Rain wasn’t someone I’d had to tear down. Life and past experience had done that. He’d needed pushes. A regular nudge. In many places, his natural hesitation and the gravity that pulled at him were at the point where doing nothing was as good as pushing him away. With his low self confidence, a simple reprimand or jab could do a lot to shape the direction he was going. In a way, the things that guided the others all applied to Rain. Maneuvering to get him out of jail and keeping him close enough, keeping an eye on his relationships, managing a balance of civilian and cape with the assumption the former will crumble… and as with Sveta, knowing that he saw himself as a monster, with a deeply regrettable past and a potentially, maybe inevitably regrettable future.

Sveta’s impending breakup. Rain’s doomed cluster. It was a question of managing the damage.

I closed my laptop.

Even Weld breaking up with Sveta was in the fucking diary.

Detailed, deep thoughts in intermittent diary entries, stored in a folder on my computer. The times the entries were made, at a glance, seemed to line up with times I’d been free and active online.

Nothing so actionable that it would be grounds to arrest me. But enough to hurt the team, if they were to read it. I had a thought, on finishing it, and the irony was that the thought had come from a line in group therapy back at the hospital. We judged our own actions based on our intentions, and we judged the actions of others on their actions.

Except this ‘diary’ fucked me at both ends.

Where my actions were damning, the diary portrayed my intentions as questionable, poor, or outright bad. Where my intentions were ambiguous, or even when it came to ideas I’d alluded to or mentioned, they were connected to actions. Desperate, rushed decisions I’d made in reality were rationalized out afterward or hinted at or led into beforehand.

It was self-involved and mission-focused, with passing mention of the others’ injuries, those mentions so fleeting that it suggested I didn’t care, or I cared for the wrong reasons.

And I couldn’t find any holes. A paralysis had crept over my upper chest as I realized I couldn’t find dates that didn’t line up, any actions I had an alibi for.

I couldn’t blame Dragon for looking over my computer. I’d told her to take everything. On a level, having already dealt with Kenzie, I had expected the sweep. I hadn’t expected a trap to be laid.

I couldn’t blame Jessica for doubting me. Reading this, I was starting to doubt my own reality. Because it was close. There were thoughts in there that mirrored thoughts I’d actually had, and lines in there that paralleled things I’d said in reality, if they weren’t those exact same things.