I felt like a lot needed to be expanded one, so consider it a two-shot.

Um, social commentary abound?

The memories are dusty, but he's already given them a good stir, so he picks them up, one by one, and gives them a shake.

The city, his apartment, that little café down on sixth, the alley – places start giving him a setting. Nothing remained of it. That was the problem with the virtual world. When the system crashed, it was like a reset.

Then the faces. Face. That face. Of course they had been friends. Good friends. But slowly age tore them apart. He couldn't stand to look at the graying whiskers or the aging skin or hear the wheezing coughs made worse by habit. Slowly they drifted. Slowly they lost each other.

Their last night together was a fight. If he had to pick one regret to be his worst, it would be that hour. Worth was only fifty, but cigarettes drugs desires kept killing him faster. It was confrontation. It was denial. It was rebuttal and hatred and anger, and it was storming out and deciding that if Worth was going to kill himself he would have no part in it.

It was deciding to not care.

He'd like to think that he made it this far because of indifference. He left and just kept moving. A year later, he wondered. Fives later, he wondered, ten years, fifty, one hundred. But then it was too late. So he kept moving. Eventually it became even too late to wonder.

At first, he kept drawing. Those were great times. He could always find some hospital (or whatever the word was at the time) with a slightly lack security system, and the rest was easily covered by art. He didn't have to worry. Of course the world was changing, but he started seeing the patterns, predicting them, seeing when he would need to move or when it would be safest to stay.

The world didn't end with an alien invasion or because of the environment (although, not for a lack of trying, just people kept pushing through that). It ended with a push of a button.

Some of the vampires that he met during the next millennium made him look like an infant. They told him that it would repeat: good times were ahead for an immortal, and slowly it'd build back, just like it had before. But they were wrong. It just kept spiraling down. But his adventures with Worth had told him not to get attached to anything with an expiration date. He wasn't cold-hearted, he was just apathetic.

The world built it self back up, smothering the remains that had crumbled down below. It wasn't better. It was just different. Parallel and incomparable. Art didn't exist, no one knew their history, society had its standards, and if you could call it politics, it would make communism look great, and democracy look like hell.

But he didn't really concern himself. As long as there was something to keep him going (most of the time there was) and a niche in the world for him to fill, he kept going. No one ever remembered what he was if they knew – he'd mastered that whole glamor thing where there were still keyboards.

The only thing that really, truly remained from his time was his rule. The rule. The rule that he made for himself long ago when he was called a pussy for it. Now it makes him … less. Less monstrous. Less vile. Less apathetic.

And he's sort of okay with that.

Do I drabble, or what?