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[skitter]

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[skitter]

Keeping her hands busy making coffee for Shaw and Tea for herself is good, for Taylor, and she keeps her head down over it.

"... yeah. Tessa- I..." She pauses, feeling for what she can remember. "Tessa drove me to the hospital."

"I... I remember being in the car, but I know I wasn't," she says at last, bringing Shaw her coffee, and sitting in the chair beside hers, rather than across.

[cactusy]

"No, you weren't there. Dad called you; that's the first you heard about it. But, later, I think--"

Belatedly, she notices the coffee for the first time and reaches out to take it.

"You saw it. In a dream...?"

No, that doesn't feel right.

"A simulation."

[skitter]

Taylor tilts her head, and wraps both hands around her cup, more breathing the steam than drinking it.

"I-" She doesn't remember that, and isn't sure she wants to. "Maybe.

"I'm - in the car, I wasn't me, and it wasn't my mom... he called me Sameen."

[cactusy]

Shaw raises a hand, lazily wiggling her fingers. "Yeah, that's me. Did he turn into Rags?"

[skitter]

Taylor nods, that much confirmed. She wasn't sure she'd remembered Shaw's given name right.

"... Mmhm. That's the time Bouchard let the Fears in, then. Some of us had domains... feeding on different kinds of fear."

[cactusy]

"And I feel that."

She presses her palm to her chest, pumping the heel of it against her skin. "You feel it, it's right there at the forefront, you know what it is."

She takes a sip of her coffee, finally, and then declares, "Kinda sucks."

She might have some decidedly mixed feelings about her own emotional difficulties, but all in all? She's perfectly relieved not to normally feel fear.

[skitter]

She nods, a little jerky.

"My- my dad blamed me, for my mom. I was supposed to answer my phone, she was trying to reach me... He knew better, but-" Her shoulder lifts in a shrug. "He did. And he told someone who told someone who told me. And I- did not have the inner... I don't know. Distance, I guess. To know that he was wrong. So I was afraid he was right. For years, every time I thought something good about myself. How could I ever do the right thing, when I'd killed my own mom? A huge meal of fear, for whoever ran that particular simulation for me."

[cactusy]

"When my dad died - that was the first time I realized how different I was from other people. When I started to realize how I'd never be what they... expected of me."

And she felt that failure over and over, until she joined the Marines and realized how perfect combat was for someone like her. Until she, eventually, found her team, and realized that it was possible for someone like her to be cared for and understood.

"How about now? You ever end up cultivating that inner distance?"

[skitter]

"I did. A lot of my graduation was learning what is my fault, or my duty, or my burden, and what is not." She looks aside at Shaw.

"I've met a lot of kids who'd just lost parents. There isn't a way they react. Some cry. Some rage. Some trigger." She shrugs a shoulder. "Some don't seem to notice, for a long time afterwards."

[cactusy]

"Mm, no, I noticed. I thought about him a lot. I could see the empty space he left behind." She pauses. "I could see how much my mom hurt. But if I hurt, I couldn't tell."

[skitter]

"Ever?" she asks, and then winces. Maybe too blunt a question.

[cactusy]

"I've been... told... by people who are good at picking up on and reading emotions that there's something there. But me?"

Shaw shrugs, a bit stiffly but with no sign of offense taken at the question. Bluntness is a thing she can appreciate.

"No, I couldn't feel it. Not ever."