Strange doesn’t catch who her gaze landed on — from a certain angle, it possibly just looks like a haunted stare into generalised space — but his eyebrows arch at hearing that answer, a mute kind of surprise. He’d been expecting practically anything but that. ‘Cut them off’ or ‘shot them off’, maybe, but ‘bit them off’ is something unexpected; is sharp and visceral and animalistic; is, also, fucking filthy because the human mouth is a cesspool of bacteria. Human teeth aren’t sharp enough to be made for that kind of cut, either. Requires brute determination. He can’t help the way his own gaze falls to Ellie’s hand, the stumps of her fingers, the way it’s long-healed over.

“A bite is unusual. I’m surprised didn’t get infected— unless it did. You must’ve done a good job stitching it up and keeping the wound clean.”

A clinical kind of compliment, insofar as he can compliment what happened. It’s a safer thing to touch on than that ugly vengeance, the attempted murder.

Throughout their journey here, he’s continually having to mentally revise and recategorise what he knows about this girl. He knew Ellie was capable — but knowing is different from seeing it, viscerally, firsthand.

He doesn’t really know how to ask the next bit. But. He just goes ahead and rips off the band-aid anyway, his own voice just as neutral, as non-judgmental as he can make it: “Did you manage to drown them?”