"So you come home after all that and discover that I've taken your Lucien, whether you'd made up your mind that you wanted him or not he was an option you had, and I'd been hugging your parents and sleeping in your bed, and getting help from your robot, which probably is slowly dying, and obviously there was no way to guess you were alive and it's all what you would've done in my position, so you can't blame me either, and usually when things hurt like hell and suck irrecoverably at least someone made a mistake you can feel smug about but you can't be angry or self-satisfied and there's nothing, yet, to grieve, and the world is still ending and might be doing it harder, and you're not enchanted with the shuttlebus option especially if you have to go back to Guide and kiss the guy you're sort of halfway to over after that disaster of an awakening, but the shuttlebus thing makes sense, and there's nobody in the world whose unflinching top priority is you having a nice time so maybe it will make sense for you to just not prioritize that, and you will have quietly almost died and quietly almost died again and quietly almost died again and quietly go dormant and maybe nobody will notice except your robot and there's nobody it'll tell if you don't want it to."

"Well, the third time I almost died was sort of conspicuous."

"Well. I noticed."

"Yeah."

"I should go to Guide and talk to the Lucien there - Turnaround? - for you. Translate between, uh, whatever we collectively are, and - esper culture."

"I'll have to go pick up a new tag, mine'll have expired, but sure."

"Yeah. Just, I should be in the first batch of people you tag to send there, whenever you get around to that. I already needed to, this is just one more thing on the to-do list before I come back here."

"- yeah, I guess you live here now."

"I do, can't really be helped. I'm at least already not living in your house any more though."

Nod.

"You can come back now," May calls to Lucien.

Here he is, still feeling the absence of anything helpful for him to do or say.

"I'm gonna go to Guide to let my folks know I'm okay and stuff and also to talk to the you there. Do you have any messages for him?"

"I. Hrm. I would probably like to write him a letter but it would be hard to do that helpfully without more context on what happened. It can wait if you'd rather not share." He says the last bit to Lorica.

"Well, what do you need to know?"

"...What happened?"

"At least the parts that are relevant to him."

"I had a bad awakening. There was psychological backlash, his partner eventually convinced him to kiss me, eventually I tried to kill myself, then I had a second trigger before I got through with it and came back for help. All my backlash converted to the organ failure kind on the spot with the second trigger. His partner did some insane shit to try to guide me but did ultimately also call an ambulance. Hospital plus the both of them got me through the last day."

"That's... probably enough that I can at all useful to him, I guess."

"You can ask me more questions, I'm just not sure what would be irrelevantly personal detail and what would matter to you or him."

"You don't have to answer but... it would be useful to know how he attempted to help you and how successful he was, I guess." 

"He kept trying to get me to make promises that I was absolutely not competent to make and would have broken if I'd made them given the backlash. He spat in my mouth a lot until his partner convinced him it would be less unpleasant for him to just kiss me. Kept doing that even after she cracked a few of his teeth trying to get him to bleed down my throat, which I guess is impressive. On both their parts if you're generous with the word. Used his power a lot while we were all three in bed in the hospital so his backlash'd match mine closer. His dad gave me a ride home from the hospital, I don't know if he asked for that or if it was his dad's own idea. I took some decompression time and then wanted to have some kind of, like, relationship conversation, but he was burned out on thinking about anything ever being his fault so I thought maybe I'd wait till he was less burned out for that and go home without waiting on it."

"I am guessing there was a reason you didn't ask to kiss him? Also I'm guessing your time in the hospital was extremely unpleasant but if I'm wrong you can correct me."

"My backlash made me - self-abnegating. I wasn't even formulating thoughts about what would be beneficial for me, let alone making requests. So I was dependent on their creativity and I can think of a dozen things I'd try if I were babysitting someone with that backlash that he didn't but maybe that's just hindsight."

"Oh."

"And you weren't an item beforehand?"

"No."