The important thing is that Max would have sacrificed his own ties in the furtherance of finding out what had happened to their friend!

His eyes flick over that hand, sensors cataloging the density of bone, the temperature, undeniable facts that don't have any significance. He's not handling the more intangible emotional parts of this very well, but at least he's not going to go pretend to be a tree again. He pointedly looks away from the bones of Skulduggery's hand as he can't imagine them being torn apart and reknit a single time, let alone over three hundred. There's something awful about finding out something terrible after the fact, when it's too late to do anything about it. A sort of helplessness that he's never felt before. Because he and Ava can't fix it, they can't undo what he's experienced - they can only move forward. And Max's plan will be to never bring it up again because he's not sure how to deal with the emotions of both empathy and sympathy he's feeling.

"How do we prevent it from happening again?" The timeline blips. The torture. Any of this.