...I've got one.

[There's a long, silent pause.]

I know it happened during everything that fucked me up. I don't need to hear it from anyone because I don't care.

...I was building a trap I'd designed. This was way back, just after John had taught me the basics. He wanted to see how I applied them.

It was called the "Addict's Chair," the thing I was making. A two-person trap, with one chair saved for a drug addict. It involved two different poisons, and antidotes for each being mixed mechanically--whatever, it's not like anybody cares about the details. We never got a chance to use it, anyway.

I was constructing the inner workings of the distributor machine, and I was getting frustrated because no matter what I did, I couldn't get one piece to socket into the other. I was on the verge of crying. I didn't want to disappoint him. Just when I was about to break down, he came up right behind me, placed his hands over mine, and turned the right one so, so slightly. The pieces fit into place. I'd just been holding one of them at the wrong angle. Only four fuckin' degrees off, can you believe that?

He must have known what I was thinking from my body language or something. He said I had natural talent, and if I stopped worrying about letting him down, it would emerge. His hands on mine, and those words--I just felt so...

I felt loved.

I know it's small, and probably insignificant to people who didn't lead the kind of life I did before I joined him, but it was so important to me. Still is, in some ways.