"Okay, well, might as well just go with you and we can leave Matt–" He looks at Matt, pauses. "We can leave Matt to tiredly recap things to Willow?"

"He already recapped a bit, but sure."

"See you in a bit, then," he says, and grabs his keys from the side to go outside and drive with Sadde to the hospital.

Hopefully none of his neighbors complain about, like, his car going missing or something. He's not sure how far the news has spread but presumably in a town like this most people 'know' by now.

Pretty much, yeah.

"So, how're you feeling today?" she asks once they're in the car.

"… Guilty?"

"About what?"

"Biting your mom," he says. "Not that I did it intentionally and of sound mind, but still."

"Oh. Yeah, I'm feeling guilty as all heck about that, too."

"– Hardly think it's your fault," he says. "Like, sure, we could have tested the threshold thing not at your house but it wasn't clear I'd go psycho or whatever over being carried toward the threshold."

"It was sort of obvious in retrospect, and it's not even about just my house in general, I should've thought of better ways to control—whatever might've gone wrong."

"Should maybe still be thinking about that, like– I mean, it'd be awkward for me to move away from town, and I'm probably mostly safe indoors, but I dunno." Pause. "By the way – the word 'mother' didn't really instantly connect to 'people'. Probably 'cause we'd been reinforcing 'do not bite people' and less so much 'mother is a person, father is a person, do not bite any of the previous category' and so on."

"Yeah. Don't know how to work around that without making an exhaustive list of everything that is a person, though."

"Yeah, but even then I'm not sure I can, like, try to instinct-ify it as easily if I have to do it for all possible person-words. It's easier to sort of, install a 'stop and think' reaction to the word person, less so for all possible other words."

"Can't install a 'stop and think' reaction to the desire to feed, itself?"

"Nope," he says. "Can't do it to literally everything I do, either, get me to check whether it's a good or a bad idea according to what I or pre-vamp me or some other person might consider good or bad, can't automatically filter for weird behavior, can't respond to weird behavior automatically." Sigh. "It honestly seems like I need someone else to shout at me when I do something stupid because this somehow just bypasses all the typical thoughts I might have to stop me from doing that sort of thing."

"Well—have you actually tried?"

"Tried installing the other things I mentioned? Yeah. Still trying in case it's just that they're difficult habits to build – might well be, who knows, the 'stop when biting and someone shouts person' one doesn't even work that reliably, but I have so far had no evidence of them actually working."

"Fair enough, I guess. Needing a spotter is—well, better than not even that helping, I suppose."

"Yep," he agrees. "I think it's mostly due to the sway, though – if you didn't have that over me I would probably be inclined to ignore you while biting on someone."

"Mm. Good thing I have some of it over you, then, I guess? Even if you do have some over me due to it, too."

"Would be even better if neither of the bloodlust and the sway existed and I could just go about being all awesomely superpowered, but yes, at least it's not quite as bad as it could be."

"Yeah... I'm not sure which fictional type I'd rather be, honestly."

"Fictional type of vampire?" he asks. "Well, at least I didn't have the, like, three days of extreme burning pain or three days of having to drink some vampire's blood or whatever."

"Or the turn to dust in the sun, or the allergy to right angles."

"Or the allergy to garlic, or the horrific paleness, or the whole 'inability to empathize' thing or whatever it was."