Thinking of You, thinking to you

Chloe's math professor was making sounds with his mouth. If she gave it enough thought, she could probably start understanding those sounds as words, and those words as parts of sentences. But as things stood, his voice just registered as background noise. It joined the whining fluorescent light that the school still needed to replace on the list of things grating Chloe's ears. She propped up her head with her arm and stared at the section of wall next to the whiteboard.

Malara was still gone. Chloe expected that Malara would be gone for a while, but the more she thought about it, the less certain she was that Malara was going to come back. Maybe Jackal would betray her. Or something else could go wrong, something else that Chloe didn't even know could go wrong. Chloe normally loved the idea of messing with powers beyond mortal ken, but not when her loved ones were doing it and she didn't understand how it worked. Especially not when it was so obviously dangerous. She hated that all she could do was stay home and wait for news of Malara's success or failure.

Her mind was full of contingency plans. For the girls, for getting a new place she could afford, for getting revenge against those who may have taken Malara away from her.The revenge plans could take a century or two to bear fruit. Imagining what it would mean to her to lose Malara, she was sure that she could stay mad for that long.

Chloe sat up straighter in her chair. This wasn't right. There was a part of her mind that was certain Malara was talking to her, but that seemed impossible.

There was a trick Chloe had started to learn from her father - thinking without words, to make mind reading more difficult. She hadn't mastered this trick; a few words would bleed through:

... Malara ... trick me? ... professor won't care ... but why would...

Chloe picked her stuff up and left. She would get notes from a classmate later. First, she looked up and down the hallway. Empty. Since Chloe was already trying to hide most of her surface thoughts from a possibly fake telepathic Malara, it was hard to think about why someone would be trying to trick her this way.

Is that really you, Malara? I didn't know you could talk to me like this.

It was too obvious that she didn't believe it, that she was worried. Chloe wished she was better at this.

Chloe entertained the idea that it was Malara, and that Malara had telepathy powers now. It sort of made sense that being a full God would give her more power. This could be difficult to get used to, but it wasn't too different from Malara knowing her emotions already, she guessed.

'Well, wow!' Now she was actually thinking at Malara, trying to simulate a normal conversation, her tongue almost moving to sound out the words. I'm really happy for - ah, you're reading my mind, so. I'm not going to fool you. You know I'm not going to believe you're Malara until I see you.'

Chloe shrugged, almost apologetically, as though Malara were there to see it. She was making her way to the portal station now.

'You also know I'll be happy for you when I see it. And that I missed you a lot.'