"No, of course not! This is stuff everyone needs! Even me, and I'm only half human!"

"Yeah. But you don't have to- And I woke you up."

June is a little embarrassed by crying on Lucy's shoulder in the door of her motel room. But thinking about going into the room adds more embarrassment and other feelings that should happen not now. So she defaults to just... Continuing to hug and breathing deeply.

"All will be well. Takes time and work but all can be made well."

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I'll be fine, a little missed sleep isn't going to slow me down."

Sniff. She's managed to stop crying.

"Uh. Should prob'ly... Tell you something. It's... Relevant. I guess. It seems stupid but it also seems stupid to not say anything, so, I dunno."

"It's probably not stupid! Do you want to sit down?"

"Yeah." June unhugs and steps backward into the motel room and avoids eye contact, fidgeting.

Lucy follows her in and sits down next to her and hugs her again. 

She hugs and cries a bit more, then pulls away. "I actually maybe shouldn't be hugging you? At least not while I say this because..." Blush. Breathe. June closes her eyes. "I am attracted to women. And you are very pretty and kind and I want to kiss you but am, not, don't actually think that is a good idea. Yeah. That's about it."

"I am going to have to think about the kissing bit? Why don't you think it's a good idea." 

"-Because you might not want to, and you're leaving to go do something about the Workworlds soon probably and you should go do that, they're supposed to be awful, and you kind of just met me today."

"That makes sense. I'll take a while to think about it and get back to you about it after the Workworlds?"

"Sure. It's just- I don't really know. It feels silly and shallow, like you're more important than me, you can do so much more, so you're supposed to be my friend at most, not - anything else. You definitely don't- Please don't feel like you have to for my sake or anything."

"I don't think I have to. I've read enough love stories to know how badly that goes. And I'm not more important than you. Maybe strategically, I can do more, but--thinking I matter more because of that is the kind of thinking that leads to, well, Judgments, and their not caring about humans. And that's not me, I won't ever let that be me." 

"Well, strategically, if you're happy and productive it helps people a lot more than if I am happy and productive."

"Well, conveniently, I like helping people. Especially my friends." Hug. 

Hug and leaning on Lucy. Both nice things. Feeling vaguely guilty about it is slightly less nice but eh.

"I think I'm going to be okay. Especially with my fingers put away for safekeeping, that's going to make me feel a lot safer long term? I'll try not to get reckless about it. I'm... Just kind of stressed out."

"That's incredibly reasonable. You've had a really stressful time." 

She nods into Lucy's shoulder. "Is it also stressful to be kicked into the future?"

"Yeah." 

June hugs tighter.

"The most frustrating thing is when I expect people to have a common frame of reference and they just don't. And people just die! And don't get up! Like on the surface! I have any work to do in the Neath, I mean in terms of resurrections not just making people behave, but it's not--it's not everyone all the time like this. And people hunt Curators for sport? In the Neath there are only a handful of Curators and they're all really powerful, like, politically and economically. Only one of 'em's died and their killer fucked up so now they're an angry god sort of. And there aren't diamonds or spider-silk here. And..." Sigh. "And I miss my family." 

"Uh, there are any diamonds if diamonds are important. And I think they hunt Curators for treasure and mostly die trying, and Curators hunt locomotives sometimes which is... Not actually much better. Can't help with your family except, like, part of the sunless Sea came through to the High Wilderness, just not all of it? I dunno how that works, it's really weird even by High Wilderness standards. But the Avid Horizon still exists and there's rumors you can go back to the Neath if you poke it the right way."

"I might eventually but not right away, there's so much to do here. The diamonds aren't important, it's just that they're plentiful in the Neath because of my father and the difference is jarring. The difference-is-jarring thing is the relevant point about the Curators, too, I don't actually think them dying is worse than humans dying. I'm not even actually sure if this is my future and not some kind of alternate universe, I would--expect to have been remembered, at all, I was running around the Neath fixing things for ten years before the accident and, uh, I'm not inconspicuous." 

"Find a historian in Eleutheria and you can look up stuff you remember and know for sure. A lot of it's Ministry-Stamped Bullshit but they can't rewrite everything and there are uncensored books somewhere - at least, I think so, you keep seeing paper stories about people arrested for smuggling illicit literature."

"Oh, there was plenty of that in the Neath. Illicit literature, that is. More of it before I showed up, I managed to bully Mr. Pages into easing off on the censorship some."