"...I'll bear it in mind. In case it's ever merited."

They return to Assembly™ before it ends so that Pete can meet up with his age(?)mates and they can go to class.

Tom waves semi-ironically as he walks past.

Pete waves at him completely genuinely.

...he looks pleased.

...oh right.

"I feel like I should be explaining myself."

"You don't have to. The boys did tell me you... like him."

"That's... not exactly true but not exactly false either."

Susan's mouth works a bit.

"If you do feel like explaining, go ahead," she says, instead of whatever she was trying to phrase.

"...can you tell me? About..."

"He killed my friend. What more do I have to explain? I'm not the one with mixed feelings about him."

He flinches like he's been punched, and his heart starts racing. "I don't actually know what happened. That's not the story he told me but I—know that he's not even just biased, about this. But I don't actually know. Sorry I can—ask someone else if it's—"

Pete kind of wishes he could use Backchannel here but the thing about Backchannel is that it requires him to want to know what he wants to communicate? And he doesn't. Or, he wants her to know that he—knows what he's doing—but he's not sure he does, actually? Except by narrative fiat, and there isn't really any way to talk about that without going into how he's a Transfer.

He definitely can't say that he thinks he'll be able to bring her back eventually. Even though he will.

The anger drains out of her face; it was never really at home there. She shakes her head to clear a few tears. "No - no, I'm being completely unfair... you don't know, you wouldn't know. I'm just–"

She inhales. "I'm sorry. I'll tell you. I... don't think you'd get the whole story from anyone else, and I won't pretend I'm not biased either, but."

"Okay. ...I'm not sure if offering you a hug is the right kind of thing to do but, well, I guess I'm offering."

He kind of could use a hug, now, though that'd be selfish, since the reason he wants a hug is because he accidentally stepped on an enormous emotional landmine and upset her.

"Please." Hug. Ridiculous, for her to need a hug after as-good-as slapping Pete in the face, but she's allowed to be selfish.

"...Ulyana transferred in year nine," she says after a few seconds. "She was on scholarship, and her English wasn't so good but her French was good enough that Ed and I could talk to her, and Peter could muddle through. She didn't know very much outside her books. Raised Orthodox.

"She was so lonely.

"I – thought Tom seemed lonely too, when he asked her to study with him. Maybe he was. He learned Russian for her. They were... cute. If you didn't look too close. But he took something out of her. She made herself sick for him, cut everyone off, stopped studying. And he just got happier, as she was dying.

"I don't actually know if he meant her to kill herself. It seemed a shock to everyone. But you don't have to want someone to die, to be the one who kills them."

...yeah. Yeah, he knows.

"Can I... tell you about someone I once knew?"

"Go ahead."

He has to pull away from this hug because it's hard to talk about and he might want more hugs later but right now it, it feels... wrong.

"His name was Matt. Matthew. He was... He wanted to be a pilot. An airplane pilot. He was obsessed with airplanes, he..." God, thinking about this is painful. Really, really painful. "He was also really depressed. His family life was... not ideal... I think the obsession was some way he found to escape, not that it wasn't genuine, of course, but still, he was..."

Pete squeezes his eyes shut. "He was in love with me. And I wasn't in love with him. But I—made a mistake. We got together, we didn't, didn't exactly date but we didn't not date. I really liked him. As a friend. I liked to listen—" No, let's not go there, he doesn't really want to remember what he liked about Matt, that'll just hurt more. "I never led him on. Or, not on purpose. I explicitly told him I didn't, wasn't, wasn't in love with him. I wasn't going to give him what he wanted from me. And he got—I don't know if he got worse. But he started to really depend on me. Airplanes and me. And he said—"

"Matt said he needed me. He said he couldn't imagine a life without me. He said he couldn't live on without me. He said, on a very bad day, that if I couldn't be with him then he'd kill himself." He licks his lips, mouth suddenly really dry. He still doesn't open his eyes. They seem to be starting to burn for some reason. "I told him that I couldn't be that for him and that he, he, I couldn't be someone's lifeline. Couldn't be someone's only person. And later, when he was having a good day, I told him that if he ever said that to me again I'd—leave." He swallows. "I know it was selfish, I know it—but I couldn't. I couldn't have this on me, couldn't be that for him, couldn't spend so much time worried about him and wondering if today was going to be the day he was going to decide it wasn't enough.

"He agreed. He said that it wasn't okay for him to do that to me, he said that I was right, he said he was going to—go into therapy, to figure something out. I believed him, at the time, I don't know why. But he never did. And he still had bad days. Still needed me. And he had another really bad day just like that one and—

"The last contact I had from him was him stopping at my place while I was away and dropping a book for me. It was a book he really liked. About airplanes. I never saw him again, or, he didn't use Instagram or anything else, and I don't..."

He's finding it hard to breathe. Hard to speak. His shoulders are shaking and he doesn't know why, or he doesn't want to know why, because he hasn't thought about Matt in this much detail in—over two years, not that he can tell Susan that, since he's pretending not to be eighteen, but—he doesn't want to think about this.

He keeps talking. "I d-don't know if-if he's a-al-alive. I d-don't kn-kn-know what happened t-to him."

He's having trouble breathing again. "You d-don't have to want s-someone t-to d-die." Gasping breath, calm yourself down, man. "To be the one who kills them."

Okay now she's the one hugging.

"I'm sorry. I'm —”

(Sniffling.)

"—you tried to help. Right? You said it, you were miserable by the end."

Yeah he will actually accept the hug this time, God he hadn't realised how much that still hurt. And he feels like such an asshole to be hurt like that because someone else was hurt, like, how fucking selfish does he have to be, right—

And the Spirit gave him a way to fix that, to be able to be that for someone, to have Matt come out—alright—at the end—

Oh thinking about that is actually making him cry harder, God fucking damnit, now he can't even speak.

Two teenagers crying on each other in the middle of campus is concerning but not by any means unprecedented. Susan gets them both over to a bench.

Yeah, good, sitting down is. Probably a good idea.