I wonder if they see more of what they are when the other leaves.

Cale, he's a bastard at times. To himself and only to himself. He beats himself mentally over the smallest errors and re-lives the event over and over again; working the computer links and the phone wires until he falls asleep on the keyboard and I have to wheel him to bed. He's an Iron Man; putting up the thickest of barriers to hide from what has happened to him and what could happen to him.

I believe he will walk again. I believe he'll get up out of that wheelchair one day and be able to do everything he wants to do. I believe he knows that as well.

But he's not going forward until he moves back. He won't let it out, won't let out the anger and the frustration and the fear and the horrors of his accident; keeping it bottled up inside to fuel his crusade to right the wrongs in this brave, new world.

And then there's Max.

She struts around him, tossing out cliches and snappy retorts while aching inside at the losses in her own life. The meaning of her existence still a gaping void begging to be filled and justified. The Ice Woman freezing out the rest of the world because she doesn't want to be involved with the small details while on her search.

Talk about opposites attracting.

He won't look in; she won't look out. But the two of them together form a single force; a powerful force, a potential that aches to be set free.

But he'll have to become less of an Iron Man. Let the fire inside him break free and temper the metal that surrounds his heart and soul. And she'll have to break the Ice Woman; let the heat sear away the outer defenses and penetrate into her inner core.

Apart, they'll never survive.

Together, they just might make it.