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With Armsmaster's death, Miss Militia is promoted to team captain. Even with the losses, however, the Protectorate ENE doesn't get new capes—all teams got hit hard by the last Endbringer attack, and even though it was by all accounts a major victory, it did not cause capes to start lining up to join.
Days pass, and winter hits Brockton Bay. It's pretty mild, as winters go, but it's enough to drastically reduce criminal activity. The heroes have an altercation with white supremacists the following week, but nothing much comes of it, as cape muscle seems to prefer to remain comfortable inside. Capes nationwide are somewhat subdued, perhaps as the aftermath of the victory against Behemoth. Nothing much seems to change, however—the Simurgh continues to fly around in her unpredictable pattern, Leviathan continues to be impossible to locate, lurking in the depths of the ocean. The public gets hopelessly contradictory information about what really happened during the fight from unofficial sources, secretly fed from official ones to make sure people don't jump to the right conclusions, and the topic loses its momentum.
And all of this completely fails to distract Sadde, who seems to not be getting better from the post-battle funk. Or, at least, not straightforwardly better. The depression and fatalism turn—maybe not completely, but at least a bit—into unease and anxiety, or perhaps stir craziness. It is, after all, true that, other than for class, Sadde doesn't really leave HQ a whole lot, not since they reached the comfortable position of being able to patrol from the comfort of the console—of, in fact, being more effective when doing that, for the average uneventful patrol.
Fatalism, depression, anxiety, and unease, all combined into a Sadde-shaped ball, are currently floating upside down in Lorica's workshop, failing to read a book while she fugues.
"Yeah, I'm okay, it's just—awkward and—Okay, so, before anything, you know that I love you, right?"
"Uh. Yesterday, on my walk, I met a tourist in a shop and played the tour guide and I kinda have a crush on her and I wanted to know how you felt about, um, nonmonogamy."
"Nnnnot super great to be honest - why didn't you mention this last night -?"
"Because I had just come from my walk and had to patrol and didn't have time to actually sort out what I was feeling and I hadn't even realized I was feeling anything that needed sorting out until I saw you and and then I needed some time alone to do that and then I did."
"Well - how I feel about nonmonogamy is 'not super great'. Is that a problem?"
"Um, it's a problem in that I still do have a crush on Chelsea but, like, I also love you a lot, you're the most important thing in my life, and I'm not gonna break up with you over it. And, uh, I hope this doesn't—I mean, I didn't mean to upset you. If I did."
"I'm sorry," he sighs. "I mean... I still prefer having told you to not having told you, I want you to know the things I'm feeling and thinking and such, and you are the most important thing to me. But I'm sorry these things upset you."
"...Vague concern about compatibility and stuff? - I want to be enough."
"Oh. Oh, love, you—" he floats forward, then stops himself. "You're everything. You're my everything. I'm—it's not how I work? Like, it's not like there's anything missing here, it's just..." He pauses, trying to think on how to best put this into words.
He spends a few seconds with his brows furrowed, then starts, tentatively: "I'm a, a people person, right? And, and I like my friends, the Wards, I would never say they're not sufficient, but I wouldn't—dislike making new friends?" He has his stride, now. "And it wouldn't make my current ones less important, and I'd be perfectly happy if I never made new friends either because it's not a matter of, of enough. It's not a matter of quantity, the place each of them occupies in my heart is unique and it doesn't, like, fill some internal gauge of friendness or something. And there's not a gauge of girlfriendness, either, you're you and nothing can replace you and we've been together for over five months and I still feel like shouting 'Lorica is my girlfriend' from the rooftops."
"I don't mean so much quantity as - fit? Complementaryness?"
"Like... at some point wouldn't you have enough friends? Maybe it'd take a lot of them for you, but you only have so much time and energy. And then you'd - well, I'd, anyway - want to make sure that as long as I was so spoiled for choice I allocated the time and energy sensibly... and for me 'enough boyfriend' is one, and if 'enough girlfriend' for you is not one, or is not one of me..."
(He tells himself, pretty sure that it is true.)
"Maybe it's an extrovert thing or something," she says.
"Or maybe it's a me thing. I think most extroverts would probably not consider suggesting nonmonogamy to their girlfriends as the solution to getting a new crush."
"- what's it feel like if not, missing something she'd fill in...?"
"It's... uh... just... she's a nice person that I like and would maybe like to kiss? It's not a need, you're a nice person that I love and definitely thoroughly enjoy kissing, plus all the stuff I love specifically about you that she does not have and all the things I've learned about you over the past year that I couldn't possibly have learned about her in one day. It's... I'm trying to think of an analogy but all of them fail one way or another."