He's still sitting there when Neil comes back in, picking at a loose piece of skin at the corner of one fingertip and thinking about everything and trying so hard to steer his mind in the direction of blessed nothing. It's not that he has no choices, he thinks; it's that he has too many now, and he doesn't know enough about any of them. In his life before, he knew who he was, what was expected of him, what the path ahead was likely to contain. Or he'd thought so.

Maybe that had been a lie. But it had been a comforting one, and now he misses it.

He looks up when Neil stops in front of him, too distracted to duck his head, look away, try to hide any part of himself. He looks up, and he's once again struck by how perfect Neil looks, a kind of perfection that seems to only intensify as he learns more and more about how fucked up the interior of that perfection really is.

Really might be.

And then he realizes: In all of this, all his fear about what might be lurking under that perfection, of what poison might now be entering long preparations for eating its way through his body... he's never once thought of trying to separate them again.

And now he knows that he won't. Whatever the truth ends up being, he wants this. Imperfection and all.