Tear Jerker / Twig

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You have been warned.

• Each of the Lambs come with a nightmare or two attached, and that's even without getting into their expiration dates and chemical leashes:
  • Gordon looks robust and well-rounded with a strong drive to enjoy life, but it's all basically Cast From Hitpoints, meaning he won't even hit his late teens. Worse, he knows this, even if he doesn't quite know when the Sword of Damocles will drop. Eventually his heart does give out while on mission, giving the Lambs their first in-the-field casualty.
  • Jaime... dear God, poor Jaime. That memory of his? Comes at the expense of slowly losing himself to a wetware computer network. Every time he gets plugged in, there's a chance his brain won't be able to handle the returned data, leaving him an empty shell.
    • This nightmare comes true. Jamie's first personality is wiped clean, and the new Jamie had to spend months re-learning everything, with a completely new personality, all while being constantly compared to the old Jamie by the other Lambs in their mourning. Worse, he knows this fate will eventually befall him too.
  • Sy may be adaptable and very quick to learn new things... but, good luck retaining anything, kid — he could lose even basic skills at any time, forget just the memory and identity issues. Worse, the Wyvern mindset seems almost addictive. Not to mention, he's got the last expiration date of all of the Lambs, meaning he'll live to see them all gone.
    • Later in the story it is revealed exactly how the Wyvern formula causes one to reach their expiration date: the slow destruction of one's personality and a descent into madness up until they're put out of their misery. Sy has adapted himself so much to imitate others that his mental models of the people close enough to him start to take on their own personalities in his brain, and then start taking control of his actions in turns, and slowly crowding out his own personality...
  • Helen is an ace Femme Fatale in the making, but... she isn't human, she is a fully artificial vat-grown creature that had to learn to act like a human. Her unique physiology and peculiar psychology mean that she needs constant appointments with her creator to stay sane and functional, and her creator doesn't consider her desires important: he expects her to be loyal only to him, and feels free to tweak her analogue of hormone-release patterns when he finds her behaviour unsatisfactory. Helen has little control over her own self: for Ibott, she's all about him and lives, dies, or is modified at his whim, never hers.
  • Mary is barely accepted by the staff of the Academy and is constantly under pressure to be as loyal as possible. Any move she makes could be her last if it's decided she isn't good or loyal enough. And, she probably won't be replaced. Worse, her accelerated maturation in addition to the initial methods used to clone her all mean she has a future with a host of aggressively interesting cancers to look forward to: a rather near future.
  • Lillian faces all the problems of a very young scholarship student in the cut-throat world of the Academy, alongside getting front row seats to why and just how badly the place is morally bankrupt. Most students can choose to not look, but she's within the Lambs and doesn't have the luxury.
  • Ashton has a few similarities with Helen combined with Mary: he's been built to manipulate the emotions of others, but has an internal psychology that's basically alien to any he can influence, so he's operating by trial, error, theory and guesswork for the most part. Worse, he's well aware that if he doesn't find a useful niche within the Lambs or the Academy at large, ASAP, he'll be discarded as scrap at a moment's notice. Oh, and he needs to replicate Sy as far as being an effective manipulator and planner goes, yet without becoming as much of a potentially dangerous random particle. Good luck, Pinocchio: you damned well need it.
• The reason that Sy hates kind people? He spent his formative years around people who were kind to him before they hurt him, basic Pavlovian conditioning. He reconciles his love for the Lambs by believing that they're not people, they're something better.
  • Also because he read his file, and knows precisely what his doctors are trying to conceal with that kindness.
• The quiet, undramatic way that Jamie admitting his unrequited love for Sy ruins their comfortable, understanding friendship, with Sy's casual homophobia not helping matters.
• Sy thinks over his feelings about how Jamie feels about him, and comes to the conclusion that he can't stand losing his best friend over it, resolving to greet Jamie with a genuine smile when he wakes up... only to awaken to find that Jamie's appointment failed, resulting in him being a mindless Blank Slate.
  • In Tooth and Nail 7.8, Sy admits to Genevieve Fray, among others, that Jamie is essentially dead.
  Saying it aloud was hard. If I’d been anywhere else, anywhere at all, it might have been easier to handle. I could have done something, moved, turned to someone, and found a small bit of respite.
  But looking one way and seeing enemies, and looking the other, seeing more, unable to really do more than squeeze my wounded wrist even harder, it was the first time in months I’d wanted to cry.
  I smiled instead. It had done me okay so far.
• In 7.12 when Catcher, who's basically the Lamb's Big Brother Mentor is revealed to be The Mole for Fray and explains his reasons.
  "I don’t believe in what she’s doing, I’ve only done this because I’m so very tired."
  In the words, the way he spoke, if I listened beyond the shrill noise in my ears, I could hear that fatigue.
  "I can’t have the stalk and the manhunt be the beginning, middle, and end of my existence,” Catcher said. “Whatever I’ll do, it won’t live up to what I was created to do, but I won’t be able to go peacefully if I don’t at least try and fail at another course."
  • And later on in the same conversation:
  “Catcher,” I said, again, more firmly. “We understand. I understood without you needing to explain. When all of this has settled down, we’ll find you, and we’ll play cards and share a meal, maybe a drink.”
  “It’ll never be like old times, Sy,” Catcher said, voice soft. “That’s the problem. Time runs out. It’s gone.”
• Pretty much the entirety of Arc 9 is a Trauma Conga Line for Sy. Gordon and Hubris die, and he can do nothing to save them. Lillian has to take Wyvern and Sy watches it alter her personality into something unfamiliar, while he himself is unable to numb his reactions to the "fake" Lillian and Jamie thanks to his own fresh dose. Sy is pushed so far that he begs Mauer to kill him in order to secure some measure of protection for Lillian and Jamie, and Mauer refuses him even that.
• In Arc 10, Lillian's father, after promising to support her, specifically asks the review committee to hold her back behind closed doors.
• At the end of Arc 10, Sy's defection. He knows he has to scapegoat himself and leave the Lambs. The truly crushing part is that he decides to go it alone without even asking Mary to come with. The fact that he could probably have manipulated most of the Lambs into joining him but decides not to makes this heartrending.
• The end of Arc 13. Sy and Lillian's passionate reunion is interrupted as Lillian has a breakdown, seeing herself as weak for succumbing to romance. Sy realizes the Dating Catwoman relationship he was hoping for is fundamentally unequal and will only bring Lillian great pain. He reveals to Jamie that he's been using Wyvern to nullify his sexuality and libido up until now, and Jamie reacts with horror at the suggestion that this was in part because of Jamie's feelings for Sy, prompting Sy and Jamie to go their separate ways.
• Sylvester's Not So Stoic moment in Bitter Pill 15.14. He reveals how hopeless and futureless he'd actually felt this whole time, and how deeply he resents the Academies and the Crown for it.