Despite his relief that things are a little more settled now, at least between the two of them, S still feels nothing short of miserable. It's just hard to shake something like this, especially with so many different pieces at play. His guilt over having kept this to himself and upsetting J, the panic from feeling so stuck with no good option and from thinking about those horrible few minutes the day J arrived when S thought he was going to lose him all over again, actually considering just how hard it was to recover from such a serious surgery alone, all of it just builds, making it that much more difficult to pull himself together. All of this was the last thing he wanted. Maybe it's for the best that it came out this way — chances are it would have had to at some point — but knowing that doesn't make him feel any better about it, at least not yet.

"I guess it makes sense," he mumbles, pausing to worry at his lower lip with his teeth. "That I wouldn't know how to talk about something I've never talked about." Even with doctors, he never really has. He's been told all of the physical details, of course, and answered questions when applicable, but he's stopped far short of going into the toll it's taken on him. Beyond that, it's a subject he's avoided, even with J, especially with J, and in avoiding it, it's become that much harder to do anything else.

He swallows hard, exhales slowly, still leaning into J and clinging to him as if afraid of the damage he's potentially wrought here. "I really didn't realize," he adds, not sure now if he said this before or only thought it. "How... big it got in my head. How much it got to me. Like I wasn't just keeping it from you, but from me, too."