Wow! Great! Love that for you! 

(She doesn't have any response to that she can really verbalize. She's just going to cry.)

"Sorry."

Headshake. "'snot your fault." She takes in a deep breath and squeezes him. "I'm - I could ask you to stop using your power if I wanted to cry on you without you talking, and I didn't, so,"

(...in practice, that would require her to know that she wanted that, of course, but let's not get caught up in trivial details like "what Cara actually wants"! They can think about that never later. People are dying all over the city!)

...she shifts, trying to increase the amount of skin contact they have.

Yes absolutely snuggling is good. "I can call people. I have a lot of callable people."

...she could ask him if his backlash lets him make out with her instead of talking. That'd be simpler for both of them, maybe. More efficient.

She opens her mouth.

...she closes her mouth.

Wow! Cool! She ✨ Doesn't Want To Do That ✨, right now, apparently, and noticed that even through her backlash! Good work, Cara!

(...say something, dipshit! You're leaving him hanging again.)

"Where do you find them? The people you call, I mean."

"Oh, all over. I talk to dungeon vics whenever they're in a state to and if they're good conversationalists I swap contact info and sometimes one'll follow up. Blog commenters. People I cold-call about their research or for interviews or for something to do with the zoo. My mother introduces me to interesting people because she's actually an extrovert in real life. Sometimes I fall back on just talking to Cricket - he's allowed into June's silo and he can sit on me and purr and explain television shows to me - but less often during a confluence."

"...man. That sounds -"  And then she - she can't quite finish sentence because 

because the thing is that it sounds so much less terrible.

What if her backlash made her live the way she used to live. the way she misses living so badly. What if her backlash made it mentally necessary to keep in touch with her friends and loved ones so she could keep up her career of saving lives. What if her backlash left her with any fucking agency, any control over her life, what if her backlash had made it so she couldn't ignore -

"...really inconvenient," she says, after too long of a pause. (She's shaking, a bit.)

(Wow! Good job! Really convincing! Surely he won't think you're asshole after that!)

"...I have thought 'wow that sounds so much better than mine' at people way too often to get ticked off at somebody letting it happen out loud, even if there were such a thing as objective backlash badness different people get ones that suit them more or less."

She sighs. "...I think I would have done better with your backlash, yeah. I'm - not especially introverted."

"I have come to a sort of truce with it, I can get a lot done on the phone these days, but it's not ego-syntonic."

"Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sorry, mine isn't either" and I bet you'd like it way less it's not a competition??? 

...also there's nothing there he can work with, so. "...you seem like you're doing an impressive job of making it work for you."

"Thank you. It's taken a while, I was way less good at it when I had just awakened and had no friends."

If she has feelings about that one, they sure aren't visible. "Yeah, that seems like it'd be really hard." Hugsqueeze.

(Good job not being weird about that! Soooo brave!)

"I lucked out hard with Cricket. I'd been thinking of getting just a normal cat."

"Yeah, it does seem like that would have worked much less well, for -" 

...she sighs and cuts herself off. "Sorry, can you call someone? I - I can't -" in addition to my many other flaws, grief makes me a huge bitch, apparently! and you don't deserve that. (she's not saying that, apparently. Cool.)

"Yeah, it's late enough in the day I can -" He cues his phone again and is presently on with somebody new.

Great. Okay. He'll be fine. He literally volunteered for this and presumably did not do so with any expectation of her doing anything besides being useful against Infested Wasteland and the usual things people get out of guiding and also helping people who could be in any kind of state, including not talkative. 

And she has little enough backlash that she can. Actually think.

 a fifth of the high-rise tears itself off the rest of the building and starts falling into the plaza below

(She manages, with a lot of effort, to keep her crying quiet and her breathing mostly normal-paced. He's on the phone.)

He looks her way sympathetically sometimes but keeps the ball in the air with the phone calls including when he gets up, nonverbally ushers her to the fridge, and fixes himself a chicken salad sandwich. He is not especially apologetic about talking with his mouth full but does take small bites.

Traceless's backlashed table manners are, perhaps shockingly, very low on the list of things Flywheel cares about right now.

Tia is gone. Tia is gone, gone, gone, they'll never go back to her cute little house in Cleveland, never go over a dungeon together, never hold each other after - after - 

At least she died thinking Cara was basically doing okay. (Avoid having Difficult Relationship Conversations with this one weird trick!!!)