(2/3) My head canon is that she’s doing the same thing here – she’s left home after fighting with her mum, had sex that she completely regrets and feels guilty about, got kidnapped, was beaten up and bruised and sexually harassed, held at gun point then rescued by a random claiming he is her father as well as the man currently occupying her father’s body – is it any wonder she’s totally overwhelmed?
And the only person who makes her feel safe, that could make this whole situation any better at all is the one that she pushed away, that everyone wants to keep her away from. Let’s not forget that Juls doesn’t know that Val has been told anything about her and Sergio or that the last time she saw Val she was hugging Lucho. She’s scared! She’s terrified! She’s an absolute mess!
But also she really needs just to hear Val’s voice but she’s so used to discounting her own feelings and pushing them down because she feels like she’s less than all the people that she’s around that she won’t let herself be vulnerable in front of Val – not when she knows that she’s done something that could jeopardise their relationship completely and shes going to get heartbroken when it comes out. (that was a lot of words im sorry lol)
Ooh, you might have hit it, anon. She does have a history of hiding her problems from Val. Even if Val has explicitly said not to, I think she kind of feels she’s lost that right, with recent events between them. And like you said, she’s not going to put herself into that place of vulnerability now either, since things are more precarious than ever.
Like, no question, she seemed to take the kidnapping more in stride than Val did, but that’s also because there was always something else to focus on, her mom’s safety, who her father was, the transmigration revelation, then her mom being the one losing it at their reunion, then having to play the peacemaker between her parents. She’s always had to be the grownup and caretaker and she just naturally took that role on again when calling Val.
Emotionless is quite different from absurdly cheerful, which is what she was. We’ll just have to see if that was because the scene was to highlight Val’s grief, we didn’t even see Juls’s face, or if any other theory bears out.