"I sort of wish we'd known that to tell Stormy and Beila. Oh well."

"So, uh, congratulations, in another universe you're a servantmaker or a weather mage or an Avatar. I don't know what all servantmakers do besides making little animate bits of light, but a weather mage is exactly what it sounds like and an Avatar is an aerokinetic, geokinetic, hydrokinetic and pyrokinetic all rolled into one, with some hefty cultural baggage attached."

"Well, if you meet more of me I guess you can add 'subtle artist' to that list."

"Cool. So what's a subtle artist do?"

"...Saying 'subtle arts' probably won't help if you don't know what we are. Um, telepathy, but I'm not uncontrollable and not reading your mind except insofar as I can tell you exist. I have a little telekinesis potential and some subtle artists can also do pyrokinesis but not me. I'm in school for therapy but haven't gotten to much of the curriculum that's actually about that per se."

Helen looks more quietly amused.

"What?"

"The last one of you suggested that we wait here in Milliways to see if we could find a therapist. We can't go to one in our world for reasons that are a long story and we...don't really need one, exactly, but it would be useful."

"...I'm really not a therapist but if you want me to try anyway I can log you as practice hours?"

"If you want to. The whole situation is fantastically weird, anyway."

"I'm willing to try, I just don't know that I'll be much good to you."

"Well, to start with, we reincarnate. I'm on my second life and Helen," she waves a hand, "is on her third. Helen and Marie are our names from our first lives, by the way, technically she's Annabelle and I'm Ava right now. And her second life was Beatrice."

"...Okay. That's not a situation I'd be familiar with even if I had my degree, but I follow you."

Nod, nod. "How old were you when you met?"

"Mid to late twenties," Helen says. "I was twenty-six. She was twenty-eight."

"Okay. So you were planning to be heroes, and..."

"And we had an argument," Marie sighs. "Which was precipitated by some circumstantial stuff and also how messed up we were at the time, but it was a really big argument. And I sort of stormed off and became a villain instead. For the record I don't actually condone my past self's actions, I am well and truly reformed."

Nod, nod.

"So we ended up each others nemeses, and we each ended up leading a team--Vanguard for her, the Dark Legion for me. And then thirteen years after we had our fight, we were duking it out in a mountainous area, and accidentally caused a cave-in. The rocks above us were unstable enough that we couldn't try to get them out of the way without maybe risking being crushed, so we were trapped. And one of the rocks fell on Helen's leg, crushing it. She started crying--about how she didn't want to die, and she was sorry for her part in our argument, and she had been so miserable for unrelated reasons since then but it would have been better if she had at least had me. And she was sorry. And she was sorry. And she didn't want to die but she so extremely didn't want to die without saying the thing she had not been brave enough to say for thirteen years, which was that she was sorry and she missed me." She swallows. "And I held her and told her it was alright and promised her anything if she would only hold on long enough for help to arrive, I'd give up my wicked ways, I'd turn myself in to the authorities if she wanted, anything, if only she would only not die. And she tried so hard to hang on, but willpower can only hold out against so much blood loss. She died in my arms. And when the Dark Legion showed up and got me out of the rubble, I gave them instructions to give her body back to Vanguard. And then I left, and I didn't come back."

"...Wow."

"And then I spent the next eighteen years learning how to be a functional human being before she showed up on my doorstep."

"...Which didn't happen to involve turning yourself over to the authorities? Just for a complete picture of the situation, I mean."