He watches the caution fall off of her like weight released; her smile to him is pitying. There is something marvelously novel in that, and something that stokes the simmer of his bitter, boxed-up fury. John has lived on his pedestal for a very long time, and it had been refreshing to step off of it, in a sense. Now he merely finds himself wrong-footed on solid ground.

But she is a child trying to be kind to a stranger. He exhales a long, slow breath, and it feels like pressure releasing.

"It's not the flesh that disturbs me," he confesses, which is mostly true. "The implication is heavy-handed, but it's not off-base."

He is peripherally aware that there must be a spell upon him, because speaking this truth feels like the lifting of a curse. It feels like shaking off some jittery, poisonous energy that has been building in him unseen.

"That's the sting of this show," he murmurs. "The blame. These are all the people I have lost through my own failures, Willow, each and every one of them."