And for another instant, Amy could fuzz her eyes, look past Hunter but still see her, snow in blonde hair, snow in eyelashes, a smile on her face, no care in the world.

Just about everyone recharged in their own separate ways, Amy mused.

Hunter wasn’t one of those people. In this state, she had no recharge or need to recharge, drawing energy from a bottomless well. It made her hard to deal with, because they had to take shifts to keep an eye on her. Most often, it was Amy and someone else. Amy and Marquis. Amy and Mark. Amy and Chris. Each came with their own anxieties. Marquis was the bad influence. Chris the worse one. Mark was too good an influence, which made Amy think he’d turn Hunter against her. She hadn’t wanted to brainwash the girl, that wasn’t how she operated. She’d kept it at the minimum possible level to keep Hunter in a place where she could help her, and that level was a place where Mark could say the wrong thing or stir doubts. Too much time with Dot would make this new Hunter even more unhinged. Too much time with Marquis would make the girl a villain. Too much time with Chris would make her a monster. Too much time with Mark would lead to a day Amy got the alert Hunter had run away or gone back home.

Easier to take care of it herself, to take as much time as she could supervising and trying to fix her damn power’s mess. Amy would never say it out loud, but she was the closest thing to a sane person here, just about the closest thing to a good person when all of her good deeds were taken in aggregate. The most human, in all her flaws. And she was steadfast, she didn’t run, she stuck to her commitments.

Hunter needed her.

Dot slept, and she slept a lot, and she burned that energy in fits and bursts. Amy envied that life, in a way. She would have liked to be able to sleep easily. To not spend nights battling her thoughts and doubts, fighting to find that one thing to cling to that would let her get through the night, so she could get through the next day. Because if she couldn’t get through the next day, it implied mistakes, it implied the world had beaten her down enough, harangued and harassed her, to the point that she stumbled. And a stumble meant more nights wrestling with her thoughts. It meant more nights spent having to find that one thing she could say to herself that would let her rest easy.