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Maebe reached out for something - anything - to throw at him, and all she found was that damned teddy bear. "He LIED to you. Do you know that?" She'd gone from comfortable, to hysterical, in mere seconds. "It's not true. None of it's true, Dawson. Whatever he said to you is a lie, because he thinks he knows what happened but he doesn't, and you don't, and NOBODY DOES."

Another teddy bear was lobbed in his direction, as Thaw tried to talk her down from within.

"He's just a stupid monster who doesn't understand anything about people. About anything. He doesn't and neither do you if you believe him. It's a LIE."

The third teddy bear was not thrown at him. The head came clean off as she screamed, ripped from it's body with a noisy tearing sound.

Maebe knew that in any other moment, she would have called him out on a lie. She never would have believed anyone so easily. He was just humoring her. Judging her. Lying to her face. In another other moment. On any other day.

Today, she heard that guilty voice, and the little girl inside of her listened. Maebe dropped the broken toy and gasped, her hands lifting to cover her mouth. Her expression warred, tempted to fall into suspicion but never truly tipping all the way, until finally she started to move back over to him, her hands reaching slowly out until she found him. Once she did, they dropped.

"Really?" She whispered, a heartbreaking hopefulness present in her voice. "You believe me? Not him?"

No, she tells herself, deep down inside where she's being drowned by the little girl who wants to hope. No, he doesn't believe you. He's just going to judge you. You can't do this to yourself. You have to be smarter than this.

Her hands reached up again, trying to find his face until it rested between them. She couldn't see him and it drove her mad with desire. She just wanted to just look at his eyes, so she could believe.

"I'm sorry." She whispered up at him. "I don't want to be mad at you. But no one ever believes."

A knight's duty.

That little girl inside of her felt triumphant. She was right, all along, and didn't she see that now? It was okay to trust a knight. He was sworn to protect. They were always sworn to protect.

But she didn't need protection, in that moment. And Maebe knew that knights in shining armor didn't really exist, no matter how much that little girl wanted to believe. She knew that Dawson was no knight, but he was a good man, and that was the best anyone could ask for. Her face tilted to the side, as she willed herself not to cry over losing a childhood she'd never wanted to mourn, because no matter what Thaw thought, she was sure she'd been loved.

There were just better ways of being loved than what he'd done. Now, years later, exposed over and over to those better ways, made it harder and harder to convince herself that nothing had gone wrong.

"I'm sorry I threw s**t at you." Maebe murmured, a helpless chuckle interrupting her apology. She leaned against him, hands still lost inside of his, and slowly recovered. She'd put that little girl back to sleep, where she belonged. "But I still can't forgive Thaw. Would you forgive your weapon if it had told me something about your past you didn't want anyone to know? Would it really be that easy?"

She flickered her sightless gaze back up at him, but her eyes never quite met his. They focused, unseeing, just below his gaze, for several seconds while she let him put himself in her position. She waited, giving him the time he needed to understand how hard this was, but every second that passed turned into something else entirely. She felt his hands wrapped around hers with acute sensitivity. She felt the warm brush of his breath filtering down towards her.

Maybe this was what happened to blind people, she told herself, as she relished intimately in being so painfully aware of every inch of him against her. It felt so raw, so vibrant, the skin almost hurt to the brush of cloth. And as the fates decided she was enjoying the feel of him too much, they reminded her once more that she could never have anything she wanted.

By flooding her eyes with bright, cold white. Not sight, but not blindness, either. She had to close her eyes, to get the darkness back. Something had changed.

She just didn't know what.

She felt infinitely relieved that Dawson agreed with her, but not relieved enough. He was still trying to convince her not to hate Thaw, but she didn't know if that was possible. Yet, even as she thought that, she heard him whimpering with pain in her head, and felt her resolve suddenly crumble.

"Ugh. I will think about it. At a later time. Much later. After hating him for a respectable period, at least." But Dawson had made a good point, an an impact on her, as he always managed to do.

She felt like putty in his hands, at times. She should have been terrified at the notion.

"If I bit him, I'd break a tooth. He's as hard as I am stubborn." She tried to open her eyes again, and the blinding white seared painfully in her eyes once more. "Can you do me a favor? Turn off the lights in this room. I want to test something."

When she heard the click of the light switch, she opened her eyes again. Her suspicions were confirmed - it hurt less to keep her eyes open. Her hands began to shake, and she reached out, begging for him to come back and hold her again.

"So, that's a thing." She shuddered out in a shaky, but excited exhale. "I can tell the difference between light and dark."

She crumpled into his embrace the moment she felt it around her, and let out an embarrassingly pleased sound. "I think my heart's going to explode right now. Just, everywhere. All over your shirt. I hope it's not one you like." She closed her eyes when his lips touched her forehead, and reveled in the possibilities.

"I know, I just - it was so scary, and it still is, because it's not like I can see you but I saw the light all of a sudden and - " She tilted her head up to him, opened her eyes, and they immediately began to fill with tears. It wasn't because she could see again, life would never be as easy as that. But in the darkness, without the blaring light to burn through her, she could tell there was an amorphous blob where his head was. It was fuzzy and it hurt a little to focus on, but there he was. Dawson. Her eyes knew where his should be, and they came so close to meeting his until they filled with tears.

She couldn't help herself. That blob of color and shadow was the most beautiful sight she'd ever seen in her entire life. "Hey, you."

He was shaking her and that was making it twice as hard to even focus on anything, but god, she didn't care. She did not care. She laughed even as he shook her, and then stopped to focus as much as she could when he asked her to read his hat. Despite how easy it should have been - how big, how obvious - her eyes only saw the dark of his hat, and the light of the D. She couldn't tell what it was.

"Not yet. Or," She got up on her tiptoes and tried to see. "I don't know. Bend down a little, let me get a closer look." She put her hands on both sides of his cheeks, trying to tug him lower.