Each word that passes through Vasquez’s lips feels like a blow, like the sharp, ripping lash of a whip. Even back at Rose Creek, when the two of them were circling one another like wary, starved dogs, Vasquez had never spoken to him like this.

It hurts, in a way, even if it’s hardly the harshest thing anyone has ever said to him. But as with most things, it just serves to stoke Faraday’s ire, making his expression darken and darken until his jaw clenches so tightly he thinks his teeth might shatter with it. He bears each of Vasquez’s shoves with surprising composure, even if his fingers reflexively twitch for the reassuring weight of his revolvers – but they’re just talking. Just talking. And even with as angry as the two of them are, snapping and snarling, Faraday isn’t about to go for his guns.

They’re friends, after all.

Or... were friends, and the thought is yet another blow to the gut.

He takes breath after steadying breath, trying to swallow down the anger rising up his throat like bile.

“If I let you out,” he says slowly, with a patience he hardly feels but seems able to mimic a little effectively. “I don’t trust that you’re not gonna run off.”

And it hangs silently in the air between them, the words he doesn’t speak: I don’t want you to go.

Selfish of him, he knows, but Faraday has always been a selfish bastard.