It's a bit selfish, and she finds that she doesn't like herself when she says it. That's not why she's silent now, though — embarrassed, and a bit scared of making anything more complicated by the arguing, she lives with those people, she's going to keep living with them…

Her dorm room's on the second floor, and it's early spring. She throws on a coat and makes her way downstairs to get some fresh air.

There's a stream of meltwater across the sidewalk's bright-black tarmac, draining off somewhere. It splashes when Ashna steps in it, like a chime.

She gently crouches down and touches it, draws a line across the surface with a finger.

(When she was little, Ashna used to make tiny paper boats, set them to float away downstream. She'd always loved that, an almost painful quantity of love, the- interaction— it would feel genuine, almost friendly, you give it to the water and it accepts. She could pull that off with people sometimes, and it was a joy, but a very very tired one, how to tiptoe so you don't metaphorically explode something…)

It's cold, exactly the right amount of it, and it feels like she expected that deep in her bones.

(Of course it would. She gets that feeling sometimes, and it's practically never right — it happens, you draw a spurious connection and get too deep into a metaphor, and never notice you're spouting nonsense until you're halfway through an entire speech on it… But it's- nice, sometimes, to play along for a while… that there's something there that she actually is perceiving, something alive that she can touch.)

(She's so tired.)

She could go over the context and nuance in her head, over and over, but right now she just wants someone to hear her. Context and nuance of the argument, but- really, she finds that it's not even about the argument, or those people — it's everything; the classes, over and over again with absurd requirements, the housework and the food and this darned city… she'd loved the city, once, but there's only so many times you can walk a street before it starts to feel like an unskippable cutscene. The loneliness, the uncertainty that people can enjoy her company without her managing it. She wants something to change.

She makes a gentle splash again, the sun's reflection on it shining, and she mentally sings it out, 'something other than this, can you give me something other than this' —

And-

it-

responds.

It's like the opposite of breathing out, or like passing through surface tension towards somewhere. She can feel something there, where the water is — and if she calls some towards herself it'll answer, and it'll move like she's guiding it with her own hand.

Only the hand's mental. See, you are outside of yourself, a little, you can have felt connection. Aren't cut off forever from it.

And she should be confused, but it feels a bit like a dream, so her first reaction is to let the relief-feeling make her cry — yes, thank you, exactly what I'm looking for, though she wouldn't have said it would be, if you asked earlier.

She figures it out, over the next few weeks. She can't hold too much water at once, or command it with attention she doesn't have, but she can see it even when she wouldn't ordinarily, know the temperature and pressure and flow.

(She gets into the habit of never playing with this in public, and smoothing over it when she's asked where she spends all evening. In a park by the nearby lake, usually, it's bright enough already this time of year… It's not that she thinks it's not really interesting to mention, or truly dangerous, just that she… doesn't want to, it'll be complications, she doesn't know how people would actually react to an impossible thing. And the water seems to care about what she wants to; she can direct it farther and faster when she leans into the desperate love for the whole idea, and the feeling of something other than this, and when she's bored it's barely a finger's worth.)