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"The bruises on your face? Your eyes? The bleeding?"

He closes his eyes, resting his hands in his stomach.

"Healed, usually. And do you mean the eyes in my head or..."

He gestures around him.

"I assume the ones not in your head are compensating for the physical ones at the moment," he mutters.

"There was a 'game' they played with the children. They would place them facing each other in circles on opposite sides of the room. They blindfolded them, naturally. The winner would be the one who would knock the other from their circle."

The expression on his face says it all.

Someone is almost hoping for a VIP flood. He won't punch the man but he might ask someone else to punch him. Trixie has a boyfriend or something, right? Surely he would. For the healing and all.

"So they taught you all to compete instead of work together. To hurt one another instead of support one another."

"He wanted them strong and independent. He was afraid that if they worked together, they would want to escape."

He adds, just under his breath. "He was right."

"Yes, which is why I want to shake him like-" damn but what do you shake? Not a polaroid picture, obviously, that's a myth. But, er-

"-like a salt shaker," he ends lamely, but the feeling is still there.

"He was just a man," he chides him gently. "Only human."

Henry doesn't forgive him, but he considers it nothing more than part of his simple nature.

"He was a dickhead," he says, "and a bastard. And you don't need to be human for those. They're completely agnostic of species, I assure you."

There was a bigger monster, Henry thinks but keeps to himself. At least Brenner was easy to anticipate. His motivations were simple.

"It doesn't matter now. That lab won't be able to function for a while."

"True enough, true enough," he says, and he can't help but think of the aftermath of the rituals, how everything had sort of reset. He wonders if there's something like that in Henry's world. If he'd destroyed something building he hadn't even realized.

Thoughts for another time.

"Hopefully, it will shut down."

"I don't think I killed Brenner," he says softly, trying to contain his feelings. "He was locked away with Ten."

And death would be too good for Dr. Brenner.

Gone is the nonchalance from moments before. Gone is his "forgiving" nature. Henry remembers how he felt in that moment, now with the pain radiating through his body.

He had wanted him to hurt. Seeing his children broken and dead would hurt more than any nightmare Henry could artificially reproduce.

"So he might start again. He had one more subject."

"Oh?"

Curious; he won't pretend differently. Just a sound of interest to nudge him along, to not get in his way. He wants to know more, always. From Henry especially.

He laughs. "There's nothing else to say. I was gone from that place and never looked back."

Henry raises a foot on his cot. "I'm not here to talk out my troubles. They tried that."

But he does know where this is leading.

"'They?'" he asks, clearly unsure if it's someone here or Dr. Brenner and his goons.

Trixie had used the word and he likes it now.

"Doctors," he clarifies. No one's talked to him here about his injuries. He's made certain of that.

"Ah," he says to that before considering.

"I'll admit, mostly, I'm curious about that last child. You avoid talking about her. Have you noticed that?"

He turns slowly to look at him. "Yes," he says. "She's the reason I'm here. The reason I lost everything."

The eyes in the room look right back at him.

"And? I talk about Elias all the time. I'd answer any question you had about him... especially since he was actually here for a time. I wasn't sure if... there wasn't a specific reason."

"Because she is irrelevant," says the man who hints and mentions her at every opportunity. "Just another pawn of his."

He'll open the eyes on his face to give Henry a Look.

"...I can't help how I'm looking at you right now, Henry, but even then: I can tell when you're full of it. Just say you don't want to talk about it."

His burns ache and his head hurts, but he flourishes under the gaze, strange and spooky as it is.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Thank you. I appreciate your candor."

He closes his ruined eyes again.

"You did luck out on the timing of things. People probably won't be thinking about your... stunt in the dining hall. After all of this, I mean."

"I didn't notice any change to my life after my 'stunt,'" he points out blandly. "Except for the people who came to visit me who don't even know me."

"And you're being very short sighted if you think that people don't take their time on things." He leans back against the chair. "Right after is too obvious. People wait. Keep your eyes- ha! - open."

"Or what? They'll kill me?"

He shakes his head. "It doesn't matter."

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