"I'm just going to try to guess, and you can tell me if I'm hot or cold. --Obie tried to paralyze you?"

"—not tried," she says very quietly.

"He—it was temporary but he did it a lot—he had a—a little gadget that makes a horrible whining noise next to your ear and then your ability to move is gone for the next half hour—" Sniffle. "I should've figured out he had shady connections as soon as it appeared but when I was thirteen I didn't realize that most people can't just invent shit like that and I never—looked back and noticed—because I really do not like thinking about it—"

She is still back there and it is a problem because she needs to be hugged. 

"Come here, I wanna hold you."

She scoots out of her tiny hiding spot of sadness and sits on the floor by the foot of the bed. Standing up sounds hard.

He will wrap her in his arms on the floor. 

"It doesn't make you a terrible person."

"I—I just—every time she brings up her actual problem she has in her life all I can think about is how utterly terrified I am of something like that happening to me—I can't exactly say 'well if it had turned out like that in my world you'd never have met me because I'd've killed myself sometime that week', that's—not fair to her—"

"I feel like this argument is implying that having been raped is not an actual problem that you have in your life."

Sniffle. "Well when you put it like that I sound ridiculous." She leans into him a little. He is very warm and good. Crying on Asher is such an immense improvement on crying by herself.

"What you sound like is a person with trauma."

"Well. Yes. That too."

She's starting to relax a little. Having Asher here is good for that.

"We can stay here or go back down, whichever you want."

"How'd the dad talk go?"

"It's honestly really reassuring that-- all of you realized the military-industrial complex was bad. Probably if my dad had lived long enough and I could have explained it to him he would have too."

She snuggles him. "Yeah, I bet."

"Also I got fatherly advice of various quality. --I guess it was all good advice, just, I don't think 'don't fuck strippers without a condom or you'll get gonorrhea' is likely to be relevant any time soon."

She giggles. "Oh no. I'm going to assume that was Grumpy Middle-Aged Me and not Worryingly Earnest Teenage Me because if Worryingly Earnest Teenage Me has found that one out through experience I am going to be even more worried about him."

"Worryingly Earnest Teenage You is apparently dating his clone! --I wonder if super questionable dating decisions is a thing we all have in common."

"It kinda sounds like it!"

"It's kind of weird that apparently cloning Tony doesn't produce a Tony."

"...I mean, is it? People normally aren't the same person as their identical twins, right, so...?"

"But we are the same person as a bunch of random people we run into in Milliways."

"But like not exactly the same person, and—I guess we can't rule out that Worryingly Earnest Teenage Me is genetically identical to your father but I'm pretty sure we can rule out all the other possible correspondences of that kind—so obviously the mechanism here is something totally different from, like, regular trait inheritance of any sort, right?"

"Yeah. It's really strange."

"No argument here. Anyway, sure, I'll come downstairs." But first she must hug him.

She must hug him and be picked up!