The conversation slowing to small talk has his fingers itching for a cigarette. He didn't notice an absence of that heavy, acrid smell in his home. There must have been a pack somewhere, and the regret of not looking for it scrapes at the underside of his thoughts.

"Blind adherence to tradition," he remarks, her comment glancing off him. He never really felt attached to his own name, before he got the diminutive working in the emergency room. Probably because it belonged to someone else first. A grandfather he met on a handful of occasions and a great-grandfather that died before he was born. What a thrilling origin. "Couldn't make my first name Aloysius and set me up for a life of character-building schoolyard bullying."