"Who's her guardian, her mom's dead, she said."

"Her father, although there seems to be a—complication, there."

"Oh?"

"She said, and I quote, 'if you tell my father I'll never ever ever become a superhero ever, I'll become a villain and beat each and every one of you up.'"

"Probably she has a bad father, can you get her a different one?"

"Not... really. If he's her closest living relative and she has no others who might be willing to keep her and he's not physically abusive there's very little we can do."

"That's a bad system."

"It's... based on the premise that young children have very little ability to think of long—or even medium-term consequences of their actions and on average cannot be trusted not to blow small disagreements out of proportion and make decisions they'll regret which an adult wouldn't." He sounds carefully neutral.

"My parents were perfectly nice and loved me very much and I was so unhappy, all of the time, and I would have kept on being unhappy."

He wrings his hands. "We can offer to take care of her most of the time but if he decides against that—but it's a very irregular case, the rules around the Wards program were not designed with seven-year-olds in mind, we didn't think it was possible to trigger that young."

"If she doesn't want to go with him and people are trying to make her I will teleport her to a country that doesn't do that."

That gives him pause. A thoughtful pause and, if what can be seen of his face is any indication, not a displeased one. "I must advise against this course of action, and would strongly recommend you not inform her of this new possible resource. It would be very bad if we had absolutely no way to keep her with her... family." Once again, perfectly neutral, except for the pause at the end, there. And he clearly does not wink but he does send Fëanáro a mental impression of a wink.

"...yeah."

"Because, you see," he belabors, "if you had set your mind to that then it's probable that the PRT wouldn't really be able to stop you at all and might not try, which would mean you wouldn't even need to follow through."

"If Sadde doesn't want to go home she's not going home and you can't stop me."

"—let's talk about this later."

I won't try to stop you, he sends, and I'm very thankful you're so protective of her. She needs that.

It's my fault for not putting Behemoth far enough away even though everyone keeps saying it's not. 

If I understand it correctly, Sadde's mother was gone before you had even arrived, but beyond that, you couldn't have known. It's not—fair, to say it was your fault for not having enough information. We didn't know, he'd never shown anything remotely like that much speed or power.

Could've put some kind of monitor on him or continuously conjured for his location or - if I only fixed things I had a fair chance at fixing that wouldn't be nearly enough fixed -

So there's not much point thinking it's your fault—you learn from your experiences, and next time you'll be more prepared for a situation like this, but no situation will ever be quite like this, and there will be situations you won't anticipate. That's just life.

Wing-hug.

Hug.

"The meeting between the people in suits who run this show should be over soon."

"The one about what to do with me?"

"Yes. There are some—territoriality problems, if you solve problems in other countries they might object or think it's the United States overreaching, but many of the countries with the easiest problem for your powerset to solve don't have enough of an international presence for that to really matter."

"Okay. I'm also happy to work with other countries' governments if they want stuff, I only came here because Behemoth was here."