"You don't have to do anything in particular. Do you want me to go away?"
She hops off Sherlock's shoulder and proceeds along the headboard until she's next to Path's perch.
"I'm watching you," Path says. "I'm used to learning things about people by watching their daemons."
"Great," says Subtrahend. She sits still, with the occasional flick of her tail, and stares at him.
"It doesn't work nearly as well on bird daemons," Path adds loftily. "We have very limited facial expressions."
"How do I not make sense?" Path asks, genuinely bewildered. "This - along with helping my Isabella understand herself - is basically my job description, interacting with other people's daemons."
"You're not interacting with me," Subtrahend points out. "You're just sitting there watching me. And pecking my nose."
"We're having a conversation right now," Path points out. "And I didn't peck you. I just nuzzled you a little."
"I don't get it," she says softly.
"You can ask me questions. I'll do my best to help," Path says.
"Sherlocks are prone to - depersonalization issues," she says, "thinking they're not real people, that they don't know how to act like real people or understand real people and their place in the world is basically to make somebody else's life easier, and my Sherlock mostly doesn't have those problems anymore but I do. Because I don't know how to act like a real daemon and I don't understand anything and nobody including me wants me to exist and I literally am a fundamentally dependent extension of another person!"
Path thinks better of this sentence partway through.
"I'm not another person from my Isabella. We're the same. But it doesn't bother me because she's a wonderful person to be part of. And the dependence goes both ways, anyway," he adds, more quietly, suddenly feeling the need to preen a feather in his wing.
"Well, I don't know how wonderful Sherlock is, but I'm apparently rude and bitchy and violent," says Subtrahend. "There's probably something wrong with me. I can't imagine there wouldn't be, really."
Path nudges closer to her and offers a wing that she might duck her head under if she wanted.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with you," Path says. "If there were going to be something it would probably have to do with Sherlock being a vampire, but that my Isabella noticed right away when we met, and we don't sense anything like it now. You just register normal, now. But you have reasons to be upset."