The effort that she makes — the struggle not to only say the thing that threatens to spill out, reasonable or otherwise — is a tangible thing, nearly, the way she absorbs what he's saying. Dislikes some of it, like the phrase panic attack which is immediately very accurate to the experience and appalling to hear. Dislikes some of it for entirely different reasons, her grip on his hand tightening as he describes how it had felt to get in a car again and she remembers enough of New York's simulacrum to imagine it herself, how trapped he might feel, how his stomach might flip at the speeds.

Imagines the crash. Tries to stop imagining it, consciously easing her grip on his hands before she hurts him.

So it is deliberate, the way that she digs past the thing behind her teeth for the reason for it, instead: “It feels deceitful to say yes, that's so, I have reacted very reasonably to this terrible experience, when I brought it with me. It's—”

he isn't telling her there's something wrong with her. He won't, she thinks, for what she says next. But it feels so upside down from his calm explanation that there's a tightening in her throat of shame that she has done this, too, all arse backwards.

“Better.”

It doesn't feel great to say that out loud.

“I brought it with me to the war and the war gave me purpose and it's been— better. Easier. As if the thing that's—” she bites back wrong with me, shifts the target slightly, “as if I'd just been standing in the wrong place, before. I don't remember a time it wasn't true. A thing didn't happen, I don't— I don't know if something happened.”

A lot of things happened later. Many of them not unrelated to the control she had not learned.

“Coupe changed everything about my life,” she says, finally. “I thought I could only be steady if Thranduil held me that way. And then he didn't, and I'm better at it, and I know that that's probably not the war—”