“…you do get it.”

At least, the part of it that matters most.

Jean pauses, hem half-lifted, to gesture at his face.

He snorts.

"Yeah. Fair."

His shirt comes off, then.

The scars cover most of his torso, wrapping around onto his hips and beneath his waistband. The ordinary features of a human body -- the nipples, the navel -- are gone, replaced patchwork with scars and off-color expanses of skin. Much of it is mottled in texture, or an angry red, or both.

He reaches out and touches them.

Just with a finger, tracing different textures down from the collarbone, and then with a whole hand flat on his stomach.

It's like the butt of a lance -- not painful, but a dull impact to the soul, something that bruises and knocks the wind out of him.

He's very still under the touch, for a moment, before he moves to shuck his pants as well.

His fingers follow the long, faint lines of solitary drips down to the donor sites on the fronts of his thighs.

"Do they hurt?"

"There? No. Not any more."

"Show me where."

So he shows him, taking Jigsaw's fingertips and moving them: raw places, where healing skin has split or stretched or grown inflamed; splatter-spots too small to graft but still too large to heal entirely; flat stretches of skin, expertly stitched, that still protest their displacement with imagined pain.

It's a map of his torso, really, traced out like constellations in the night sky. This is what hurts, right now.

He's transfixed.

When it's done he retraces the spots with his fingertips again and again, like he's trying to commit them to memory.

"...didn't think I'd get to see this in person," he says, eventually.

"It must be terrible. Never to see."

"I get to see the dead ones, sometimes. But the one who lived is...not a fan. Don't exactly blame her."

He takes at least a minute by the clock, thinking this over.

"I can see a certain beauty in that," he allows, eventually.

"...yeah?"

This angle doesn't seem to have occurred to him.

He's trying to reason it out himself.

"Some art is -- deliberately repulsive. Intended to evoke disgust in the viewer."

"...not really how I'm relating to this, but sure."

To misunderstand this is horrible.

"I'm sorry. Please -- explain."

He leans back in the chair, and stares up at the ceiling, and thinks.

"I'm... I want them to want to live. As bad as I do. That's all. I want them to not take it for granted. And if that makes them hate me, then...sure. I put you in a situation that could've killed you. I made you walk twenty feet over needles. Makes sense you're not wild about me. I don't want them to hate me, just, you know. Shakes out that way."

"Kind of nice for somebody to appreciate it, though. Like I did."

He's intensely attentive, as if he might be called on to recite the words back at any moment.

"Yes. I see -- yes."

Jigsaw has occasion to recall some wise words spoken by a friend.

"...did a number on you, huh."

This, too, is the price of doing business.

"Yes," he repeats -- grateful, a little smug.

"So," Camillo says to Jigsaw -- later, conversationally -- "I came home from the grocery store and Valentine was descaling the plumbing. So I asked Cato what was up, and you know what he said?"

"What," he says, nose almost touching his sketchbook.