[turns down the volume]

Answering that question will make me look and sound like a massive tool, so I'm declining to answer.

I'm going to give you a third heart attack if you don't take that back.

[she has absolutely no rebuttal for this other than a sour look, like she's pouting.]

It's a tie. [she says, finally.]

[she thuds her head against the wall again.]

I don't think she can. [...] If I tell you something, you have to promise to keep it to yourself.

Nonagesimus and I grew up together and there wasn't a single second that where we weren't trying to kill each other. I have scars still from her tiny goblin nails.

[she folds her arms, closes her eyes.]

When she was ten, I was eleven, she broke in somewhere she wasn't supposed to. And there was a girl, there, she was in there, and I know this, right, because Harrowhark told me, but she doesn't know that she has. There was a girl in that place, and she was frozen solid, and Harrowhark said to me that she decided she wanted to live forever, just in case that girl woke up.

[she chews her bottom lip.]

There's not a chance in hell I could measure up to that. Not because I'm not hot or really good at swords, because I am. I just can't meet that.

[so she did the next best thing - she died for her necromancer, because it was all she knew how to do.]

You wouldn't get it, because you don't get who that girl is. [...] Do you have a God in your world? Something that people devote themselves to?

[twelve. that's so many... she seems sort of interested in the fact that he's fought one, but she lets that rest for the moment.]

It's like that. What's in that place isn't God, but it's close enough to it that it doesn't matter what the distinction is. Her whole everything is devoted to it.

[the immediately eugh face that she makes might actually be kind of comical]

No. Yuck. No.

[silence, for a moment. she really hates how he can just see into her brain like this, all the squishy little parts that she barely even admits to herself.]

I don't want to talk about this. [she says, grouchy, her shoulders around her ears.]

[she glances at him, finally.]

You keep hinting at all your drama and never giving it up, and here I am, spilling all of mine into your lap.

[the low stakes of this conversation vs. the absolute internal shrieking of saturday

anyway, she sighs.]

Yeah, but my problems are fucking stupid.