It would almost be better if Black Coleman weren't so mundane.

Give a man an eyepatch, a pegleg, and it's so simple to build a story to fit him. This is a pirate, surely! A blackhearted terror of the rails, pillager of the defenseless, cannibal of lesser trains! You can tell yourself that this is but a twisted shadow of what might be, an impossibility made real through some quirk of the Heart. It's not you, not [i]really.[/i]

But those eyes... they're the same eyes he sees every day in Sasha's gleaming mirror-polished surface. This isn't some cackling villain, some nightmare mirror-version. This isn't a madman, somone who's lost his soul. He looks in those eyes and sees, behind the coldness and the determination, the regret hiding there. This is a Coleman who [i]knows[/i] what he's done, what he's [i]become[/i], and would do it again. He made choices with the knowledge he had. To modify Sasha or hope that she'd be strong enough without Wormwood to protect her. To carry on, to build a family even despite the difficulties. To build a crew who loved her as much as he did. To join in the war, when all other options had been exhausted.

Gods. War amongst trains. As if things weren't bad enough without a thousand tiny gods deciding that, [i]Right,[/i] it's time to show that shiny new up-and-comer down the rail [i]exactly[/i] where they are in the pecking order.

Black Coleman isn't even that older than he is, he realizes with a start. No missing scales, no sagging crests or dulled claws. He's got more scars, and the bags under his eyes speak of many missed nights of sleep, but he can't be more than maybe five years into the future.

"You don't want to do this."  Not a question, not pleading. Simply a statement of something they both know. "You didn't want to do most of the rest, either."

He's made decisions, yes. Necessary ones, difficult ones.

Maybe the wrong ones?

"Tell me what happened. Tell me how to [i]stop[/i] this."

[EDIT: Talk Sense, 8]