Words were so hard to find, weren't they? It made Ashton's heart hurt a little bit, hearing how stilted Claude sounded sometimes when he talked about things. And how utterly regretful. ...Hopefully things would restore themselves to normalcy eventually (if the two of them were willing to go through the long process to do so) but it didn't seem like it would be a walk in the park.

"If that made any sense, maybe it'd..." Ashton half-audibly murmured to himself after that first comment. He'd been talking about eavesdropping. How would things 'have a way of working out'? Then he tried his best to shake himself out of those negative thoughts, shaking his head quickly and looking at Claude, then away. This whole thing.. wasn't good, was it? He couldn't add to the conflict any more. No, no, no.

He tried to smile a little bit - not earlier's mostly-fake smile, but a horribly executed, half-limp movement of his lips. "There's nothing you can do about the hurting. These things just happen, and there's not really a quest we can go on to undo it, or any Heraldry in the world that can fix it. You.. you should't blame yourself or think of it as your responsibility to fix it. If.. if that's what all this is about, then you should forget it and just be happy."

Leave it to Ashton to shrug off other people's worry. He didn't want other people to inconvenience themselves on his part unless they were responsible for something that happened to him. And no one was responsible for this. Just Landel's.

"You.." He took a deep breath. "You can't answer that question because you're not happy, right? As for me? I.. well, I'm trying. I'm trying, and Dias is too, and.. I'm really happy sometimes, but I can't really, really be happy unless you are, Claude. But.. if my being happy makes you sad like it seems to, like Dias said, then I think I'd rather not be happy again."

With that, he downed the rest of his apple juice, his face all red. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to meet Claude's eye for the rest of lunch.