Ranyi's trying to get rid of a weird fruit she bought a whole box of and it might be good in smoothies, you could come over.

Sure.

Should I come get you?

Yeah, if it's not too much trouble. I'm still a big fan of roc rides.

"Aww, thank you! Look, Liqing, it's you." Liqing is not impressed. "She loves it," Beila says anyway. Waft onto bird. Pilot bird to house.

"She's totally identifiable," Beila confirms.

Dao grins. "I feel all accomplished and stuff!"

"Yeah, it's not bad but she shouldn't have gotten quite this much of it."

"Well, I will help you out by drinking your weird fruit smoothies."

"I appreciate that."

"Happy to help!"

Sip. Sip. "You're feeling better, seems like."

"I'm - yeah."

"That's good."

"Yeah. Uh, how've you been?"

"Eating a lot of weird fruit. Conventional Avatarring stuff. I read half of a really good book on South Polar history and then lost it on the train and have it on hold again at the library."

"Aw. That poor book, getting lost on the train."

"Yeah. But it was awful flying weather, so I stand by my train use, I wouldn't have wanted to be late to the memorial."

"The memorial?"

"It was in the papers that I was involved with finding Sora. In a rather garbled way, but still. And one of the victims' families invited me to the memorial service."

"Oh."

"One of the others sent me a letter but the funeral was weeks ago, so even if they would have invited me it didn't come up."

"I don't think I read the papers; what did they even end up saying about it?"

"Republic City police were called to the location of the serial killer, deceased in a conflict with the Avatar, turned out to have been a bloodbender using pyrotechnic equipment, insert about new bloodbending information available on page six."

"So the usual procedures for ruling out bloodbending in criminal processing have been updated. People are nervous about that but it'll die down."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

Vaguely awkward silence. Weird fruit smoothie.

"It's just... very different from how I think so I'm not sure what to make of it."

"Well... I think maybe you haven't gotten a good impression of what I've been thinking about for the last couple of weeks, because I've been avoiding you the whole time?"

"That could be it, yeah."

"Yeah."

"Do you want to tell me what you've been thinking?"

"...I'm not sure? Like... I don't not want to, exactly, maybe, but I don't... know what you want to hear?"

"I didn't ask for, like... recreational purposes."

"I, uh, what?"

"It's not about what I want to hear, I mean."

"...I haven't come up with a less hopelessly incomprehensible way to say the thing that's been bothering me than 'I understand your perspective but I don't understand your perspective'. Um, with the part I understand being - I get what factors and ingredients and experiences would cause the parts of your feelings on the whole subject that I can see, but I don't have a good understanding of their ratio. And I usually find other people's feelings-ratios bizarre but this feels more fundamental."

"Okay... uh, well, I don't really know what to say, still, because... do you just want me to say I'm sad that those people got killed? Like, I am."

"That's... not what I mean, although it's in the neighborhood..."

"Then I kinda don't know what you're asking me for."

"Iiiii think so? Although if I tried it I would go crazy, because wow?"

"Well, I mean, this is not a literal line, I can't account for everybody in the world. But I can make a good guess about who's on the ends of the lines when they rise to my attention. Everybody anywhere on the line still matters. If I could help, like, the bottom half of the line or the top quarter of the line, and those things would take the same amount of time and cost the same in - resources-in-general, with the well being of other people on the line being one of those resources - then it would be better to help the bottom half than the top quarter. But that's usually not the case because the easiest way to be at the top part of the line is to be helping, is to be looking after some of the other people on the line somewhere and making it so I don't have to worry about them directly."

"Okay..."

"And the easiest way to drop to the bottom of the line is to start killing people and I feel like you resent me for making that tradeoff, maybe because it involved uncertainties and I wasn't positive he was going to kill anybody else?"

"I wanted him to be okay too. But I didn't have a safe way to do it."

"Maybe I'm not getting the significance of the resemblance..."

"Probably not. You don't have weird problems like my weird problems."

"That's true."

"Which is great, I wouldn't wish my weird problems on anybody. But it does kinda mean you don't really know what being me is... like."

"Yeah. ...which kind of bothers me."

"...What do you mean?"

"I dunno, I just - don't really understand you, and maybe you don't really understand me, and I'm not sure we have a way to fix that?"

"Do we need to? Like, is that a thing that needs to be fixed?"

"It's not the end of the world if we don't or anything but it might keep bothering me."

"Well... I don't know what to do about that," he says.

"Me either."

"I guess I don't know... why you want to know what being me is like? Being me kinda sucks."

"I like understanding things. Even things that suck. And I'm your girlfriend, I was expecting at some point I'd - know more about you on a deeper level than I've managed? I don't know if that was a realistic expectation or if I'm just being impatient or what."

"I mean... if there's something you want me to explain, I can try? I'm just not sure it's going to work. I feel like... there are a lot of experiences in my life that you don't share, and most of them are bad experiences, and I don't know how to explain what they're like to somebody who, like, doesn't really have a 'hate yourself' setting as far as I can tell."

"I... don't have that lever, no..."

"Yeah. So. I have one and it sucks and I don't really know how to explain how it works in a way that makes sense when you don't have one."

"I... guess I can see how that wouldn't be the greatest thing, yeah..."

"Do I make sense to you? Or seem like I might eventually...?"

"I mean, mostly, yeah?"

"Mm?"

"...The way you work is really different from the way I work but it makes sense when I try to figure it out, it's just hard to wrap my head around sometimes because you're so... I guess 'lucky'? All these problems that I have and you don't, like hating myself and being afraid of myself and, and weird serial killer feelings."

The ice in Beila's smoothie has melted too much. She refreezes it. "Well, I guess that's something..."

Shrug. Sigh.

"Uh," says Dao.

"Well. I guess that depends," he says. "If this is the kind of thing where I need to figure out how to explain how my brain works or you'll break up with me, then it seems like a good idea for me to know that."

"I mean, I don't want to phrase it as an ultimatum like that, that would be awful, I'm just - wondering if - this is it, this is the level of romantic intimacy the two of us are capable of."

"I have no idea."

"Me either." Headshake. "I don't want to break up, I really really don't..."

"I don't either. So... let's not do that, I guess?"

"I'm trying to figure out if I don't want to break up like I don't want to go to the dentist or like I don't want to set my house on fire."

"Oh."

"...I can think about that not at you, if you prefer."

"I don't know," he sighs.

Smoothie. Slurp.

"I guess it depends if you think I'll have anything useful to contribute."

"I'm not sure. Do you think you might...?"

"Kinda hard to tell without trying it."

"Suppose." Shrug. "Where do you see us going? Where does this end up?"

"I... don't really know?"

"Where do you want it to end up, then?"

"I don't really know that either. I don't have, like, a big plan for how my life is supposed to go. I don't know where I want to be in ten years, besides out of my dad's house and, like, alive and not a serial killer."

"Okay, good."

"Yeah."

"So like... there's kind of not enough there there for me to even say 'we're not compatible', it's not like you want to move to Ember Island or devote your life to protesting various monarchies or something I couldn't be attached to like that, but that's... kind of not helping? Not incompatible but not present enough to be compatible in a more active sense."

"...What do you mean, 'not present'?"

"Your plans are all about places you don't want to be. There's not enough substance for me to think about in terms of the question I'm trying to get at."

"What actually is the question, though?"

"Whether I want to stay together that being the logical consequence of not breaking up."

"Okay... I mean, what are your big life plans?"

"Traveling around for Avataring projects and going back over all the bending forms to polish them and I'm ambivalent about having, like, kids, but I do want a relationship and while I'm listing things I'd probably rather it be properly monogamous at least once I'm no longer literally a teenager and I want to build that bridge and figure out how spirits work and see if there's dead people somewhere and if so whether anything useful can be made of that information and become immortal."

"I'm still going to study structural engineering, I want to like... build stuff... I just don't know what stuff, or where, or anything like that."

Nod.

"...I dunno. I feel like we don't have to know for sure that we're going to be great for each other five years from now to decide not to break up immediately, but... maybe you don't feel like that."

"I mean, there's... degrees of sure."

"As degrees of unsure go, I think 'not having my life figured out yet because I'm only eighteen' is a pretty okay one..."

"You're probably right."

"Like, if you meet a guy tomorrow who already has his life figured out and is, I don't know, trying to reinvent the lost art of spiritbending, maybe break up with me and ask him out, but... I think I'm better than nothing? And I think I'm okay with being just 'better than nothing' and not 'literally perfect'."

"Wow, that would... that would fuck me up real bad but I guess we've established we are very different people."

"It would fuck me up real bad to think of it as my personal job to make every single person in the world happy, so, yeah. I'm, like... I sure don't think I'm perfect, so it would be weird to expect somebody else to? I don't, actually, have my life figured out, and I'm probably not going to reinvent the lost art of spiritbending, but I've got time to figure out what I am going to do."

"Okay." She finishes her smoothie and set it down and leans on him.

Hug.

Snuggle.

Snuggle!

"You," she asserts, "are snuggly."

"It's true, I am."

So Beila takes advantage of this excellent property.

Awesome.