Huh, another thing he didn't think of despite - shut up Bryce now you're just being self-indulgent - "It looks pretty normal, and trying to haul that while on the lookout for another ambush seems risky, but I'll let them team know where we left it."  Score, score, score score score.

"Yeah, I guess you never know with dungeons."

"You don't."  Score score, score, score score.  "I can't think offhand of something useful that came from a sample of a random mundane-seeming wall but I wouldn't," breathe, "necessarily be able to."

"Maybe I'll look it up when we get outta here."

"Most," he begins, as conversational as he has sounded since the ambush, and then he abruptly stops what he's doing and shuts his eyes and clenches his fist very tightly around the handle of his knife and hisses, under his breath, "god dammit."

"...what's wrong?" Well, probably what's wrong is backlash and she shouldn't be asking, but unfortunately she only thought of that after the words were already out of her mouth.

He shakes his head.  "It's not important right now.  It's - probably not - I shouldn't be - "

He takes a breath.

"You have no responsibilities toward me regarding deciding what the answer to this question is, only that - I mean, please answer it honestly.  Would it help at all if I explained what my backlash is."

"...I'm not sure? I've been kind of assuming I shouldn't ask, just on general principle. But if it's - something that's easier to handle if I know about it, then sure?"

"If - "

" - I am trying not to place any more emotional responsibilities on you regarding managing my psychological condition than I already have," he says, carefully, still holding so tightly to his knife that his knuckles are white and his hand is trembling, "because I'm responsible for you and not the other way around, so I only mean to ask which of knowing or not knowing would make - this - not as bad for you."

"...well, then, it's definitely easier for me if I know, but you're not gonna like the reason, 'cause the reason is that I wanna be nice to you and I don't know how."

...he lets out a coughing sort of noise that may or may not be recognizable as being, or having at one point been, a laugh.

Very slowly, very deliberately, he relaxes his grip on his knife.  With motions that are incongruously smooth, even calm, compared to how tense he seemed a moment ago, he straightens up and sheathes the knife on his belt.  He is turned away from her, so it may not be visually apparent exactly what he's doing next, which is: raising his gently fist-shaped left hand to his mouth and driving the pad of his thumb, very hard, into his upper incisors, while taking a long and shaky breath in and out.

He puts his hand back at his side, turns to her, opens his mouth,

thinks for a moment,

and then, in a steadier voice, says, "can you do me a favor and tell me very honestly how you're holding up."

"I'm okay. Like, today has been a lot, for sure, but... I don't know, not in a way that really bothers me? You've been really nice and we're probably about to find the rest of the way out and it was really funny when I spraypainted that guy in the face? My biggest emotional problem right now is probably still wondering if I'm gonna make everything weird by blurting out a sketchy nature fact?"

He lets out another laugh, that's much more recognizable as a laugh this time.  "If you blurt out a sketchy nature fact I will be polite and professional about it."

"I appreciate that and I am gonna keep trying really hard not to."

...how symmetrical, he doesn't say.

But this might be one of those situations where all the individual steps you take to get somewhere make sense viewed in isolation, but the place you end up is kind of self-evidently fucked up and stupid even if you can't identify a particular wrong turn you took.  So maybe, given that they are in fact having this adventure together, he can go ahead and - 

...he takes another kind-of-shaky breath.

"My backlash makes me feel intense, and," he sighs, "not - "

He shuts his eyes and shakes his head.

"My backlash magically enforces feelings of guilt."  Which okay when he says it out loud like that makes it sound like nothing he's worrying about is probably that big a deal - 

"Wow, that sounds like a really hard time."

"It's usually," breath, "easier to manage than this, but shooting the - " he gestures down the hall behind them " - thing, with my power up - I don't usually do that, it kicks my backlash really badly.  Worse than I usually get up to over a whole dungeon run.  The way it landed, it - "

He aborts the gesture he was making, because maybe he does not have to get that specific with her.

" - wouldn't have been safe to take down my power before it was dead."

"...yeah," she says, thinking back to how he had to crawl out from under it afterward, "that makes sense."

Rueful half-smile.

"And what happened just now - there's the feeling of guilt, which is - I can work around it.  And there's the - if it latches onto something, and I start feeling it as about that thing instead of a background psychological pain, it can get - worse.  Sometimes really dramatically all of a sudden.  And it - latched onto something about what I was about to say."

"...yeah. Makes sense. Okay."

"Thanks for being - as stable as you are.  Generally it is not a good idea, or, like, really fair, for espers to unload a lot of venting about their backlash onto the people who they are supposed to be rescuing."

"Yeah, I'm glad you wouldn't want to put all that on me if I was already freaking out. But, like, I'm also glad I'm not freaking out."