Xaviers!

"Well, then maybe it's just the wolf coming into it's own, more," Will shrugged. "Progress doesn't always go in the direction one may have hoped."

"I could be wrong," she admits. "Just... we're both kind of cooling off after this morning. It wasn't a fight or anything, but..."

"But...she was disturbed? Distant? Pissy?"

"We just couldn't really... talk about what happened."

"Was she embarrassed about her other half? Some people can be pretty slow at accepting weird sides of their personality..."

"A lot of it she seemed almost confused about. She couldn't find words for much."

"Maybe she should talk to Isolde? She's had more experience with the whole 'being a wolf' thing. Tereza's still quite new at this."

"I don't... much like Isolde," she sighs.

"I know she's getting better, but that doesn't mean I have to like her."

"Doesn't at all, no. I just don't have a ton of werewolves on speed dial."

"I guess I could bring it up. She tolerates Isolde a lot better than I do."

"I just...I can only imagine what that kind of change does to a person, you know?

It's not normal. Unlike us," he joked.

"Says the man whose head I had to glue back together."

"No harm in popping open the hood now and again; getting your fingers dirty."

"Speaking of, how've you been since?"

Will drummed his fingers a little bit.

"I've been...hanging in there.

This time was a little different; two sets of memories to kind of...." he started, and trailed off again.

"It was a little different. I've been just kind of sitting around and letting myself....readapt, to a certain extent. Mostly...keeping to myself. Just the one of me," he said, deflecting with a joke. "So not quite the same boat, there."

"You can ask for help if you're having a rough time of it, you know."

"Mmm."


He paused.


"No, I shouldn't leave it at that. I'm...difficult to handle. At the best of times. And I know that. And I'm getting through it, slowly and quietly. This isn't my first rodeo, or mental blowout, for that matter."

"I've just dumped entirely too much information on my personal life on you," he points out.

"Oh, I figured you just wanted to see people squirm when they had that mental image," Will counted back, joking in a fairly baldfaced, obvious and poorly constructed attempt of deflecting the topic.

"Point being, I know I'm a lot."

"I can take some in the opposite direction."

"It's just...

...well, I have a whole support system back home. Like, of over a dozen people. Family. Professional help. Colleagues and allies. And there's a whole, you know, process to coping with things. To help prevent, uh, breakdowns of this magnitude. It's a trial and error process figuring out how to keep everything running over here, that's all.

I'm a high-maintenance diva," he said, with an abashed smile that didn't really make it past his lips. "So I do get, to a certain extent, why Tereza would be balking a little bit with your, you know. Your stuff. It's easy to get cold feet."

"So tell me what's wrong," she says simply.

"Sam, everything's wrong," Will said, with a disbelieving chuckle. "Everything. And everyone. It's all just ever so slightly off. It's like if the Mandela effect was real, and not some bullshit made up by paranormal charlatans. You're lighting up clubs with wolves; Miriam's mostly not killing people, ASHLIE...ASHLIE's gone," he said, his voice breaking just for a moment. "Everything, everything is five degrees off center. Everything. And every way I know to cope with things, when they get too tough to handle...they're gone, too. They don't work over here, because the people are different."

He closed his eyes and took a breath. "But I'm alive. And I'm here. And Robin's here, too. And there's an end, of a sorts, in sight. And I'll make it through to the end, someway, somehow."

His fingers idly danced over the keys again.

"Is this your way of making the problem too big to ask for help?"

Will sighed. "I'm sorry, Sam; I don't mean to dump on you like that. I just need to vent and cool off, sometimes. You know how it is."

"You do. I'm not denying that."

"But you just made the problem the world, and I'm asking about you."

"You may not have everyone you're used to, but I'm still your friend, aye?"

"Not your goddess. You'll see her in awhile. Your friend."

"You are, aye. And I appreciate it," he nodded. "I'm just sorry I don't have a great answer to your problem."

"Aye, well, the world's not ending, is it? We're not even breaking up."

"You're allowed to need some support too."

"Yeah, but I'm an old cranky man, and you have to give us old timers some extra leeway for complaining about things," he joked.

"Complaining's one thing. Hurting's another."

"And you're hurting."

"I may not have designed what's in that head of yours, but I can help keep it running."

"And you did a wonderful job when you poked around in there. Back to one person! Almost no personality disorders to speak of. Well, except for the usual ones," Will joked.

"I get why you stayed away for a while afterwards. It's not a pretty picture in there, from what I've been told. Hell, even Robin kept her distance, and I never saw Tosh before he was kidnapped.

I be strange," he said, with an abashed smile. "And I be high maintenance. When I'm back home, I try to get smaller tune-ups on a more regular basis, as it were. I let it build up over here."

"So let's not, aye?"

"Can we make it that simple? Let's not do that."

"Let's not wait until you're two people. Or fifty. Or you're five hundred feet tall climbing the Shard."

"Alright, it's a deal. I'll try to keep closer tabs on that from here on out, and come up with something to keep me pointed in the general direction of sanity," he said, vaguely.

"You know you really didn't like it when we had to freeze-dry you and vacuum you up."

"I mean, don't knock it till you've tried it," he joked. Or 'joked', depending on your point of view and degree of telepathic invasiveness.

"I'm saying you're of a sort that makes interventions often take an extreme form."

"You're saying I'm a pain in the ass," Will laughed. "And you're not wrong, per se."

"At this point I'm leaning towards getting Robin to make sure you do it."

"I'm sure she's already keeping an eye on me. Heck, she was here for, what, a couple weeks before she poked you into action?

To be fair, she may just have wanted to steal Jez and Katarina's leftover pizza. Hard to tell with her."

"So you're fine with me rolling up and saying 'Hey Robin, is your dad alright, or should we Clockwork Orange him some more?'"