After the talk and quiet moments with Susan, Reid had realized something. When he had the headaches that led up to his cancer diagnosis, Susan had implored him to get things checked out. It was only his stubborn idiocy that prevented him from catching things much, much earlier on. It was one of those dumb, preventable mistakes that seemed obvious in hindsight. So, Reid's first fix to himself was on his own poor mentality.

Reid had shared multiple conversations with Susan about what happened. They dove together deep into explanations of the feelings Reid had in his body as he'd worked, and a less than fun experience where Reid mentally walked himself back through the process of how he'd petrified everything. Susan had multiple people with bladed weapons present for that one, just in case Reid needed to lose another limb.

This time around, he listened. He communicated. And he grew. It was incredibly slow the first day. Reid was only allowed thirty seconds of self-work every hour. The next, it rose to five minutes. By day four, Reid was allowed to do several hours of work on himself without stopping to rest. By the end of the week, a combination of Reid's self-healing and Susan's skill work had done enough to get his 'internal energy landscape' back to normal. That also meant Susan was able to finish regrowing his arm. Reid still thought they should workshop a better name than internal energy landscape, but Susan had shut his banter down quickly on that one. And - he listened, and had stopped being a pest about it.

Post-recovery, following Susan's advice let the couple engage in new and exciting experimentation.

A blade sliced through and around Reid's left arm, down to the bone.

"Again."

Reid moved through himself, healing his body from the inside out. Susan stood over Reid, watching closely as he followed the instructions she'd given him. He started with deep tissue and blood vessels. They knit together far more quickly than they had prior to this practice - and Reid stopped healing long before pain and heat truly overtook his senses. He pulled himself up and out of the still-open, but no longer bleeding wound and looked at his wife. Her hands glowed with energy as she inspected his work.

"Better. Much better. No residual bleeding. This wound looks like it could take a decent amount of strain, and you improved your time again. Let's continue with the weight tests."

Reid started with a 20-pound dumbbell, and worked his way through a series of exercises they'd set up to test his progress. He held the weight out in his hand, and turned his arm. It was painful, but it didn't tear open any of his recent work. He caught a medicine ball. Lifted a full barbell. Susan scribbled notes, and nodded for him to continue.

Susan's efforts to get Reid a better way to recover from injuries was incredibly exciting. He was able to focus in on how he healed himself and the specific areas he needed to work on to do so. All of it improved his ability to survive wounds without fully exiting a fight. His speed wasn't great enough yet to actually heal himself mid-battle, but it might get there eventually. Every time he dove into himself and fixed an area, he paid more attention to what exactly he did and the order in which he did it. And now - healing certain things in certain parts of his body were starting to feel more like muscle memory.

Susan's notes - and Reid's own cataloguing - had offered some insights that helped Reid ensure that muscle memory was crafted correctly. It wasn't high stakes by any means, but Reid knew a handful of people from his softball league that had never learned the proper way to throw a ball. They could, technically, throw - but their form was all wrong, and they ran the risk of injuring themselves each time. They overstrained certain muscles, didn't use the entirety of their body effectively, and more often than not missed what they were throwing at. But, because they'd been doing it that way for so long, it was incredibly hard to un-learn the poor form. Reid had found a bit of that in his own process, with Susan's help. He'd often fix muscle before blood vessels, and as a result was spending extra energy to power his muscles while he repaired other parts of himself.

That was, by Susan's theory, one of the reasons why Reid had struggled and been unable to stem the bleeding on his arm. He didn't need a massive amount of energy reserves to do so, but he also didn't know how to work without bringing out massive amounts of energy. The work they'd done greatly increased Reid's survivability.

The muscle memory creation, and the rapid-recovery healing practice were incredible things on their own. But they had also paved the way for another discovery.

Susan had Reid carefully work to activate specific skills, like strengthening, and made him take stock of where Reid felt the pulls of energy. They worked together to try and 'map' the ethereal space. While the mapping portion failed quite miserably, Reid did manage to 'feel' one of the skill-threads within himself. And instead of reaching beyond his capabilities, Reid focused on getting to know that specific skill.

Strengthening was already a great skill. It was Reid's first, and helped him survive quite a few battles. But, Reid found he was using the thing wholly inefficiently. And part of that was... a personal problem.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Strengthening was intrinsically tied to Reid's states of rage and anger. Every time he'd let himself fall into the waves of rage within himself, the skill had been 'let loose' throughout his entire body, all at once. Because of that, his entire body was overworked and overclocked. That applied to his physical body, and his internal energies. Both were overdrawn - which was the reason he felt so utterly exhausted after a rage session.

In rare cases, Reid had better controlled the application of the skill. Punching into coyote skulls came to mind. But that was still just Reid pushing massive amounts of strengthening energy into his fist, instead of letting it run wild throughout his body. Through practice, though, Reid had learned to better focus the effects.

It didn't give him quite as much of a strength boost, but focusing on a smaller and more specific strengthened area massively lowered energy consumption and fatigue.

His rapid partial regeneration, paired with targeted strengthening, was like magic. Well, not like magical healing or fireballs, but 'this-is-incredible' style magic. Reid could grow back a portion of muscle in a nearly severed arm, use strengthening focused in on the newly repaired muscle, and achieve nearly full normal strength as a result.

He racked the barbell back, and stared at the open wound. Lifting weights with an arm only connected by blood vessels and a few strands of muscle was, in Reid's opinion, one of the coolest freaking things he'd ever done.

He smiled at himself, then at Susan. He'd hit the milestones she wanted to see out of his skill testing and growth. He was back to full health, as much as she could see. And that meant tomorrow was a big, fun day. One Reid had been waiting for. Tomorrow, Susan would help Reid make himself a growth weapon.

#

The orange juice Reid sipped on was concentrate from a can, mixed with water. Warren had offered to put alcohol in it for him, but Reid turned the man down. As much as he wanted alcohol to lubricate his current conversation, Reid needed to be in top form for tomorrow's work. So, he endured and sipped his juice.

All around him, nearly everyone else was downing beer or spirits. Warren's had, miraculously, managed to stay 'open' and serving Sanctuary's residents. So, Reid sat at one of the tables.

He stared hard at the orange juice as his brain failed to come up with another throwaway conversation topic to share with James.

The two of them had been playing a game of conversation chicken for the last twenty minutes. Weather, Sara, and recovery had been excellent distraction topics - but anything 'new' there had already been discussed between the two of them. Their ritual of daily visits to the bar had exhausted those topics. And Reid knew it was time for them to actually have the conversation they needed to have.

James ended up breaking the silence first. His voice carried the extra slip into his home accent that always came when he was a few drinks in.

"Do you remember when we first met? Actually first met, I mean. Before the system." Reid nodded. "My bladder was near bursting, and Marlene made me run down that hill to go offer you our help. She was insistent we needed to do it."

Reid let a pause stretch out.

"She's always been her own, incredible brand of driven, Reid. To the point where she worked people however she needed. It's one of the things I love about her. But she also lived to lift people up. Helping people improve themselves made her happy, but she'd work on others well beyond the point where she really wanted to. She'd agonize over getting people who weren't good or weren't motivated to do better. She'd use their own mentalities against them - for their benefit. And she always hated it when she had to give up on any cause, any person because they were beyond her ability. I think..."

James swirled amber liquid in his cup and stared at it as it rotated.

"I think she decided, when she got in charge, that lifting people up wasn't enough. I think she assumed she had to raise up some new sense of civilization, and the only way she could understand it was by using people to prop up that idea. But she stopped seeing the people as people and started seeing them as... societal scaffolding. She internalized this need to make people better and stronger not for them, but for this idea of a new society. I can't blame her for that."

James took a long drink of his beer.

"She and I, we've seen what happens when evil shits are left in charge to lead. We know what it leads to, and why people need a good, competent leader. But the pressure of all this, it took Marlene down a bad path. I explained it away while it was happening, but now that she's not in charge anymore, Reid..." James sighed. "She's back to herself - at least mostly. She's back to the person I fell in love with. She's back to lifting people up, instead of looking at those people as a way to lift up a community."

James looked Reid in the eye.

"So thank you. I'm still worried about what Sara put into Marlene's contract, but at least I have my wife back again."

Reid turned his glass in his hand. "Yeah, I talked with Sara about that a bit more the other day. I think Sara was mostly on autopilot with her skill when it happened, and... being on autopilot can make things happen weird with pathfinder. She should've talked to Susan or I before she did everything, I know. She's taking after me with all this 'do it myself' stuff, and we all know where that leads." Reid tapped his recently regrown arm. "But I'll have another talk with her, and we can try to figure out how to make it a bit better."

When Reid looked back up, James's eyes were a bit wet. "Reid - You're a good... Reid I'm sorry. I left you, and I left Louis. It's my fault he's dead, and then I left you by yourself, and I hate myself for it. You should hate me too. It's alright. I deserve that."

Reid grabbed James by the shoulder. "Jesus, man. I was captured. You were making snap calls. You had hundreds of people to look out for, and you kept them safe. You made sure Susan was safe. How the fuck could I be angry about that? You didn't kill Louis. Bertrand's people did - and they're dead, James. Louis died to make sure everyone else lived - and you made sure they got out alive. Give yourself some credit for that, and stop worrying about me. You and I are good. I don't blame you. And if you start crying, Warren's going to kick us out. So do me a favor, and don't worry about that again."

#

Later that night, Reid lay awake in bed. His mind was too excited to rest.

He'd practiced with dozens of weapons, but hadn't decided which one he really wanted to use. The only thing he knew was that he wouldn't be using a sword - that was Sara's thing now.

Reid blinked at the ceiling. What weapon would he wield?