S trembles a little, pausing before he speaks not because he doesn't want to answer but because he doesn't want to risk falling apart all over again. Already he feels perilously close to it, thinking back to those empty months when he was all but bedridden, when he wanted so much just to have J there to hold him, or his mother to cook for him like the times he was sick as a kid, his father to help support him when he shakily tried to cross the studio. That was when he couldn't help wishing that J had finished what he started, unsure what the point of his still being alive was, certain that being dead would have been better than living with the aftermath and the weight of all that grief. He never sank quite as far as J did, never really entertained the notion of taking his own life, but there was still a point when he very much would rather have lost it.
Despite everything they've just said, that's one thing he still thinks it would be better not to say. He doesn't want to make all of this worse, doesn't want to give J something else to feel guilty for. Right now, it's not really the point, anyway. That time passed soon enough after he got J's journal and found a purpose within its pages, a desperate need to exact some sort of justice keeping him going when nothing else could. Even if they would have wound up here anyway, he prefers it like this, being able to assure J that whatever he did beforehand, he saved his life, too, that he survived even when he shouldn't have. Simply contemplating taking this step would, he's sure, be infinitely more difficult if those wounds had been fatal.
"If... if it does wind up being too much," he starts, a roundabout agreement, even if he has to pause to swallow hard, "please say so, okay? I'll understand, I really will." After so long spent convinced they would never do this, it isn't something he can just throw himself wholly into at a moment's notice. He still isn't convinced that this will work. But somewhere in him is still the part of him that wanted nothing more than to have J by his side as he recovered, that's hated not being able to talk about what happened to him and what that's involved, and especially when J sounds like this, S can't bring himself to turn him down, to draw that line. He can, though, make clear that he has no expectations, that it isn't something he'll push. He couldn't bear it if he prompted the same sort of reaction again that he did the day J first got here.
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Despite everything they've just said, that's one thing he still thinks it would be better not to say. He doesn't want to make all of this worse, doesn't want to give J something else to feel guilty for. Right now, it's not really the point, anyway. That time passed soon enough after he got J's journal and found a purpose within its pages, a desperate need to exact some sort of justice keeping him going when nothing else could. Even if they would have wound up here anyway, he prefers it like this, being able to assure J that whatever he did beforehand, he saved his life, too, that he survived even when he shouldn't have. Simply contemplating taking this step would, he's sure, be infinitely more difficult if those wounds had been fatal.
"If... if it does wind up being too much," he starts, a roundabout agreement, even if he has to pause to swallow hard, "please say so, okay? I'll understand, I really will." After so long spent convinced they would never do this, it isn't something he can just throw himself wholly into at a moment's notice. He still isn't convinced that this will work. But somewhere in him is still the part of him that wanted nothing more than to have J by his side as he recovered, that's hated not being able to talk about what happened to him and what that's involved, and especially when J sounds like this, S can't bring himself to turn him down, to draw that line. He can, though, make clear that he has no expectations, that it isn't something he'll push. He couldn't bear it if he prompted the same sort of reaction again that he did the day J first got here.