I watched her eat in silence. She sighed and then asked it out loud:
"Why are you like this, Phaser? Why are you so passive about people's suffering?"
There was a dozen ways to answer. I could have told her I learned the uglier math of survival. I could have told her that sentiment got people killed. Instead I asked her a question that deserved an honest answer.
"Do you have anyone who matters to you?"
Her face folded. For a second she looked at me like she was measuring whether telling the truth would hurt more than lying. Then the softness in her eyes went brittle.
"No. They're all dead."
People imagine grief as a single storm and that you come out on the other side. The truth is messier. Grief rearranges rooms inside you so that you bump into the wrong furniture for years.
"Sacrifices have to be made. This isn't a novel where everyone gets applause and tidy arcs. This is real. People don't get a second draft of a choice. They don't get a montage to reset their losses."
She blinked, spoon hovering halfway to her mouth. "That's cruel."
She saw cruelty as something someone else delivered to the world, not the sort of calculus I drew in the dark.
"Maybe, but it's true. Once we leave this Fluve Field, you'll be thanked in the moment. People are always quick to shout thanks when their throats have stopped burning. The university will put together some official statement about bravery. Houses will make polite noises and then step back. You're a Commoner, Verdamona. Even if you stand with us and the Houses look impressed for a day, you won't suddenly be invited into the circles that decide everything. You'll be 'that girl who helped'. People learn to clap to survive. They don't change their minds."
"But I—"
"You shouldn't be suicidal about it."
I cut in before she could give me the staccato list of reasons she had given herself for every reckless step. I wanted her to hear that straight. Heroism without a plan to survive is martyrdom masquerading as virtue.
I closed the distance between us without making it a moment. My hands found her bare shoulders.
"If you push yourself so hard again that you can't get up, I will make sure your goal of helping others never comes true."
She opened her mouth to protest and I put my other hand over her lips. She could push herself into the ground with a thousand noble reasons and people would build stone tablets to honor the corpse. I had no interest in that kind of memorial.
"Guiding them and helping them is good. Even after I tell you the disadvantages of what you do, I know you'd still choose that side. Fine. However, prioritize your life first because here's the reality. If you die, the people you would save tomorrow die too. Heroes aren't rainbows and sunshine. They last long enough to do any real good and make horrible decisions sometimes. They learn to be useful instead of always being sacrificial. Do you understand?"
Her eyelids fluttered. Grief had etched something permanent into her eyes and the tilt of her head. People like her had already practiced the habit of being nothing but a vessel for other people's relief. It wasn't bravery so much as habit and a search for proof that she was worth something.
"You don't get it. You can say all this, but you're passive. Why don't you rage at it? Why don't you fight harder for them?"
"I don't have time for theatrics. I make choices that ensure the ship keeps sailing. I don't need to scream about the storm while the engine is still running."
Verdamona has a hero complex because she's suicidal.
It's a phrase people misunderstand in the game. It doesn't mean she would step on a ledge tonight and not think twice. Her suicide was a strategy, not an event. She involved herself in situations where the only honorable outcome was her own destruction, where giving everything away was the only path that fit the story she'd built for herself. It gave her a metric for worth of how much she'd been willing to suffer. The math told her life had value only if she was useful and grievously hurt for it.
I've seen it in the way she flung herself into the center of every fight yesterday in the habit of treating bandaging other people as if it were the same thing as patching up the cracks in her own chest. To me, it was a chronic erasure or a methodical self-annihilation dressed in compassion. She didn't just volunteer to risk her life. She turned risk into routine.
"I know why you do it. You saw lives end young. You learned to trade yourself for meaning because meaning was the only currency left after all that loss. You look for pain because pain proves you exist. It's not that you want to be dead. It's that you don't think you deserve to live without proof someone needed you so badly they'd sacrifice for you back. That's a lie you've been repeating to yourself since childhood. You manufacture martyrdom to feel valued. That's the slowest kind of suicide."
She stared at me. Years of hollowed-out nights had carved strict lines into her face and it was upsetting. Thales would have found some way to stop her from trying to be the world's emotional paramedic. But he isn't here because she met me first. That means I had to say it and say it harsh. If no one tells her to live rather than to die prettily for causes she can't finish, then she'll die. And if she dies, I don't know what will happen to the story without the protagonist.
Her hands tightened around the bowl and for the first time I saw how small and frail she was. I didn't do soft. I can't pretend to be soft and keep everything steady. I wanted to preserve her stubbornness without letting it destroy her.
"I… I'll try."
"Good. Now rest."
She wanted to argue but she stopped because she saw what she was about to do. Again, she wanted to shove herself into the noise and duties that made her feel needed.
She finally finished the soup. When the bowl was done she laid it aside. She lay back on the bedroll with and closed her eyes.
"Don't leave the tent until you're fully rested."
She closed her eyes properly then, acceptance and fatigue pulling her under. I looked at the girl who had been made of loss and determination and for once, let her be nothing more than a person wrapped in a blanket.
Damn it. If this is what the story chose me to be Phasnovterich, then it really made him a babysitter for someone like her.