She sits up. Changes into the magic shirt and puts on the headband.

"That worked out well - probably strategically useful, too, though if I'd be reluctant to have two Catherines running around in fights that often until I can be shapeshifted and mind-blanked reliably."

" - incredible. Well, I think we'll have someone at eighth circle by the end of the upcoming season, and after that we can probably swing it. Congratulations."

"Oh, I'm sure I'll get there again before too long."

...She still feels like she could really use a hug and there are no longer reasons she can't have one and - she still finds herself completely unable to make the request.

He could also really use a hug but it feels fundamentally ridiculous to need that, or to ask for it, or to get it, and also at this point it feels weird, that she looks like Catherine, after he sort of successfully convinced his mind that Catherine is not Alfirin-being-subtly-clever-with-him. 

"- this isn't very fair to ask but would you mind looking like yourself?"

"I'm sure you found some of my hair or - something - did you happen to have it with you when you woke up in the 48th century?"

"Yeah,  I brought my things with me - I would probably have just lost the fight with Minagho otherwise, really -"

He will rifle through his bags for a few minutes and give Alfirin her own hair back. He doesn't apologize for stealing it in the first place.

It's what friends do. She had some of his, for about a century after he died. Has some more now.

"Better?"

Okay now he will wordlessly reach out for a hug if it's on offer.

Yeah that seems good.

"...It was a very upsetting vision. Or - getting it at all was upsetting. Or maybe both of those."

"Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it'd - have to be - both that She - It - can, and that It'd pick you, and that - 

that It can't be sorry -"

"Well. Picking me - made a lot of sense. Nobody else there with - shared memories of someone getting dominated by something slightly godlike. Nobody else who had an antimagic field prepared.

But I didn't like having those memories used like that. And you're right, It - She - It can't be sorry."

"...And It knows I'm here."

"Well. It probably knew that already, and now we know It knows." He is aware that this does not really answer the emotional core of the complaint, at all.

"It only intervened to save both of our lives, I really shouldn't be afraid of that like I am - I miss her, gods, I still miss her."

"Every single day. I keep feeling like I'm - mostly shaped, as a person, to pull against something that isn't there, and I don't like where I land without it. I keep wanting to yell at her, except I know I wouldn't yell at her. I keep being annoyed with myself that Lastwall didn't produce more like her, except of course it wasn't going to because there is probably not another soul like that in all of Creation. And it doesn't quite feel fair to her, to miss her so acutely it gets in the way of all the work that she and I both wanted her to - build something in Heaven to enable - but -"

"It is not - doing perfectly right by her memory. I don't think it's quite a place where 'fairness' applies."

"I'm pretty sure half of the ways I'm relating to it are ridiculous and wouldn't hold up under a close look but - it turns out it's hard to take a close look. ...and I don't want to.

I don't really want to run around with a gaping hole in my capacity for reason, either, it's getting embarrassing, but -"

"You think it's embarrassing for you, ..."

"I would in fact take it, with you, as a worrying sign on the mental inflexibility question except that as far as I can tell you were also like this for the whole of the war, no subtle mental effects required." 

"Please. I was worse for the whole of the war - at least now I know it's something I'm avoiding because it hurts -"

"If only the Shining Crusade had had Ember to follow us around and say 'you feel betrayed', 'you're in a lot of pain and it makes it hard for you to see your way forward'...

I should probably have tried to talk to you. I - figured you knew I didn't trust you after you left, and knew why, and would change it if you wanted it to change."

"It would not have been doing right by you to change it - you weren't wrong to mistrust me. Or at least that's what I thought at the time."

"I think if Cheliax were not ruled by Hell I'd have found the murder much more of a barrier to cooperation, yeah. But - did you have anyone other than her that'd tell you if you were being ridiculous -"

She thinks. "Well, there was - no, I suppose not."

"And since her?"