Harlow's teeth were grinding, which was a sure way to tell that he was trying to keep from succumbing to the overload of his emotions. There wasn't a single bit of him, not one fiber or cell, that wasn't effected by the things he was feeling. The hurt, the anger, the relief, the longing-- it was everywhere, snapping through him like electric shocks, overwhelming his senses and making him feel raw as if he'd been dragged behind a car over asphalt. He felt skinless, he felt exposed. He felt wild, irrational, insane. He was ablaze with the intensity of it all, craving a hundred different things and feeling suffocated by the effort to bottle it all inside.
"If I did, it was because I knew I couldn't survive seeing you split open with something fucking eating out of you," Harlow carefully ground out, words tense and jaw clenched. "If I walked away, it was because I couldn't stand the idea of some useless, soulless, mindless already-dead thing taking everything away from me for sustenance it doesn't even need. If I walked away, it was because I needed you and those things didn't and they took you anyway. I screamed. I looked. I couldn't find you, I didn't hear you, and everyone was ripped to shreds. Convince yourself I didn't care, go ahead. Problem is really that I cared too much."