"You know it's a lot harder to lie to me about stuff like that when I can see it, right?" Joel asks in a dry voice, but he's smiling as he forces himself to snap out of it. She doesn't need him standing here and reading every last bit of her aura, but there is a part of Joel that's glad he's done it. It means he knows what she looks like now and there's something comforting in that, in knowing what she should look like, in being able to tell if there's suddenly a lot of pain for some reason or if something else were to go wrong.

"I don't mean to suggest you can't bear it. I know you can, I know how strong you are, but it's just... unless you experience something like that, learning to live with constant pain, it's difficult to understand." And even having seen it, he knows he'll never really understand, but he does have a reminder now that it's there. That it's always there. That Raleigh deals with this every single day and she doesn't complain, she doesn't even ask for help most of the time.