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This is the wrong building. She could have sworn the RA said "take a left at Emily, first on your right", and Bella did exactly that, and here she is and the rooms in this place don't even seem to be numbered, it's all letters and names. She's not going to find Intro to Subtle Therapy in Room 206 like that. Maybe the RA meant take a left after Emily, not before Emily? Maybe she was supposed to go the other way around the quad and approach Emily from the other direction? She's going to be late.
Bella tries to get out of the letter-named-rooms building to go ask Emily for directions, but that's not a stairwell after all, and there's someone shouting at her not to come in and she flinches back and clonks her elbow on the door and boots or no boots she's down and she -
- is falling -
subtly_artistic
The fruits here don't do whatever you think would be nicest and most peaceful, only fruits in the domains of the Valar. You have a book about fixing people who have things wrong that no one can see. You're not living in your house plot. Why didn't you tell me?
I don't think you're going to fix her, I'm not going to get my hopes up. But that's why you're here. You could have told me. You could have told me when you took the book.
subtly_artistic
"I am kind of terrified of your father because I have not been here quite long enough to get used to the idea that he couldn't casually execute me if I annoyed him."
subtly_artistic
"Several people have told me that they wouldn't let him, which is very reassuring, but I'm still not up to the point where I can complain about his parenting decisions right to his face. That is going to take a while."
"He's a good father. I'm just really, really difficult. Mother couldn't handle me at all. If Father notices how I am he'll probably get sick too."
subtly_artistic
"Fëanáro, I made a very serious promise not to tell anyone anything that I learn about a patient while treating them. Since you figured out that I'm treating your mother, that means that if you say things like that to me I may start to think that you're trying to get me to break that promise, or trying to get around it by watching my face or something. I have already told you that it's not your fault, which I know just from when her problem started; and that's all I can tell you and you should not try to find out anything else I know."
subtly_artistic
"That doesn't surprise me. But the promise I made is really important. Like - you know how much you need to be alone sometimes, it's even more important than that that people get to be alone in their own heads. I have powers that let me go look inside people's heads. I have to be very careful about only using them with permission, and once I've looked, I have to be a space of privacy for what I saw. So please don't try to make me make a mistake."
subtly_artistic
"I didn't think you were. But I think you're very clever and have learned to be very sneaky so that's what I'm going to think if you keep saying things you know I'll want to contradict about your mother's condition."
subtly_artistic
"And I just told you how to make sure I don't, so this should be pretty straightforward."
"Never mention again something I hear all the time from everyone around me when they think I'm not listening, which is probably true. Yeah. Great."
subtly_artistic
"You could mention it around people who aren't me. Or in ways I can't follow. I won't speak competent Quenya for years, probably longer because I don't have your gift for languages and I can just subtle arts it. Or, you could pause before you say things like that and warn me that you're going to so I have a moment to make sure I'll control my face and think about what I'll say. But mostly my reaction to this situation is 'people should not say that even if they don't think you're listening, that's horrible'."
"I"m going to say something on this topic," he says primly. "They say it because it's obvious, you can't expect people to hide the truth in every conversation just because it makes me sad."
subtly_artistic
...Bella giggles. "All right, do you think these people would say I made my parents get divorced? It happened pretty much right after I was born, after all, they decided they didn't want to be married anymore and they could do that because they're humans."
"If my parents stopped loving each other immediately after having me that'd also probably be because of me, yes."
subtly_artistic
"There's a difference - a really important difference - between 'because of me' and 'my fault'. In my parents' case I think they actually would have gotten divorced either way, they had me pretty quickly after they got married in the first place and it just didn't take them that long to discover it had been a bad idea - but even if what had happened was that they were too stressed out at having a baby Bella to love each other any more, what could I possibly have done? I couldn't even talk."
"Okay. I'm going to talk about this subject. My mother is dying because of me. That makes me sad and makes everyone wish I didn't exist. Even if I am not culpable it is a bad thing that is a consequence of me and I will never do enough good things to make up for it so the world where I exist is better than if I didn't."
subtly_artistic
"Did they have you by accident?" Bella asks. This is not something she would normally ask a child but she is pretty sure that if there's any hint of it this particular child will know and be perfectly willing to tell her all about it.