Ingrid's kindness, or what fickle pieces of it that's left standing, were pulled out by the roots long ago.
She was no more the naive child who believed that reviving plants and healing wounded birds would give her a place among her kin ━━ That her mother would look upon her with something other than disdain and her father would acknowledge her as his daughter. She was no longer under the illusion that the gods would relinquish their curse upon her when they witnessed she possessed a good heart. That she'd not be remembered as a gluttonous thing that only consumed... a thief and a stranger in her own family just because she had a different fate.
Then she changed, and her curse was no more a force that needed to be tamed or kept in a bone. For centuries she roamed the world, her existence spanning beyond mortal sight with an immortal face and magic stirring deep inside. It plunged her into a streak of cynicism, meanness, and the general belief that life was a sort of sick joke and not worth the ablutions of compassion.
So, to be entirely honest, none were more astonished by her decision than Ingrid herself when she impulsively took in a mushy-brained human under her nonexisting wings until he, himself, felt like he was pried out off his own mind and body with a rusty crowbar and made wholly anew.
Well, none except Ikaris. Her former lover, although surprised, had decided looking far too pleased for some reason that it was fate's way of reminding her she was still a human. Better and darker and infinitely more dangerous than the rest, but still, at the core, bitterly, beautifully human.
While Yao, another ageless friend of hers, on the other hand, gave her a frustratingly secretive smile, her eyes all-knowing as she told her she was as glad as she was surprised Ingrid chose this path. It ticked Ingrid in all the wrong ways like it always did when she talked with the damned woman who spoke of time and fate with all the crypticness of a half-mad oracle high on opium.
But then again, she supposed, no matter what Ikaris and Yao had said or was written in fate, nothing and no one could stop Ingrid when she had her teeth in an idea.
So maybe, it's not compassion that made her rebuild a broken man, just curiosity. But for someone like Ingrid, who gets bored of things easily, it's certainly a surprise that she heavily weighted her decision towards keeping the human alive instead of designing his death after assuaging her interest. So one could only imagine, in the last 10 months, the human had grown closer from being a complicated equation she desired to solve to a roommate that Ingrid had come to accept with a resigned submission that she had reconsidered every time she wished to kill him on a whim.
