Avery looked confused for a moment before she realised that her hand wasn’t hidden. Then she looked sheepish and just rubbed the back of her neck. She looked down at the bruising, mottled and purple and flexed her fingers, feeling the pain setting in. It would subside soon, it always did. While she didn’t have a fast healing factor herself - it took forever for her own injuries to heal - it was like she just… absorbed the ones from others and bore them briefly before they disappeared. Where they went, she had no idea.
“Ah- I- uh- yeah,” she cleared her throat. “It’ll be like this for a little while and it’ll go. Don’t worry about it. It’s not like it’s a bruised kidney, fractured spine or lacerated spleen or anything.” Those were just a few of the injuries she’d healed up in her time here. She knew what each and every one of them felt like. She wondered if that was why she was so terrified of pain, of having it inflicted upon her by a force she couldn’t control, because she knew intrinsically how much the human body could hurt.
She drew a breath in and shrugged again. “I don’t know, Dove,” she told her honestly. “The dangerous ones we stop. The innocent ones… I guess the intention is to help them? To bring them somewhere where no one’s going to judge them or abuse them for their abilities?” She’d been told time and time again that she’d be abused out in the real world, that they’d just want her for her powers and would drain her energy until she had nothing left if they could. If they knew. Still, sometimes she wondered… “People are always afraid of what they don’t understand. Sometimes… sometimes it’s safer to be behind walls where we can’t be hurt by someone else’s ignorance.”