“Are you feeling anything that seems out of the ordinary for you right now? Something you wouldn’t normally be feeling in this situation?” It actually does help that he’s asking sensible questions, instead of freaking out. /She’s/ freaking out. She clamps her hands over her temples, imagining the impenetrable soap bubble wall that’s always meant shielding before.
She can taste Stiles, but he’s right /there/. Everyone else becomes dimmer, softer, like the sounds from the neighbour’s yard instead of right there in her ear. Or her mind, as the case may be. She really doesn’t want to know this much about what is going on inside him.
It’s rude. She hates being that kind of rude.
He makes an odd movement with his mouth at the question, absently looking around at the other students surrounding them. It’s more or less to distract the time away from her questions, but he knows he’ll have to answer them. “I mean, no? I’m not feeling problems with my brain, no strain like before, it’s controlled like I always have it.” He blabbers these things out, just not sure how he has to say it.
There’s obvious frustration on her face, the girl obviously not understanding why she couldn’t control her gift. Stiles would be the same, not really looking forward to going back to the pain-striking headaches and the irritation of not being able to control his mind correctly. He couldn’t fully understand though, could he?
“That’s not quite what I meant, but okay. Okay. I’m not projecting.” Experimentally, just to see if she even /can/ at this point, really, she tries projecting calm on him. What bits of her are out of control? Is it just her shields, the ones that protect her from everyone else’s emotions? Or is she going to be lashing the people around her with her emotions, or worse, forcing them to feel random things?
She picks at the zipper on her backpack, not looking at Stiles. “It’s okay,” she says softly, listening to the rapid spin of his emotions. “You don’t have to stay here with me.” After all, she knows why he was the only one to say anything. It’s rare for an empath to be in the Hero track; most of the other students don’t know what to do with her. And what she’d done to Jackson, sophomore year, had left a lasting memory.