He doesn't mind it, even if it makes his breath catch faintly with surprise, calling to mind the image of Haylen crumpling against the pauldron of his power armor while he'd tried awkwardly to hold and comfort her with metal gauntlets the size of her torso. It's the only other time in his memory that he's ever needed to support anyone in quite that way, and it's a very, very different sensation when he's not even wearing a shirt, let alone an impenetrable mech suit. He'd thought Nora's hug had felt like being thrown into the deep end after so long being unaccustomed to touch--he sees now that he hadn't even realized what the deep end really was.

The flippancy helps. It's normal. He'll take it. He holds himself carefully still, spine stiff and muscles tense, but he's trying to be helpful in that sense, an anchor in the water.

"All right," he says, trying to organize his thoughts tactically here, even if he still sounds a little scattered. "Our best bet is to...try to recreate the conditions that made it possible for you to breathe up until this point, even if we know now that it wasn't a permanent solution. If it works again, it'll buy us time."