He assumes it’s part of the process. That jarring disorientation that works itself into Simon's desperate features, familiar only because he remembers filtering it through the gap in his skull’s polyalloy superstructure where a bullet had punched straight through. The snap-hiss of static ringing behind his eyes, lingering on his tongue as he struggled to reaffirm who he was and where he was and when and why— all the haunted sensations he’d buried beneath a cause, beneath the androids that needed him.

He’s sympathetic to it, even as some battered aspect of his self protecting instincts urges him to pull back. Away from Simon, the same way he’d torn himself out of the arms of every android in that scrapyard and its yawning, coagulated mass.

But it’s Simon. Simon that he’d come here to help, that he’d insisted on seeing alone— where he's still strung up high in a DPD evidence locker, suspended on magnetized clamps like prey in a kitchen, waiting listlessly for oblivion. His hands wrap around Simon’s wrists, thumbs soft, grip present and invested and unmoving.

“It’s all right. You’re safe now.” Slow words, rhythmic and patient. Soothing in the way his voice was always designed to be. At his core he was still a caretaker, beyond the high-collar of his coat and the stern-eyed image of a prophet among his people, beneath the ideals and promises of hope, Markus never strayed far from the life he left behind.

"I’m not going anywhere without you."