During the days I spent holed up in that cocoon of a motel room, I had a lot of thoughts. I realized, despite all the times I'd failed, or something unfortunate or tragic had happened to me, ironically, this time, when nothing had actually even happened, this was the worst I had ever felt.

When I became Exhuman, I'd faced it with faith in the system and the high horse of 'doing right' to lean on. When I'd fought AEGIS and her robots, Karu and her faith, or Saga and her shadows, I had the self-assurance that I was doing right and they were wrong. When I'd lost to Blackett and the XPCA, it was a choice I was making to save someone I loved. When Mage had died, she had at least been a soldier who faced it knowingly. And when Karu had given up on us working, as much as my heart said no, I at least understood all of her issues, if not agreed with them.

But this...I didn't even know what to call it. Wrenching Saga out of my life, and Lia's attempt at breaking a compel, they came out of nowhere. They felt like betrayals. I had nothing to stand on or lean against or to justify what had transpired.

It just hurt, more than anything ever had. I was so completely unprepared for how much physical pain could come from something in my head. It was surreal, and all I could do but to lay there, not even feeling self-pity, just...being. Being empty.

Which was just stupid, I told myself constantly. I knew in my head that Saga was out there, doing fine, being the arrogant ass she always was, as indestructible and unassailable as ever.

But the rest of me knew no better. She'd betrayed me, left me, and then I heard the tale which broke my heart, and that's where it stood. She wasn't walking through the door, letting me know it was all just a prank, she was gone, possibly forever, and Lia's story may as well have been true for all the difference it made.

But something else I learned was you can't just hurt forever, just like you can't stay vigilant forever or stay awake forever, your guard drops, you get sloppy, something chips away at you. It wasn't that the pain had dulled, I realized, it was me.

Which led to my current state. By all metrics, I was 'just fine'. The hundreds of punctures on my body from being thrown into barbed wire were healing nicely, and my broken wrist was splinted and bound, the inflammation gone after the first couple of days. If I wanted to be, I was mobile, capable as ever.

I just...didn't want to be capable. I didn't think there was anything wrong with me, or wrong with that, but the looks in Lia's eyes every day when she came in and prattled at me, holding an entire one-sided conversation where she confessed her failings and laid out future plans to me, meticulously covering every detail and never expecting for me to respond… Or how AEGIS came and pampered me beyond any level of normalcy, spoon-feeding me if I didn't take the food, dressing and undressing me if I never stirred from the bed, carrying me to the toilet twice daily if I didn't go myself, even flushing for me.

These weren't the behavior of two girls around someone who was capable as ever, and the more I saw myself through them, the more I realized...I must be fundamentally broken somewhere. Laying in bed all day, not eating, having no interest in doing anything for days at a time...who was I kidding, thinking any of that could be normal, even given my recent trauma?

I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know what was wrong with me. I just felt...less than before. A little deader, I guess. I thought...if Lia and AEGIS of all people knew what might be wrong with me, I had to count on them to help me out of it. So I listened to Lia's prolix ramblings and tolerated AEGIS' indulgent coddling as much as they wanted.

Not that I really minded. It was an easy, comfortable life. I just...had this distinct impression that I was fragile, and it was all going to end with me just vanishing through their fingers. And soon.

AEGIS was here now, closing the door behind her with the softest of clicks. She was halfway between her 'I look adorable' attire of a cutesy sundress and her 'the world can fuck off' outfit of a frumpy tracksuit, instead wearing a strappy brown top which showed off the markings on her shoulders in their entirety, as well as some cleavage, and a pair of short comfy shorts.

She looked me over as she entered, making sure I wasn't asleep I guess. The way her eyes jumped from the top of my head down to my chin was just one of those things that made me feel like I was dying and nobody had told me yet.

"Did you eat breakfast this morning?" she asked. I didn't know why she asked. She could see the plate right there, and was talking more to it than to me. It hadn't been touched since she brought it in this morning. "What a shame," she sighed, and took it back outside. In a few minutes she returned with another plate with what looked like lumps of rice on it.

She put it on the bed next to me and then sat down next to both of us.

"Chiho's been teaching me Japanese food. I'm not...sure it's entirely altruistic. I think she hopes I can start cooking them for her as well. This is nigiri, or...o-nigiri? I didn't quite follow. Like, mizu was water, but so was o-mizu? Girl's a horrible instructor but knows her food I guess."

She took a breath and looked down at the plate. "Anyway, rice and seaweed and fish. All things you'd like, I thought." I guessed inside the little rice triangles somewhere there was fish, too, then. She swallowed heavily before touching me to pull me upright, and then picked one rice triangle up gingerly, holding it by the black strip of seaweed at the bottom.

"Aaah," she said. I blinked at her for a moment and then relented. This girl knew best, right?

She put a corner of the rice in my mouth and I bit into it. It didn't just taste like rice. Somehow like, fluffier and sweeter. Definitely some toasted sesame seeds in there, and something else. It was good.

"I hope you like it," AEGIS said. "When you get...um...I mean…" she trailed off ominously. She and Lia both seemed to do that a lot too, now, always when making references to the future. Yet another thing making me feel dead in here.

"If you tell me what you like, I can make it better for you," she finished plainly. It was a sentiment she'd expressed at almost every meal. I didn't feel the need to reply. For someone with no sense of taste or smell, she did pretty well. I was certain in one or two dishes she'd gotten some spices mixed up, and she was almost certainly just following recipes, either from the 'net or now Chiho, but it was all passable enough.

She'd apparently exhausted all the conversation she had bottled up and just hand-fed me the rest of the rice balls in silence, her eyes still avoiding mine, still heavy with worry and anxiety.

I didn't get it. Sincerely didn't get it. She should be annoyed with me. If nothing else, I'd shown up and just ruined their life plans. They were over a week now since they were scheduled to fly back home, Chiho had to submit a leave of absence from college, and they were cooped up in this tiny motel in the middle of nowhere, babying me. How her eyes couldn't even hold an ounce of resentment for me, after all that...I just didn't understand.

If I were in her position, I'd be incredibly pissed. The fact that she wasn't, she and Lia both...

Honestly, it scared the crap out of me.

AEGIS finished up and smiled at me, and then warily glanced at my face, her smile fading away for a second.

"How cliche," she said, happily, and dabbed a piece of rice off my cheek and into her mouth. "Not that I guess you'd get that one."

I just blinked at her, but at least she'd somewhat involuntarily made eye contact with me, her yellow eyes boring straight into mine, her finger slowly sliding away from her lips, frozen like she'd been caught doing something wrong.

"Ah," she said, and broke the contact after holding it for long seconds. We were so close I could feel her breath warm on my skin, but unlike a human's breath, hers wasn't muggy or unpleasant at all. "Sorry. I'll let you rest for now. Lia might come in, but I'll be back for dinner. Please try to feel better."

She laid me back down, gently, like floating a lantern on water, and left without another word.

And like that, again, I was alone with my thoughts. Again, another awkward experience with one of the girls, which screamed of my apparent fragility. That look of regret in her eyes when she met mine, and how she got lost looking at me like it was for the last time. But every time. No wonder she avoided looking at me.

I wondered why I wasn't more bored. By all rights, I'd done nothing but lay here for days with nothing but a gnawing sense of dread to entertain me, and the couple hours a day when Lia and AEGIS came to look in on me. Before, I'd be restless out of my mind, but instead, I felt like I was in a hospital, or a hospice, waiting to get better or to get worse. Just waiting. But waiting was still something I was actively doing, and so it didn't bore me somehow.

I guess that was the kind of twisted logic that proved there was something messed up in me. I didn't know. I just had to trust the girls.

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I spent the next bit of time reliving the argument I'd had with Saga. The last words I'd said to her, while I was still me, before she blanked me out was 'I hate you' and 'you're such an insufferable arrogant cunt', both of which were completely over the line. I could see why she'd used her powers to stop the argument at that point, and I probably deserved some mind-blasting for the things I'd said.

I wasn't quite so certain about having my memories tampered with, but that was another issue. The point was, if I never saw Saga again, those were my last words to her. I fixated on that point, tried to feel some of the guilt I knew should have come with that thought. Guilt was, after all, one of my oldest friends.

But...nothing. Even when I'd so clearly been in the wrong, to someone I loved, someone who's apparent death could do this to me, all I felt was empty. I couldn't get emotions to stir, good or bad. I was just dead inside, it felt like.

I wondered what my eyes looked like, that the girls always avoided them, and swung my legs off the bed to go to the bathroom. After I finished, I leaned against the sink and stared at myself in the mirror.

Most of me looked the same as ever. My clothes were a simple white tee and sweatpants that AEGIS had put me into, my hair was a tangled mess more than ever, but otherwise, I looked familiar, as long as I avoided seeing my own eyes.

But in those eyes...I looked away. I understood. They were not the eyes of a living person. There was a blackness behind them which would have startled me, if feelings like that were still readily within my grasp.

I realized I'd seen those eyes before, a long, long time ago. I laid back down on the bed, away from the mirror, trying to remember something I'd tried to forget.

Ah, yeah. I remembered. Zach. In elementary school.

Every school had its tragedy. The kid who died, or the thing that happened, or God-forbid, the Exhuman event. In elementary school, ours was Zach.

There was a lot more to the story, I was sure, but I only remembered the broadest strokes. He was a kid a year above my grade, happy, charismatic, one of the cool kids but blessed with this ability to still talk with everyone, no matter what clique, and nobody ever batted an eye at it. He just made it seem so natural to walk past a huddled group of punky goth kids and say hi to them with an earnest smile and start a chat about what they were watching without any of the social norms applying to him.

I was really into sports, even back then, and while he wasn't, I'd still had some great talks with him in the hallways about our local sports teams, odds of winning this year, how big an idiot the manager was for trading away such-and-such a player. Now, I couldn't even remember if he convincingly knew that stuff or not, but at the time, it never felt like a forced or fake conversation. And somehow, he kept up that kind of thing with most everyone in the school, even a lot of the staff.

In brief, he was a 'great guy'. I guess looking back now, I could notice through retrospect that he didn't have any actual close friends, no clique to call his own, spent most of his time alone, despite his friendliness with everyone. Red flags nobody could notice through his easy smile.

So it was out of nowhere for us when his dad killed his mom and himself and tried to burn the house down with Zach in it when he wouldn't leave his room to get shot in the face.

As a class, we had a campaign to send him cards and flowers in the hospital, and once he was available for visits, we went in shifts, organized by the school so that he had visitors every day, at least for the first month or so. After that, I supposed nobody ever visited him. He had no close friends. Again, somewhere I should have felt a twinge of guilt, but nothing.

I only saw him twice in that time. His burns weren't that bad looking, red across his body, patches of skin sewn to him like a Frankenstein's monster which didn't quite match his skin tone. He didn't smile, he barely spoke, thanking us formally for our visit and well-wishes, and listening passively as we told him of the boring minutia of outside life, while our chaperones made sure we didn't ask any questions or veer into conversation which could upset him.

But for me the worst part was his eyes. At the time, I'd thought smoke from the fire had gotten caught in them, and wondered if he could still see, they just looked so blank, so black.

So like mine.

Lia opened the door and smiled in the vicinity of my chest her little mask of a smile. "You're up, that's good," she said airily. "Sorry I'm a little late, I got distracted playing Kingdom Blade." She waved the mobile in her hands at me before pocketing it in her slipskin. "We just killed a boss, and I got revered reputation with Elis, so that's pretty cool. Chiho and I are really tearing it up."

She sat down on the foot of the bed and started talking to me about the game, the main characters, her party and Chiho's and what their achievements meant in the context of the game.

"Hey," I interjected, only half-listening to her talk anyway. She stopped, and seemed a little scared to. Whatever I had to say, she didn't want to hear it. That was why she kept up the deluge of inane commentary I knew.

"Do you remember Zach? From elementary school?"

"Zach...Williams? I didn't know him, but I remember the story," she said, hesitantly.

"I guess you weren't in school with him ever?" She shook her head. Yeah, I guess the math didn't work out. "I was remembering visiting him in the hospital."

Lia smiled in my direction again. I vaguely wished she'd stop. Look me in the eyes and frown, instead of smile at my chest at least.

"AEGIS has been cooking recently. I think she's really enthusiastic about it, which is weird. We'd been taking it in turns to do the cooking, but she just started to take over...it's actually funny, there's a kitchen in this motel that never gets used. We just started sneaking in and using it, and the staff caught us once, and said they didn't care...had to give the guy a croquette to buy his silence, but--"

"I remember Zach's eyes. They were so black. At the time, I thought he had smoke trapped in them."

All traces of her smile was gone now. She was looking right at me, her eyes flickering back and forth across my face. I saw her swallow heavily.

"He got better though, didn't he?" she asked. "He moved away to be with another relative, and we heard he was going back to school and readjusting and fine and all that."

"Or so we heard."

She tutted at me and went back to looking at the walls. "You're such a cynic. I'm sure that he's out there right now, going to college somewhere, looking forward to winter break with his friends. Trauma can shape who we are, but that doesn't mean it defines us, you know? Just look at me, I ran away from home, got away from…" she took a deep breath. "From Brick, and from Dad, and now here I am, reasonably well-adjusted, right?"

"In a slipskin."

"It's comfy."

"It's not reasonably well-adjusted."

"Actually, it adjusts itself. Pretty cool, right?"

I let the joke die in the air where it deserved to.

She sighed, obviously annoyed I wasn't biting on any of her distractions. "Look, Athan, I'm sorry. I've been trying not to bring it up because I don't want to hurt you with it again, but I'm sorry like you wouldn't believe. I messed up so bad, worse than I've ever done before, I think."

I shrugged. "It's fine."

"It is NOT fine! You're here, talking about the eyes of some boy who watched his dad kill his mom, who survived a house fire and murder attempt, and I can read between the lines and know you're talking about you, too. Zach, he was fucked up by that thing, I know it, and you're relating with him, and in this scenario, that makes me the father who snapped and tried to kill him."

She looked down at her hands, a bitter smile that suited her more than the fake mask on her face.

"Except I wasn't crazy when I did it. I planned it out, I rented trucks and barbed wire and the holos. I signed those rental forms with a smug stupid grin on my face, thinking I was outsmarting you and Saga, so freaking clever, Lia always is. Never once thought about how much I was hurting you. Never even crossed my mind!"

She looked me back in the eyes. "And now you're like this, and it's nobody's fault but mine! I don't even know why AEGIS and Chiho are still here. They told me this was too far, and I insisted, and was one million percent wrong. And I don't know what to do or how to make it better, my stupid brain keeps coming up with all these new schemes to get you up and out and better, and I just have to remind myself everyday that I'm an idiot, and I can't scheme my way out of putting you through this, and if I try, I'll just make everything worse."

She sighed. "And now I'm dumping all this on you, which is the last thing I ever wanted to do, because now you'll just feel even worse. All I wanted to do was to take care of you until you were ready to face the world again."

"I don't care--"

She interrupted me with an afterthought. "I called in to your work for you, you're on medical leave. AEGIS and I forged some papers having you admitted to a mental ward. We thought if it was anything physical, they'd just force you to jump in a regenerator. Your boss, Cosette or whomever, she's been going nuts this last week trying to reach you. That's why I took your mobile. I'm sorry about that, too."

I hadn't even realized she'd taken my mobile, and I didn't really care. "So there's nothing worse wrong with me?" I asked.

"Worse than what? Worse than what I did to you?" she laughed hollowly. "How could anything be worse than that."

"I just thought, the way you were treating me, I was going to die or something."

"Oh. No." She hesitated like she wanted to say more but didn't.

"Then I guess I should go," I said, sitting up. "Nothing wrong with me really."

She knitted her brow and stared at me with open worry. Fear, even.

"You don't have to. If you're just doing that to make me feel less bad about what I did--"

"No, you said it yourself. There's nothing really wrong with me."

"That's nothing I said," she muttered. It might have sounded like a joke if she hadn't been so serious. "I think you still need to recover. If you go out there and fight an Exhuman like this…"

She let the sentence hang. I wished she'd stop leaving things unsaid. It was the same ominous nonsense of her not looking me in the eyes or wanting to hear anything I had to say. It just made me feel like she thought the second half of that sentence would shatter me.

"Then what?" I asked.

She jumped like she'd been shocked. "Um." I saw her thinking, trying to scheme some way out.

"Then what!?" I repeated, almost shouting, despite the unusual calm in my veins.

"Y-you...you've changed, is all," she said, trying to blurt out an answer while still keeping it tactful.

"Then. What?"

She stood up and I thought she was just going to walk out without answering, but she only went as far as the door before talking to me without turning.

"Someone doesn't have to die for you to lose them, Athan."

She paused and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. "How bad you felt about losing Saga, I'm feeling that too, okay? About you."

And then she opened the door and headed out before her composure cracked.