A Celebration of Spring

[Natalie Denisov]

"What I saw from you at the hospital was *not* healthy, but I couldn't convince you of that then, so I doubt I'll be able to do it now."

[Null]

"Mmm," the boy said, looking around, and grabbing a discarded Starbucks coffee cup.

"Demonstrate by doing, I suppose."

He held the cup up to the palm of his hand, and pushed. The cup was slowly absorbed into the clay, briefly bulging out before vanishing.

"Now you see it, now you don't. I can control it. He couldn't. I mean, if your life goal was to be part of one of us, I'm sure we could oblige, but I thought it was probably not good to let him absorb an entire hospital with all the patients in it. Just a little weird quirk I have, there."

[Natalie Denisov]

"I'm not talking about him, though that you first inclination was to destroy him says more about you I think. I'm talking about the whole way you handled the mission. Or was that someone else I was arguing with about collateral damage?"

[Null]

"And if I had left it up to the rest of you, we'd still be standing outside the hospital, waiting for the right moment to go in.

The hard part about leading a team is to know when to make the risky call. There will never be a situation where everything is 100% fine to go ahead and do things; sometimes, you have to make a move even though there's risk involved.

Everyone here...everyone here is so damn passive. You have to hit them with a cattle prod to make them do anything. It's beyond frustrating."

[Natalie Denisov]

"There's a difference between trying to scout the situation and your 'damn the torpedoes' approach. We were approaching Maldon's only hospital with no reports of anything being wrong there. How would you have handled it had we barged in there and been confronted with a normally running hospital? 'Oops? My bad?'."

[Null]

"Nat, I got the information. It wasn't pleasant, for me or anyone else, but I got it. I knew they were in there. 100%. The fact that you didn't trust me to know that is not, at the end of the day, my problem."

[Natalie Denisov]

"They were there, but you didn't know *anything* beyond that. They could have been hiding in the basement, avoiding the staff. As I said, we had *no* reports of problems. From Maldon's *only* hospital. And you wanted to charge in, powers blazing. But you content yourself with being the big bad hero who always thinks he's right." She drains the last of her coffee and turns to leave, "Cause eventually you'll be wrong and it'll cost *everyone*."

[Null]

"They were in the basement! I know this, because -that was part of the information I got when I fucking interrogated Char!- I fucking told the team this!

You're looking for a reason to hate me, I get it. But yeah, I think we're done here," the boy said, angrily standing up and slamming his own chair in.