Dyllan stared blankly at his two best friends. The brief adrenaline rush was starting to wear off, and he was sinking back into his funk. “Look… Andie, Cedric. I know helping depressed people is sort of our thing… but if you could just… not? Thanks…”

“No.” Andie put her foot through the doorway to stop Dyllan from literally and figuratively shutting her out. “Fuck that.” She winced only slightly as the door hit her toe, then pried her way into Dyllan’s room and tackled him to the ground. “Fuck that, and fuck you.”

“I…” Dyllan looked around the room, more than a little confused. “…What?”

“You heard me. You’re being a self centered little brat right now. Shutting yourself away, leaving your friends to worry about you, and…” Andie stopped mid-sentence, speaking the last of her sentence using thought doodles. “”

“I, I’m…” Dyllan frowned quietly. “It’s better off this way.”

“Oh for!” Genuine anger started to sprout on Andie’s face. “Stop trying to frame your damn pity party in some kind of noble light. You messed up one time, and now you’re suddenly a blight on all you touch!? This is blatantly irrational, and I refuse to debate it with you!”

“Andie!” A twinge of intensity returned to Dyllan’s voice. “Somebody died! Don’t you care?”

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“Of course I care! I might even care more than you do! That’s why there was a funeral, Dyllan! So that everyone could feel sad, mope around, and get it all out of their system.” Andie took a deep breath. “People need to grieve, but then they need to move on, and take time out of their day to remember the good times instead of just crying a bunch. To channel their grief into something productive, and move on with their lives. Because if the poor guy was someone worth crying over, that’s what he’d want.”

“But…” Dyllan had fallen back to his more timid demeanor. “We could have saved him.”

“…So? Do you think that good surgeons never lose patients who could have been saved, if only said surgeon had been just a little bit better at their job? Do you think those deaths make them feel any worse than the patients that were doomed from the start - the patients no surgeon could save, no matter how skilled they were? Do you think they can even tell the difference between the two?” Andie grabbed Dyllan by the collar and stared him right in the eye, keeping him pinned solidly to the ground. “Do you think surgeons don’t cry themselves to sleep every now and again, remembering all of the people they’ve failed!? Because they do - but they get up again. They get up again every morning, and they go back to that hospital, because people need them.” She took another deep breath and relaxed her grip on Dyllan. “…Look. You, me, and Cedric. We care about people. Not just people we know, and not just a little bit. We care about every single stranger as if we’d been friends with them for years, and it sucks. If we could just look out for our little group here and be happy, life would be so much easier. Caring about people is going to make us miserable, and it may even break us someday… but we can’t stop. Just like some people need our help, we need to help people. So are you going to stand up again, or are you going to make everything worse for everyone.”