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The shock was there: he could see it in her eyes. Underneath it, something warmer had taken hold.
She stood from the sofa. Her hand moved to the base of the tentacles at his collar and she wiped at something with her thumb: a thread of dark fluid where the transformation had finished.
"Hey." Her voice was quiet. "Don't be so nervous."
She looked up at the tentacles, all ten of them blood-red above her, nothing she had encountered before, and smiled.
"Do you think I'll hate you?"
"You don't get it," he said. "I'm not human anymore." He looked at his own void-black hands. "I'm a monster. An abomination. I hurt people. I kill people. I give people fates worse than death."
Rhea tilted her head. "And?"
"And?" he repeated.
"Yes. And?"
"What do you mean, and?" He took one step forward. His voice came out louder than he meant it to. "Why are you calm? Why aren't you—" He stopped. "I told you. I showed you."
The volume startled her. Then she stepped in and put her arms around him.
"Dummy," she said, into the front of his coat. "I don't care."
"Rhea—"
"How many people you've killed doesn't matter to me right now." She pulled back enough to look up at him: the tentacles above, his void-black face. "Have you ever hurt me?"
"That's not the point."
"It's my point."
"You're missing—"
"Ren." She said his name. He stopped. "If you were really only a monster," she said, holding his gaze, "would people choose you as their doctor?"
He didn't answer.
"Would Lu Changcheng call you his sworn brother?"
Silence.
She raised one hand and pressed it flat against his chest, against his chest.
"You have a kind heart," she said. "A real one. If you were only a monster you wouldn't have chosen to be a doctor. You wouldn't have pulled a stranger back from a train platform."
"And even if everything you said is true: the killing, the fates worse than death, all of it. I still don't care."
"Why," he said.
She placed her index finger against his lips.
"Shh."
"For me," she said, "you will always be the man who saved my life. Nothing changes that." She looked at him steadily. "And the man I fell in love with."
He was quiet for a long moment.
She could see him processing it. He ran the calculation, set it aside, then ran it again.
"You don't know everything I've done," he said.
"No," she said. "I don't."
"If you did—"
"I might still not care." She tilted her head. "Or I might. I don't know. But Ren, I'm not saying I'm fine with everything in the abstract. I'm saying I'm fine with you." She gestured at the tentacles, the void-black skin. "This you."
He looked at her.
"You're not afraid," he said.
"I was, for about two seconds."
"And now?"
She thought about it.
"Now I'm looking at you," she said. "And you're still you. The person who sat next to me on a step and didn't ask a single question. Who answers the phone at three in the morning. Who acts like he doesn't care and then shows up anyway." She crossed her arms. "The tentacles are new information. They don't change the data I already have."
"I have given people fates worse than death," he said. Not a confession. A test.
"Have any of them been me?"
"No."
"Do you plan to?"
"No."
"Then I don't know what you want me to say." She uncrossed her arms. "You're telling me things as if they're supposed to make me run. But I don't run from people I love. I ran toward you in a parking lot and knocked you over, mister. That is my established pattern."
"You're not taking this seriously," he said.
"I'm taking it very seriously." She stepped closer. "I see what you are. It doesn't change how I feel. You can keep showing me the worst of yourself and I'll still be standing here." She stopped in front of him, looking up at the tentacles, then at where his face would be if his head hadn't been replaced by them. "I know you don't believe me yet. That's fine. I'll just keep showing up until you do."
The veins pulsed. Below them, the city made its ordinary sounds.
"That's not a reasonable position to take," he said.
"I know." She smiled. "I don't care."
The transformation reversed: the tentacles folding inward, the skull reasserting itself, the void-black receding until what remained was the face she knew.
He stood in front of her in his human form and his face held something she had no word for: something between pain and confusion, the look that comes from hearing a truth before you know what to do with it.
"I still—" he started.
"Quiet for a bit, Ren."
His knees gave without warning, without injury, without exhaustion as a cause. The floor came up. One knee then both, his hands finding the tile. The sound that came out of him was not a word or a name.
It had been there for a long time: the weight of being what he was and not knowing if that could matter to anyone. The fear that it didn't. The deeper fear that it might and he would ruin it anyway.
Rhea was already on her knees in front of him.
Her arms went around him. She wrapped around what she could reach.
"Cry," she said. Her voice was quiet and certain. "Go ahead. Cry as much as you need to."
He did, and he didn't know for how long. The clinic was quiet around them, the veins on the walls doing what they always did, the city going on outside. Rhea held on through all of it. She didn't say anything else for a long time. She just stayed.
When the worst passed he was on the floor with his back against the sofa, breathing uneven. Rhea sat beside him. Their shoulders touched. She didn't move away.
"Whatever you are," she said, "you don't have to carry it alone anymore."
"I've been alone for a long time," he said, looking at the floor.
"I know." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "You're not anymore."
"No matter what happens," she said, "I'll be here. I told you I'd keep showing up. I meant it."
"Rhea."
"Hm."
"I love you," she said. "I hope you know that. And I hope—" She paused. "I hope you feel the same."
He looked at her.
"I do," he said.
She leaned in and kissed him.
He stayed very still for a moment. Then he kissed her back.
She stayed. Shoulder to shoulder on the floor while outside the city went on, and the quiet between them had nothing left to prove.