[ She's being generous, he knows, refraining from outright asking so as to offer him a means of escape. On the one hand, he doesn't know what to do with the kindness, having lived so long without it; on the other, he almost rails against it, resistant as he is to being pitied. His brow knits as, for a long moment, he avoids her gaze, instead looking down again at their hands, their fingers now intertwined.

Would she still hold his hand, if she knew how he'd spent the last two hundred years?

Perhaps it's the hope that offering one truth will allow him to avoid speaking another that leads him to answer anyway, and it's only once he opens his mouth that he realizes his throat is dry, his voice a scratch rather than its usual mellifluous honey. ]

I didn't wish to die.

[ The words sound pathetic, to his ears, but the ribbon loosens a touch. This, at the least, isn't the network. No one else will know what he's said to her, not unless she chooses to tell them. ]

If he'd come to me any later, I'd already have bled out. Sometimes I think he must have arranged it, somehow. He must have known, or else how could he have swooped in so quickly?

... I was afraid, and I was a fool. Of course escaping death would come at a cost. But, it's like you say— [ he manages a smile, albeit a bitter one ] —it was a lifetime ago.