Desmond had only been waiting for a couple minutes when Aela walked in. She ushered him away from the bookshelf where he was browsing and settled him on a chair, while she sat on the bed across from him. She quirked her eyebrow like she was waiting for him to speak, and when he didn't she threw a pillow at him.

"Talk."

He shrugged, stalling. "What do you want me to say?"

She rolled her eyes. "Well, you can start with who you are and where you come from, Sir 'I've-Never-Heard-Of-Cyrodiil.'" That seems like a good beginning."

He let out an explosive sigh and scrubbed a hand over his face. "Ugh. You just had to pick the hardest topic, didn't you."

She leaned back on her elbows and watched him expectantly. He dropped his gaze to the floor, so he didn't have to look at her expression when she ultimately didn't believe him.

"Well, when I said I wasn't exactly from around here, I meant it on a much larger scale than you were probably picturing." he made a vague gesture with his hands. "You were probably thinking like country or continent wise, and I meant it more in the… dimensional or plane of existence scale."

She froze, muscles tensing, and oh no, there was another cultural thing here he was missing, wasn't there? "You are Daedra?"

"Uh, I don't think so?" Desmond paused. "What's a Daedra?"

She said nothing for a long moment, nearly glaring at him in her intense scrutiny. She rose fluidly from the bed and shut the doors with a resounding click, feet silent on the thick carpet of the floors. She settled on the bed again, pulling a fur around her shoulders, and leaned into the corner, somehow seeming even more interested in what was coming than she had been previously.

"...continue."

He shrugged, trying to stall again, no matter how ineffective it would turn out to be. "This is going to take a while. Like, a long ass time."

She just quirked an eyebrow, looking rather like she was going to punch him in the fucking face if he didn't get on with it, and Desmond decided that now would be a great time to start talking.

"First things first, alright?" He just had to clarify. "There's tons of technical shit involved with how I got here; shit I don't actually understand. I'm not even sure if this actually is a different dimension than mine, or if I'm only on a different planet- or maybe this is all one big fucking hallucination and I'm still flat on my ass and out cold on the Grand Temple floor- I don't know." Desmond rubbed tiredly at his eyes, already feeling exhausted despite the fact that he hadn't even begun to explain yet. "So when I say I don't understand something, I honest to god don't understand it, got me?"

Aela tilted her head as she stared at him, eyes narrowed in examination. Desmond shifted under her gaze, not willing to admit to himself that it made him just the tiniest bit uncomfortable. He'd been through enough shit already, being stared at shouldn't unnerve him. Except, well, it did.

Finally, Aela seemed to see something in him that she found worthy of her approval, because next thing he knew she was nodding along like this was all some big conspiracy that she was in on. "I understand. Explain as much as you can, and we will work through it all from there. Does this seem fair?"

Desmond leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. He sucked in a breath, as much as his lungs could hold, before letting it out all in one great sigh. This was definitely going to be one hell of a conversation, but it certainly was off to a better start than he'd been hoping for. He straightened up and looked her in the eyes. "Yeah, sounds good."

"You're going to need a shit ton of backstory before we even get to my life, so settle yourself in." He pulled out a roll of parchment from one of her shelves and grabbed a stick of charcoal. "Do you have a map of your world? Like, with all the continents and stuff?" Aela nodded. "Get it out please."

She rose to do so, and he quickly sketched out a decent map of his earth with all the countries he could remember, thankful that he liked geography in what had passed for high school at The Farm.

He paused, eyeing his map. Decent enough, ignoring coastlines and shit. And the actual size. And all the smudges... Drawing was hard, okay? He tossed the first awful map away and grabbed another roll of parchment, drawing a second, and frankly much better, map.

He set the two maps side by side on the table and motioned Aela to sit beside him. He labeled his 'Earth' when he saw that the other one was labeled 'Nirn'. "Is Nirn round or flat?"

She looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "What does that even mean?"

"Does your world have a place where it ends? Like an edge? Earth is round, which means that if I traveled from one end of the map to the other and stayed on a straight path the whole time I would end up right where I started. Earth is a sphere."

He dragged his finger across his map to illustrate his point and smiled when Aela's eyes lit up with understanding. Maybe this wouldn't be so difficult after all.

"Nirn is flat." The huntress answered, leaning back in her seat and crossing her arms across her armored chest. She gave a small huff and rolled her eyes. "Many a cocky sailor have sailed off the edge of the world through naught but sheer stupidity."

He nodded. "Okay, and how long would it take you to travel from one end of Skyrim to the other? How large would you estimate Skyrim, Tamriel, and Nirn as a whole are?"

She thought for a few moments. "You can cross Skyrim in three and a half days if you travel continuously. I'd estimate it to be… between 200 and 300 square miles. Tamriel, I'd say is about 2000 to 2500 square miles, including the islands. Nirn as a whole is a bit more difficult to conceptualize, but based off the size of the land masses I'd put it at 160000 square miles."

"Mmhmm," the Assassin hummed thoughtfully, taking the information in and mentally calculating how much that would be on a map. "And what would you put the population of Skyrim, Tamriel, and Nirn at? Just at a guess."

She tapped the table pensively, nails clicking on the hardened wood and brows furrowed in deep concentration. It was obvious that she'd never had to put much thought toward this subject before. "Skyrim has no more than five hundred peoples, likely far less than that. Tamriel itself I would put closer to... five or six thousand. I have no way to speak for the other continents, but as an uneducated guess I would say the whole of Nirn carries about seventeen thousand peoples."

She paused, and glared at him. "I do hope these questions actually have a point, and you're not just trying to stall again."

Desmond chuckled, maybe a little nervously, but that was nobody's business. "Okay, Earth is absolutely massive compared to Nirn. You're lucky I like geography, or this explanation would make so much less sense."

He tapped America on the map. "The country where I'm from is called the United States of America, or the "U.S." for short. It's divided up into 50 individual "states," and each has their own local government."

Aela brightened. "Like the holds within Skyrim! Each of the seven holds of skyrim is governed by the Jarl within their capital city."

Desmond nodded. "Right, exactly like that. Every state's got it's own capital city, and the capital of the whole country is Washington D.C. The U.S.," he smiled, "is just over... 3 million square miles, I'm pretty sure." Because he was a fucking bartender, not a geography professor.

He laughed as her jaw dropped. "It's actually pretty tiny compared with some of the other continents. There's seven of those, in all. North and South America, Oceania, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Antarctica. Asia is the largest and Europe is the smallest. " He tapped them out in turn. "Earth's got, like, two hundred countries. The smallest is Vatican City, which is not even one fifth of a square mile- -the only reason it's even it's own country is because of political reasons and shit, "he waved a hand in dismissal. "Largest country would have to be Russia, which is some massively ridiculous number like, 6 million square miles or something like that. I don't really remember."

Desmond smothered a laugh behind his hand at her gaping expression and brought out the big guns. "The entire Earth is about, uh, 190 million square miles? It's got a population of over seven billion people."

He tilted his head to pin his companion with a stare, and her reaction didn't disappoint. "You're joking. That's impossible," she breathed. She'd stood up sometime in the midst of her jaw-hinged fit of speechlessness, and was now grasping empty hands around imaginary somethings- perhaps the weapon she'd left lying on the bed behind her?- and Desmond shivered, and swept the thought away.

"It's super possible, Aela," he grinned, instead, "because our planet is literally about a million times bigger than yours."

"We're also, like, centuries ahead of you guys in terms of technology and science, but you do have some things we don't, like magic, and elves, and, uh, dragons." He paused, and the two of them smirked at each other like two kids getting away with rule-breaking. "Our planet is entirely inhabited by humans and animals, no magical population to speak of, although Those Who Came Before had things that seem like magic and were just incredible feats of technology…."

"You keep saying that word, 'technology', but what does it mean?"

Oh man. And the theoretical stuff begins. This actually was going to be difficult. Fuck.

Desmond steepled his fingers together and scowled minutely as he thought of a way to explain it simply. "Technology means like... machines and stuff. Some of our world is really poor and lives without most if not all technology, and then some people choose to live without it. But a good portion of the earth has electricity- which is, like... lightning- trapped in little metal wires that we use to power other things."

"You mean like a soul gem?"

That sounded...ominous. "Uh, soul gem?"

She nodded. She stood, rummaged through a chest by her bed, and returned to the table with a fist sized lump of luminescent crystal.

"This is a soul gem. When you are in a battle, you can cast the spell Soul Trap, and when that enemy dies their soul will be trapped in the gem." She flicked the crystal lightly, and it made a sharp tinkling sound, like broken glass clinking together. "They are used to power enchantments on weapons, amongst other things. I have heard that mages use them to power some of their more complex spells, but I am no mage and I do not know if this is true."

"Like a battery!" Desmond nearly cheered- something that made sense! Well, aside from the magical bits, but… knowing that not everything in this world was absolutely different was comforting.

At Aela's inquiring glance, Desmond hurried to tack on, "They're little containers, about as large as your thumb," he held up his own for reference, "and they hold a certain amount of electricity. A lot of them, you just throw away when they run out, but some are rechargeable- -which means you can just put more electricity in them."

She nodded. "Yes, that does seem to be an appropriate comparison, although the only rechargeable soul gem I've ever even heard of in passing is the Star Of Azura."

They lapsed into a momentary silence. Desmond blinked at her, wanting to ask- but then he cleared his throat and decided against it. At his own guess, he had plenty of time to ask his own questions, later. "So, uh, back on topic."

He made a grandiose gesture with one hand. "Now, ladies and gentlemen, for an extremely condensed history of the planet Earth." Inwardly, he groaned, but then Aela's eyes lit up with interest and a bruning sort of curiosity, and suddenly he couldn't find it in himself to give a half-assed lecture. Fuck it all.

"Once upon a time there lived a race of god-like beings, called Those Who Came Before… or, precursors." He grimaced. "They were really fucking powerful, and they sort of created us puny little humans to be their slaves." Aela's eyes went dark and scary again, so he hurried on to the next part- -" Um, we sort of worshipped them as gods later on, but they really weren't. They were just as mortal as the rest of us, nothing special there."

Aela muttered beneath her breath, something about "playing at being Divine," or something. Desmond decided it would be best to just ignore that and carry on.

"Then, a great shitstorm of a natural disaster, also known as the Calamity, hit Earth hard and destroyed nearly all life on the planet… except for a handful of precursors and a few hundred humans. And, as far as most humans know, the world's history starts from there."

Aela frowned. "Are you telling me that most of your people do not even know their own history?"

He smiled sadly. "Yeah. I'm all for telling people the truth about what actually happened, but at this point? No one would believe us. Even if they did, there'd just be mass panic. How would you react if you were told that everything you knew about you and your people was wrong and that you were actually created as slaves for a powerful god-race?"

Aela snorted. Her features smoothed out a bit, and she nodded at him in assent.

"Exactly." Desmond hummed.

"The hand full of precursors remaining died a few years later, sealing their memories and minds into their temples and tools and shit. Ruins of their technology were left behind, hidden away from the rest of us little humans. We call the special bits of it that we find "pieces of Eden." Back before the Calamity, they were used to control humanity, specifically golden orbs called Apples of Eden." He very pointedly did not think about his own Apple, which was metaphorically burning a hole in his pocket.

"Humanity eventually gave rise to two opposing factions, Templars and Assassins." Here- Desmond cackled internally- Here was where things really hit it off. "The Templars believe that humanity can only be free through enslavement, and that taking away people's ability to choose is the correct path to creating a utopia. My faction, the Assassins, disagrees. We live by the idea that humans should determine their own actions, that life without true freedom is no life at all."

Aela snorted. "I am inclined to agree. These Templars sound like the worst of men. Nobody should have such absolute power over another, not without consent."

Desmond paused, and smiled over at her. "...You would make a good Assassin, Aela."

She snorted. "I am a Companion, through and through." Then her face softened just the tiniest bit, and she looked over at him quietly. "However… by all means, continue your tale. Your ideology intrigues me."

He nodded, obliging her request. "The Assassins and the Templars have been fighting for hundreds of years, across the entire globe, a secret war that has claimed the lives of thousands. My ancestors have been Assassins from the beginning. I'm descended from some of the most famous Assassins of all time; Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Ratonhnhaké:ton or Connor Kenway… to, well, name a few. I grew up reading about them in history book and I was expected to live up to their legacies because of our blood ties, or some bullshit like that," he let out an explosive sigh.

Aela had a knowing look on her features when she met his stare, this time. "Quite the legends to match, I take it?"

"Thing is, my dad was an asshole who just… really didn't like me no matter whatever the hell I did," at this, Aela frowned, but Desmond powered right over whatever she would have said. " -and by the time I was sixteen I never believed a word out of his mouth. He kept spouting idealistic shit, and going on and on about how we were Assassins, that the Templars were out there waiting to find and destroy us, and I thought he was insane."

"You no longer took his warnings seriously," Aela guessed, and Desmond nodded.

"The worst part is," he sighed and rubbed at his temples, "I really, really should have."

He tipped back in his chair, absentmindedly tapping his fingers against his knees. "But I didn't. When I was sixteen, I ran away from our secret compound, the Farm- -a safe place for Assassins that the Templars didn't know about- -and I ended up in New York, the biggest city in the United States. I was stuck on this idea that, if I just kept my head down, I could ignore all the shit I grew up with and just live out a normal life like I wanted to. I thought that, since I didn't associate with the Assassins anymore, the Templars wouldn't come after me like my dad always said they would."

"Instead of worrying about the Templars, I spent my time paranoid about Assassins finding me and dragging me back to my dad." There was the dark and scary look again. Desmond continued on like a particularly determined soldier. "I was so scared about being hauled back to the Farm that I didn't even think much about the Templars." A wry, bitter smile stretched across his face. "Thing is, the Templars didn't ignore me just because I didn't hang out with their enemy. Instead of the Assassins I spent so much time worrying about taking me away, it was the Templars who kidnapped me. They locked me up for a while, and then put me in a machine that can make you relive the lives of your ancestors through their memories."

Aela's eyes widened. "That must be magic. Such a thing would be impossible otherwise."

"Ah ah ah," Desmond wiggled a finger. "Technology. There's no magic on earth, just technology so advanced that it seems like magic." He leaned forward again and propped his chin on his hand, tracing the whorls on the table with a finger.

"It was called the Animus," he told her. Aela settled back onto the bed against and crossed her legs underneath her. "I was forced to relive the life of my ancestor, Altaïr, while the Templars watched the memories from outside the Animus in case they could find out the locations of Pieces of Eden that would let them control the rest of humanity."

Aela's face twisted into a sneer, and Desmond sighed and resolved to listen to her short rant about 'idiot Divine-pretenders, worse than Daedra, scum of the earth and honorless fools.' It made him want to laugh, and some part of him settled down comfortably at the knowledge that he wasn't the only one absolutely done with the Templar's shit ideas.

After she was finished, and had cast him a vaguely embarrassed grin, he continued. "Thankfully, I didn't have to stay with the bastards long. I ended up being rescued by an Assassin spy within the Templars named," his breath hitched; he very firmly ignored it, carried on, "Lucy Stillman, and she broke me out and took me to an Assassin hideout, where I met two other Assassins, Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane, and where they put me back in the animus to relive the memories of my next ancestor, Ezio Auditore da Firenze."

He huffed out a bitter laugh. "Unfortunately, the Animus has a unique side effect called the Bleeding Effect. Having two or three people's worth of memories in your head on top of your own makes things get a little… jumbled up, you could say." Her eyes widened in horror. "I spent so much time in the Animus that I forgot how to be myself. I would spend hours or even days thinking I was Altaïr or Ezio and I couldn't handle it. I was going insane." Aela placed a careful hand on his shoulder, but he was too deep in his own memories to notice.

"Eventually the Templars found us again, and we were forced to relocate to a new base in Italy," he tapped it on the map, "to Ezio's home, actually, and I relived more of his memories while we searched for a Piece of Eden to help aid us in the fight against the templars. I finally found one, and the four of us- Lucy, Rebecca, Shaun, and I- traveled there. In the Precursor temple I was confronted by one of Those Who Came Before, who called herself Juno." Aela growled softly as his eyes went dark, fingers digging into his palms. "I touched the Apple we had found, and Juno took control of my body and…" He took a deep breath, "and killed Lucy."

Aela's eyes went wide, and before Desmond could gather himself up again and brush it off as nothing, she'd leaned across the space between them to grab his shoulders. He was forced to look her in the eyes; eyes that held fire and brimstone promises of pain. The Assassin swallowed thickly.

"This Juno," Aela bit the name out, like it was a particularly nasty curse word she'd been saying all her life but had just now learned the true meaning of. "She forced you to kill your shield-sister?"

"My…" Desmond trailed off, before he remembered what exactly a shield-sibling was. "What? No, Lucy wasn't- she wasn't my shield-sibling, or anything like that- we aren't like the Companions, Aela, she was just-"

"She was," Aela cut in immediately, all smooth and calm and nothing like the scrambling mess Desmond had become. "This Lucy was your friend, a person that you trusted to watch your back in a fight. She, and the other two of your faction- Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane- came for you when you were in danger and took you to a safer place, treated your injuries and gave you something like a home. You trusted them, and they knew how to fight for and trust you in turn. Are these not shield-siblings? They certainly sound it, to me."

Desmond wasn't able to formulate a response. He fell back against his chair- these seats were hella deep, comfy, and smelled heavily of leather. He sort of really liked them- and stared at her, mind rushing back to where he kept the memories of Post-Abstergo Imprisonment. Not the ones from after his dad had joined their little save-the-world team, after Lucy had- no, he kept those is a particularly dark corner of his mind, locked in a chest that was drowning in metaphorical chains. Just like most of the other memories he associated with his father.

He shook his head, very firmly lead his thoughts away from those locks, and focused on brighter images: Shaun, smiling into a cup of tasty, tasty leaf-water, ("For fucks sake, Desmond, it's called tea.") as he compiled new codex entries at a rapid fire rate. Rebecca, who he would always associate with the tap-tap-tapping of keyboard keys and cheeky smiles and horrible puns ("What did they teach you at that Farm of yours, Dezzy? Whoever it is, I'll flail them- you don't even know how to run a Task Manager?! Who th'fuck doesn't know how to-"). Hell, he even had fond memories of 'Baby' (flashes of clear skies and desert sands, warm winds ruffling his hood and feelings of home-home-home- A familiar reflection in the sweeping waters of the canals, the smell of cafe, and wonderful, clever Leo- Bowstrings twang, arrow flies, prey falls, crashing waves and salt sprays on cliffs, the rocking floor of wooden planks, the feeling of belonging-). Yeah, good memories, even if not all of them were technically his.

Then there was Lucy. Sunshine hair and a sparkly smile and eyes that were witty and knowing and held just the smallest bit of sadness-

Desmond planted his elbows on his knees, leaned forward, and buried his face into his palms. A warm hand clamped down on his shoulder, tight and firm and there, and Desmond focused on it like a drowning man yearning for land. He took a couple of steadying breaths and, once he was certain his eyes were dry, he looked up to meet Aela's unwavering stare.

"Are you going to let me tell you my tragic backstory or not," he asked thickly, and it wasn't really a question.

She looked satisfied somehow, even with concern flashing brightly in her eyes, and she nodded. He resolved to ignore it as he thought of a way to continue his summary.

Aela wasn't having that, though.

"She was important to you," the huntress pointed out firmly, like it was a fact, and fuck, yeah it was. "If anything else, that means something, Desmond. That this Juno," she spat, again, darkness swirling through her gaze, "dared to take your will away and force your hands to end her- that is nothing less than the most twisted immorality. This Juno is no friend of mine, be assured of that."

That… Desmond wasn't going to fucking cry. He was not. But… god, how long had it been? How long had he gone without someone to share his problems with, to tell him his feelings mattered, to take his side without any hesitation? It felt- good. It felt so good.

He flashed her a slightly wobbly smile. "Yeah, Juno's a bitch." The two of them shared a wavering smile, and Desmond very consciously decided to ignore the entire "shield-sibling" thing for now. Aela made no move to force him to confront that, which he was grateful for.

"So yeah- Lucy… " he shook his head, pointedly looking away from the understanding that crossed her face, and continued. "Juno tried to justify it to me, said that Lucy would have betrayed us, that she was a Templar spy." He huffed out a bitter laugh "I'm still not sure if it was true or not, but… I like to think it wasn't."

Aela said nothing, but her hand left his shoulder and grabbed his fist instead. He uncurled his fingers and accepted the touch. It was grounding.

Shit, maybe this group therapy thing was actually working. God knows Desmond had some real shit that he'd never actually been able to talk through with anyone, before. The short chats with Clay had helped, some, but they weren't… they hadn't actually been all that focused on helping Desmond work through his various and numerous issues. There had been more pressing matters at the time. And after that, well, Clay hadn't exactly been around to chat with anymore.

"She did something to me, after that; put me into a coma- I just… I couldn't wake up," He explained, when he saw a flash of confusion cross her face at the unfamiliar word. "I just slept and slept, stuck in… dreams, or memories. A lot of which weren't actually mine."

Aela made a noise of understanding, hand tightening its grip on his own. Desmond nodded at her, thankful for the tether to himself- not Altair, or Ezio, or Connor, or even Haytham… just him. Desmond.

"Then my- my dad showed up. He wasn't too keen on the whole 'multiple sets of ancestral memories running around in his son's head and making him go insane' bit, so he had Shaun and Becca put me back in the Animus to try and look for ways to stop the Bleeding."

Aela paused in her soothing motions, going tense with repressed shock and something bitter, like unresolved violence. "Your father," she said slowly, coldly, too angry to even begin moving past slow and deliberate rage, "the one man who is supposed to love you more than anyone else in the world, was so upset that you were going insane- to further his cause, might I add- that he decided to put you back into the device that caused your insanity?"

Desmond blinked up at her, nonplussed. "Um… yeah?"

Aela ripped herself away from the table, pacing back and forth like a caged animal, snarling loudly. Her hands flexed and clenched, fingers grasping at empty air like she was prepared to grab the first person she saw and rip their fucking throat out. Desmond was humbled, and, quite frankly, also terrified.

"Aela?" She didn't appear to hear him. "Aela! Calm down!" She turned to him, eyes flashing pale gold under the flickering candles that surrounded them- was that a trick of the light or something else? Whatever, he didn't have time to think about that right now, there was a snarling destructive warrior woman in front of him and he needed to de-escalate this entire situation.

"Aela, seriously, calm down!" He held out his arms. "Look! I'm fine, I'm okay, I need you to take some deep breaths and find your happy place or whatever because you are freaking me out."

Slowly, glacially slowly, her muscles relaxed, her teeth unclenched, and her fists flexed back open. Then, lightning quick, she turned, snarling once again, and punched the wall so hard that everything in the room rattled.

"Woah! Woah, woah, woah, calm down! Fuck, Aela, why are you so angry?"

She whirled on him, stalking forward with the grace of a predator, and he somehow resisted the urge to back up. Somehow.

"Your father-"

"Isn't worth this!" She opened her mouth, likely to either verbally rip him apart or start in on another lecture, and he cut her off before she could even start. "No, Aela, listen to me. My dad? He's the fucking scum of the earth, ok, and I have spent far too long agonizing over him and his shitty life choices to let someone else try a hand at it too. He's a bastard, and he's not fucking worth it."

"Of course it's worth it!" she snapped, and Desmond did actually back up a step out of reflex. Her face softened. "It is worth it," she continued, brushing hair out of her face carelessly, "because it upsets you."

He snorted, very pointedly not reading any deeper behind that statement. "It seems to be upsetting you a whole lot more than me, right now."

She shoved a finger in his face, nearly scratching his nose. "Do not make this about me!" she growled, reaching up and grabbing his ear to yank him down to her level. "Why are you apparently incapable of confronting your feelings without deflecting them to something else?"

"What the hell do you mean?" He winced at the fingernails digging into the sensitive skin of his ear. "I don't-"

But Aela steamrolled right on over him. "You have left your entire world behind for ours, through no decision of your own, and been thrown to the wolves. You are completely out of your depth, in an entirely new place where very little is the same as what you know, and you are scrambling to keep up. You have been used, abused, and discarded by your old world, only to end up in ours and face nearly the same treatment. And still, you insist on putting others before yourself, on accepting every request that comes your way, and spend no energy on taking care of yourself!" She looked him dead in the eyes, face twisted in sympathy and anger- not at him, but for him- and slipped her hand from his ear to cradle his cheek. "Stop pretending you are fine."

And it really was a testament to how long he'd been holding all of this in that he started crying almost immediately.

The first tear slipped out almost without his notice, and the others followed quickly after, rushing down his cheeks that were stained red with helpless anger and embarrassment. Aela said nothing, merely pulled him down and let him bury his face in her shoulder. She held him while he shook silently, softly carding her hand through his hair.

Eventually, his silent crying evolved into full-blown sobbing. He kept trying to pull away, to preserve even a shred of his dignity but Aela remained firmly attached to him. He was practically hyperventilating, desperately trying to get enough air to his lungs, and he felt his fingers dig into the soft leather of Aela's armor without meaning to.

Pull away, please pull away, you don't need this, you don't need to do this, I'm fine.

Don't you see, though? You're not fine. You've never been fine, and that's okay, that's okay.

They stayed that way for a long, long time.