He watches me, silently.

I watch him back, as I do whenever we meet, every time another opportunity to discover how much further he has fallen.

I study that face, its form as familiar to me as the smell of blood by now, even as the details change. I look for the evidence of new crimes layered over old. Ghosts of the past that should somehow be carved and sealed into his flesh.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul, so I look to them to show me his. I want to see guilt or pain, just one honest emotion; even cold indifference would do. Something to convince me that he feels, that he is still human. I need to know that he isn't a monster, that some small remnant of the man he once might have been remains in his tarnished soul.

Eye sockets are gouged deep into his skull in stark gothic contrast to skin as pale and opaque as candle wax. The poor overhead lighting cannot be blamed; it merely accentuates the blurred insomniac greys that have been brushed in under his dark, feathered brows. Puffed and bruised, wine-dark shadows drag down from the inner corners of incongruously wide set and childlike eyes, and cobweb-fine lines track out from their outer corners, delicate, but etched harsh and hard as the toughest steel. Long pitch-dragged lashes frame the dulled whites of his eyes, which are mapped with the red spider paths and blushes of exposed capillaries. The glass green irises are as lifeless as museum caged jade, pulled back into paper thin rims to reveal pupils grown wide in the dim light.

All these things are signs and symptoms of exhaustion, and maybe even illness, but however hard I look there is no emotion to be read in those eyes. They are as beautiful as emeralds, and as dead.

I have my answers.

I turn away from the mirror, and turn out the light.