to sleep, perchance to bleed

"Lora, I hardly think I'm the right person for this."

She gave a nervous laugh. "Sorry - I guess I just sort of think you're a very emotionally intelligent person, and I felt safe enough with you that I could try talking to someone besides Jin about my worries, for once."

Every meekest and boldest voice in Lora's head, all alike, voted on the part of sticking to the proven confidant and never once broaching the terrifying ordeal of placing trust in someone else who hadn't known her since the tender age of ten, who didn't know her reasonings, who had no nuanced idea where to give and where to hold firm.

(That was why Haze couldn't fill this role: she could be something of a yes-woman.)

But even Lora herself could feel the responsible impetus to broaden her horizons, to at least attempt to trust someone other than Jin, since she now had such people available to her. And while Addam had aspects of his identity that made him an outcast of his original society, he had his own worries. Not that Minoth didn't, but...

Well. Lora sensed a bit of particularity about the people he chose to associate with. Meanwhile, Addam was afraid of no one but Mythra.

"That's a big compliment," Minoth said, after a moment of reticence of his own.

"Oh, but surely you must have heard it all before."

Minoth? A safe person?

And what was that old dichotomy, about emotional intelligence versus awareness?

No matter. Absolutely no matter whatsoever.

"I haven't heard much of anything, Lora. I'm just a failed experiment scraping by until something gives out."

Such emphatic dismissal delivered with so little preamble took Lora aback, literally. He wasn't just saying that to be polite, then. He really believed it.

"But you seem so confident."

"Yeah, I seem it. That's my little secret - actually, I hate myself."

Lora hummed, frowned. "So you're more content to hate yourself than to open yourself up to what might happen if you didn't."

"Big talk..."

"It is! I'm here more content to isolate myself than to venture outside of my bubble and see if I can't survive. Really, how much trouble do you think Hugo's flagship would have given me? Addam was with us. I could have reasonably expected that Jin was in no danger."

"Reasonably," repeated Minoth. "That's the big-ticket item, isn't it?"

"It always is," sighed Lora. "See, maybe confidence doesn't come into it after all. I'm just enjoying talking with you."

He shook his head, eyes lidded and arms crossed, leaning back from the fire. "You'll keep saying that until you're freaking out about something, and you reach for me, and I can't be there."

Freaking out was an imprecise description, but it covered all the sins it needed to: refusal to act, self-sabotage, even literal shaking and crying at the feet of some looming, indescribable threat that to any other observing would seem so invisible as to be intractable.

"You're not so untrustworthy. No way I'll believe that."

Minoth opened his mouth to reply, but heard his own words about to exit. Not about trustworthy or untrustworthy, no. Humans are just unequipped to help each other, plain and simple.

If humans weren't equipped to help each other, no one was. Putting aside Amalthus's loss of faith in the Architect, they couldn't just rely on some force from the sky to come save them from their interpersonal burdens. No, that was on people.

So Minoth let himself smile. "You're right. I won't believe it either. Let's keep this up, shall we?"

And Lora, stirred more than she was shaken, grinned right back. "I'll hold you to it!"