When he arrived home he found Li asleep on the couch. The place was almost completely dark.
He sat down on the floor next to her and listened to her breathing. The expression on her face was so calm. Sleep was the only time she was completely relaxed. He wondered what he looked like when he slept.
She stirred. He touched her cheek and she opened her eyes..
"You came back."
"Of course I came back kid," he said. " I just had a busy day, that's all."
"Your dinner got cold," she said, sitting up.
"Don't worry about it. I'm not hungry, just gonna go to bed."
Lying in bed he could hear her getting ready to go to sleep in the next room.
He thought again of how weak she was and how she instilled a sort of weakness in him. But she seemed to have grown a bit stronger during the time she'd been staying with him. She spoke more, though she occasionally reverted back to her original silence and she had even made eye-contact a few times.
The weakness she caused in him was something he had never experienced before. He found himself behaving in a way that was strange to him, like when he touched her cheek to wake her. A simple action so tender, he had never felt the need to do something like that before. He had never understood why someone would want to. But now... Li needed him, and though he would never have thought it possible, he needed her. Dependency was something he had always despised. Jack (or Kyra), had opened the door for this, he knew. She was the first person that he would have ever considered getting close to, but even so, he had to try to keep her away for her own good. That hadn't worked-out so well. He didn't want that to happen with Li.