Gideon says it's not your fault, and it draws up tears that Paul didn't know he still had left, soft and dissolving. He makes a sound caught between whimper and keen, burrows deeper against her, and her words keep falling like warm rain.

And he's selfish, and he's weak, because he soaks them up as helplessly as her t-shirt absorbs his miserable, exhausted leaking.

"I still want it to be," Paul says, clinging to his voice as wildly as he clings to her, because this matters the way almost nothing else in this hideous place matters; this might be the only thing that matters, the fulcrum of the whole wrecked world, "I want it to be my fault."

His breath hitches hard in the back of his throat, a soft gag on a trickle of bitter brine, and he grits his teeth, his head unraised.

"I wanted to keep you together." Quiet, for all the shuddering tension of him. He sucks in a sharp breath, unwinds his fingers from bloodless tightness to flatten on her back in turn as he finds his feet under him. "I didn't want you to lose him again. I didn't want any of you to lose each other. If I could have - I tried, Gideon. I tried, and he's still gone, and even if he comes back, it's still-"

"-it's not fair."