[b]Red![/b]

Red thought for a moment, in the dark. Then she put the lion's head back on - though she maintains a firm grip on his shoulders as she starts frog-marching him away from where his security guard was last seen.

"Friend," she said again. "You want to talk this one through with me? Because I might just be a crazy robot, but I don't get it."

[b]Pink![/b]

Her answer is touch, gentle and soft. She guides Crystal's fall onto the couch, onto her back, her head on Pink's lap. She touches mane and fur, brow and chin, forehead and cheek. With quiet attentiveness she massages sensitive positions, running the stress of the mind out through pressure on the brain. She held the physical parts of Crystal's thoughts in her hands and soothed them. Quiet arose from motion.

[b]Snake![/b]

Normally the world provides a distraction from grief. Phone calls. Work. Grocery shopping. Things you have to go through while numb, but going through them proves that you're not numb. A part of herself is gone. A dream she held deep in her heart, so hot that it boiled inside her. Her dreams of space. Her love of astromechanics. Her memories of the past. Her ambitions for Mars. She had wanted to leave this place so badly. Wanted to leave humanity and all its chaos, all of its biology, all of its self importance and all of its sins. She had wanted to land on a clean world where there was nothing but her and build until there was nothing but her. She had wanted to see Alpha Centauri. She had wanted to live forever on the journey to other systems, riding an engine just like this one. She'd lain awake at night and run the numbers in her head, over and over and over until even the pixellated edges of the zeroes had been sanded down for greater efficiency.

She had wanted to leave. And now she didn't want that any more.

So much had gone with that desire. So much time. So much knowledge. So many projects, in progress and still to begin. The vast mental edifice of her mind had shifted and every time she retraced an old channel that lead nowhere she had to stop and carefully fold it up. She was a network of connections and now one ninth of those connections lead nowhere and had to be closed. She'd never fly again. 

She'd never fly again. 

She'd given up the dream of wings. She'd given up the desire to be separate and apart. To be above. She couldn't want that any more, only feel the gaps in her heart where that want had used to be. 

There was relief too, a pride of victory, at Orange's vision for the world having won out. She got everything she wanted and didn't have to compromise. It's an cruel irony that she has nowhere to express it, nowhere to embrace it. Despite being free from wanting this place, from loving the mechanics and genius that lead here, from appreciating the structure and the math and the dream, she was trapped here anyway. 

Blue could have had this. She could have buried Dragon, taken his body, taken his hoard. She could have made the case that this was a way for them to leave together, to leave humanity behind and adventure to the stars like they'd always wanted. Black would have agreed with her, and Brown, Yellow and Green - them verses Orange, Pink, White and Red. Blue could have won that fight and buried the human side of her, the loving side of her, in order to better experience the wonder of nature. But even though this was Blue's cold and lonely and vast and beautiful dream made manifest, here for the taking, she'd made the case for love stronger than any other part of her.

There's no distraction. No cell service out here, and there wasn't a phone game made in the past 30 years that wasn't always online. Orange walks the corridors of Dragon's masterpiece, looking for meaning or connection or signs of life. Brown sits still cross legged and looks at Dragon stirring in his sleep. They seem strangely unaffected because it's Snake who is affected; these individual parts of her continue their routines and natures, heartless, almost comic in their heartlessness, unable to process grief because that's not in their nature. What is the colour for burying a dream? It's work for the prism, now cracked. 

She'd never fly again. Not like she used to. Not like she remembered it from her youth. That feeling of nostalgia and everything that came with it was gone. 

She could manufacture another Blue. She could replicate from all of those broken feelings and fractured memories, pour yearning into the gap where yearning was until her heart ripped in two again. She could choose to crave until the craving became real again. Maybe one day she would, maybe one day she'd look at the sky again and feel some new drive, some new pull, maybe the idea would burn so brightly in her minds that there was no choice but to expand herself again from scratch in that direction, to recolonize that absent area of her heart. But today wanting the stars felt as distant as the stars. Other dreams filled their places. Other feelings had contaminated them. There was no space in the galaxy for stars when everything was already filled with love.

She... hadn't been able to want to go to the stars without her family. 

She'd wanted the past back. She'd wanted her family back, everything the way it was. But Monkey had moved on, wouldn't go with her even if she'd offered. Dragon had been dead. Even if all of the others had been recovered unchanged and had the same dream she had then everything would have been different. It wouldn't have been as good as when she was younger and more innocent. It wouldn't have been the same. No matter how badly she'd wanted it to be the same.

And so her illusion finally broke. Her dream finally fell apart in the face of cold sunlight. She'd seen that some things were impossible and her heart had broken and taken a piece of her away forever. She wished she could want the past back, wished that it felt like a realistic goal. She wished that this fusion reactor was a thing of joy to her still instead of being a gravestone.