The return

Context: Rain returns capable of responding, not with a newfound or completed self. Vesper is shaken because the finished record contained no next response. In a last attempt, he attacks. Rain sets out the Clone as the expected target, then takes the real blow himself and catches Vesper while Vesper passes through the copy. Rain's past still feels like fiction he knows intimately; the scene proves only that he can make a present choice without using that past as felt proof.