2.I — Amy Dallon: The Boy Who Asked Whether She Was Tired
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The thing about healing people was that they stopped seeing you the moment they felt better.
Amy had noticed this early — she'd been thirteen the first time she'd really understood it, treating a badly fractured wrist for a League associate while his wife and two kids watched from the doorway, and the moment the bones had knit and the pain had left his face he'd stood up and said thank you, Panacea and walked out of the room to his family, and she'd been left standing there with the biological memory of his fracture in her fingertips, the echo of what had been wrong before she'd fixed it, and he hadn't looked back.
She didn't blame him. She didn't even blame the specific version of it that happened with strangers — strangers didn't owe her eye contact after she healed them, strangers had just had a frightening experience and the frightening part was over and of course they were looking at the people they loved rather than at the person who'd fixed the damage. That was correct. She would have done the same.
It was the pattern that wore at her. The way it happened every time, the way it was built into the transaction. You needed something, you came to Panacea, Panacea fixed it, and then you were better and Panacea was still there, still Panacea, still the thing that fixed problems rather than the person who'd been in the room.
The capes were better about it, technically. They said thank you more deliberately. Some of them asked how she was. Some of them meant it when they asked.
But there was a specific thing that happened in medical situations — she'd identified it somewhere around the fourth month of being active, when she'd been treating a Ward who'd taken a bad hit from an ABB enforcer — where she became the room rather than a person in the room. The Ward had been talking to Armsmaster throughout the whole treatment, giving his report, barely looking at her, only registering her presence when she had to move his arm to a different angle. She was the thing that was happening to him medically. She was not the person doing it.
She was used to this. She had gotten used to this the way you got used to things that didn't change — not comfortable with them, not okay with them, just familiar enough that they didn't take her by surprise anymore.
The fire kid had taken her by surprise.
He'd come in shaking.
Full-body tremor, the deep kind that meant the muscles had been used past their tolerances and were filing the complete accounting. She'd assessed him before he opened his mouth — overexertion, possible mild heat exhaustion, dehydration from the thermal output — and she'd been in the corner with the chart from her previous patient and she'd watched him register the room and then open his mouth and give the nurse a full medical intake report.
With timestamps.
She'd been in enough medical situations to know how people reported their own symptoms, and the range went from I don't feel good to careful description to thorough clinical history, and nobody — she had never, in three years of active healing work, heard someone arrive for treatment and open with a caloric deficit timeline including exact intervals.
She'd made a sound. She hadn't meant to. He'd explained the timestamps, which was not a thing people usually needed to explain, and the explanation — the interval matters for assessing the deficit — was so completely obvious from inside whatever his processing was, so genuinely just the accurate answer to why the timestamps were relevant, that she'd made the sound again.
He'd kept going. He'd told the nurse about his tremor, his visual disturbance, his elevated baseline temperature and how it changed the reference point. He'd been precise in the way of someone who was not trying to seem precise — he was just giving information in the format that contained the most information, because he'd assessed that the information was the point and the format should serve the point.
She'd watched the nurse do the intake and start the IV and she'd stayed in her corner because there was no reason to leave — she'd been waiting for paperwork, she didn't need to go anywhere, she was just waiting — and because she'd been curious, which was not a thing she'd been about a cape patient in a while. Curious in the specific way of: I don't know what this person is.
Not in a rude way. In the — she'd been treating and interacting with capes for three years and she'd developed a pattern recognition for them, the way you developed pattern recognition for anything you encountered regularly. She could usually place someone in a category within the first minute or two of interaction. The categories were not always flattering but they were useful.
He didn't fit cleanly.
He'd asked her if she was tired.
Not are you okay. He'd explained the difference, when she'd called it weird — she hadn't meant to call it weird, she'd meant to sound neutral and it had come out weird instead, which was fair because it was unusual if not weird. He'd explained that are you okay was the social convention and the convention produced fine regardless of truth, and he'd been trying to ask the actual question.
She'd said yes.
She'd said yes without thinking about it, which was the thing — she'd answered the actual question automatically because it was the actual question and the actual answer was yes, I'm tired, I'm tired most of the time, and she'd been saying fine to are you okay for so long that she'd just — said the true thing, because he'd asked the true thing, and the true answer was available and he'd asked for it and so she'd given it.
And then he'd said okay and eaten his sandwich.
He hadn't followed up. He hadn't said I'm sorry or that sounds hard or wow, healing must be so draining in the specific tone of someone who found her draining-ness interesting as a concept. He'd said okay and eaten his sandwich, which was — she'd been trying to categorize this response and hadn't managed it fully.
It wasn't indifference. His attention before the question had been specific and real — he'd noticed her standing-for-a-long-time posture, he'd made an inference about her patient. He'd seen her. And then after the answer he'd just continued, as though the answer had been received and processed and was now in whatever internal system he used, and he was now eating his sandwich.
She'd decided, sitting with this for a few days, that what he'd done was — respect the answer. He'd gotten the true thing and he'd held it and moved on without making it into a thing she needed to manage. Without requiring her to contextualize it or reassure him or perform being okay about not being okay. Just: question asked, answer received, she was tired, noted, sandwich.
She kept thinking about it.
Victoria noticed on Thursday.
Victoria noticed most things eventually because Victoria was observant and because she loved Amy with an intensity that occasionally crossed over into monitoring, which Amy had complicated feelings about that she wasn't going to examine right now. They were at the kitchen table with homework — well, Victoria had homework, Amy had finished hers and was sitting with a cup of tea that had gone cold — and Victoria looked up from her history reading and said:
"You're making that face."
"I don't have a face," Amy said.
"You have a face," Victoria said. "The thinking face. Not the this bioanalysis problem is interesting thinking face, the other one."
"I don't have two faces."
"You have like seven faces," Victoria said, with the confidence of someone who had been cataloguing Amy's expressions for seventeen years. "The one you're doing right now is the one where something is sitting in your head and you're turning it over and you haven't decided whether it's important yet."
Amy drank the cold tea. It was not good. She drank it anyway.
"The fire kid," Victoria said.
Amy looked at her. "I haven't said anything."
"You don't have to say anything, I have seven faces' worth of data." Victoria put her pen down. "I'm not — I'm not doing the thing where I interrogate you about it, I'm just saying. You keep doing the face."
"He was a patient," Amy said. "Sort of. Overtraining, mild heat exhaustion. I was there, I observed, it was an atypical interaction."
"Atypical how."
Amy thought about the timestamps. About are you okay versus are you tired. About okay and the sandwich.
"He asked if I was tired," she said.
Victoria waited.
"Not are you okay," Amy said. "He explained the difference. He said are you okay was the social convention and the convention produced fine regardless of the actual answer and he wanted the actual answer."
Victoria looked at her for a moment.
"That's," Victoria started.
"Weird," Amy said. "It was weird."
"I was going to say kind of sweet," Victoria said.
"It was weird," Amy said, which was accurate, and also less complicated than kind of sweet, and she was going with accurate.
"And you told him," Victoria said.
"Yes," Amy said. "I told him I was tired. I don't know why I did that. The question was just — it was the right question and I answered it."
"What did he do."
"Said okay and ate his sandwich."
Victoria stared at her. "He said okay and ate his sandwich."
"He'd been sent for treatment because he'd underhydrated during training. The nurse had given him food. He was eating it." She paused. "He said I should eat dinner."
"He told you to eat dinner."
"He said it to himself, technically. About himself. And then at the end he looked at me and said eat dinner." Amy heard herself describing this and was aware that it sounded — a specific way. "He was borderline hypoglycemic and he'd been told to eat consistently and he'd just finished making the point that he knew the protocol and hadn't followed it, and eat dinner was consistent with the whole conversation."
"Okay," Victoria said, in the tone of someone managing their response carefully.
"Don't," Amy said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have the face," Amy said. "Your face, not my face. The one where you think something and you're deciding whether to say it."
Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"He's the Tradd Street kid," Victoria said. "Redline. First manifestation, saved someone, the PHO thread."
"Yes."
"He's been training with Armsmaster."
"That's what the nurse said." Amy wrapped her hands around the cold tea cup. "I don't know why you're talking about him as though the facts about him are going to add up to something."
"Because you're doing the face," Victoria said.
"I'm not doing anything," Amy said, which was the exact thing Victoria had said thirty seconds ago and which was not appreciably more true when Amy said it.
Victoria picked up her pen. She went back to her history homework. She didn't say anything else about it, which was Victoria exercising restraint, which was something Victoria had been getting better at and which Amy was grateful for even when it was slightly maddening because it meant there was something not being said that Victoria had decided not to say and Amy didn't know what it was.
She drank the rest of the cold tea.
She thought about a boy who had given medical intake information with timestamps. Who had asked are you tired and received the true answer and said okay and moved on without requiring anything from her.
She thought about how strange it was, that the true answer had just come out. That she'd said it before she'd decided to say it. Three years of fine to are you okay and she'd said I'm tired most of the time to a boy she'd never met who was eating a banana and drinking an electrolyte drink he'd told her he didn't like the flavor of but was drinking anyway because the function mattered more than the flavor.
She hadn't told him the rest of it. She'd said I'm tired most of the time, it's not a crisis, it's just how it is. She'd stopped there. He'd said okay.
She kept thinking about the okay.
Not what it meant — she wasn't going to assign it meaning she didn't have evidence for. Just the quality of it. The way he'd received the true thing and held it without doing anything with it except holding it. The way that had felt different from most things people did when she said anything real.
She did not think this was particularly significant. She thought it was notable. She thought it was the kind of thing you noted and then went back to your homework.
She went back to her homework.
She was thinking about it again by the time she finished the chapter.
Amy had noticed this early — she'd been thirteen the first time she'd really understood it, treating a badly fractured wrist for a League associate while his wife and two kids watched from the doorway, and the moment the bones had knit and the pain had left his face he'd stood up and said thank you, Panacea and walked out of the room to his family, and she'd been left standing there with the biological memory of his fracture in her fingertips, the echo of what had been wrong before she'd fixed it, and he hadn't looked back.
She didn't blame him. She didn't even blame the specific version of it that happened with strangers — strangers didn't owe her eye contact after she healed them, strangers had just had a frightening experience and the frightening part was over and of course they were looking at the people they loved rather than at the person who'd fixed the damage. That was correct. She would have done the same.
It was the pattern that wore at her. The way it happened every time, the way it was built into the transaction. You needed something, you came to Panacea, Panacea fixed it, and then you were better and Panacea was still there, still Panacea, still the thing that fixed problems rather than the person who'd been in the room.
The capes were better about it, technically. They said thank you more deliberately. Some of them asked how she was. Some of them meant it when they asked.
But there was a specific thing that happened in medical situations — she'd identified it somewhere around the fourth month of being active, when she'd been treating a Ward who'd taken a bad hit from an ABB enforcer — where she became the room rather than a person in the room. The Ward had been talking to Armsmaster throughout the whole treatment, giving his report, barely looking at her, only registering her presence when she had to move his arm to a different angle. She was the thing that was happening to him medically. She was not the person doing it.
She was used to this. She had gotten used to this the way you got used to things that didn't change — not comfortable with them, not okay with them, just familiar enough that they didn't take her by surprise anymore.
The fire kid had taken her by surprise.
He'd come in shaking.
Full-body tremor, the deep kind that meant the muscles had been used past their tolerances and were filing the complete accounting. She'd assessed him before he opened his mouth — overexertion, possible mild heat exhaustion, dehydration from the thermal output — and she'd been in the corner with the chart from her previous patient and she'd watched him register the room and then open his mouth and give the nurse a full medical intake report.
With timestamps.
She'd been in enough medical situations to know how people reported their own symptoms, and the range went from I don't feel good to careful description to thorough clinical history, and nobody — she had never, in three years of active healing work, heard someone arrive for treatment and open with a caloric deficit timeline including exact intervals.
She'd made a sound. She hadn't meant to. He'd explained the timestamps, which was not a thing people usually needed to explain, and the explanation — the interval matters for assessing the deficit — was so completely obvious from inside whatever his processing was, so genuinely just the accurate answer to why the timestamps were relevant, that she'd made the sound again.
He'd kept going. He'd told the nurse about his tremor, his visual disturbance, his elevated baseline temperature and how it changed the reference point. He'd been precise in the way of someone who was not trying to seem precise — he was just giving information in the format that contained the most information, because he'd assessed that the information was the point and the format should serve the point.
She'd watched the nurse do the intake and start the IV and she'd stayed in her corner because there was no reason to leave — she'd been waiting for paperwork, she didn't need to go anywhere, she was just waiting — and because she'd been curious, which was not a thing she'd been about a cape patient in a while. Curious in the specific way of: I don't know what this person is.
Not in a rude way. In the — she'd been treating and interacting with capes for three years and she'd developed a pattern recognition for them, the way you developed pattern recognition for anything you encountered regularly. She could usually place someone in a category within the first minute or two of interaction. The categories were not always flattering but they were useful.
He didn't fit cleanly.
He'd asked her if she was tired.
Not are you okay. He'd explained the difference, when she'd called it weird — she hadn't meant to call it weird, she'd meant to sound neutral and it had come out weird instead, which was fair because it was unusual if not weird. He'd explained that are you okay was the social convention and the convention produced fine regardless of truth, and he'd been trying to ask the actual question.
She'd said yes.
She'd said yes without thinking about it, which was the thing — she'd answered the actual question automatically because it was the actual question and the actual answer was yes, I'm tired, I'm tired most of the time, and she'd been saying fine to are you okay for so long that she'd just — said the true thing, because he'd asked the true thing, and the true answer was available and he'd asked for it and so she'd given it.
And then he'd said okay and eaten his sandwich.
He hadn't followed up. He hadn't said I'm sorry or that sounds hard or wow, healing must be so draining in the specific tone of someone who found her draining-ness interesting as a concept. He'd said okay and eaten his sandwich, which was — she'd been trying to categorize this response and hadn't managed it fully.
It wasn't indifference. His attention before the question had been specific and real — he'd noticed her standing-for-a-long-time posture, he'd made an inference about her patient. He'd seen her. And then after the answer he'd just continued, as though the answer had been received and processed and was now in whatever internal system he used, and he was now eating his sandwich.
She'd decided, sitting with this for a few days, that what he'd done was — respect the answer. He'd gotten the true thing and he'd held it and moved on without making it into a thing she needed to manage. Without requiring her to contextualize it or reassure him or perform being okay about not being okay. Just: question asked, answer received, she was tired, noted, sandwich.
She kept thinking about it.
Victoria noticed on Thursday.
Victoria noticed most things eventually because Victoria was observant and because she loved Amy with an intensity that occasionally crossed over into monitoring, which Amy had complicated feelings about that she wasn't going to examine right now. They were at the kitchen table with homework — well, Victoria had homework, Amy had finished hers and was sitting with a cup of tea that had gone cold — and Victoria looked up from her history reading and said:
"You're making that face."
"I don't have a face," Amy said.
"You have a face," Victoria said. "The thinking face. Not the this bioanalysis problem is interesting thinking face, the other one."
"I don't have two faces."
"You have like seven faces," Victoria said, with the confidence of someone who had been cataloguing Amy's expressions for seventeen years. "The one you're doing right now is the one where something is sitting in your head and you're turning it over and you haven't decided whether it's important yet."
Amy drank the cold tea. It was not good. She drank it anyway.
"The fire kid," Victoria said.
Amy looked at her. "I haven't said anything."
"You don't have to say anything, I have seven faces' worth of data." Victoria put her pen down. "I'm not — I'm not doing the thing where I interrogate you about it, I'm just saying. You keep doing the face."
"He was a patient," Amy said. "Sort of. Overtraining, mild heat exhaustion. I was there, I observed, it was an atypical interaction."
"Atypical how."
Amy thought about the timestamps. About are you okay versus are you tired. About okay and the sandwich.
"He asked if I was tired," she said.
Victoria waited.
"Not are you okay," Amy said. "He explained the difference. He said are you okay was the social convention and the convention produced fine regardless of the actual answer and he wanted the actual answer."
Victoria looked at her for a moment.
"That's," Victoria started.
"Weird," Amy said. "It was weird."
"I was going to say kind of sweet," Victoria said.
"It was weird," Amy said, which was accurate, and also less complicated than kind of sweet, and she was going with accurate.
"And you told him," Victoria said.
"Yes," Amy said. "I told him I was tired. I don't know why I did that. The question was just — it was the right question and I answered it."
"What did he do."
"Said okay and ate his sandwich."
Victoria stared at her. "He said okay and ate his sandwich."
"He'd been sent for treatment because he'd underhydrated during training. The nurse had given him food. He was eating it." She paused. "He said I should eat dinner."
"He told you to eat dinner."
"He said it to himself, technically. About himself. And then at the end he looked at me and said eat dinner." Amy heard herself describing this and was aware that it sounded — a specific way. "He was borderline hypoglycemic and he'd been told to eat consistently and he'd just finished making the point that he knew the protocol and hadn't followed it, and eat dinner was consistent with the whole conversation."
"Okay," Victoria said, in the tone of someone managing their response carefully.
"Don't," Amy said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have the face," Amy said. "Your face, not my face. The one where you think something and you're deciding whether to say it."
Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"He's the Tradd Street kid," Victoria said. "Redline. First manifestation, saved someone, the PHO thread."
"Yes."
"He's been training with Armsmaster."
"That's what the nurse said." Amy wrapped her hands around the cold tea cup. "I don't know why you're talking about him as though the facts about him are going to add up to something."
"Because you're doing the face," Victoria said.
"I'm not doing anything," Amy said, which was the exact thing Victoria had said thirty seconds ago and which was not appreciably more true when Amy said it.
Victoria picked up her pen. She went back to her history homework. She didn't say anything else about it, which was Victoria exercising restraint, which was something Victoria had been getting better at and which Amy was grateful for even when it was slightly maddening because it meant there was something not being said that Victoria had decided not to say and Amy didn't know what it was.
She drank the rest of the cold tea.
She thought about a boy who had given medical intake information with timestamps. Who had asked are you tired and received the true answer and said okay and moved on without requiring anything from her.
She thought about how strange it was, that the true answer had just come out. That she'd said it before she'd decided to say it. Three years of fine to are you okay and she'd said I'm tired most of the time to a boy she'd never met who was eating a banana and drinking an electrolyte drink he'd told her he didn't like the flavor of but was drinking anyway because the function mattered more than the flavor.
She hadn't told him the rest of it. She'd said I'm tired most of the time, it's not a crisis, it's just how it is. She'd stopped there. He'd said okay.
She kept thinking about the okay.
Not what it meant — she wasn't going to assign it meaning she didn't have evidence for. Just the quality of it. The way he'd received the true thing and held it without doing anything with it except holding it. The way that had felt different from most things people did when she said anything real.
She did not think this was particularly significant. She thought it was notable. She thought it was the kind of thing you noted and then went back to your homework.
She went back to her homework.
She was thinking about it again by the time she finished the chapter.