What a shame indeed. It was such a peculiar thing, to oppose the burning of something already dead and gone. Was a corpse any more important than the tobacco rolled tight into his cigarette? Certainly the latter could at least provide some sort of use. All a corpse did was rot in the ground.

It was not an opinion that a Catholic priest should hold. No, he knew the reason. A body could not rise from the ground for resurrection if it had been reduced to scattered ashes. It was just… a shame, as Hurley so eloquently framed it.

Malachi couldn’t have said he was paying the parasite any more attention than he was to his own thoughts, but he still looked at him when he chuckled. Oddly enough, a sound he heard frequently at funerals. What were they, but a good excuse to mingle and make one’s self look empathetic and well-connected?

Hurley replied to a question he’d already forgotten he’d asked.

Zack… he didn’t know any Zack. Must have been that shorter one he’d brought with him. If it was Levi this Zack was going for, it wouldn’t be that hard to check – but the diamonds? Those were his.

Everything was his.

The time it took for Malachi to blink, once Hurley bothered to return his stare his gaze, bordered on absurd.

What was he supposed to say to that? ‘God?’ That probably would have been a better answer.

Instead, he shrugged. The only one that’d ever looked out for him was currently in the church, waiting to be put into the ground. He was looking out for himself, but that didn’t count. From the desperate state of him, he wasn’t doing a very good job. Malachi pulled the bent cigarette out from his lips and exhaled off to the side.

“Why?” he questioned flatly. “You’re not feeling sympathetic now, are you?”