She reaches for him again and he does not retreat.
He does not fear the things she shows him.
He had registered the confusion in her expression. How strange it has become to watch emotion flicker across so many countless other faces and feel nothing at all. Not even the ghost of things he had once felt. He has seen these things as if they had visited him once in a dream. He understands them but has nothing at all to connect to them. Even his memories are gray, faded at the edges. He does not remember what it meant to be happy or angry or, in this case, confused.
But she reaches for him and he lets her and he sees what she wants him to see. And he feels some strange splinter in the center of his chest. Another, sharper twinge than the last. A fissure crack in the ice that has protected him from all the pain in that useless heart. But he cannot know this.
She draws away and he tilts his head. Were he capable of the same range of emotions, perhaps he would have frowned. He might have softened his expression to something plaintive. But he merely blinks at her now. “I’m sorry,” he says, but the tone is flat. And perhaps he is sorry on some level, apologetic simply for the sake of being apologetic. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
And there, a flicker of guilt. He feels it strong enough now that he cannot convince himself that he’s imagined it. A flicker of guilt, which fades quickly and is replaced by a smoke screen glimpse of surprise, confusion. A glimmer of abject horror before there, again, is nothing at all.
