Dany nearly lets the moment go, and she doesn't even know why. She comes right up next to damning the galaxy by releasing some awful thing pretending to be her mother, and there's no rational reason for her to do so! Her mind stops thinking in anything so sophisticated as words. Because, and here is the truth of it, the ugly painful truth of it: she didn't realize Bella would be tempted, and now all she can see is that Bella is tempted. It's a rough and painful thing to realize that your heart is blind. It's even worse when you're steeling yourself to stand as a unified front against your mother, the thing that has stolen your mother's face, the thing that now lurks under Nero's wine-steeped laughter in her memories. There's no space for reason, for Apollo, for anything in the heart but shields up and lances out. And then to feel more than see Bella move? Now she's dizzy with the sudden loss in the shieldwall, stumbling, unseeing. Her body knows better, as usual. Her body lunges out to catch Bella's wrist, and fails, and it's her body that decides there's only one thing for it, as per usual, the thing that Bella has taught her [i]not[/i] to do, and now is the only thing she [i]can[/i] do to her wife: She lunges forward and interposes herself between her wife and the fires, trusting that if there's one thing Bella will [i]not[/i] do, it is to destroy her in order to quench[1] those hellish flames of Dis. And if Bella would, well, being destroyed is what Dany would want to have happen to her anyway, come to think of it? Better to be trampled in the process of discovering that Bella values the approval of her mother-in-law more than the bodily integrity of her wife. She makes mouth noises. Does it matter what they are? Neither she nor Bella nor Nero really care about what those mouth noises are, after all. A noisy, witless princess even to the end. So go ahead, Bella: maybe it's [i]her[/i] turn to get locked in a closet, unable to stop you from chasing your heart's desire. Maybe it's [i]Dany's[/i] turn to get hurt. Maybe you're still capable of hurting her. [hr] [1]: what a word. quench. queeeeeeeeeeench. haha. we have fun here.