"Fifteen-hundred Ceronians."

She's going to die. She's going to die because she opened her stupid mouth to make a joke that only ever made herself laugh and that only in her own head. The flush is starting at her head but she can feel it surging down her tail like a fire. Just bury her ashes in the ground here and find something more pithy for her tombstone than "fifteen-hundred Ceronians."

You know, with all the trees having sprouted, the soil's probably nice and soft, could do the burial nice and easily. 

"What?"

"In-joke, sorry. It's that each Pix is, uh."

[i]Bail.[/i] Pivot. Topic change now.

In all her years she's never seen a more compelling question of wife or life.

Fuck, fuck, change back--

Because on the one hand, [i]whoof.[/i] The silver scales? The scars? The shape, that [i]armor--[/i]

Note to self. Invest in armor. Find a tailor, invest in armor. Research tailoring, invest in armor. Hell, she's already half a blacksmith, and they can probably pick her forging gear out of the wreckage--

God, she could climb him like a mountain.

But it's like, it's not [i]just[/i] the physicality, right? Not purely the sex appeal of a big buff guy made more buff by armor?

It's the confidence, is what it is. Every inch of him says that he knows what is right, has bound himself to live it in both word and deed, and to look at him is to want to do better personally. 

Red, right on the face. Red, right where people can't help but see and know and be confronted by and--

What other people think doesn't [i]matter.[/i] This is his virtue, he shall live in it, and the petty opinion of the Azure Skies will not change it.

Fuck, she actually has to explain why she did it. The words bubble up--excuses, lies, witty sayings--

But looking at that face--looking at those eyes, those [i]eyes[/i]--the words gurgle and die in her throat. It's like, she doesn't need them? Doesn't actually need the full reasoning, either, it seems. She could explain her reasoning, explain how it happened, dance around the fact that she wasn't exactly in control of piloting while still accepting the praise (and she's realizing now that the praise of this man abruptly matters quite a lot), could spend a whole lot of stammering and words to say not very little.

But there's a certainty here that cuts through all of that. 

It's like, she's heard questions like that before. Dyssia, why would you do that? Dyssia, why are you like this? [i]How[/i] could you do this? Why would you [i]not[/i] do this other thing that nobody told you about but which somehow everyone is supposed to know anyway? Always with that same air of Dyssia, you moron, you fuckup, you embarrassment to your family, clod, idiot, like getting stabbed by knife after red-hot unspoken knife.

(And then they never stay for the answer, by the way, which is even worse. Because it means it's not actually about getting an answer--it's just about making her feel like shit in a way that doesn't make [i]them[/i] feel like shit.) 

But he'd asked as if there was… Admiration? No, maybe not, but at least certainly approval. Curiosity. She'd done something interesting, something unusual, something he approved of, and now wanted to find out whether she'd done it for the right reasons. And he was listening, as if what she said actually [i]mattered.[/i] To him! To a knight of who knows how many campaigns and seasons!

"How could I not?"

Four words. As if they were the most simple, obvious thing in the world. Because if the world is one where they aren't, the world is a shitty place that Dyssia doesn't want to live in.

"They were going to--"

She gestures emphatically at the forest around them, as if nothing she could say would say it better than just looking around.

"As if it were their fault that we, you know, [i]made them[/i]. And then decided that we didn't like the way we made them. And so because we made them in a way we didn't like, somehow that means we also have the right to murder them all?

"S'like, what part of that says that we should be the ones with the fingers on the trigger, huh? We fucked them when we made them, we fucked 'em again when we played around with them, and then when we can't twist them into something useful, oh well, we did our best, obviously we can't be blamed for this, we'll do a little light genocide in the morning and then go out for brunch after?"

Probably a bad first impression to have that much bile in your voice, but she can't help it.

"They're [i]people.[/i] People who are different from us, yeah, but whose fault is that? Who picked and bred and programmed them and then decided they weren't needed? What's a ship compared to them?  What ship would [i]replace[/i] them? We can [i]make[/i] more ships, or we could, if--"

She bites her tongue just in time to cut off the treasonous sentence. We could make more ships, if the system actually even fulfilled its promises. If the Skies existed as more than a phantom of its former self.

Would she want it, even if it did?

"… We shouldn't be killing people. Like, bare minimum. We owe them too much to even contemplate anything but trying to help them as best we can."