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"Can I look? Is that okay?"

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Hesitantly, still crying, he nods.

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Bella looks.

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Someone else once thought of him as a walking fuckhole. Someone else once told him he must like things that he didn't want. Someone else once handled him the way Brad just did, with that same combination of violence and casual objectification.

Someone else once called him a freak.

He killed that person. It was messy and bloody and nasty and violent. He keeps remembering it in detail, over and over again, along with everything that led up to it—the years of torture and starvation, locked up underground where the only light that reached him came when his owner wanted to play.
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Fuck. Bella hasn't actually taken any courses on mental healing yet. She doesn't know what to do with this, doesn't know what to say or what to probe at with what power.

She gathers him up into a hug. [Name, name]. She doesn't know what else to tell him, but she knows his name.
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Celo cries helplessly in her lap.

It helps when she tells him his name, anyway. It reminds him that he's not there anymore. He's here, at school, with Bella, crying in her arms on the kitchen floor. Here is much better.
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Bella holds him. Here you are. You're here, it's just you and me.

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It should perhaps not come as a surprise that, under the circumstances, he feels strongly positive towards her.

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She's not surprised. She carries on kneeling there, hugging him, occasionally repeating his name.

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It takes some time, but eventually he is thinking not very much about his trauma and very, very much about his incandescent love for the person who is hugging him and comforting him.

(Perhaps a little surprisingly, given his species, it is not primarily a sexual kind of love. He feels about her the way he feels about - sunlight. He doesn't want to fuck sunlight, but it's warm and bright and good and he likes to bask in it.)

At about the same gradual pace, the crying stops.
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...Sunlight.

Bella decides she likes to be sunlight. That works for her.

"You're okay," she murmurs.
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"Guess so," he murmurs back.

He appears to still be in her lap.

He decides he's not doing anything about this just yet. Physical contact helps, at least if it's the nice kind, and this is.

"Sorry," he adds. "I - thought I could handle him. Turns out I couldn't."
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"It's okay."

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"Okay."

Hug. Definitely hug.
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Yup.

And:

"D'you want the rest of your soup?"
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He laughs shakily.

"Yeah, sure."
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Up they get.

Soup.
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Soup! Soup and hugs?

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That might be awkward to manage simultaneously.

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Soup and some kind of touching, then, if Bella doesn't object. He'll settle for holding hands.

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Bella will hold his hand. "Everyone already thinks we had sex," she remarks.

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"...Does that bug you or something?"

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"It's not true, and even if it were it wouldn't be any of their business."

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"Well, yeah," he says. "But I'm a nymph. Of course people are gonna think we've had sex."

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"As in fact they do. One person believed me when I told her different."

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