Nah. Sometimes you just gotta hurt for a bit.

I miss being upset about Snyder.

Yeah. This world - this world sucks. I didn't remember it that way but it sucks.

Wouldn't be doing this if it didn't, I guess.

You're very brave.

Thanks. M'trying to be.

Do you want to, like, play Stratego or something? I dunno if you have, like, important stuff to do, or whatever, but we could probably make a set just out of paper, and - maybe the awful will feel less awful if there's anything non-awful going on. Possibly.

That sounds great. I'll come over.

Cool.

She makes little folded paper pieces and draws numbers or flags or bombs on them, and she makes a map with a grid on it, and then they can play. (Wishbone can play, too, though only if someone moves his pieces for him, which is all right because only two people can play at a time anyway.)

She stops building houses, on the grounds that this might require speaking to or making eye contact with random Quendi ever. This results in her spending a lot of time in her room. She makes an effort not to totally ignore Ryan but she does kind of spend less time hanging out with him.

He's not quite sure what he did wrong or why he's bothered by it but it's fine, really, pretty much. 

He keeps building houses.

She tries to think of alternatives to just doing the same thing again in a month. She's not even sure she can do the same thing in a month, if she tries she'll be even more nervous and probably Ryan will notice and then maybe it won't hurt but maybe it will, and she wants to choose to do the thing but she's not sure her body's gonna let her. She tries to think of ways to open a conversation with Ryan that builds up to 'so do you think you could have sex with me while I was unconscious maybe' without making everything, like, terrible.

She waits fourteen days. Sixteen. Twenty. 

So I'm pretty sure I've officially skipped a period. 

That's....good, right?

Means I may or may not be pregnant right now. It's not, like, definite, I have no idea what the odds are, but it's likely enough that I intend to seize the excuse to skip repeating certain excruciatingly painful activities that I might otherwise be intent on doing. I guess it also means I couldn't time stuff right this month anyway. It's - really not certain that it'll take, though, even if there is something, like, twenty percent of known pregnancies miscarry, and the actual number's higher because lots of them miscarry before people even notice, and it's also higher without - whatever the operative factors of modernity are, nutrition or medical care or whatever, which may or may not apply to here, so - it's not really certain at all.

But it might have worked. That'd be cool. For values of cool that include 'I guess I'll have to tell Ryan that I will in fact be going ahead with murdering his child'.

I'm really glad you don't have to do that again.

Yeah. Me too. Like, not for sure, but - yeah.

It's gonna all be okay. Somehow. Eventually.

- yeah. Yeah, it will.

She goes to find Ryan; no sense in putting it off. 

"Hey."

"Hey!

" - I think, um - nothing's certain, or anything, yet, but - it is possible that it worked and I am pregnant now."

"Wow! Okay. That's - uh, that's good news."

"Yeah. It's - yeah. I mean, I don't know for sure or anything, I think they haven't really invented pregnancy tests in this timeline yet, but - yeah."

"You doing okay?"

"Yeah! - mostly. It's like, it's good, it's all according to plan and stuff, it's just - I always figured if this ever happened to me, even if it happened somehow when I wasn't ready or planning for it, I'd, like, try to do a really good job with it, you know, eat healthy foods for baby development and play music and read books aloud and, I dunno, do yoga classes so your muscles don't all atrophy, and do that thing where you go swimming and be a human submarine, and think about how I'm building a person inside of me, and even if it sucked and I got really sick it'd - also be kind of cool? And now it all just feels, like - whatever I do it's not gonna change anything for this kid. At all. This kid who may or may not currently exist."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. So it's - I'm gonna get over it. But it's - it's gonna be sad."

"No kidding."

Heavy sigh.

"So. Well. I - guess I just wait around to see if I get hit with devastating morning sickness and cravings for foods that haven't been invented yet. Or if I get eclampsia and die. That would suck."