Compassion
The day that EVE asked about WALL-E's 700 years alone, she realized he'd been waiting for that question to come up a while. Within moments, he was giving her a prepared abridged version of his story the best he could with his dialect. But by a few minutes in, she wondered why he'd ever wanted to tell her. Was it that important to him that she knew?
After all, and he sat next to her on a bench, he was throwing his heart on the ground in front of her. It was as if he was just now realizing how much it had hurt. She nodded and listened, nodded and listened, a compassionate look on her face as she held his hand.
Compassion.
It felt so fake right now.
Compassion was partly the act of feeling somebody's pain. To feel somebody's pain, you must have at least an imagined idea of what the pain was like. But this, the story WALL-E told her with one of the most serious looks she'd seen in a while from him, went beyond her imagination.
700 years.
700 years.
When he first started getting a sad look on his face, those two words hit her like a ton of bricks. But she just continued to listen, in a slight daze.
It didn't take long for her to look ten times more devastated than he was by the story, and he noticed.
"...Evah?"
"WALL-E!"
She grabbed him, holding him tightly against her, eyes closed sadly as a spark passed between them.
"Evah?" he asked again.
Her reply was different this time, and quite simple.
"Stay."
She had to try. She had to try and understand. She had to try and be compassionate for him. But to stand the pain, she was going to need him there. After all, he was the stronger of the two.