It wasn't the first time he'd ever been back; it would be dumb to think any time would ever be the last. The world was too fickle. Jin had been back many times over, continually cursed with the inability to let it end. At first he'd spent his time quantifying, analyzing the data of the world around him; he mapped the world, identified landmarks that still remained in some form, mentally described their destruction and decomposition, took stock of elements that could possibly remain. Processed and reviewed like a computer, neatly able to section a part of his brain away like a malicious program.

(At a certain point before he'd come back the last time, he'd grown terrified of his own processes, and terrified of the fact that that was what he had called them just look at what they had done to them everything, everything he had said and talked about being untouchable in the long run maybe that was just wrong)

And so the next time he was back, with too much time to think, too much room to be himself, it was natural for him to both futilely rebel and quietly accept himself and what had happened-- and he'd dropped himself down on the ground in the remains of the closest thing he'd ever called home. Just a run down old warehouse that barely qualified as a building anymore, with a couch that barely counted as a seat and tools and teenage odds and ends scattered on the ground and abandoned, and the water boiler broken. Again.

(He'd tried to fix it again once before, for old time's sake, but it wasn't quite the same when there was no water anyway, and no one to yell at him if there wasn't).

He dropped himself there like a ragdoll, the corner of his glasses perpetually shattered, his hair a grown out and ragged mess, and his countenance astonishingly silent as he tried to format the hours in his head.