Chris needed time alone. Simple enough. Amy could kind of understand that. Maybe in another universe, that would be her. Not now, not when anxiety swelled with every second spent on her own. She had spent very little time alone over the years, going from being with her biological mother to Marquis to the Dallons, to being with Victoria much of the time. The times she’d first been truly alone had been when Victoria had been starting to date Dean, the next logical step in Carol’s 1001-step plan to train Victoria to be a classic superheroine.

Having Dot around helped. It meant she was rarely truly alone, even if her company was someone who could be sucking on a lollipop big enough to fill the entire interior of her mouth in one moment, and sitting in a corner crunching the bones and chewing on the gristle of some mouse she’d just killed in the next.

Marquis, for lack of a better way of getting it right in her head, luxuriated. Tea, a nice drink at a nice establishment, an evening with a refined woman or spent refining one, or sitting and reading fine literature, which all seemed more exhausting than recharging to Amy. Shin was a new place with new things for the foreign aesthete to explore. Clothing was the most recent area of study, and he had a new article of clothing every time she saw him. One in three times she saw him, he would have a gift for her. The coat and scarf she wore now were his gifts to her. He could give her those gifts and gently worded support and reassurance, but he couldn’t help her find a way to recharge. They were similar in so many ways, but not in that.

Mark fought an uphill battle, with exercise, time alone and time with others seeming to carry him two steps forward, one step back. He seemed better about it when he was with Carol, but he wasn’t always a better person with Carol. She could kind of understand and empathize with that. He didn’t give her any answers, but he gave her reassurance that at least someone else was struggling.

No. Recharging wasn’t easy. Different for everyone, hard to impossible for some. Amy had it hard.

Like Mark, Amy had a few things that could help in small ways, but in isolation, it a two steps forward, one step back thing. That might have sounded like it was still progress, but it wasn’t. Not when the rest of the world dragged her down, when things went wrong, like they had with Hunter, like political shifts, Goddess getting more aggressive, and Teacher’s maneuvering. Breakthrough coming for a visit.