That was fair. I didn't really know why I was nervous either. It's not like I had a part-time job, or much allowance. No one was expecting me to deliver expensive, incredible presents. No one was going to be quietly disappointed in me for not doing enough.

But it felt wrong. The Brandts, the Saints—the other Saints—had all done so much for me. I knew I didn't owe them. I knew no one had extended me a hand because they wanted me to pay them back. But I still wanted to.

"It feels like I should be able to do more for everyone."

Inessa, monster that she was, d'awwed at me with all the sisterly affection and/or condescension she could muster.

"I mean, it's Christmas. You get up and trade presents and then dad makes cocoa and we play board games or something. They're parents. They have jobs and money. If they actually wanted something, they'd just buy it. It's the thought that counts. Come on, you can't get a bad grade in Christmas Chiro."

"Last year, I was living with my dad still, mom had just abandoned us a few months ago, and I was still a boy."

"Well." She had the grace to sound sheepish. "Okay, if you put it like that—"

"And then I got kidnapped, gift-wrapped and thrown in a sack by a walking Christmas tree."

Inessa pursed her lips, as if struggling to recall which of the many strange monsters it had been, before nodding. "Oh right, Gula had it put that ribbon in your hair. But I'm pretty sure that was like at least a few days before Christmas proper. Huh, Temperance really is consistent."

I hung my head in shame. Of course, there were enough of those incidents that she couldn't even remember the right one.

She coughs. "What I mean is that you definitely can't get a failing grade in Christmas, this year; not that any of that was your fault."

"You're right, it's just…"

I didn't really have a good way to end that sentence. Obviously, Inessa was right. And all this anxiety about not being good enough, not making it special enough for everyone else, that was obviously just falling back into old habits. At the same time, the thoughts wouldn't just go away because they were silly, and I was still on pretty strict orders not to just shut up and keep that kind of anxiety to myself.

I stood up and stretched.

"I'm going to get some air, see if that helps."

"This late?"

I shrugged. We'd been up late fighting monsters all the time and somehow none of us ever seemed to pay for that quite as much as we should have.

"I am part bat," I said instead. "And besides, I'm sure Angelic Saint Humanitas would be kind enough to give me a little pick-me-up if I need it. Cover for me if they check on us?"

'They' is a wonderfully flattening term. But the choice between calling them our parents and Inessa's parents is one I still couldn't quite bring myself to make. Maybe life is just an endless succession of choices that don't quite feel right no matter what you pick.

Inessa grumbled, but didn't say no. I popped open the window and hoisted myself over the ledge in a well-practiced moment. Then I jumped, letting the winds catch and push me forward as I moved.

By the time I touched down silently on a nearby rooftop, I was clad in the comforting form of Angelic Saint Humanitas.

And then I was off.

A Saint's wings are plainly inferior to the beautiful bat wings I'd had as Invidia. Aesthetics aside, they also lack any functionality. Moving quickly is limited to hopping from rooftop to rooftop via raw muscle strength. Still, it felt good to forget everything and everyone to the soft sounds of the empty night.

Of course those feelings were stained with a hint of guilt at using Humanitas' powers for personal reasons. Michael had told us several times that they were our powers, and we were trusted to be responsible with them. Humanitas' powers were sustained by kindness that had to include myself. Even if the bracelet pushed me to go and do more good in the world, it wasn't actually against this kind of thing. But it still felt wrong to bounce around the city looking like some kind of patrolling hero when all I wanted to do was clear my head.

And besides, these little escapes tended to feel better if I did find a way to make myself useful. I stopped on a particularly tall building and oriented myself. Magical girls shouldn't carry smartphones; so I couldn't exactly use a map. But you can only sprint across the city a half dozen times before you start getting a sense of where you are relative to where you want to be.

And the local hospital isn't a hard building to find.

I landed silently on the roof. I was prescribed hormones here. By day, from the ground, the hospital papers over its own sterility with a veneer of welcome. But it's different at night, different when you stand on top of the world and look down. It's an odd feeling. In practice, we magical girls are creatures of the rooftop world. That's a bad thing, I think.

Still, there's nothing that suits the rooftop world so much as self-indulgent kindness on Christmas Eve.

So I sat on the roof, legs dangling over the edge as I looked out at the skyline, and plucked my lyre. Humanitas is no miracle worker, not really. I can't vanish cancer or set broken bones. It's just a little push, encouragement that makes you strong enough to get through another day, to soothe and encourage; a second wind when its most needed.

I'd taken to coming here and playing when I needed to find a space to breathe. I'd found that if I focused a little, I could send the feelings through the wind without letting people really hear the music. It's harder and not as effective, but it doesn't wake up patients in the middle of the night. Honestly, it was probably good practice.

I didn't tell the others I was visiting the hospital. They'd probably compliment me, or tell me how nice it was; when really, it was mostly a way of tricking my head into feeling a little better when I needed to sink a bit back into melancholy. And as much as I'd promised not to just bottle up everything again, sometimes talking through feelings leaves you feeling just like you did at the start but also ridiculous for having such dumb thoughts in the first place. This was a happy enough compromise.

I could accept, reluctantly, that these visits probably weren't entirely selfish. I'd practiced telling myself that a really bad person wouldn't make sure they were distracting themselves through doing a good thing.

Or maybe I was being ridiculous. Maybe sneaking out on Christmas Eve to quietly give comfort to the sick gave lie to any feelings I might have about not doing enough.

Or maybe it was okay to feel a little pathetic and selfish even if I was doing something nice.

Or maybe everyone needs a place to play quiet music and debate themselves on whether this is progress or backsliding until they've agonized enough, and they can finally sleep.

At the very least, Humanitas' winds seemed to appreciate me finding ways to make myself useful. And eventually, exhausting yourself makes it easy to push past the poison in your skull.

That's what I told myself after the concert was over, as I skipped across the roofs, heading back toward Inessa's—our—house.

That's about when I heard it, shouting its own existence into the night air. It was a clangy, metallic howl of a sin, something like the sound of a shower of coins or perhaps the staccato of a sword fight; utterly unrestrained.

Avaritia.

To my chagrin, I hesitated for a moment. It wasn't that I didn't want to see Lupin. I did; more than anything. But what was I even supposed to say? It had been months and we still hadn't been able to reach em. Oh, ey'd pop up now and then like this, letting us see ey were alive; helping in one fight or another; sometimes even making a resinner. But ey'd never stay long enough to talk. I didn't have the strength to make Avaritia Wolf stop and listen or words to persuade em to come back even if ey would. I didn't even have time to go home and get eir Christmas present.

Still, even if I wasn't exactly great at the whole magical girl thing, I couldn't just leave that desperate howl unanswered.

I let my current leap fall a bit short of the next roof, using the wall below it as a launching pad to change direction and head downtown.

I wasn't sure what to expect; why Lupin would be out in force alone on Christmas Eve. Was ey okay? Was ey about to start something big that would ruin the holiday for everyone?

I probably shouldn't have been surprised to see Avaritia Wolf—A santa hat resting off-center over one ear and a giant sack hoisted over eir shoulder—standing on the rooftop of a department store.

For a moment, we looked at each other awkwardly. Ey'd always been worse at sensing things than me or Temperance; and neither of us really seemed to know what to do with the situation.

"So, uh, Merry Christmas?" I tried, eventually.

"Merry Christmas," Avaritia answered, familiar confidence papering over the thin undercurrent of resentment in eir voice.

"So…" I let my eyes shift toward the sack.

Lupin let out a low growl, holding up eir free hand defensively as if to ward me off.

"I've said it before; I'm a greedy greedy wolf! I'm doing something evil! Sinny!"

I tapped my foot against the rooftop concrete, waiting.

"I'm going to give them to sad gay orphans," ey adds, triumphantly. "Like Robin Hood."

My eyes narrowed.

"I mean, not… you or Gula," Ey said a bit too quickly. "Just, like, normal sad gay orphans at an orphanage or something." I was not, in any substantive sense, an orphan.

"Sad gay orphans…" We were supposed to be close; partners. I wanted to extend a hand to pull em back and promise never to let em run again. Why were we talking about these silly excuses instead?

"Just orphans?" Ey suggests, ears drooping.

"Specific ones?"

"Well…"

Wordlessly, I pointed to the lone rooftop entrance to the store. Lupin took a step back defensively.

"Avaritia, do you even know where to find an orphanage."

Eir claws trembled, just a little, but ey growled defiantly at me, as if I couldn't feel the uncertain impulses that had driven them to this on the wind.

"Even if you found one, they'd just get in trouble if they had a ton of stolen stuff show up."

Did I even care about stopping em? This wasn't someone getting hurt. I wasn't supposed to be talking about imaginary orphans.

But this wasn't even another monster of the week. It wasn't an evil plot. Ey was just running around without any ideas in mind.

"Avaritia…" Wordlessly, I offered em a hand.

"Stop." Ey took a step back.

"We can help," I said; ignoring the way eir sin twisted through the space around us, telling me the obvious. "You don't have to be lonely like this."

"Someone has to stand for sin," ey said desperately, as if retreating into a cliche would save em from emself. "You and Gula are the ones who abandoned that." Who abandoned Lupin.

My hand fell to my side.

"It's not like that. We'd never..." Why was my voice so small?

"It's like, Envy will always be a part of me, you know. Or maybe someday I'll actually work through everything; but that's not happening any time soon, and it's not like I'm rejecting it or denying it. Envy pushed me to find myself. But it hurt me in the end. I'm sure I could go as far into this whole kindness thing that I destroyed myself too. It's finding a balance, that's all."

"Says Saint Humanitas." I couldn't tell if ey was angry, or if ey simply needed to convince emself that this had a purpose, that ey's stand was anything other than a kind of stubborn self-harm.

"I went too far in that whole thing. I let myself do stupid things when I let my envy take control of me. I hurt people—" Avaritia near the top of the list—"But I don't know if I'd be Chiro without it pushing me. I don't even know if I'd be anyone?" Would I have just vanished one night into the wind without Avaritia's misguided help? Nothing else had been able to reach me.

Ey set the sack down.

"Fine," ey said, desperately faking a grin. "If you want me to hear you out, then prove it. I'm not going to listen to a Saint. If this is about balance, then talk to me as Invidia."

I didn't say anything for a while. Could I? The seed was there in my chest, desperately hungry as ever. It would only take a thought to crack the fragile shell of Humanitas and let Invidia Bat take flight.

But what would that mean for me? An irrational part of myself was terrified that if I indulged that constant temptation, even for a moment, I'd never stop again. That I'd dive back into layers of denial and self-harm, twisting everything around my most indulgent, worst aspects until someone got hurt.

Could I take a single sip, choose to indulge just enough to do what I needed and still keep hold of the weak little resolve I'd been nurturing day by day? Obviously, there was no reason I couldn't. They were both a part of me. It was about balance. But the thought of it was still terrifying enough to swallow me up.

"I—"

Avaritia shook eir head, pain in eir eyes as disappointment, fear and guilt saturating the air between us. "Don't. It was stupid to ask. You're obviously happier like this."

But ey needed this, for whatever dumb reason. Ey needed to see. And maybe they'd find another excuse if I did. Maybe it wouldn't be enough to push back against the pain childhood had taught em to associate with virtues. But it might help em.

I shook my head. "It's scary. I don't feel like I'm ready, but if this is what you need to know that you wouldn't be betraying anything. And, it's something I should face eventually." Probably. Michael had said that

Humanitas' power disperses in a flash of light, leaving me there in my pajamas on a suddenly freezing roof.

I took a deep breath, forcing my heart to keep beating, my lungs to keep processing. Maybe this was good? It was one thing to try and speak up about my issues instead of bottling them inside, to try and admit to those horrid dark parts of me and try to love them. But could I really say that I was balanced if I never let those darker impulses materialize in any concrete form?

"I can—"

Avaritia's forehead smacked hard into mine, the puff ball on eir santa hat brushing against my nose as ey took a step back. I may have screamed. But if so, at least it wasn't, like, a boyish scream.

"What was that for?" I asked, rubbing my forehead.

Lupin laughed again, but some of that knife's edge of tension was gone.

"Nah, it's supposed to be, like, a big holiday for you, right? That's not the time to make a dumb point."

Ey laughed, and turned to leave.

"But maybe I wanted to try being the greedy one for once…" I whispered under my breath. I was surprised the words made it out, surprised I even dared to think them.

Avaritia Wolf's exposed ear twitched, and ey slowly pivoted to face me, eir tail frantically hammering itself against eir leg. Stupid dogs and their stupid hearing. And why was it so unbearably warm? Wasn't winter supposed to be cold?

"Ooooh?"

"I'll leave your present on the windowsill," I said as I turned and jumped; Humanitas' powers giving me the push I needed to run away as fast as I possibly could.

I didn't realize that I hadn't actually made em put back what ey'd stolen until I was nearly home. Well, at least, somehow, Christmas with the Brandts didn't seem quite so scary anymore.