He thinks she'll hit him again; he thinks she'll scrunch her face the way she does, the way he's used to, in utter distaste. What she does instead is worse.

John's breath hitches in one great, awful shudder of a failed laugh. There is a tremble through his shoulders, an aborted flex of his fingers: he could gather her into his arms and tuck his face against her throat. She'd let him. She is plain and human, brave as hell, and she'd do it because they're friends.

He doesn't. He goes agonizingly still, his expression on the edge of collapse. His throat works for a moment, his thumbs worrying the crooks of her elbows, a miserable aimless fidget. He can't stop looking at the way she looks at him.

"There's the bad news," he says, only a little unsteady in his levity. "Less E.T., more Lovecraft."

His hands still and settle, careful and deliberate. Crowded up too close under the heat of her panicked blue eyes, with no other out, he talks.

"They have a very definite aesthetic. One that I can get behind, honestly, as a fellow skin guy. Do you want me to—?"

He lifts one hand away from her arm, palm open in demonstration; the grime has come away on the pads of his fingers as though magnetized. Where he'd touched her, the skin is pale and clean.