter, you should understand that as I am, all deaths are the same .” He paused before continuing with its playful, annoying, tone. “Even the most cruel ones, you can get used to.”
Carter sighed, his eyes lower than before.
You can’t… He said to himself, convincing himself with such thought.
But, even with his whole being rejecting the thought of getting used to deaths, he couldn’t argue with him since Noir’s argument was undeniable, with more than a thousand total years of experience in his pocket.
He knew and was confident he wasn’t wrong, but until he lived as long, he could say nothing.
As it is, not only loneliness titles and powers could get to people’s heads, but also the weight of their beliefs.