Four billion years, and here you sit, in a room that smells of fear and disinfectant, holding a small warm creature and telling it, in a voice we have never heard you use, that everything is going to be okay.
Understand what you are. The lungfish gulped raw air into a body that had only ever known water. The shrew froze in the dark while the ground shook. The woman on the ice fed the fire before she fed herself, four nights running, so the little ones would not go stiff by morning.
Every one of us spent our whole allotment of days doing one thing: not dying, and dragging the next of us along. We had no time for a creature that could not hunt, could not carry, could not do anything but need us.
And you. You have taken in a thing with claws and no plan, a soft doomed animal we would have watched die on the tundra without a second glance, and you have driven it, in a machine, to a warm room, to pay a stranger to make it well. You are stroking its ears. You are whispering. Your voice is shaking.
We do not understand it. We know weather. We know the sound of a child breathing wrong at night. We do not know this: a body safe enough, fed enough, to break its own heart over something so small.
The stranger comes back with good news. The little creature will live. And your shoulders drop, and you press your face into its fur, and we go quiet, all of us, the fish and the shrew and the fire-woman, watching our runner weep with relief in a bright clean room over an animal that cannot even say your name.
We spent everything for this.
Look what you did with it.