Teeth.

Teeth teeth teeth stench meat teeth

Why are there so many teeth why is everything fire this is not sexy at all.

Trillions.

She knew, right? Like, this many planets, this big a scale--

Intellectually, right? Like, a number that big stops fitting in your head? You can't imagine a million grains of sand, let alone a million millions.

[i]Trillions.[/i] On the low end! 

Is a low trillion even a thing? Can a trillion of anything be described as a low of anything?

Is this what the knights felt like, staring down the barrel of interplanetary--

Trillions!

But they at least had--

Friends? Coworkers? Allies? Idiots whose ideals happened to line up?

She has those, though? Right? Or, you know.

Already, she's feeling the loss. They're gonna make the best world possible for them here, but--she's losing friends, nevertheless.

It's so, so tempting to say yes. 

Such a relief when she turns away, like a cloud passing in front of too hot a burning sun, and isn't that a shameful little ember piercing her. Yes, let Bella take the weight--she's always been the strong one, even now, even broken.

Even now, there's a part of her that's contemplating the idea. She doesn't have a plan for what happens after the Skies, after all--she's not a dreamer, not an ideas person, doesn't have a grand art project to cast into the skies.

She can see the blood already, dripping off her hands to pool on the floor and drown them all.

What would be the harm in saying yes?

Better put, what would be the harm in saying no? Beyond, you know, trillions of lives? 

If, you know, you were to think about it purely numerically. If you shut yourself away from thinking of them as people, and reduced them purely to casualties reduced.

How do you go forward, knowing that--

She's not wrong, is the thing, right? How can she do anything against the sheer scale of trillions?

… How can she [i]not,[/i] against the scale of hundreds of trillions?

It'd be so easy. Sit back, be a toy, let massive atrocity be carried out in her name from the safety and distance of the seraglio, tell herself she's taking the moral option, the humane option.

Her hands ball into fists.

Unthinkable. She will bathe the galaxy in blood, first. If there are horrors to be done, she will do them. Dyssia the distracted? No. There will be other epithets carved on whatever shallow grave she's eventually dumped into, but they'll be [i]hers.[/i]