[The door is a handful of seconds away. Anna wouldn't stop him from standing up to head towards it, with any pale excuses he might make. He had thought he wanted to talk about this, to better understand, in whatever way he was able to understand. He was wrong. He often is. His feet are already bracing on the floor so he may rise.

But she looks up at him, expecting nothing, and he is fixed in place by the absence of demand. The difference in their ages has never struck him like this before. He is a man grown, head of his House - but he feels like a boy, the one she saw him as when he walked into this place. She is worn, and tired, and she has set her heart whole and beating between them without asking for anything back.

His hand steals across the table, almost as if at someone else's will, and he leaves it open by hers, fingers splayed to be taken up, if she wants them.]

They shouldn't have done that to you.

[Not for God, whatever twisted logic led them there. Not for anything.]

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have - [he shakes his head with a hard swallow, his voice clotted with an echoing empathy] - you're right. That's what matters, when it comes down to us.

I want there to be a reason. I want to understand. [he's the one who can't meet her eyes, now] Sometimes, I think - if I could understand, then -

But that's not something anyone else can tell me, is it? Or can tell you.