She looks at the ground.

She thinks that proper snuggles will maybe not happen tonight. Apparently she is the sort of person who is terrified of snuggles.

"D'you think you could just - hold me?"

"Yeah. Of course." 

- did she mean while she is standing there or is she going to come over here - he probably isn't supposed to stand there holding her - but maybe he is - well if she doesn't do anything in a couple seconds he'll stand up -

Yeah she's just gonna stand here actually. Everything is terrible.

Well okay that's fine. He stands up and walks over and gives her a hug.

Hug.

"M'sorry. For not being better at this."

"I don't think you're bad at this?" That wasn't true at all, wow. "I think most sixt-" no, don't make someone feel like a little kid when you are trying to have sex with them, "most people would have a really hard time with this?" There! True and not all that condescending. "I'm not, like, expecting you to have already figured everything out."

"OK."

She's scared and sad and her stomach is all knotted up and she's trying trying trying not to let herself tremble.

"I just - it's a pretty unreasonable thing to ask of someone, and it's cool of you to help, and I just, I wish I could at least make it easy and - other than really horrible for you."

"Uh, I mean, so, this is very awkward, definitely the most awkward that my life has ever been, but ... later we're going to kill a baby? So this doesn't, actually, really stack up at all honestly. Also - it seems like this is pretty clearly terrifying for you? And it's not, for me, I'm not going to get hurt, I'm just going to feel kind of bad about myself, so, I don't think you should really be worrying about that at all on top of everything else."

"It's a little terrifying," she acknowledges. It is the most terrifying thing she has ever done. "I'm - better at killing stuff when it involves more, uh, killing stuff."

"I figured. Anyway, like, if you're making a list of things to be upset about, I think 'no hot showers ever again' should be ranked significantly higher than you making things awkward for me. Not a big deal, not your fault, not your problem."

She checks whether she can maybe laugh at that. She can't.

"OK.

"I'm - trying to think of ways to make this less terrifying, and I'm not immediately coming up with any promising ideas."

"I'm gonna sound like a bit of a broken record here but...waiting? Especially since - especially since, just realistically here, we're going to be able to try a lot more often if you're not traumatized."

She briefly consults her image of her twenty-year-old self. Twenty-year-old Karen, do you feel like you're probably going to be any less traumatized by having to have illicit sex with someone you don't know or like or want to marry and who probably thinks you're a total dumbass?

(Well, sixteen-year-old Karen, I'm glad you asked. No, I think sex is probably going to just keep being terrifying until you figure out how to make it not be terrifying. But I do think it'd be less terrifying with someone you - OK, loved might be too much to hope for here, but generally trusted, even if you had less than no interest in having sex with them under normal circumstances. Like, if Dennis were here - forgive me, younger self, I need to use someone as an example - you'd be nervous and worried about what he'd think of you and worried about whether you'd hurt him, but you wouldn't be like this, because you'd both be scared and upset, but you'd be on a team, you'd be slaying a god together, you'd know that together you had this in you, and - that would be enough. Because you trust each other and you know each other and you would definitely, definitely be on a team.)

Her projected twenty-year-old self makes some compelling points.

"I - don't know that waiting will help by itself. Knowing you better seems like it might, but that implies - needing to figure out how to make that happen, not assuming that if we wait longer it just magically will."

"Okay. Well, uh, we can talk. Do you know - what sorts of things it'd help to know?"

"Uh." Whether he likes her or cares about her or is going to keep her safe and not be terrible and be gentle and OK if she breaks down crying and honestly could she be any more pathetic. Think. Think of something not-pathetic to say. Come on, Karen, you killed Lurconis that one time, you shot your best friend in the head, you forged an unbreakable friendship bond with a vampire serial killer in no time flat, surely you can figure out an activity that everyone who has ever reproduced in the entire history of the world has also figured out.

"...honestly I'm a little unclear on how I get to know people? I think mostly everything is on fire all the time and I tend to just grab people to help put out the fires and then at some point I look up and I have a bunch of friends who I really trust, because I've put out a bunch of insane fires with them, but problematically the only fire that seems to be worth putting out right now is... this."

"Okay."

" - we could try to reconstruct the Bible together from memory because otherwise this timeline won't have it for a really long while." Wow that's the least sexy activity anyone has ever suggested.

"Yeah, OK, lemme grab some paper."

Well, it's something.

She leaves and returns with lots of paper.

"OK, so, skeleton." She sings a song that has all of the books of the Bible in it a few times through, writing them down as she goes. She doesn't remember where all of the apocrypha go because this is a protestant song, so she kinda notes those off to the side. "OK. I remember how Genesis starts - I won't get the wording of the whole creation section right, but I think I remember all of the days, and the structure of each is kind of similar. I remember how John and Luke start. Matthew starts with the genealogy of Christ, and we're never going to get that right, except that David's in there somewhere. I don't remember how Mark starts, I think with the baptism of Christ? That sounds right. Um - here, maybe if we sort events into the books they happen in and then note down any specific wording that goes with each event - we can have one sheet per book to start - "

He takes some sheets of paper. He remembers less than her overall but has like three quarters of the Sermon on the Mount by heart - "we had this really tedious pastor and I figured I wasn't slacking off if I was trying to memorize it instead -" and remembers lines from a long string of school plays and can sometimes finish a sentence if Karen starts it.

Karen has a kind of ridiculously good memory for random lines of things, and also spent like seven years in parochial school memorizing different verses of things every week " - not just the Bible, I've got some poetry and the first amendment and the Gettysburg Address and most of the Declaration of Independence, but a lot of the Bible - " and on top of that used to spend every night when she was very small getting read to from this version of the Bible that was a comic book and had sequential pictures of lots of different stories - so despite being terrible at actually consistently reading the Bible on her own, she's pretty good at this.

" - OK, I don't remember anything that happens in Habakuk. Nehemiah's the one about the wall. And - I'm sure other things happen in it at some point. The minor prophets are rough. - I feel like I have lots of stuff from the epistles but I mostly don't remember which things go with which epistle. Maybe we should just have a page for stuff that's probably from one of the epistles somewhere."

"Sure."

"OK."

Genesis grows some more pages. Exodus grows a second. Leviticus is painfully blank with the words "something about shellfish? mixed fabrics??" on it. She has the whole "Love is patient, love is kind" sequence but has no idea which epistle it goes with. Maybe Galatians? Her brain thinks a lot of things might go in Galatians, it's possible that it's just giving her that answer for everything. She has part of Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Something something. In this way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

" - y'know, it's weird, I think the sex part wouldn't be a sin if we were married. Unless we went and tried to be... not married, and went off and did stuff with other people later. And - I feel like it's stupid to care about that, even, since I'm gonna go to hell anyway - feel like it's stupid to care either way, really, because, I mean, why does premarital sex matter if you're gonna go to hell, and why does extramarital sex matter if you're gonna go to hell, but - knowing you're gonna go to hell makes a bunch of things weird, I guess."

He knows Leviticus! Or, well, he knows that it contains a lot of rules about sacrificial offerings of livestock though he's not sure of the details so it's probably better to leave them out, and it's where 'thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman, it's an abomination' is from, along with "uh, not your mother, not your father, not your sister, not your niece, not your aunt, not your daughter-in-law, not your brother's wife, and don't sacrifice your children to Moloch, that's all Leviticus -"

"I think you're being kind of hard on yourself, there? I mean unless you're reasoning that Jesus doesn't exist yet which is true I guess, but. I dunno. I always knew I was going to kill a lot of people in my life and some of them would be innocent, and I think, you know, the big picture matters."

"No, I don't think so. I think - I think that God can forgive anything. Anyone who repents, anyone who asks him. But you have to repent. And this - Catholics don't believe in choosing the lesser of two evils. Not when both things are inherently evil. There's always a - there's always something you can do, some right answer, and it's never the one marked 'sacrifice your infant in a pagan ritual'. But I don't know. I don't know what the right option is. And - I know that this isn't it, but - at least this way fewer people have to die than if we do nothing. Baby goes to heaven, not their fault. Little orc babies grow up safe in little orc cities and tell stories about orc reconstruction. I don't know how to repent of that, not if I don't see what the right thing was. And I go to hell, I get to give up eternal life, but - greater love hath no man than this, that he give up his life for his brothers. I guess.

" - where does that one go, Romans? Is it even 'brothers', or is it 'friends'?"