Joss turns to Ginia, still holding her hand. “You misunderstand me. I’m not afraid of losing Romeo; I’m afraid of Romeo losing me.” He knows, acutely, the pain of watching a loved one slowly age, then decay, and finally losing them to either disease, or accident, or age. He knows what it’s like to be stuck, unchanging, while the rest of the world moves on without him.

And the thought of Romeo having to endure that agony for his sake is more than he can bear.

“A twilek,” he muses, trying out the new word on his tongue. “Is he called a twilek because he’s blue, or is it the...” he releases Misa’s hand to motion vaguely at his own head, imitating the fall of the head tentacles he’d seen.

“I think...I think someone was trying to take you. You cut them with a rather strange knife.”