No sooner had Veronica left than Akane turned to me and asked, "Should we let Nicky move back in with us?"

I was not at all happy with the idea—mostly because Veronica had accidentally informed us she was currently trying to hunt me down, but I couldn't exactly say that. Then again, I didn't need to stay here, per se. I could go back to doing what I'd always done: fending for myself eking out a living on the margins of society. It wouldn't be anywhere near as idyllic as the last few days, but… well, that was how life was. Good things don't tend to last.

"It's your apartment," I said. "You were just letting me stay in it. If you want to give Veronica her room back…"

"I didn't ask if I should 'give Nicky her room back'," Akane interrupted me. "I asked if we should let her move back in with us. I'm not considering kicking you out!"

"There are only two bedrooms, and I'm way too tall to sleep on the couch."

"We can share a room. Just because Nicky's weird about physical contact doesn't mean we have to be."

"Look, as much as I appreciate having a proper hug dealer after all this time, I'm not exactly comfortable with the prospect of sharing a bed with you," I said. "What is this, fanfiction? There needs to be more than one bed."

"But we're friends," Akane said.

"Friends don't typically share beds. Didn't you live with Veronica for years?"

"Yeah, but she doesn't like being touched because of all the pageantry horror she grew up with."

"Huh," I said. "Well, I'm also weird, but for different reasons, and I'm drawing the line at sharing a bed."

"What if we weren't 'just friends'?" Akane asked.

I squeezed my eyes shut and focused my healing implant on staving off a stress headache, which was definitely a normal response to being propositioned for a relationship shut up.

"You've known me for all of three days," I said.

"Speed dating exists," Akane countered. "Three days is a perfectly acceptable length of time to learn whether you're interested in pursuing a relationship with someone."

"It clearly is not," I said, "because it isn't long enough for you to realize that I am not someone you want a relationship with."

Akane frowned, then reached out a hand towards me, and I let her take one of mine without really thinking about it.

"Do you not want to be in a relationship with me?" she asked softly. "Because if that's the case, I'll shut up and not mention it again. But you know you aren't the authority on which people I'd want to date. I'm not asking for commitment, Roxy. I'm asking you to give us a chance."

"I'd like to think I'm the authority on who I am," I said. "I know you've got… empathy, or 'soul sight', or whatever you like to call it, but it clearly isn't getting the job done because I am not a good person, Akane. I'm… fuck, I don't know why I'm telling this. I want you to like me, at least enough to let me crash on your too-small couch."

A small corner of my mind was at war over whether I should be panicking or not. I had some pretty hefty psychic shielding and none of it was detecting any funny business. On the other hand, I was venting a lot of things I had no desire to air. I was given to rambling—I had ADHD, sue me—but I was pretty sure rambling about my emotional damage was out of character.

"I'm not doing anything weird with magic, if that's what you're worrying about," Akane said, causing me to go through a small moment of telepath panic before remembering that I'd all-but aired that concern out loud. "This is all you."

"This is not 'me'," I said.

"This is 'you when you feel safe'," Akane corrected herself. "You haven't felt around someone else for a very long time, have you?"

"I hardly know you," I muttered.

"I have gone out of my way to make you comfortable," she admitted. "Comforting people is my duty and calling as a magical girl, and I think I'm pretty good at it. Living with someone full time only makes things easier. The more I see of you, the better I can tell what calms you down and what closes you off, and do more of the former and less of the latter.

"Additionally, you know I'm a retired magical girl, which means I have that ability to see your heart, or hear your soul, or any number of other poetic metaphors that all amount to 'I know a lot of things about you you wouldn't otherwise share'. So you take that and think, maybe not consciously, but you think, 'How much worse could sharing a little more be?'"

The answer was 'a lot worse'. Unfortunately for me, Akane had very quickly established herself as my friend, and I had a strong desire to protect my friends. Even from myself.

"You said I don't hurt people intentionally," I said. "You're wrong. Not on the subtext—I've hurt a lot of people by accident—but I also hurt people on purpose. I've enjoyed it. I'm selfish, and angry, and violent, and I do not understand how you missed all of that with your personality scan or whatever but I think you made a mistake letting me move in."

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Everyone is selfish when they're in need," Akane said, "and everyone can be violent when threatened. And anger isn't an evil emotion. This isn't Star Wars, and anger is not the path to the dark side."

"Isn't anger one of the prominent Nightmare emotions?" I asked.

"It's a famous one," Akane said. "So is grief. That doesn't mean people shouldn't feel them. Emotions are part of life. It's when they take on a life of their own—figuratively or otherwise—that they become a problem."

She took a half-step closer to me and put her other hand on mine. "There's a reason anger is associated with fire imagery so much. It can cause a lot of harm if it burns out of control, but it's also warming. It can light the way in darkness like a torch, define boundaries like a line of candles, ward off dangers like a bonfire, or empower us like a furnace. Anger is, at the end of the day, the feeling of being transgressed against. It motivates us to defend ourselves, to stop people from doing things that are unacceptable. Yes, maybe you've been angry enough to hurt people on purpose. But who? People who happened to be too close to you at the wrong time, or people who were doing things you absolutely needed them to stop doing?"

That was… one way to describe some of the more murderous actions I had taken.

"Look, Roxy," Akane continued, "I'm sure Nicky bemoaned how violence is no longer an acceptable answer to unacceptable conduct, especially for magical girls in the public eye, so you know we aren't pacifists as a matter of course. Leaving violence as a last resort does not mean being unwilling to resort to it when absolutely necessary. And do you really think Nicky wouldn't enjoy punching a Nazi so hard his limbs landed in the 1940s?"

"I… mmm."

Neither of us spoke for nearly a minute.

"You're right that I feel safe around you," I admitted, "but you really shouldn't feel safe around me."

"But I do," Akane said. "The only way you're going to make me stop is to hurt me, and I think we both know you aren't willing to do that."

"Willing, God no," I said. "That doesn't mean I won't do it by accident. I am not a caring, conscientious person."

"If you weren't a caring, conscientious person, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Akane said. "And I don't mean 'I wouldn't have approached you', I mean that you would not be arguing against a relationship on the basis that I would be the one being hurt. You made mistakes in your past relationships? Everyone has. The tragedy is that you, in the present, are so caring and conscientious that you would rather not try at all than risk repeating your mistakes on another person.

"Well, Roxy, I am willing to accept that risk. In fact, I am a grown, adult woman who is capable of understanding and communicating my emotional and physical needs and desires. If you don't fulfill your end of the bargain, we can address that when it happens—but I would have had to have misjudged you utterly for that to be an issue."

Akane stepped forward again, careful angling herself so I had all the space in the room to back away if I so chose. "We can go as slow as you need, be as careful as you need, but please, Roxy, don't let yourself believe you're unworthy of love."

I took a deep breath.

"You need to tell me what you see," I decided. "The more you try to justify things with your 'reading' skills, the more it feels like you're reacting to events that never happened. Like, maybe if we'd known each other for a month, you could point to things I'd said or done and say, 'I really appreciate this about you', or something, but this whole thing is going off something you and only you can see, and I cannot, in good conscience, jump into bed with you on a hunch."

Akane stepped back—not far enough that she had to let go of my hand, but far enough that she could give me a look from head to toe without having to crane her neck in either direction.

"There are things I can point to that you've done just in the three days you've been here," she said. "You've cooked two meals out of three since you moved in. You fixed the hinge on the bathroom door so it doesn't squeak anymore. You flit around in the background picking up after me even though we both know I'd deal with the mess soon enough. You spent most of this morning reorganizing the horrorshow that was my spice rack."

"The spice rack isn't evidence of me being conscientious," I protested. "Just that I'm autistic."

"And the other things?"

"You know that autistic people are especially sensitive to unpleasant noises and textures, right? That's all just self-preservation—I have to live here, too. And I have ADHD, I need to burn off my energy somehow and cleaning is useful."

"But that's still a choice you make," Akane said. "And that's one of the things I admire about you, Roxy: you're who you are by choice. You're meticulously conscientious not by nature but because you refuse to hurt people through carelessness or inaction. You step in to help in ways big and small not because you want respect or appreciation but because you know it's the right thing to do and you choose to be the one to do it. You know when to take pride in yourself and when to swallow your pride and admit that you're wrong. You've hurt and been hurt badly in the past, socially ostracized for mistakes you made in ignorance, and you not only accepted your share of the responsibility, you promised yourself you would never paid that pain forward. You try to handle people so gently not because you think they're made of spun glass, but because you'd rather die than risk hurting them on accident… but when you need to, you step up and protect the people who need protecting, even if it hurts you to do so."

"Is that what you think I'm doing right now?" I asked. "Protecting you from me?"

"Aren't you?"

"Someone has to. I don't care how confident you are with your super-people-judging-skills, you haven't asked a lot of very important questions. Like how I managed to screw up so badly people never wanted to deal with me again, or why I ended up homeless. You have no idea where I came from or where I'm going, or when—to be honest, I don't know 'when' either, but I will be going, sooner or later—what are you laughing at?"

"Sorry!" Akane exclaimed. "It's just… I never thought someone would actually give me the ol' western, 'I'm sorry, lass, but my heart belongs to the windin' road.'"

"Can you please take this seriously?"

"I'm perfectly serious. You, Roxy, are lonely because on some level, you think it's what you deserve. You push people away because you believe deep down that it's the only way to protect them from your own innate harmfulness. But you're wrong on both counts. You deserve the same happiness you want for other people, and you aren't the blightful burden you think you are." Akane let the statement hang in the air for a moment before giving me her best soothing smile. "I know you don't trust yourself, but could you trust me? Trust that I can look after myself if you do have to leave, and stand up for myself if you cross any boundaries before then? Trust me when I say you deserve to be happy, Roxy, even if it's fleeting?"

I swallowed.

"Yeah," I whispered, my voice hoarse. "I trust you."

She didn't ruin the moment by going in for a kiss right there—she just held me close as I let the weight of years of regret begin to slip from my shoulders.