"I'm very comfortable with it..." he says, and it occurs to him that maybe he should offer to switch over for her, if that would make things ultimately easier. Though he is bad at handling distress in all but his closest of friends (with whom he has a nearly preternaturally adept touch), he is grasping for ways to make this situation somehow better and less stressful for the girl.

I can attest to that...

What had he meant?

His eyes scan over the words; though he's a speed-reader, Japanese is not his native language and it takes a fraction of a second longer for the characters to fall into meaningful order in his thoughts. Once they have, though, the pit is dropping out of his stomach again, and he's in the dark, settled on a couch and staring impassively at a blonde girl, trussed and restrained. He sees everything. He watches her suffer and sips his coffee. He munches sugar cubes while she sobs. She won't die here, but she will wish for it, and he feels nothing as she begs, her terror glancing off his black-ice eyes like twin indifferent mirrors.

This echo is different. It leaves him freezing, trembling with the cold as if he's been pulled out of a frozen lake. His doppelganger is lauging, the girl at his side screams, and that empty feeling remains, filling slowly with the empathy that Lazarus feels where his preinacarnate perhaps couldn't. As his doppelganger glances Misa over with new knowledge of what she looks like in intimate and compromised positions, he looks away. What can he say? What would it mean, what does she know about his role in her torture?

"I'm so sorry," he says, horror and chill flash-freezing his tone. "I am so sorry..."