"When the fuck did I ever call you cowardly?"

"You implied it," she argued, but before he could give her even a minute more to point out how unfair he was being, how little he was giving her when she was there with so many good intentions, he was continuing in grand flourish.

"Though, perhaps that's just the right bloody term for you, isn't it? Your place goes up in flames and you run off to hide; I come out to visit - hell, even at your own fucking request - and you invariably panic and send me packing. Coward. I've never called you that; but it fits you like a bloody glove."

Her eyes could only hold his waveringly as he berated her, and she attempted to take a step back from him, needing to put distance between them, needing to erect some kind of wall, some kind of defense from all this. She stubbornly clung to the thought that beyond an apology, a sincere one, she had no need to defend herself from any false accusation he wanted to fling at her. Her pride, unmentioned till then, reared its ugly head to keep her emotion at bay, a defense mechanism if there ever was any, and her gaze held his own as if to challenge the coward that he was now calling her to her face.

"You never thought, for one minute, that maybe I wanted to share your pain and loss; but then, I was fooling myself wasn't I? I'm the fucking idiot for ever thinking that maybe you actually gave a damn about me."

If it hadn't been for all that he'd said, for all that he'd done since she'd stepped through the door, she may have felt some sympathy for him, some degree of guilt for her past actions. But he had, and the pause she allowed after that, as she sought his eyes, was not one in which she pondered his hurt. It was her own that rose to the forefront.

"I had nothing to give you," she said quietly, each word punctuated with a degree of frustration he could not have predicted. "I was sucked dry- no, Leathan, I was- I'm not you, I don't have your iron will to handle everything, deaths, heartbreak- I don't. You're an Auror. You've been trained to expect the terrible before it happens. I haven't. I could offer you nothing that you asked of me, I couldn't and yet you still demanded it."

Shaking with a self-righteous anger that was newly taking hold of her, she continued in a clenched whisper, her frustration only escalating as she saw that he'd locked the door. Turning on him, she swallowed tightly before shaking her head.

"You demanded and demanded, knowing that there was nothing I could do- you promised me, do you remember even, Leathan? You promised me that if I ever needed, you would be here, but there was nothing unselfish about even that. You wanted me, no- demanded me to bend to your will, your time, and when I couldn't, when I truly couldn't, in the state I was in, you abandoned me."