"Yeah. Okay. When did you first encounter Billy apologizing for things?"

" - oh, right, the talent show rehearsal. I didn't even, like - I didn't see him, the first time, and it was dark, so I just kind of assumed someone had run into someone else, or something? But then I recognized his voice again later when I ran into these vampires who were going to....... when I was attacked by vampires, after I left the Mayor's office. And that time I remembered that I'd seen him in the hospital, too."

"Okay. Doesn't really seem like you could've put that together a whole lot faster."

"It'd've been hard. I guess he might have been other places and I just didn't notice him? Maybe I'd have seen him again if I'd been looking harder and not  focusing as much on, uh, going places."

Nod. "Okay, next failure, didn't take steps to protect people close to you. This happened to go badly for them because bad things happened to literally everyone in the city, but we'd also have been putting them at risk if this was some attempt to hurt you personally or get to us through you or draw you out into a bad situation, so it was a tactical error in many scenarios we might've been facing."

She nods seriously.

"What do you think you should've done there?"

" - I definitely at minimum should have called my sister and explained where I was and what was happening. We probably should have taken her and Connor to Michael's with us, that seems like it would have been an appropriate response to me getting hit with hallucinatory bullets. But I also sort of feel now like anything can go after them at any time, even if we haven't had a warning like that? And you're good at what you do but you still have to, like, drive places. So I don't know how safe they are in general."

"Yeah. It might just make sense to try to convince them to come live here, and even then someone can catch them coming and going if they really want."

"Yeah. It's... hard to know how much it makes sense to ask them to give up for this, since the amount of danger they're in on a regular basis is really unclear? They've been fine, apart from this, but if really big and dangerous and unpredictable things happen once a year then they're not very safe at all. But they also have, like, lives. And then I don't know how many resources it makes sense for you guys to spend on just me. And... I know nobody's perfectly safe, and stuff, I just don't know where the lines are between negligence and reasonable precautions and really unreasonable ones."

"Yeah. It also matters, for that, whether you think kidnapping your family is in fact a good avenue to making you do awful things."

She looks at the ground.

"I don't feel like it's a great avenue, but I don't know that I expect kidnappers to know that. And you could probably get me to do stupid things. For Connor, anyway."

"How much would it disrupt their lives to live here?"

"Dunno. It'll look weird. Couldn't have friends over anymore. And they'd have to move everything. Commutes won't be that much worse. ...of course if Azalea saw the place she would probably be on board. But it's also Michael's house, and stuff? Where he lives?"

"Oh, did he not mention yet - higher-up wants us out of here, they think Sunnydale's in more danger with us here than with us gone. Michael told the Pope or whoever he tells that he wants to transfer. It might be ages before they let him - I get the sense Sunnydale's not wildly popular - but, uh, eventually. 

I haven't been told to leave."

" - oh. OK. - but they want you to?"

"I think they think Sunnydale might be safer if I did, which would mean I should. I don't think it's clear-cut enough to - disrupt established commitments, yet."

"Oh."

The death numbers will go back up, if he leaves; she can't find and defeat dangerous entities all on her own fast enough to prevent them from killing people. They won't go all the way back up, she's probably better than nothing. And she has Wishbone, and Dennis and Mercy and Chris, and Zeke if she really needs him, but - it won't be enough to avoid missing things. It'll maybe still be worth it if the city would otherwise explode, but - well.

Also she'll die. That's fine, though.

"That makes sense."

"I'd just ignore them if they were wrong." He shifts unhappily. "I might anyway, since - if you hadn't noticed yet - I'm not a good person."

"...you are, though," she says, quietly. "As much as anyone is, anyway."

"Uh, there's lots of people who don't do any murder."

She picks idly at the sofa she's sitting on.

"...I wrote it all out, after it happened. What all the nightmares were, and who they had to belong to, and the points where I was definitely confused about things. And I think - I think the part where you killed me wasn't my nightmare. If it were my nightmare it would have happened differently. And then I went back, and - Cory Daniels wasn't my nightmare, either. The birds stuck to your car weren't my nightmare. Having to kill people for the Silmarils was super not my nightmare. The high school and the babies were maybe pulling double duty, but - there was kind of a pattern, to the things that had to be yours. So - I dunno what you were before, or what exactly you did, or anything, really, so I guess maybe it's not my place to say, but - I think that really evil things aren't terrified of hurting people. So I don't think you're one of them."

"I think you can end up pretty darn evil while meaning the whole time not to hurt anyone. I think most people do."

" - no, it's not that you don't mean to. I'm going to say this wrong, but - lots of people have justifications for the things they do wrong, or reasons why the things they do are actually OK, are maybe even good, and why they shouldn't be held accountable for their effects. But that's not the thing you do, I don't think? It's not what happened in the nightmare. You never thought the stuff you were doing was right, or OK, you just didn't have the freedom to stop doing it. You kept giving people lifelines, but nobody took them, 'cause you're scared that people won't. And you told me to try to save the people at the school, and you kept telling me to focus on ending the nightmares even though you couldn't, and you tried to give me ways to give you the Silmaril without having to die or to totally trust you about everything, and I just - I really don't think you get to count the fact that you're terrified of being forced into doing evil stuff as evidence that you're evil. Not any more than I get to count the fact that I'm scared of being the stupidest person alive as evidence that I am.

" - or, alternatively, there aren't any good people, I'd buy that too. But in that case it doesn't say anything about you that you're not one of them."

" - I've killed and eaten people. I've burned a forest down because I was mad at a guy in it and he wasn't even actually in it anymore and I knew that. I - I can hear the pigs screaming and I still buy Wishbone bacon because I'm not, like, the kind of person who - stops people - everyone here is murdering babies all the time and we've decided not to do anything about it because do you know how many people you have to torture their whole lives just to deter five percent of them - I kidnapped a girl once and told her I'd marry her, I - I don't know if there are any good people, I think once there might've been, but even then I wasn't one."