“I did. I went. I got the exercises and the game plan and I’ve been keeping up with it. Every morning.”

“Regimes need to change. Things need to be monitored, Victoria.”

Doesn’t answer my question about whether this is caring or accusatory.

“They were. And they are. I’ve seen family and teammates get hurt, I read up on what to do when Patrol members got injured when I was in the Patrol.”

“That’s no substitute for medical attention, Victoria.”

It’s not, but I’d like it if it counted for more when I did pick up certain skills or knowledge. Or when I put in effort.

“It’s enough. I know what to watch out for, the differences between kinds of pain. I just…”

She didn’t cut in or fill the silence that followed.

“…kind of hate hospitals,” I said. The bitterness of the sentiment and the bitterness of the feelings I was holding back made it a paradoxically weaker statement overall, like my voice had almost broken as I admitted it.

“If that’s how you’re taking care of yourself, walking that risky line where you’re half-blind and taking on enough responsibility that you’re running the risk of hurting yourself, are you really taking care of the others?”

What? This was the first thing she’d said that really hurt, that felt like it wasn’t possible to fit into the mold of a normal conversation with Jessica Yamada.

Why do I feel like there’s nothing that I could say that would change the tone of this conversation? Like my points aren’t being directly addressed?

“I’m damn well trying,” I said. “You asked me for help. You seemed okay with the coaching thing. You put me in close proximity to a dangerous biology-altering threat of global proportions without cluing me in.”

“He wasn’t a threat, Victoria. He needed more sessions but he was on his road to normalcy, striking his balance, learning the necessary skills.”

“He’s not the cataclysmic threat I was told to watch out for then?”

“He’s—” she started.

She stopped.

Don’t.

She wasn’t good at being evasive, or at thinking on the back foot.

Don’t shut me out. I don’t fucking deserve this.

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“Victoria…”

I waited. I didn’t respond, as much as there were fifty things I wanted to say. I let the silence hang, as she’d done to me many times before.

“No,” she said.

Fine. I’d say the first of those fifty things. “You want to accuse me of not caring for them? I sacrificed to help those guys. I gave up a literal pound of flesh, at least—!”

I pushed up my sleeve to show the scars I’d been through physio to rehabilitate. The scarred notch in my tricep.

“—for them! Because people wanted to kill them, because people wanted to kidnap or co-opt them, because they’d been taken to pieces. I gave my all, and your complaint is I’m not doing a perfect job of it? I’m paying too much attention to the cape side of things? That’s not a fight you win, when agents are involved. You don’t get wins, you find a working balance where you minimize the damage and you maximize the gains!”