Her eyes started watering.  She blinked the tears away.

“And my orders?”

Stay alive and… stay sane?

“Order number one is that you go see the PRT’s therapist.  If I can clear it with Director Piggot, figure out a way to make the patrol schedules work, I’m going to try to get everyone to go.

Sounds like a good idea. Man, the amount of fictional ‘verses out there where no one gets therapy…

I’m honestly kind of flabbergasted that nobody higher up than me has mandated it already.”

Heh, yeah.

“Okay.”  In a way, she was relieved, at that instruction.

“Order number two is to let yourself cry, damn it.  Stop holding it back.”

Open those dams.

Seriously, this is good advice.

She shook her head, “Nobody else seems to care as much-”

Weld raised a hand, “Stop.  Let me finish.  Remember that your teammates have their individual strengths to their personalities.  I don’t know enough about Aegis or Gallant to say for sure, but I think maybe Clockblocker is stepping up to become more of a leader, in Aegis’s absence.

Oh yeah, Clockblocker was the one who was supposed to be the next leader anyway, wasn’t he? Except he wanted to procrastinate on that for as long as he could.

And it does seem like he’s gotten a little more assertive since Interlude 3, among other changes.

It could be part of why there’s friction between him and me, even if he doesn’t fully realize it.”

Maybe to some extent.

“Gallant was sort of preparing to be the team leader, for when Aegis graduated,” Vista said, her voice quiet.

Oh right, that’s how it was. Clocky was next, I suppose.

Weld nodded.  “The impression I’ve picked up, and forgive me if I’m off target, is that Aegis was the head of the team, the leader, strategist and manager.  Gallant, maybe, was the heart.  The guy who tied you all together, kept the interpersonal stuff running smoothly.  

Weld, have you been up looking at TVTropes?

But yeah, that sounds accurate.

Would I be wrong in assuming he was the one who handled Sophia best?”

…

That might explain Sophia acting differently for a while too.

Vista shook her head.  A lump was growing in her throat. 

“Okay.  With all this in mind, I have one suggestion and two orders.  My suggestion?  Stop trying to be everything they were.

So if Clockblocker’s taking over as the head (even though officially, that’s Weld’s job), maybe Vista should settle for the heart. She’s rather fitting for that role anyway, what with her emotional maturity. She’s sort of been doing that already, throughout this Arc…

…and she wasn’t visibly doing it in Interlude 3. Huh.

Be what you’re good at, a caring, sweet young woman who everyone on the team likes.  My professional opinion is that you have it in you to fill some of that void Gallant left.  Use that empathic nature of yours to help others with their own struggles.  Be the team’s heart.”

Yeah.

You know what, Weld? I think you’re pretty good at this whole leadership thing, once you’re settled in.

“You wanted to talk to me?” she asked.

“I sent Flechette on patrol with you because she’s got an objective perspective on the team, and I wanted to see if her thoughts on you echoed my own.

Ah, interesting. So then I guess he’s going to talk to her about Clockblocker next.

True enough, you were only out for a short while, and she’s already expressed concerns.”

Yeeah, being this comfortable with one’s own future death at age 13 is unusual and can be signs of more worrying things.

“Okay.”

“Tell me straight up, are you doing okay?”

“People keep asking me that.  I’m fine.”

She does seem to be doing alright for the most part, at least judging by what we’ve seen so far. But she might also be unwilling to actually acknowledge that she’s not fine even in her own narration, forcing us to read between the lines… but yeah, she does seem mostly fine. The only real exception is the grief for Gallant, which is to be expected.

Sophia was manning the console, browsing Facebook.

…naturally.

Kid Win was testing out the armor – four guns with the size and shape of large pears were floating around the shoulders in a loose formation.

Cool!

Rather than distract Chris or have to deal with Sophia again, Vista left the headquarters and headed into the elevator.  Weld’s room was in the hallways one floor up, opposite Kid Win’s workshop.

The door was open, and he was there, reclining on the a heavy-duty chair of the same model as the one he had in the conference room.

Hi again! What’s up?

He had headphones on, his feet on a granite counter where his computer sat.  She’d never been in his room.  Looking around, she saw rack upon rack of CDs, DVDs and vinyl records.  There was no bed, but he didn’t really need to sleep, so that made some sense.  It was easily possible that he slept in the chair.

Sounds about right.

His head was bobbing with the music until he spotted her.  He gave her a quick nod, pulled off his headphones and turned off the speaker system.

Music is such a good thing. I love music. 🙂

So I say… thank you for the music, I guess.

Bristling at the midget comment and the crack about her chest, Vista just stared at herself in the mirror, ignoring the girl.

Yeeah, fuck you, Sophia.

Sophia finished washing her hands, then got her toothbrush and brushed her teeth.  She took her time, while Vista stood there, clutching the towel around herself with both hands.

Honestly, out of everyone on the team, Sophia is probably the one person who just straight up wouldn’t care about the scar, but that doesn’t mean Vista should let her be the first to know about it.

Finishing, Sophia put her toothbrush away, and, as she’d been doing recently, put a hand on Vista’s head as she passed by.  Only this time, she mussed up the younger girl’s hair, with more roughness than was necessary.  “Carry on, kid.”

I mean, it could be worse, but I do wonder if Sophia is aware of Vista’s distaste for being patronized and is doing it on purpose. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put it past her.

Great, Vista thought.  Dennis might be acting more like his old self, but Sophia is too.

Huh, so Sophia had a period when she wasn’t acting like this?

She combed out her hair, sorting out the tangles that Sophia’s attention had given her, dried off, and then went to her locker to get a change of clothes: A t-shirt, sweatshirt and flannel pyjama pants.  Comfortable clothes.  She pulled on slippers and went to find Weld.

Yeah, I’d much rather have you talk to him than Sophia.

Vista might have tried asking Panacea to fix it, but hadn’t been able to summon up the courage.  Now, as she thought about it, she thought maybe she didn’t really want to get rid of it.

Sometimes injuries and the marks of them can be comforting reminders.

A part of her took a perverse kind of pride in the fact that she had a scar, as though it was some kind of proof to herself that she was a good soldier.  It was a sort of validation of the philosophy she’d been outlining to Flechette.  Why stress about a scar on her chest when some villain could kill her before it became an issue?

Heh, yeah, good point.

A toilet flushed in one of the bathroom stalls, and Vista hurried to pull her towel from around her shoulders and wrap it around herself, hiking it up to cover the scar on her chest.

Sounds like she does still keep it secret.

Sophia strolled over to the sink next to Vista.  She gave the younger girl a cool look, “Don’t freak out, midget.  It’s not like you have anything worth hiding.”

Oh great. Just the person we wanted to talk to right now.

*drip*

It had only been later that she’d seen how serious it was, how much it had been bleeding into the fabric of her costume, underneath her breastplate. She’d stitched it up herself, here, in the showers.

Well… that’s honestly kind of hardcore. Did the others ever find out?

She’d done as best as she was able, worked with a kind of grim determination.  Not the most competent job, in the end.

To be expected, I suppose.

She kind of regretted that series of decisions, now.  She was a late bloomer, looked younger than she was, but when she did eventually have the sort of cleavage she could show off, the scar would be there, plain as day.

Well, if they don’t know now, they will if she starts showing off her cleavage. Which it sounds like she does want to do someday.

It might even be worse, when that time came, depending on how the scar stretched as her chest grew.

Unfortunate.

Well… at least it could act as a conversation starter with new people, I guess? Though I suppose she’d be showing her cleavage primarily in her civilian clothes rather than while she’s Vista, which sort of defeats that point unless her identity goes public.