Perhaps it was the empath projection, but he did feel…calmer, with her there. Like there could be time.
“Yes, tricks and games. And then what? I have failed so many times, I will never be respected.” He caught her hand in his own, curling his fingers into the connection as if he could absorb more of her warming presence.
“What you did, with Thanos, that wasn’t a game. It was a grand trick, but it definitely wasn’t a game.” She stopped for a moment, squeezing his hand gently, then went on, “Did you even tell them what you’d done? Or did you let them all go on thinking what they’ve always thought? It’s hardly fair to expect respect when you keep secret the very things that would earn it for you.” Her own past unfolded itself in her memories, spilling from her lips.
“It’s hard for people who’ve been around you all your life to see how you’ve changed; they see it every day and so the incremental stages pass them by. When I was younger, I had a terrible temper — no, don’t laugh, you didn’t know me then — and I worked hard to learn to control it. To learn what control meant. It wasn’t about /not/ feeling it, it was about what I did with it.
“But I never felt like my parents, my family, saw that I’d changed, that I was different. I felt like all I ever heard from them was ‘hold your temper, Summer’, ‘don’t get angry, Summer.’ It’s only been in the last couple of years, really, that my mom has acknowledged that I’ve changed, that I got better.”
He listened to her silently, watching her history dance before him among the stars, feeling awestruck for a moment how anyone else could voice the pains that he never knew how to explain. This woman who drifted among the realms, whom he had met only by chance, saw so much. Had he ever felt truly connected to anything before this moment?
“I tried to tell them. I always do. But you’re so right; no one wants to see. Perhaps someday they will,” his voice was barely above a whisper. He almost believed himself just then. He really almost did. He laced and unlaced their fingers, exploring the way they fit together.
“What matters,” she went on, voice a whisper, “in the end, is how you see yourself. It’s not easy. Gods, it’s not easy. To remove yourself from needing to know how other people see you.” She shifted over onto her side more, cupping her other hand over their interlaced fingers and looking at his face. “You’ve spent so much time knowing what they thought, and shaped by that, right? That you were not the same as — ” she hesitated, but plunged on, ” — as Thor, and therefore not as good. Different is bad, right?”