Being stabbed is often seen as sexy, romantic, and clean. It’s not, and it’s definitely not the kind of death you’d want to give to somebody you love. But it’s not like Martin had a choice there in that room, with one way to save everyone, to stop everything; and it’s not like Jon had any other option.

Physically, stabbing someone isn’t difficult if your knife is relatively sharp; but you still have to press through fat, muscle, tendons, organs. Whether it’s psychological or genuinely feeling your knife tear in, you’ll know what you’re stabbing through.

Psychology, stabbing someone is a different story. To stab anyone takes a tremendous amount of effort, generally the human brain isn’t predisposed to such a level of violence. But to stab someone you love, rupture their body with intent to end their life? It’s excruciating.

Being stabbed isn’t as painful as you’d think. At first. It’s often compared to the feeling of being punched; the shock eats away at the initial nerve response. But realising you’re horribly, critically injured? That’s what really hurts. Feeling your blood spill out, knowing that the organs that give you life have been pierced, made obsolete. Knowing that everything you love may be over soon.

You begin to feel cold, fast. With an injury like that your body knows it’s failing, and sends all the blood to the heart and brain, hoping to keep you awake long enough to get help; the body doesn’t want you to die comfortably, it wants you to live. Cold hands, cold feet, cold face, shivering, and without hope. Can you imagine holding someone you love, bleeding and shaking from your actions. What could make that bearable?

They say that animals know when they’re going to die, when they’re beyond the point of healing; this, to a human, is possible, but so wildly ignored. You cannot ignore this wisdom when your blood is spilling onto the floor and your vision is growing dark.

Holding a person going through this, even if they say nothing, is to know the thoughts that race through their mind. The tension in their body as the shock reaches its climax, their desperation to survive peaking. The gradual loss of tension as they submit to their fate, and the eventual crushing weight of their unconscious body; the knowledge that you tore the life out of somebody. Your somebody.

Maybe it’s a good thing Martin didn’t make it out of the archives, because facing all that is incompatible with moving forward.