Xaviers!

"Still working that out. Getting used to being out and about first."

"Baby steps, I suppose. I suppose you'll have to find some recompense for all that sleeping and eating you have to do now."

"Never know. I might start dating again if I can find someone who is willing to put up with me. But that's probably getting ahead of myself."

"You gonna leave them halfway through the first restaurant, too, or have you gotten a little smoother since you've been here?"

That elicits a long sip of her coffee. "That depends on whether they're even aware they're on a date."

"Yeah, no good getting ahead of yourself. First steps first."

"Yeah, well. It's not like we all have years of experience to offer supposedly sage advice from."

"Oh, now you want advice from me? Because I could give you some."

"When I said 'supposedly sage advice', I was talking about you. You are not one of the people I would go to for advice."

"I got that, Nat. The fact that you think my advice is only 'supposedly' sage is a symptom of your youth."

"The word 'symptom' implies that youth is a problem. I disagree."

"You would, 'cause you're young," the boy grinned.

"And you don't see it because you're old. There's an optometrist down the street, we could stop in and get you glasses."

"Mmm, I think not. I see the world in my own way, and it pays dividends."

"Exactly what sort of dividends?"

"You'd be amazed how freeing it is to peel off unnecessary social niceties.

Then again, maybe you wouldn't -- you've talked about how dealing with people is a pain, right? Compared to machines?"

"Just because I have difficulty understanding the social variables doesn't mean they're unnecessary."

"Some of them certainly are. And they keep you behind the eight-ball.

That's the general 'you', not you-you."

"Everyone's 'behind the eight-ball' on something."

"Well, A, that's not true, and B, even if it were, it'd be no reason not to try to get an advantage anyway."

"Fine," Natalie says with a shrug, "But I still don't think it's a call to throw out being polite."

"I didn't say throw out being polite. I said unnecessary social niceties. There's overlap, but they're not the same."

"So give me an example of something you consider unnecessary."

"Well, if we're talking about yours truly, smiling and nodding politely when treated like a sub-person in that bakery would count.

Or, if we're talking about you...that whole 'does the other person know it's a date' thing, right? If you'd made your intentions known, plainly and clearly before hand, you'd have had a facefull of Stanton that night. Instead, you ended up saying you never wanted to see me again which, I'm guessing, was not your intended outcome."

At 'face full of Stanton', Natalie nearly chokes on her coffee, but manages to get around it. "Not at the time, of course, but it probably ended up being for the best."

The boy shrugged. "I'm glad."

A pause.

"No, really, I am. I meant it when I said it was good to see you out and about once again."

Natalie inclines her head in some sort of acknowledgement. "Been going through some sessions with Professor Terrance. She wants me to make the effort and so far so okay."

"Ugh, shrinks. You have my condolences, there. I've spent far too much of my life blabbing to them."

"She's nice," Natalie says with disapproval in her tone. "She's actually helped me talk through some things."

"Yeah, well, they're paid to be nice," the boy said, somewhat dismissively. "While all the time they're just writing on that little pad of theirs all the things that make you wrong. I'm glad I'm out of that business here."

Natalie bristles, "You're making a lot of assumptions about her there. It's not about 'wrong', it's about understanding how I work and how I need to work with that rather than against it."

"I have been a regular client of five or six different shrinks in my time, as I've gone through one or two notable incidents. I can tell you, from a much larger sample size, that they're mostly all the same. I don't need a taxonomy of how my brain was broken."

"And you never need any help either, I assume?"

"Well, I did, sure. But now that part of me is lounging around with the Wolfpack. A rather....dramatic solution, but a solution notwithstanding."

"I don't know that I would necessarily designate *that* as a solution."

"Not for most people, I would imagine. I bounce back better from that sort of stuff," the boy 'agreed'.

"Not what I meant. I wouldn't call splitting off part of yourself like that any sort of solution."

The boy paused and thought.

"Counter-example. What if, say, your leg had gangrene? Removing that is part of a solution to not, you know, dying.

Tumors. Burst appendixes. Wisdom teeth. There are plenty of things doctors would advise removing for better long-term health. Think of it that way, and it might seem a little more, you know. Normal."

"You certainly didn't see that part of you as a disease before and I'm positive he wouldn't appreciate the comparison."

The boy shrugged. "To each their own. All I can tell you is that I'm happier, healthier and more proactive since cutting the dead weight.

And, frankly, I don't think he'd say anything, one way or the other, about the comparison."