"What's the matter, can't you take a little affection in your life?"
    "Not today. And probably not any other day for a very long time." My voice sounded dead in my own ears, I realized, tried to recover with a little smile. "Sorry. Yesterday kind of fucked me up."
    "All right," she said after a moment. "I won't try to be your friend. I'll be your teammate."
    "Lucky...." I have no idea what I was going to say. I'm too tired for this, too confused, too sick of trying to figure out what it is she expects from me.
    "It's what you're asking me, isn't it? Not to care, not to ask questions. If that's what you want I'll give it to you. But it better be what you want. Cause I'm going to put out a hell of a lot of effort to give it to you."
    Silence while I wondered if there was even any point in trying to recover this situation. I'm still not sure what decided me; maybe I was just too tired to fight. "I'm sorry." Pause. "What did you ask me originally?"
    "I asked you how you were doing," she said quietly.
    "Well, that should be an indication, that I can't remember you did."
    "Sure you shouldn't go home and go back to bed?"
    "Probably. Physically I'm OK, just a little... confused. As usual."
    "You need a vacation." She smiled suddenly; I tried to.
    "No shit." After a while I glanced from her to Scott, who had been politely acting like part of the landscape. "Well, I assume that Winters knows everything now?"
    "Yeah," Lucky answered.
    "Suppose it was inevitable. I just need to think. It... knocked loose a few more memories, what happened, so I'm a little..."
    "Secrets and lies won't keep you safe," she announced with sudden intensity.
    I stared at her. Where the hell had that come from? "Any suggestions as to what would?" I inquired coldly. Not a little wounded, as well; I was trying to tell her what was going on, which is what she keeps saying she wants me to do, and this is her response?
    "Probably nothing entirely, but a lot of the time the truth works better."
    "I told you the truth."
    "You had to."
    "Yeah, so?"
    "You're far to intelligent to keep playing these screwy head games with me."
    "Thank you, I guess." I bit off the ends of the words.
    "And you're a lot braver than this," she added.
    "Thanks. Again. What are you getting at?"
    "Stop running away from the people that care about you, stop running away from yourself and your past. You just have to face it and do what you can."
    At this point I was getting angry. "And suddenly you're an expert on this how?"
    "Skip whether or not she's an expert," Scott piped up. "How about the question?"
    "I don't remember asking you to get involved in this," I growled without looking at him.
    "You're probably quite right," Lucky said airily, refusing to hit back, which annoyed me almost as much as everything else about the conversation. "We're here to help you if you want."
    "Thanks. I'll let you know." Stiffly.
    "You do that."
    "I will." I've sworn, since that talk with Chandler, not to let her get to me so easily. Now I managed to take a half step back from that initial who the hell does she think she is and consider what she was saying, take some of the defensiveness out of my voice and try to mend the freshly reopened rift. "You know, I'm a lot less of a bitch than I act like sometimes."
    "I know that. I'm a lot less of psychopath than I act like a lot of the time."
    A brief quiet fell.
    "Needle?"
    "What?"
    "Look at me." I did. "No. Really look at me."
    I gave her a puzzled look. "You want me to do an aura reading on you?"
    "Yes."
    I shrugged and focused on that level of her being. And my jaw almost dropped.
    It was like looking at a different person. Far more powerful and tightly controlled that it had been. There was a heavy overlay which reminded me strongly of Chandler, not quite the duality I had sensed with Traveler but something akin to it.
    "What the hell happened?" I asked blankly.
    She took me aside a little distance. "I'm his familiar."
    "Oh. I don't know what that means. It's obviously changed you." So this was the source of her weird behavior over the past couple of days.
    "I'm linked with him in a magic sort of way. A slightly psychic sort of way. It's because I wanted to protect him. It means I can do a few things better, and it means I'm a lot calmer, more clear-headed. And you asked why it was that I thought I had the right to be giving you advice, I don't think that I have the right, but I have the capability now. And in some ways, I can't speak for Chandler, but I think he'd like you to be happy as well."
    That mile-wide protective streak again; I fought back an urge to say something biting and just said, "I'd like me to be happy, too." I wish I could remember what it felt like. "We'll see about that. Thank you." More sincerely, this time.
    "You're welcome."
    "It's not that I'm just being difficult," I felt a need to add. "I just... don't like to talk about it."
    "You're protecting yourself," she shrugged. "Protect away, but don't be afraid to call on people who care about you when you need help."
    "Evidently I don't even need to be conscious, after what happened yesterday."
    "I'm sorry that scared you."
    Too direct. "It was just a little... weird. Weird, that's a good word for it." Please, just drop it, I thought.
    "Wish I'd been there to help."
    I changed the subject. "Some very strange people there. Anthony Taurus introduced himself to me out of the blue, I don't know what that's all about."
    "Why was he there?"
    "His daughter goes to Lancaster. Well, daughter in a kind of weird, variant sort of way. She's kind of odd."
    "So what'd he want?"
    "Just to say hi, I guess. I was still kind of fuzzy."
    "I don't see why saying hi is weird."
    "He's the mayor of New York! You don't just introduce yourself to random wounded variants."
    "So he came to say hi and offered no explanation and left?"
    "Yeah. Well, I don't know. He had some questions, they've got a team in New York that he's kind of in charge of, he wanted to know a few things about how things were working for us, but I really couldn't tell him all that much, 'cause I was still kind of out of it. It was weird," I repeated.
    "I've been reading the Times, they're about as young a group as we are. Maybe he's looking for advice."
    "I don't consider myself an expert."
    "Hm. Why don't you go get some more rest before you fall over," she suggested, giving me an appraising glance. Hans had called in during our talk, told Scott we wouldn't be needed.

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