It hurts to know, so well in fact that he does not need to second guess her shifty movements and empty silences, and that she does in fact understand and let his words and prophetic urgencies shift past her without the need of comprehension.
It hurts when she shows her gratitude through polished steel, bloody hand prints and buckets of water as he compliments and serves her grain feed beef while forming allegoric poetry from synthetic blood on died green steel.
It hurts to speak in the tongue of a madman when your brain clearly speaks another. That it will pass through the red and blue constellations while streams of yellow drift across her face.
It hurts when she realizes for the fifth time that he simply won't go away. That her frigid movements and cold stares only ease when he touches her childhood and the crushing of fingers and then her anger can't help but pour out and break the moment.
It hurts to hear her cry and scream and beg, clinging and banging herself against the steel bars, acting as if she were to only try hard enough they would simply crumble and fall beneath her hands. It hurts as it carries down the wide cement hallways to his spare apartment, reminding him that love is not always consensual.
It hurts when she rejects her blond curls and unabashed eyes as she giggles and plays with the wood blocks laid precariously around the apartment living room floor while she hides behind the thin metal grading and pretends that the patterns simply aren't there.
And who's to say it isn't? Especially she, who has not known and felt the hands of God.
It's wonderful isn't it? When you see everything falling as it should. When joy and relief are close at hand while you feel it move through you, as if it were a part of you, and he was.
This, he does not know how to describe this.
Plans and manipulation do not incorporate this.
Emotions reduced to nothing more that butterflies, millions of them, all scattering about and setting at the base of his stomach as they flapped their wings, making him shake uncontrollably.
It hurts but not when she goes for the knife or when she moves for the child and after when she leaves with her husband but when she discovers by the cruel hand of God, that her instincts and vague assertions were right and the child that she bares and loves and protects even in the face of apathy, is not hers at all.
It hurts that it was working and God's plan had flourished and then withered away. That it will be harder next time when the days are more limited and she has nothing to base her dissolution's and madness of the divine.
It hurts that he understood, even for the fraction of the second, what it was to be human, a wild temerity that clings closest to love whenever she was around.
How can they exist with such a thing? Sensations that threat to tear and break: Blood, liquid and the transfusions of air.
Then her hand digs and twists, severing the lower muscle as he stands, she graces him backwards, as if to give one final injury to her blow and then watches her leave up the narrow stairway with all that he holds in meaning. He realizes, at the cruel irony of it all, that he will never possess this feeling again.
But it's beautiful, all of it, in its painful twisted way.
He understands now.
There is a God and it thrives most profoundly in Kara Thrace