What's a friend?

Valli genuinely didn't think he'd ever need it, but that was the trick with self defense: You didn't often think you'd need it. Sometimes it caught you off guard. Sometimes you were just minding your own business, and then an otherwise stable patient was coming at you.

It hadn't really happened with Valli, but he'd had some close calls.

Valli was so focused on taking the whole thing seriously that he very nearly missed the joke, his grin widening when he finally caught it a few moments later.

"Aside from that, I... read. I want to say reading is what I spend most of my non-work time doing. Fiction, non-fiction... I read a bit of everything, now."

"Well," Valli said, "thankfully my job gives me a bit of a leg up. Making conversation is a sizable part of my job."

To varying degrees, anyway.

"We talked about hobbies. I suppose maybe just longer introductions? There's plenty I left off my profile just to avoid saying too much in public, but I'd say we're getting along pretty well, so..."

Valli paused, the smile still on his face as he considered.

"We've already done names. I work as a therapist, and have for more than a decade. I have my own practice, but I've recently started taking patients directly up at the school. The work is a bit more inconsistent, but it lets me see more patients overall, which is nice. I live with my..."

Here Valli paused, once again caught as to what he should call Gask. Boyfriend? Boyfriend felt strangely childish, and implied a lot of things he didn't like.

"My significant other. I'll sheepishly admit he's the only non-work social interaction I get on most days, and having him around is what encouraged me to get out of the house and try and make more friends." Gask hadn't really pushed him, but Valli felt the pressure anyway. He didn't want Gask to feel like he was Valli's only social connection.

So he had no one, to put it less than tactfully. In a lot of ways that had been Valli's life, and he'd been fine with it. It was only the introduction of Gask that had changed things for him, and that had been a complete coincidence. Random chance.

He hadn't talked about his family though, and it seemed only fair, so Valli quickly added that.

"My mother and sister both live on the island, but I'm not close with either. Half-sister, technically. I see them on major holidays, and otherwise not at all." Which was a stark contrast to so many on the island, who had no family but desperately wished for some.

"You have a partner at work? Another lawyer?" Valli asked. It seemed like safer, less serious territory.

The island was a mess when it came to families. Almost no one had a whole, complete family. The entire idea of the nuclear family was rarer on the island that unicorns. There was a spattering of single parents and a mountain of orphans, and if Valli had been a more jaded person, he'd have credited all those dysfunctional families with letting him afford the life he lived.

"A junior?" Valli asked with a quirk of his eyebrow. "I considered that. Taking on someone fresh out of college. Eventually I'll have to retire, and someone will have to take over the practice." There he was, talking about work again, but work felt good and normal. It consumed his life, and he couldn't just avoid it.

"I assume you're doing the same thing?"

An issue of scale. The island could be a bit lopsided in its distribution. More students then adults it felt like a lot of the time, and considering? It was a genuine possibility. Lots of students completed their schooling and then went home, back to the communities that had sent them. To the narrow reality. To their packs. To their covens.

"How relatable," Valli said. "Mine's doing... I don't know, a bit better. We're here, aren't we? Talking. Like normal people who definitely didn't abandon their social circles the moment they graduated school."

Valli sure had, and he suspected Arthur had as well.

"You should give yourself more credit. Trying is what matters. We can decide to put the effort in, but we can't decide how others react to us."