There's a thought she had so fleetingly after she thrust her palms against his chest that it did not register as a thought. What it began to do instead was to loop, like all the worst thoughts, a shivering whispered repetition that is boring through the permeable shell that got her this far.

He's looking at you like he's seen a -

But it's not only the looking. It's the whole state of him. The crushed in wreck of his face, the tentativeness underlying the clinging of his hands. He's talking about Lovecraft and aesthetics in the jagged, jumpy way he gets stuck in when there's something else he doesn't want to talk about, but can't shake.

She's always been a bit perverse. His fragility rallies her where comfort might have failed. She breathes down to the bottom of her lungs, so deep it aches, and her freed arm snakes up so she can cup the back of his neck. She nods.

"No funny business," she tells him, reflexively, probing around the base of his neck for knots of tension. Her fingers are clinical, which means that they're gentle and they're through. Someone once told her in another life she would have made a damn fine pediatrician.