When the words had left his mouth, the smile that had so slowly crept forward had quickly vanished once more, shamed by his thoughts. It did not occur to him that he was actually opening up to her, that he was letting her win the game he'd been so determined to win himself. It didn't occur to him that he was showing his vulnerabilities, that he was mentally lying belly-side up and and defenseless. It didn't occur to him that she would take his words and write about them in that silly little journal of hers, make her witty observations, and plan her next moves to break him apart further. It didn't matter that his walls and defenses were crashing down, even if just for those few moments. As the words left his mouth, nothing went through his mind at all. Nothing but the mixture of emotions, of sadness and pride, tragedy and confusion all spinning endlessly in his head.
His eye remained affixed on his reflection in the water, broken only by the sound of moving water, at which his ears perked when he realized she was in action. Jefferson's single-eyed gaze rose, but as it did, she met him--brushing against him in a way that none had ever even tried, let alone wanted to do. Such contact fired up reflexive, defensive instincts, the very same instincts that killed countless innocents in cold blood before and after he lost his memory and the same instincts that killed Aurelie, the coyote who mothered his shamed children. The cyclops's single eye stared forward in shock and his body froze at the contact... and yet it was warm. Comforting. Geneva moved to meet his flustered, clearly overwhelmed gaze and spoke in the kindest of tones, but Jefferson shook his head. He spoke in a voice lacking walls, a tone that reached back into his youth and could have been Maluki himself speaking: it was void of the gruffness, the darkness that normally inhabited. He sounded... young. Scared, maybe. "N-No," he argued shallowly, lacking anger or anything more than saddened frustration in his voice. "Y-You know who I am. You know how I look and act just as well as everyone else. You can't say I'm not..." ...ugly. Why was it so hard to say?