Min's Death was everything.<br/><br/>Min's Death was nothing.<br/><br/>Min was a stastic.<br/><br/>Min was a person.<br/><br/>How much did one note matter in the symphony in the world?<br/><br/>How much less was a symphony without that note? Too many notes and it was just noise but that sweet moment of experience was all the richer for everything you had...<br/><br/>To Min, that was the end.  Everything he had been, everything he was, snuffed, gone in an instant, and you could say that he went on in the hearts of those that loved him, but William didn't believe that.<br/><br/>He didn't believe in an afterlife.  As he sat there in World religions, he thumbed through the sacred texts offered in the class, he saw that for most, the idea of the afterlife was a progresisng thing. And there was no evidence in his experience with the bugs that belief affected reality.  Realities existed and conflicted but belief alone didn't seem to affect that.  And if that was the case, then while one could make the argument that spiritual truths that had always existed slowly leaked out and were distributed ...<br/><br/>Or you could say that just like Little Green Men with ass probes, the shared lie got better and more believable as it was passed around to people and the idea that there was something after the Big Snuff became something more and more palatable until it went from Dante's intolerable but beauteous disgusting Heaven to Michael Landon's pablum of Angel's Who You Used To Know in Highway to Heaven.<br/><br/>One thing William knew for certain sure.  Martin was NO angel.  And neither was he.<br/><br/>The world might be called a God; and of the big three questions; all loving, all powerful and all knowing, the world could maybe be called love in a way...or knowing in a way.  But what was knowledge without a prefrontal cortext? Who was the Brain of God?<br/><br/>No, the world and all that was in it was a beautiful place, and where there was more than one reality, that put the odds that any reality you could imagine was still out there somewhere.  So that meant Rin was out there, being a jerk, or not a jerk but it wasn't THAT Rin.<br/><br/>Rin was gone.  And therefore RIN didn't care.  William cared.  He cared too much for his own good.  When he had finally had a few moments to breath, about 5 days a year after he had finished running when he saved the village...he'd had a breakdown.  He'd cried then.  He'd let the horror of the blood and the people and the monsters was over him and gotten over the illusion that he was human or normal or part of the world end forever after.<br/><br/>And then he'd worked on fighting. He had been studying the bugs, finding ways to crush them when he'd thought about potentially listening to the world and that had changed everything.<br/><br/>And that didn't change anything about Rin being a festering maggot trap right now.  Technically, the meat that was Rin, was alive and kicking but biological function didn't make Rin, Rin.  Indeed, the non function of being able to revive Rin when the Soul Eater had consumed his soul was the ultimate irony.  Rin's death proved what thousands of years of holy men could not; there was a soul. There was a ghost in the shell.  There was some THERE, there.<br/><br/>And there was no where for it to go after the Big Snuff.<br/><br/>William would mourn Rin in his own private way in a few days.  He had known Rin, so honoring Rin's memory; jerkish as that memory was, said more about who William was than Rin.  And William didn't want to be any more of a monster than he already was.<br/><br/>But not now.  For now, there was work to do.