[ It's not really that she's hurting him in as much as she's simply forcing him to do things he really doesn't want to do. It's become easier to accept this idea of himself, and it's one that he's had since he was basically a child, so it's difficult to suddenly, all at once - from his skewed perspective anyway - flip that on its head and insist that the reality is in fact, the precise opposite. Tony Stark is mercurial, loves progress, defines the future, and hates change. He can only deal with it in the superficial sense, almost craves it in the superficial sense, but on any level that carries meaning? It takes quite a lot to turn his powerhouse of a mind around.
But these are even more, even deeper things about her former life that he almost can't reconcile with the Max he knows. He constantly keeps shifting, back and forth, back and forth, between what she's showing him and what he knows of her already, more recent memories and feelings. It's almost enough to produce an odd sort of whiplash, and if his eyes get a little more watery he's going to blame it entirely on how purely... bleak, how detached she feels from everything in these memories. She shouldn't feel like that, and immediately after each flare of negativity there is a surge of anger, because this shouldn't have been what she had to live through. He disagrees.
And then suddenly that's too much. (As predicted.) Too much emotion, too much sharing, and he abruptly tries to pull himself back into his own mind where at least he's comfortable and things make sense, things are familiar. He's got the idea, he got it, and he tries to say something like that, whether it's more physical or through the link - in actuality it's both, but slightly more the link if only because he still has a gag in his mouth and isn't actually that interested in talking anyway - he doesn't know. Just that he got what she was trying to show him, and that it's something he now - also - doesn't know what to do with. It's a great deal of confusion now, down to the core, that he's having to wade through on his way back to calming down. ]
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But these are even more, even deeper things about her former life that he almost can't reconcile with the Max he knows. He constantly keeps shifting, back and forth, back and forth, between what she's showing him and what he knows of her already, more recent memories and feelings. It's almost enough to produce an odd sort of whiplash, and if his eyes get a little more watery he's going to blame it entirely on how purely... bleak, how detached she feels from everything in these memories. She shouldn't feel like that, and immediately after each flare of negativity there is a surge of anger, because this shouldn't have been what she had to live through. He disagrees.
And then suddenly that's too much. (As predicted.) Too much emotion, too much sharing, and he abruptly tries to pull himself back into his own mind where at least he's comfortable and things make sense, things are familiar. He's got the idea, he got it, and he tries to say something like that, whether it's more physical or through the link - in actuality it's both, but slightly more the link if only because he still has a gag in his mouth and isn't actually that interested in talking anyway - he doesn't know. Just that he got what she was trying to show him, and that it's something he now - also - doesn't know what to do with. It's a great deal of confusion now, down to the core, that he's having to wade through on his way back to calming down. ]