I raise my hands. Non-threatening. Visible.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn'thave?—"
"No." She cuts me off. "You shouldn't have. And you especially shouldn't be looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're cataloging damage." Her voice drops. Goes quiet. Dangerous quiet. "Like you're counting scars and calculating what they cost. Like you have any right to my pain."
She's right.
I have absolutely no right to her pain, not to witness it, not to calculate its shape, not to mentally catalog each scar as evidence of my failure. But I saw them anyway. Can't unsee them now. Each one is burned into my memory with the same precision they're burned into her skin.
The burn scar across her left shoulder blade, plasma scoring, the edges still angry after six years. The thin white lines from knife work along her ribs, interrogation marks, methodical and cruel. The twisted mass of tissue on her right thigh where something melted through flesh and kept going.
And the others. The ones she did to herself.
The cutting scars on her arms. Self-inflicted during the worst of her recovery, when pain was the only thing that felt real, when she needed to hurt something and her own body was the only target available.
The full accounting of what six years without me did to her.
WhatIdid to her, by leaving.
My marks are pulsing, grief so profound it's nearly physical, guilt that tastes like copper on my tongue. I'm feeling everything I put into her body through absence. Every scar is a wound I dealt secondhand.
"I'll go," I say.
The words come out rougher than I intend. I need toleave. Need to get out of this room before I do something catastrophically stupid like apologize again, like try to touch her, like beg her to let me stay.
I turn toward the door. Every instinct screaming at me to fix this, to stay, to make her understand?—
"Wait."
I freeze. Don't turn back. Don't trust myself to look at her without my marks betraying everything I'm feeling.
Silence. Long enough that I almost turn back. Almost ask what she wants, what she needs, what I can possibly give her that won't make this worse.
"Did you feel it?" Her voice is rough now. "When they took me. Could you sense what they were doing?"
The question lands like a blade between my ribs.
I could lie. Should lie. Tell her the distance was too great, the sensing cut off, I felt nothing after the first few hours.
"Yes."
The truth comes out flat. Clinical. The only way I can say it without breaking something.
"All of it?"
"Not... not everything. The connection faded as they took you further from the extraction point. But the first hours—" My throat closes. "Yes. I felt it."
Her emotional state spikes. Not anger this time.
Pain.
Raw, absolute, the kind that has no bottom. I taste copper and lightning and something that might be vindication. She wanted me to admit it. Needed to hear me say it out loud.
"And you still?—"
