Pinion plays along with the bit. "Oh no... I was lured in by the tiny adorable animals! I never knew I was in such terrible danger... Thank you so much for warning me now, before I fell prey to the siren song of Cozy Scarf!"

"All in a day's work for an esper."  She might ordinarily follow that up with 'ma'am', but she does not want to emphasize the age gap today.  "It's a terrible thing.  First, they start you on cute little animals.  Then once you're hooked, you start craving harder stuff.  Socks.  Scarves.  Sweaters, if you live long enough."

"And to think, not that long ago, I had found myself thinking, 'Oh, granny squares don't look so bad, I bet I could do that'. I could have found myself with an entire blanket! My savior."

She giggles. "So I take it you're into fiber arts?"

"Oh, no.  I kept stabbing myself with the needles and got mad at it.  My sister got big into it, though.  She made her own prom dress and everything, it was actually really stylish.  She swore me to secrecy about it."

"She crocheted an entire prom dress? That's insane! It must have taken forever! I'd ask to see pictures, but I guess I'll just have to use my imagination."

"Hmm, I don't think that one was crochet, actually?  I know she did a sweater in crochet, though.  Dad was mad as hell because he'd okayed the pattern for the dress ahead of time, but he can't actually read patterns worth a damn..."

"It's still impressive if she knit it! More impressive, even, I think knitting's a lot more complicated than crochet." For one thing, you have to juggle two needles at the same time, sometimes more. "Why was he mad, was it really skimpy or something?"

"Well, I didn't think so.  And neither did she.  But he sure did, it was backless.  I think Mom was a little on the fence about it, but she had gotten permission...so she didn't want to set a bad example.  It passed dress code, so that was enough for her."  Okay, she's a little warmed up...let's see if we can get a good segue going.  "I'm glad that time in my life is over."

"My parents are Muslim. Not even especially conservative, but my dad would have had a stroke if I went out in something sleeveless, much less backless. I definitely feel you. Being an adult is so much better." To be fair, I would never have felt comfortable in something sleeveless back then anyway. A few years as a working esper sure changes your views on a lot of things.

"Yeah.  It's a lot different now, what with the job's requirements.  Or, not requirements, but what the job incentivizes."  She swallows her nervousness and pushes on.  "And on the subject of incentives, if you change your mind about fluid exchange, you only have to ask.  No pressure either way, no strings.  Okay?"  And I'll just...move my hands back down a bit closer to her navel.  Make it clear I'm not trying to push boundaries.  I guess I am being a little pushy, but she scared the shit out of me before.  I definitely can't kiss her like she was after that van, but if we take more breaks, maybe..

"I... thanks for the offer. It's not that I don't want to, exactly," I'm straight, but I don't mind kissing girls for guiding. "It's just, it's only been a few weeks, and I'm trying to take baby steps right now. If it turns out that, I don't know, your lips feel just like his did, or they feel too different from how his did, and that's upsetting, then maybe I end up crying for an hour or two, and that's a dozen people who don't get rescued today. This is my first time back out in the field since, and I want it to go well, to prove to myself that it can go well. So. I'm trying to play it safe. Maybe later, once I'm a little more back in the swing of things, it's something we could try. If we're still teamed up then, or if we team up again for some other thing. I'm not really sure how long it's going to take me to feel ready to try it. But I'm not, yet. Sorry."

Of course, if she were guiding more efficiently, she could be saving more people per day, too. Everything's a tradeoff. But guiding works off backlash at a known, predictable rate, and her emotional reactions are really not very predictable, these days. Better to wait and experiment with stuff like the more high-throughput guiding techniques when she has a few hours where spending them being a wreck won't trade off so directly against people's lives.

She smiles, a little.  It's a rejection, but it's not a rejection because of her.  And she's got good reasons for it.  "Hey, it's an offer, not a demand.  You don't owe me any kind of explanation, and you really don't owe me an apology about it.  We're cool, okay?"  She squeezes Pinion in a very calibrated manner, like someone intimately familiar with Pinion's compression tolerances.

How is this girl so good at that? It took Connor months of regular guiding sessions together before he could manage not to squeeze me too hard. And when I've done pickup guiding like this before, they've always done something that hurt, I always had to remind them every few minutes not to do this or that, but somehow we've been guiding for over an hour now and she hasn't hurt me so much as once. It's so unfair that I have to turn her down like this! We could be getting so much more done if only -- if only -- everything is so fucked up!

She's tearing up, but more easily observed from Sinkhole's vantage point will be her breath hitching as she tries to get it under control.

Carol's no stranger to hiding one's emotions.  You can't fib a fibber, as they say.  Pinion can stay hugged, right on the edge of Problems.  She's locked in.  Well, great.  Making a pass at her made her start to sob a little.  And she's probably going to dislocate her everything if she starts sobbing for real.  Great going.  Fantastic start to your...well, not partnership, probably.  She holds Pinion, and doesn't say anything.  Doesn't ask if she's okay, because she isn't.  She does hum a meandering tune.  She can't remember if it's from a song, or if it's maybe two songs mashed together in her brain.

She's so glad she zeroed out before failing to hit on Pinion.

Okay. Okay. Being upset about being upset is not going to make me less upset. We still have some time before I'm going to be low enough for it to make sense to go for another car, anyway. This can just be. Part of the process. It's okay.

She has to redirect herself a few more times as her feelings attempt to add in sadness epicycles about various other unhappy ideas, like "I'm ruining Sinkhole's day" and "I couldn't even make it halfway through a reduced-load workday before breaking down" and "this is so fucking embarrassing what if I am never functional again", but with the exception of a few hiccups she manages to keep herself solidly in the range of "weeping" and not "sobbing".

After somewhere between five and ten minutes, her breathing slowly evens out again. Alright. That wasn't so bad. I even got myself under control before I got all the way zeroed out, so if you think about it, I was really just being efficient.

"Hi. Sorry. Really really not your fault. You've been great. I'm just kindof a mess right now. Um. I'll probably be ready for another car pretty soon?"

"You're okay, hon.  Really, you warned me.  I'm pretty bad at being comforting, anymore."  She's not going to chicken out, she's not going to chicken out.  "We can talk about it, if you want?  Or you could tell me about your bouldering?  I was too busy warning you about crochet to mention, but I do problems* too, sometimes."

*A/N: 'problems' are what bouldering people call 'routes'.  The author is not sure why bouldering people want more problems in their lives, but the author is not here to judge problematic names.

Sinkhole is like half my age and is being way too mature about this. I really would have expected her to go for the "I can just go back to the silo and get out of your hair until I'm ready to work again" option after the first time I did something dismayingly unprofessional.

"Don't worry about it. It's not your job to deal with my emotions. I can talk to my grief counselor, later. It's agency policy for all bereaved espers to be assigned one. I probably wouldn't have gotten one otherwise, but. It genuinely has been useful, so I guess they were right." 

"Bouldering... Uh, so where I live there's this park where the city's set up these big granite rocks specifically for people to climb on, and that's probably where I go the most just because it's really convenient. And then a little ways out of town there's Okotoks Erratic - most people just call it Big Rock, and that's pretty much what it is, it's just this huge rock out in the middle of a field, and that's got some really good problems on it. And if I really want to just get away for a while I drive out to Banff. It's gorgeous there and the Rockies aren't called that for nothing."

Sinkhole nods in acknowledgement that it doesn't have to be a Whole Thing, then remembers that Pinion doesn't actually have a sensory power.  "I moved pretty recently, after - " my longest-lived partnership disintegrated because I got a phobia?  yeah that's not going to fly " - I needed a change-up.  It's been a few months since I used to go, but there was this gym I used to go to just a mile away from home.  I'd jog down, climb to the very tippy top, none of the - fakeness?  No safety gear, just me and my power.  My agent hated it, but if I can't walk off a hundred-foot drop, I'd have no business doing what I do in a dungeon.  Tons of fun."

Her thumb hand goes back to petting Pinion's finger.  It's not much, but it's about the best she can manage without escalation on the Flirtation Ladder or compromising Pinion's physical safety.

"I know exactly what you mean. I don't want to be strapped in and strung up, I want to know it's just me and my own strength. I've done a little free solo climbing, too, and that's just so exhilarating every time, to get to the top and look down and be like I started down there and now I'm all the way up here and that was all just me."

"Besides, I can always catch myself if I fall." Even if I was going at terminal velocity, it just wouldn't represent all that much backlash.

"Exactly!!"  Pinion feels five rapid-fire spikes of backlash before Carol continues.  "You and me, we're like this."  Carol interleaves their fingers and squeezes her hand in her extremely well-calibrated way.  We're both fucked up because of our partners.  No, that's backlash talking.  Christ.

Okay seriously does this girl have some kind of sensor power for detecting precisely -- huh. The mission brief did mention something about Sinkhole having some kind of close-range "sixth sense" for combat... maybe "combat" somehow includes handholding??? Powers are weird.

Since Pinion's nearly zeroed, she squeezes Sinkhole's hand back. "Yeah!!" Her grip is actually surprisingly strong, without the backlash.

Excellent!  I probably didn't need to check, but.  It's cheap enough and we're already cuddling, and if I was gonna traumatize myself this way, it would have happened a long time ago.  Now it's just noise.  "Do you want to stretch a little bit before we do the next one?"  Even if you're immune to bedsores like SOME people I could name but won't, it's still a good habit to be in.  Especially at her age.  ... maybe I wouldn't have made a pass on her if I'd known right away.  Well.  Can't unfuck that one now, and she's not holding a grudge, probably.