Trouble is in the kitchen, eating oatmeal, when they come down.

"Morning," says Bella, helping herself to oatmeal.

"Good morning," he chirps. "You guys sleep okay?"

"Yeah, fine. You?"

"Peachy."

"Would you rather have our talk without Andi around?" asks Bella neutrally.

"Yeah."

"'Kay," shrugs Andi, and she takes her bowl of oatmeal upstairs.

"So... I don't think I can just figure out what I need, and tell you," he says. "I don't think I can guess that well what you might do that I should warn you off of."

"I don't know either. But if I run headlong into something that turns out to be a huge problem for you, I cannot safely replace you, and that's if your reaction is 'flee to Australia' and not 'sell us to the invading force'. Anybody could be piloted by a Yeerk, to say nothing of your particular talents as bear bait and so on."

"I'm not gonna sell you to the invading force," says Trouble. "There is nothing that could get me to do that on purpose. Not really keen on fleeing to Australia, either." He sighs. "What I mean is... fucking things up with me is pretty easy, some ways, there's stuff I'm touchy about. But fucking things up with me forever is really hard. For you, anyway."

"Temporary screwups could jeopardize delicate things, too."

"Sure," he says. "But, like, I know that. If you manage to piss me off in the middle of kidnapping your dad, I'm not gonna bail on you out of spite."

"Okay. That's good, then."

"For that matter, if he manages to piss me off, I still won't bail on you. But I might wanna stay out of his way as much as possible."

"I don't anticipate needing you to spend much time in close quarters with Charlie."

"Okay, good."

"It would still be good if I could avoid pissing you off."

He shrugs. "Yeah. But - I don't know, I didn't know you were going to say the thing that set me off this time until you said it, I don't know how to guess what the next thing might be. Do you?"

She shrugs. "Do you have a reasonable model of me being desperate, paranoid, overclocked, and some amount of traumatized? Because that's how I'm going to be for the foreseeable future."

"Nnnot really," says Trouble.

"Then that makes it harder to guess. And I can guess what I'll do but not which of those things will upset you."

"...I could try to tell you what about that thing just now got to me," he offers, "if that'd help."

"Potentially very much."

"It's something like... it seemed like you didn't know that I'd think about what it might do to you before running off and planting explosives somewhere," he says. "Like you figured that was a pretty obvious thing for me to do and you had to warn me off it because I wasn't gonna get there myself unless you gave me a shove. And there's something about the way you said it, too, but that's harder to nail down - I could just say I don't like it when somebody tells me what not to do, but that doesn't get all of it."