rejam
He did not introduce the topic by saying what he had been thinking since that voice message in which she had called him a friend, which was: the only thing worse than not having any friends is only having one friend.

But he did introduce the topic in the more natural way, and had gone slightly off into the thoughtful weeds, absently tapping his hands on the wheel as they crawled through a snarl of morning traffic.

“I tried, before - not for - not for -” he could not think of a polite way to say people like you, and didn’t. “I mean I tried to find a way to reach out to people who are having a hard time settling in. There’s already so little for getting us together and all of it’s for - for when we’re not ourselves. You know?”

It was hard to speak euphemistically about things like this but if he was paranoid, Elaine was obsessive. It would be better not to talk powered shop in her car, and he had apologetically told Kalani as much. He spoke with faith that Kalani would pick up what he was putting down.

“But I just can’t think of how you’d do it safely. I guess you’d need a sort of - vouching system. And you wouldn’t have to know who anyone is. You could - you could just know that they are. We could - I don’t know - I have ideas. But I can’t get past that part. Maybe it’s worth the risk.”

He shot her a glance. “Is it? For me, it is. But it’s not the same for me.”


Kalani listened as Morgan spoke. If you could call it speaking. She counted perhaps one full thought in what he said aloud, but it was enough to cobble together what he meant.

“I believe it would be worth it,” she agreed, though her attention was fixed on their surroundings. The more technology and engineering and industry she observed, the more it made her faintly sick, but it was fascinating, in a grotesque, horrible sort of way. There were so many of these ‘cars’ on these ‘roads’. What did they need all these cars for? Surely there were better ways of transportation. On Kua’kua they’d just walked, or sailed if their journey took them across the water.

But that wasn’t the subject at hand.

“I feel - very lucky,” she began, “that Cersei, a dog belonging to one of my roommates, found me. I was living in the park before that happened, and I do not think I would have survived the cold season in Destiny City like that,” she admitted with a faint chuckle. It seemed silly now, camping out in trees: beds were a wondrous invention. They had had them on Kua’kua, but nothing as comfortable and big and bouncy as what they had here on Earth.

“My roommates are…” she gestured vaguely with one hand. “They are not all like me, or even all like us, but - several of them are. It has been good to…to speak to them, especially those who are farther along in their journey than I am. Their planets are…well, I suppose they are still dead, but…less dead than Kua’kua is?” Kalani squinted slightly, not entirely sure if that made sense in any language, but especially not in Earthling.

“Community was very important, on Kua’kua,” she said, still turning over the subject in her mind. “But everyone is much more - I do not know the word in your language,” she said with a faint sigh; someday she would learn all the words there were to learn. “Everyone here is less - together. Separate. It is just one city, but it is a large city, and that means it can be very lonely. I think the level of…” she paused a moment, searching for the word, she knew she knew it, “...hilinaʻi...trust, that is it. The level of trust, even among people on the same side, is…low. Lower than it should be. It makes me sad, but it also makes me feel very lucky that a dog nearly ran me over and brought me to my present home. It is strange, feeling grateful and sad at the same time.”

rejam
"It does feel strange when it happens," he agreed, after a moment to think about it and abort a habitual attempt to chew on his cuticles. "I think it's pretty normal, though." There was a tiredness in that. Even if he couldn't remember specifically what it had been to him to be grateful and sad for what had gotten him out of sleeping in a park and into someone's bed, he knew that it had been. But there was no sense in talking about it. It wasn't what Kalani meant when she said it, and he was trying to talk about her, not about a person who no longer existed.

"I'm grateful to that dog too, for what it's worth. And I know what you mean about the - like - the trust thing. Keep getting stuck on it."

Uncomfortable, that, for reasons he also would not touch.

"I don't know how to get over it, though. But maybe we can do - something. I don't know. I probably," he added, with a sheepish laugh and a glance at her, "should have actually figured something out before running something by you that doesn't exist. But if I can - if someone can make it exist. Would you - maybe you could tell your roommates about it. And I have people I could tell."

He thought, with a pang, of Ilmare.


Kalani considered what he was saying, tilting her head as she thought. “You mean to have a time and space for those struggling with…” she gestured between herself and Maus, summing up the whole ‘aliens’ and ‘people whose life was erased’ in one motion, “with themselves and their lives, to speak to each other?” It seemed logical to Kalani, but she knew she had a more trusting mind than others did; some had the experience to know better than she did.

“Would we meet like–like this?” Kalani asked. “Or in–the other–the other way? I understand that when many of us gather, in the other way, it can attract…the wrong kind of attention, and I do not think anyone would wish to risk that. But I also do not know how many would be willing to share their–their this, with many other people…hm…” Kalani trailed off in thought once more, squinting vaguely into the middle distance as she worked it through in her mind; it was faster to do in her head than have to translate and explain aloud.

“Perhaps if there was no expectation of sharing identities. When I am like this, I understand that people do not know or recognize me as my other - way. You do, because I told you, but if I had not told you, you would walk right past me, and I by you, on the street, no? Perhaps if we forbid the sharing of - of any name at all. And forbid the sharing of anything anyone expresses beyond that meeting. So that the people who attend may speak freely and without fear that what they say will come back to hurt them in some way.”

Such is the way of things: every so often, someone reinvents Alcoholics Anonymous.