Zoey stares down at his hand for a long moment, where it rests over hers. ’Some people just have a little more of the world in them than others. Yes?’ Oh, that is… something, isn’t it. His words earn him a lopsided little smile as something quavers deep within her. They were the sort of thing she had longed to hear for most of her life. Wanting so deeply to be accepted for exactly who, and what, she is. Since her gift had first manifested, since the first time she had been looked as though she were mad, shunned and mocked… since she first learned to hide what she was. Keep it to herself.

She learned to do that at a very young age.

And to suddenly hear them, to have someone TELL her such things is almost too much. To have someone letting her know he thinks she’s extraordinary, that it’s just normal for him is… a depth of feeling of belonging, of welcome she never realised she’d never had until it suddenly was there, filling her chest.

Her brow furrows, as she searches for the vocabulary to put into words something she has never really, truly, tried to describe for anyone before. “It was… a cacophony, chaos. Like I was receiving three separate radio transmissions all at once. All accompanied by feedback. Words, and song lyrics, and your words. Filling my head until they were all I could hear. All I could think.”