It's something of a relief to Derek when Buffy actually does sit down. "How that Steve guy was shot, you mean? Yeah, I think everybody did," Derek replies, frowning. This place is a nightmare and he feels useless and vulnerable without his abilities to protect himself and the people he cares about. Like Katniss. Like Buffy. But Buffy already knows how he feels about that, so he doesn't see any reason to bitch about it for probably the hundredth time.

"Wait, by yourself? What the hell, that's way too much ground to have to cover all by yourself," he says, annoyed both by the fact that it's going to run her ragged and by the fact that it means the security on those floors is, in a word, shitty. One person cannot be everywhere at once and if she's got to patrol three floors, one of which is the goddamn Commissary, there's no way in hell that all of those floors are safe. Not fourteen and sixteen while she's here, for example, or the Commissary and fourteen while she's on sixteen, and so on. That's just a way to cop out. When something terrible inevitably happens on her watch but she was watching another floor at the time, she'll get blamed and it won't be her fault. Again, Derek feels a surge of rage on his friend's behalf that he has to swallow back.

But then she mentions the dreams and Derek's eyes narrow in thought. "Yeah, well, you're in good company with that," he tells her. "I think a lot of us had them." Katniss did. He did. Adam did. Now Buffy. He's willing to bet that if these dreams work for everyone they way they seemed to work for Adam, then whoever Buffy dreamed about and whoever Katniss dreamed about experienced it as well.

"Been worse," he replies. "But I've also been better. Pretty much par for the course around here." He pauses. "We miss you in the room, though."