They'd looped around enough to satisfy him, and he opened the door to his building for her, leading her down the hallway and up the stairs to his apartment as she spoke. He waited to answer until the door was safely closed and locked behind him, and he leaned his forehead against the door for a moment.
"I'd been planning--I should have told you. Asked you," he amended. He slipped the guns out of his sleeves in one smooth motion and placed them on the kitchen counter, where they could still be within reach if by some chance someone kicked in the doors behind them, and unbuttoned his coat. He still wore the clothes he'd worn at work that day: incongruously casual khakis and a button-up shirt, now somewhat sweated through.
"I don't want either of them hurting you. People like them, they're good at hiding what they really are." Not all sense offenders had been political idealists, after all; there had been the odd sadist and psychopath he'd dealt with in his career, though they had been a very small minority. But they'd been enough to make him second-guess himself and his conviction that the freedom to feel was something necessary. "They don't just apologize and never do it again. They need to be... discouraged. Harshly. For good, in some cases." In Crane's and Nigma's, if Errol had his way.
He clenched his hands, the muscles at the corner of his jaw working, and when he looked at her, there was genuine fear in his eyes. "If he'd hurt you again--" If Crane had hurt her again, Errol would have painted the halls of Arkham red with blood and burnt it to the ground. He would have dragged Crane out to the middle of the street and forced him to watch it burn before killing him.
"I would have done something unforgiveable," Errol said, dropping his eyes.