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Alcor clears his throat.
“Do you want to do it another time?” he says. “I have a couple places to be and—”
“No,” Jude says, her teeth gritted. Her finger hovers over the button on her holocell. “I can do this.”
His eyes flick to the sweat beading at her temples. The trembling of her finger as it intermittently dips toward the button, never quite touching it.
“If you want I can call for you—”
“No,” she says more emphatically. “ I can do this. ”
He allows her a few more moments, watching her aura shift from one muddy color to the next. When nothing happens, he assumes a bored expression and murmurs, “Can you?”
Her head snaps up from the cell and she shoots him a glare. “What?”
“I mean, it’s been what, ten minutes, and you’ve done nothing but have a staring contest with the screen and sweat a lot. Maybe you aren’t ready for this after all.”
“Of course I am,” she snaps, searching his face. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Alcor shrugs casually. “Well, calling people is always intimidating, even for adults. This is a new situation for you, unfamiliar territory, which kids are never good at dealing with since they’re so young and inexperienced. And you’ve never really tried to confront your many issues in this way before—or in any way really, which can be upsetting, so it’s really only natural.”
He pauses for a moment for dramatic effect, and to swallow a grin at the look on Jude’s face.
“I’m just saying, it’s ok if you’re too scared.”
“You piece of--I’ll show you too scared!” Her eyes flash as she mashes the call button, whips the holoscreen to her ear. She continues to glower at him, leg bouncing as she waits for the call to connect.
The tinny voice of an AI secretary warbles, “You’ve reached the office of Dr. Aisling Lily; would you like to schedule a therapy appointment?”
The yellows and blues that replace the scarlet in Jude’s aura make the air around her look bruised, and Alcor can smell more sweat on her brow as she stammers, “U-uh, yes…I’d like to schedule an i-intake?”
---
They arrive at the building 5 minutes late, to Alcor’s chagrin; it took 2 seconds to blip over but 2 hours for Jude to change clothes in order to go. How she managed to do that when her closet consists almost entirely of jeans and jerseys he isn’t sure. The why of the matter, though, is obvious as Jude rocks back and forth on her heels in front of the office door, her colors roiling.
“I’m not gonna have to trick you into opening the door like I did with getting you to call am I?” Alcor sighs dolefully.
Jude seems taken aback for about a second, but the scowl slides off her face almost as quickly as it comes. “I shouldn’t be surprised anymore,” she mutters.
He quirks a smile. “Well, that’s new.”
“Huh?”
“Usually when I say something like that you curse and shout at me.”
“Well I can’t really freaking curse now, can I?” she says, spinning to face him. Alcor swallows the blip of energy from the word she wanted to say instead. “Not since that stupid deal I made.” Under her breath, she adds, “And I don’t always shout…”
“Hmm.” He floats toward her casually. “If the deal’s so stupid,” he says, stretching his hand out, “we could just call it off. You could walk away from this appointment…go back to the shack…pretend this never happened. And you could curse again.”
He doesn’t mention that this will leave her in the same situation as before, alone and hated by her peers in the Shack. She seems to remember anyway, because after a moment’s pause she shouts emphatically, “No! I can—” quieter, “I can do this.”
She turns toward the door again and quickly raises a fist. Knocks echo down the hallway as Alcor fades out of the real world, and as he disappears completely a woman’s voice says, “Hello! You must be Judith.”
---
After an hour he pops back into the hallway. Jude isn’t out quite yet, and any murmurs from inside Dr. Lily’s office are covered by the sound from the noise machine at the foot of the door. After picking his sharpened nails for a couple minutes, the door opens and Jude walks out, her shoulders slumped, her eyes red.
“Are you ok?” Alcor says, startled.
Jude nods, looking away.
“…Were you crying?”
Though she doesn’t say anything, the inward curling of her shoulders and the blues and greens of sadness and embarrassment in her aura tell him the answer.
“We can find a new therapist,” he says seriously, floating toward her. “I’ll even call myself. I’m sorry I didn’t check this one thoroughly enough; it was my mistake; I’ll make ś̰̝̬̹͚̟̞u̱̦͉͉͔r͖͚͙̖e͕ the next person doesn’t d̦́á̻r͕̟̞̮͚̺͔e̪͕̝ ͍̀m͖̬͕̗͟ą̻̼̲̬k̜̼͕̼̣e̤͔̰̤̞̳ ̨̙̻͍̟y̨̙̩̘̱o̼̲͚̼͈ų̱ ͔̙̫̝̱̯c̶̻r̻͍—”
“Alcor,” Jude says hoarsely.
“…Yes?”
“Shut up.”
He blinks, dumbfounded. Her shoulders are shaking slightly—is she crying again? He checks her aura and no, she’s…laughing? “So…I take it the session went alright?” he ventures.
“It was,” she clears her throat, “it was pretty crappy. But yeah, it went alright.” She smiles at him oddly, or maybe it’s only odd that she’s smiling at all. “It was good.”
Alcor stares at her, confused, but manages to give a nod of assent. “I…don’t think I understand,” he stammers.
“That’s because you’re a demon and an idiot,” she says, walking toward him and punching his arm. “It doesn’t matter anyway. All that matters is that I scheduled an appointment for next week and you’re going to blip me here so I don’t have to walk, alright? Now take me back to the Shack; it’s lunchtime and I’m starving.”
There the familiar Jude again. He grits his teeth and nods slowly. Grabbing her jersey, he pops her back to her room and gets ready to return to the mindscape.
“Hey, Alcor.” Jude flops down on her messy bed and picks at one of her teeth.
“Yeah…?”
“Is there like, a therapist for demons?” She smiles wryly. “Might do you some good.”
In an instant, he thinks about his own psyche, damaged, confused, torn between not-quite-human and not-quite-demonic. His centuries-long bouts of depression, his sudden fits of decimating rage. And sometimes, millennia of numbness and nothing…
He forces a laugh before the silence gets too long. “I doubt it. Demons hate each other too much to care about each other’s mental states, and even if another species wanted to try to psychoanalyze us, I doubt they could with their sanity intact.”
“Huh. That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He shrugs and starts to fade into the mindscape. “It really is.”