Michael's with the mummy girl. She was attacked last night, right as you were tracking Drusilla, by a swordsman who believes he has to stop her before she kills people. She thinks he was activated somehow when the seal broke. We don't know where he is. He broke down the door of Michael's house and the door to her bedroom; she had to escape out the window. 

Well. All right then.

I asked Wishbone to look up more about vampires with mind control abilities, and particularly the remote mind-control thing. Under less precarious circumstances I'd suggest that Michael or I take turns sticking near you and reading you until we're sure that's not happening, but I tried to read you back at the hospital when he first raised the possibility and I got the sense it'd be a really bad time for us to be doing that.

That. Might be slightly non-ideal. Yeah.

Sorry.

Just means we need to think of something else. The problem here is that I don't super want to leave you with a team because if you were, in fact, suddenly mind-controlled I think you could take them all down. But you should stay home from school today anyway, since you were attacked last night. And it seems likely that Wishbone will know a bit more by this evening, so we don't have to worry about this now. 

Yeah. OK.

You wanna talk about everything else, we absolutely can, but I didn't have any right to be in your head and unless you bring it up I'm gonna pretend I wasn't.

We probably should. I guess. I kinda don't want to right this second, but - I suppose if I get upset enough that it makes me worse at doing my job then I probably have a responsibility to figure out how to get un-upset.

Also sometimes if you check the stuff in your head against reality sooner it gets less - tsunami-sized. I'm not gonna hurt Drusilla. 

OK.

Thanks.

Not as, like, a favor, though I would do it as a favor if you asked. The things I asked Spike were whether he'd had backup, whether anyone'd told him to do it, where Drusilla was. So we could stop her. Unless she has made a vampire army whose hideout is unknown to us by the time we catch up with her, it wouldn't even make any sense.

Yeah. OK. That makes sense.

The vampires all have television and books and blood and regular visitors because being alone isn't good for people. I'm not - I'm not saying I'm not a terrible person, you know where I stand on that, I'm not saying I didn't hurt Spike pretty badly because I did, but Drusilla'll be comfortable, and the rest of them already are.

OK. That helps.

Like, I still have all these feelings about being useless and stuff, but it helps. - I don't even know which parts of the twisty mess you got.

Uh, you were scared I'd hurt her, and worried that being tortured would be traumatic for her, and worried that you weren't useful because the three most recent problems haven't been Slayable ones, and worried that this meant you had to go along with whatever the government wanted, as if they could do a damn thing about it if you did something else with your vampires, and figured that, uh, if it bothered you that I hurt Spike, then this was your fault - I don't even think you meant it was your fault I hurt Spike, I think you meant it was your fault that you were bothered I hurt Spike, but maybe it was both? - anyway that it was your fault because you had been unable to best him in single combat and the only sustainable solution where you weren't miserable was that you be unbeatable so that nothing bad could happen to anything you failed to beat.

Ah.

I wanna take a second to point out that I do, like, know that a lot of these things are stupid.

Yeah, of course. It's none of my business, I don't get to read your mind just because I can. 

But it doesn't seem stupid to me.

No?

Uh, no? I'd have pretty mixed feelings about handing Drusilla over if I thought anyone was gonna hurt her, and I hate it when people figure they can tell me what to do because they have resources I don't, or because they haven't screwed up and I have, or -  well, really for any reason, having to rely on people is just infinitely worse than handling everything yourself actually.

It's not infinitely worse if the people you have to rely on are, like, reliable. And stuff. Like, it's never terrible relying on Wishbone. Or you, or at least it wasn't until the twisty mess got all - big.

- I just, like, I was doing really really well at not being like this, since I became the slayer, because, like - I had a thing to do that wasn't just meeting other people's expectations, and then later people had expectations for me but I was meeting them, I was doing OK, I was fixing things, and then - I know I'm not gonna be able to pull off a perfect victory every time, and sometimes I even won't be able to win against something that it looks like I really should have been able to beat, and it's not my fault, or anything, but people are still gonna die for it, and -

- I dunno. I dunno where I'm going with any of this. I just - 

- I don't wanna turn eighteen because when you're eighteen people stop grading you on a curve. And I still care about that, when I'm thinking about it, but - a lot of the time now I don't really care about the curve. I care about, like, people not dying, and people being OK, and actually accomplishing my goals - I don't even know where I got goals - and it's just, like -

- I just really want to figure out how to make things less bad. And I kind of don't really know how to do that.

I'm sorry.

S'OK. Or, like, it's not, but as long as I'm not fundamentally failing as a human or anything I think I'll bounce back.

Things could be a lot worse.

That's not what I mean, I mean, you needed me to be a certain kind of way, and I'm not, and I'm sorry.

Oh.

No, I'm still lost actually, what?

Now we have the problem where I'm not - good at talking -

He tries to send it anyway. 

Okay. So. People and Valar and Maiar and so on, they tell others what to do. Sometimes this is directly 'unless you do what you're told, bad things will happen to you', and sometimes it's just 'unless you do what you're told, I won't love you' or 'unless you do what you're told, bad things will happen which isn't even my fault, I'm just warning you'. 

All of these are inherently soul-crushing and bad for people. People are only actually okay when no one is telling them what to do and when all the important things are theirs no matter what. 

(People also give advice. That's usually shaped like 'the best way to get the thing you want? I bet it's this", and in theory that's okay but in practice lots of people manage to be the kind of people whose advice is just telling you what to do, too, or at least what to try, but that's kind of a digression because he's bad at this, see, you're supposed to do it in words and even if you don't do it in words you're supposed to do it in narrative and he can't even do that.)

So - in the world, which is bad, important things aren't there no matter what, can't be, but you can at least try to make the attached strings not dangling right there, except that metaphor makes it feel like the important thing is how obvious the strings are when it's fine for them to be obvious, it's just not okay for them to be strategic. That's not the thing either. Maybe he can do it with examples. 'I won't be your friend if you murder my whole family' doesn't damage friendships very much because they're not usually between people who want to murder each others' whole families and because no one thinks you deliberately put yourself in the habit of feeling that way in order to discourage your friends from murder. 'I won't be your friend if you talk to her' damages friendships more. 

And, like, sometimes you get lucky? And the things people need from each other to get stuff done in the stupid bad world just don't happen to be things that strangle each other too badly, like, Karen was observing how relying on Wishbone wasn't terrible, like that. And relying on him didn't used to be terrible, and now it is, and he knows how completely horrible and soul-crushing relying on someone when it's terrible is, so that part, he's sorry about that part, and he's confused about what about that she doesn't understand because it honestly seems very obvious, he's not sure what reaction normal people expect from 'I used to be able to rely on you but now that's horrible' but 'I'm sorry' kind of seems like the bare minimum, and, it's not a catastrophe or anything, people doing what other people tell them is only a weird kludge to deal with everything being horrible anyway and he's used to not having it and to working with people when they don't have it, but it was important to Karen so it seems at least worth acknowledging that it'd be better for her if he were shaped the way that made it work, right?