"Listen," Moonstone says, "I'm not The Smart One—" and Hazel slams the kitchen knife she's holding down on Moonstone's chopping board with excessive force and turns around, both hands gripping the edge of the counter.
"People think they have an ineffable shape to themselves," she says, hearing how close she is to science rant intonation. "Or they look at themselves in the moment and see themselves shaped to their surroundings like water in a river bed and think they're products of extrinsic shape. But if you watch a river for a decade you'll see it cut the landscape. People are a process and they make the extrinsic moulds that shape them back. Moonstone—"
She closes her eyes. Moonstone doesn't listen, Moonstone needs to listen; she makes her lips shape the other name, the name that Hazel Isn't Allowed To Use because Hazel is a cartoon of a mad scientist and she mustn't be allowed to act too much like a real person, because that's one of the guard rails. She makes her lips shape the name and feels another thing in the back of her head peel apart like soggy cardboard delaminating—
"—Sabine," and Moonstone startles and Hazel flinches, and she can see Moonstone seeing her flinch, and unfortunately it takes a second to recover—
"How did you 'instil yourself with habits', exactly?" Moonstone says, narrowing her eyes.
"Exacting spreadsheets," Hazel says. "Rigorously calculated programmes of behaviour reinforcement. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, psychoactive microdosing, shock collar—"
"Shock collar."
"Exhibit A has people asking lots of questions already answered by the fact she's Exhibit A," Hazel says sharply. "People are what they do. You need to stop talking about yourself the way you do. Some rando in a comments section once said he'd jerk off to three of the other Pilot Princesses before thinking of you and you've made it part of the shapes you cut for yourself and you need to not, you're better than that, you deserve better than that."
"He didn't say he'd rather jerk off—"
"He was a rando in the comments putting you down. Everyone knows what he meant. He probably doesn't even remember, he doesn't matter, the speck the worm the BUG ON THE WINDSHIELD—" she shoves her wrist into her mouth and bites down, eyes squeezed shut, and growls around it until Moonstone stops trying to interrupt. Breathes, concentrates. "You. Need to stop. Sabine."
Moonstone raises her hands in silent surrender. "I just meant that Onyx is the science one," and Hazel opens her eyes to slits.
"Has she ever been tested?" she says, brain still too sharp and bright and hungering for target.
Moonstone stops and stares.
"Doctors are notoriously bad at spotting subclinical cases, but unpublished studies put peer diagnosis at around 90% accuracy. Women particularly get labelled with cluster B personality disorders instead of a competent diagnosis—"
Hazel flinches again at the look on Moonstone's face, and tries to fucking stop. "I don't know anything about the team's medical files," she promises. "I'm not even taking potshots blind, it's literally just statistics."
"I know." Moonstone shakes her head. "I just...don't need to know that about Onyx. She really wouldn't like hearing about it, either."
Hazel laughs, only a little shakily. "No, really?" she says.
"Anyway," Moonstone says. "I think you're derailing me on purpose," and their eyes meet. "I...don't do science for the team but I do know the word 'decompensation'."
Hazel breathes, breathes, peels her fingers off the edge of the counter, starts nodding slowly. "I shouldn't be near knives for this?" she suggests.
"You're not dangerous," Moonstone says.
"I wasn't." Hazel finds a brittle smile for her. "When my compensatory mechanisms were working."
"Will it make you feel better if we go sit down?"
Hazel nods.
"Okay. Because it'll make you feel better."
They arrange themselves on Moonstone's couch, and Hazel worries at a tuft of damaged fibre at the knee of her jeans, and Moonstone sighs.
"I don't have some kind of romantic fantasy that I'm going to fix all this," she says softly, and Hazel politely doesn't say oh god yes you do, you just rationally know that's not how anything works, I don't mind. "You're — how you are. You'd be doing the things you do whether you'd conditioned yourself or not. That's not—" and Hazel doesn't say curable.
"I cannot be stopped," Hazel says instead, quiet and wry.
"I made a mistake," Moonstone says, and her voice wavers in a way that makes Hazel want to build a robot that can punch the moon out and go lay waste to all guys from comments sections, ever. "I thought I was keeping you out of custody, but you're not — I can see you're not doing well. I should just have told you to run."
What comes out of Hazel is laugh-shaped, the way she's person-shaped.
"Coping mechanisms all the way down," she says. "And they're broken. They wouldn't be less broken if I was on the street."
Moonstone has given her the safest environnment she's had since OG Hazel existed. And no, it's not going to save her, but Moonstone is the martyr type — that's what gets her into the big robot to fight the good fight — and all she's seeing is Hazel's mind going and the fact she can't safety show her face outside. She won't believe that it's a decay as inevitable as uranium, and she'll never know that there was no more perfect gift for Hazel, while this iteration still exists, than a slightly larger, comfortably furnished containment box.
"You could," and Moonstone takes a breath and squares her shoulders, "I dunno, keep your head down. New false identity, instead of Grandmaster. Something different enough people won't instantly connect it — call yourself the Space Crayfish Universal Empress with a big bug helmet or something. Go north of the border, get into maple syrup fraud, something, just far enough it doesn't get you caught."
Hazel shouldn't. She knows she shouldn't. There are many excellent reasons why she—
"You beautiful dipshit," she sighs, climbing into Moonstone's lap, and kisses her.
Sabine is, Hazel thinks in a dim and fractured way, accustomed to being in charge at times like this.
"Witness the pitiless victory of my empirical perfectionism!" she hisses hot and dark against skin, while she does the thing she's discovered she can do with her fingers that makes Moonstone howl her throat raw and claw helplessly at the sheets.
She doesn't think anyone has exhausted Moonstone into falling asleep before. Which isn't just a religious experience, it gets her out — for now — of discussing reciprocation, because Moonstone's going to want to do that, she thinks, and. That. Is going to need a conversation.
How do you stop a mad scientist in a box from simply deciding to mad science themself out of the box? Well, one thing you can do is subvert their real basic drives to incentivise sticking with it. Hazel — fucking Hazel — did some really coldly calculated rewiring around Hazel's libido. The cackling about concubines, when Hazel's mad science wins her the day — that's uncomfortably not a joke. But it's safe, because it's a desire that actively keeps her inside the box which guarantees she'll never be in a position to follow through.
She's...pretty sure she legitimately can't risk Moonstone getting her off.
"You fuckup," she hisses at the Professor, and throws him across the room before taking her rightful place as big spoon.
