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The pain radiating through his foot would have been a rude awakening, were he not painfully alert already. He felt himself go a little limp, in fact, as some of the alarming tension that had been building seeped right out of his body. Octavius hadn't known, not for certain, what reaction his words would provoke from her, but they had done what he'd hoped. And although he felt bitterly that they were true on some level, he knew he'd be ashamed of saying them when the haze of the night had finally filtered through him.

If there were ever a doubt about if he was, or more appropriately, exactly how perverse Octavius was, the answer could be measured by the sort of grim satisfaction, the relief, he was feeling at her anger. He gave her the benefit of meeting her stare head-on, because she deserved that, and although her words pulled at the old wounds their incessant arguing over the last months had dug, he let them go. He realised, perhaps too little too late, that that might have been the kiss of death for them, being unable to let these things go. The continuous belief that they could make the other understand their perspective if they only just… could perhaps be as damaging as failing to see the other perspective at all. The endless cycling, needling, endeavouring to get the last word in. Rose's jab rocked him backward, but he said nothing, merely looked at her.

All he wanted was to slink away, to let her have this, but it felt somehow important to play the fight, though he had none of it left in him. No fire, simply ice, and he thought it miraculous that he could even imagine feigning it for an argument he didn't deserve to have. "When will you understand that it never bothered me, this absurd disagreement about how you view your friends? It was never a question of liking or disliking them—So what if you treated them closer than usual, I knew you were with me!" He leaned back. "Or at least, you were."

Folding his arms, he continued, "Then I will remind you that it was at your edict we not communicate, which I believe I followed. And again, it was your choice to lift that edict and seek me out, to which I listened, though you were withholding some crucial information." He ticked off on his fingers. "All along, I've been subjected to your whims, your decisions, simply to find out at the end that if you ever really cared, it was obviously not enough."

But then, because it wasn't going through the motions, because he felt this last part keenly, he shook his head, and his voice lost its wintry tone. "You keep saying love, but how do you show it? How am I to believe that any of this is the way love is supposed to be?"

There was the last thing, one last thing, before he was done, finished with saying his piece no matter what else she wanted to do to him. When he dropped his hands, there was an air of defeat about him, but his tone was soft, pleading, although with a note of warning. "But don't pretend I'm the only one who's ruined what was between us."