Lemons

Amygdala Circuit

As they descended past the pastel trees, Quinn suddenly took note of the crowd. Tons of people, cheering, taking photos, waving signs with her Savior printed on them. It was very strange. Not unpleasant, really, but certainly disorienting. She hadn't been outside around normal people other than Hovvi, and even then, she'd been mostly invisible in the crowd. Not so here; here, all eyes were on her. The enthusiasm was almost infectious.

She took a deep breath, and as she walked with Besca towards the entrance of the building, she lifted her hand in a cheerful wave. The noise of the crowd swelled as she did. It was almost deafening, and she found her normally solemn face curving into the start of a smile, though there was certainly an element of faraway blankness on her face. It was nice, but also weird.

As much as she liked being around people to some extent, though, having so many looking at her was still just a little uncomfortable. The people on the Aerie hadn't prepared her for anything like this, not at all. So she breathed a sigh of relief as soon as they walked into the hall. People were still looking at her, but they were also going about their normal business, not stopping to cheer for her. It was a little bit more what she was used to. It was nice.

Plus, the head chef was there. And she had a hunch she knew what he was cooking. She really could eat it all week and never get tired of it. There was just something so—

"Oh my gawsh!"

A moment later, she was swept up by Hurricane Mona. Despite herself, she found that fragment of a smile growing to—well, it was small and faint, but it was still a real smile, and she almost unconsciously ran a hand down her braid.

"You've probably heard this a lot recently but I am a huge fan!"

And there was the word. As Mona beckoned her to sit down, she followed suit, taking a seat opposite her and watching as the world went on for a moment more before looking back at her. That elsewhere look in her eyes faded as she, nearly stupefied but still wearing that little smile, softly asked the question that had been on her mind since she'd walked off the elevator outside:

"I have fans?"

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn had only ever ridden the elevator when she was on Ablaze. The only thing she'd ever seen was the cold darkness of the cockpit, and the only reason she'd ever gone to begin with was training, again and again and again.

So she was completely unprepared as the elevator platform dropped down beneath the rim of the Aerie, and the hardlight sheath opened up around them. For just a moment, she was looking through the window of the house by the lake again, and she leaned over the railing, holding out her hand, barely a foot left between her fingers and the channel, almost like should could touch the spreading colors and twirling leaves. "Woooowwwww..."

A moment passed and she regained her balance, eye glimmering as she stared out at the world that was arrayed beneath her. Another unfamiliar feelings flowed through her. She'd been afraid of so much, and for so long, that she'd almost forgotten the feeling that she'd only really felt on one warm afternoon, almost two months ago now. She was nervous, yes. She was nervous, scared, worried. But...

What I'm helping protect...

Descending into the whirlwind of pastel colors as autumn took hold, she felt the heady rush of excitement as well. The flowing, swirling, erupting colors bloomed beneath her, almost like...like...

She hugged Besca tight, and felt a warm tear roll down her cheek as she did. And there were some tears in her voice, it was true. But despite that, it was more than evident that she was undeniably, irrefutably, and deeply happy. "They're like fireworks, Besca."

Amygdala Circuit

As she deftly twisted her hair into the long plait that it had become so known for on the Aerie, Quinn almost started crying again.

But it was a different kind of 'crying' than before.

Besca and Dahlia. Her family. They were so nice to her. So, so nice. She had never imagined that anybody could be like this before. Never, in all her wildest dreams and fantasies. They helped her when she was at her absolute worst. No matter what she did, how she messed up, they were still always there to help pick her up when she fell. They made her smile. Dahlia had even made her laugh. They were the best family anybody could ever ask for, anywhere.

And for one delicious, impossible moment, Quinn let herself believe she deserved it.

She was quiet as she finished the braid, bringing it around the front to check it before she snapped the elastic on the end to tie it off. Satisfied, she flicked it behind again, settling it against the jacket until everything sat comfortably. The nerves were still tearing at her. Anxiety was still bubbling deep inside her and setting her heart pounding. But Besca would be there. And she and Dahlia were both proud of Quinn. She would pin it to her chest and wear it like a badge if she could.

You're one of the most important people in the world to me.

"Um...Besca?"

She took three long, deep breath. One. Two. Three. Then she stood, moved to the door to wait, and turned, looking at Besca as she plucked her coat from the counter. And she put a smile on her face.

It took so, so much effort. It was fragile. It trembled as she tried not to cry. But it was still a smile. And it was still there.

"You're, um, really important to me too." She paused. "And...thank you. For...you know."

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn lay there for a few moments more, staring at the open door, as what had happened at CB Dane's played back through her head. She cringed as though she could cringe away from herself. With the benefit of hindsight and the comfort from her dream, no longer trapped in her own head as it careened out of control, she could vividly hear the pain in Dahlia's voice. And replaying the conversation, if you could call it that—or what was left of it in her mind—through her head, she could see why. She would need to apologize to her later on. It must have been horrible.

But she needed to make it through the daunting task that had been set out in front of her before she even thought about talking to Deelie. They weren't letting her come down to the studio, and they wouldn't have time to talk beforehand even if she saw her before going down the elevator.

Nerves dug fishhooks into her skin as she levered herself out of bed, shucked off the clothing that she'd fallen asleep in, got dressed in the new stuff that Besca had gotten her. She latched on to the jacket to distract herself from the nerves. With the dark gray and yellow, it was just like her hair. She liked it a lot, actually. She'd definitely keep wearing it after today.

Speaking of her hair, she really did need to rebraid it. As she finished dressing herself and zipped the jacket up, she grabbed a hairbrush from her nightstand, plucked the elastic from the end, and started unpicking the braid, brushing down it as she did. Shoving the door open—those few inches really did make all the difference, didn't they?—she walked out into the common room, still brushing, wincing here and there as she caught a knot that she worked out.

A moment later, she held the brush out to Besca, picking up a strand of her now loose hair and fiddling with it. She never really got used to it, and she thought it was kind of funny how strange it felt to have her braid undone. She'd do it up herself fine, it wasn't like she didn't know how to braid her own hair. Learning how was one of the only things she had to do for sixteen years straight. But...

Her voice started raspy with sleep and the remnants of tears. "Can you brush out the parts by my legs? It'd take me a long time to do it myself."

By the time she went quiet again, though, it had smoothed out enough to resemble what she usually sounded like.

Amygdala Circuit

In the midst of a breakdown enough to eclipse nearly anything else inside her, Quinn was suddenly given direction.

"We should go. Back to the dorms, or the gardens. Somewhere else. Somewhere quiet. This...this isn't good for you."

There was something so intensely pathetic about how comforting it felt, how natural it seemed, to be told what to do. She hated it. She hated it so much, she knew that she should hate it. But in that moment, there was something so normal about it, so soothing. Like a deep breath after surfacing from the bottom of the well. She hated it. She hated it more than anything.

She loved it anyway.

So, lost and confused and head full of thunder, she latched on.

Dahlia was right. It was loud in here. Or maybe not loud, so much as overwhelming. Crowded and busy and people were staring at them. With a great deal of effort, she hauled her head up from where it sat, doing her best to wipe the tears off even as they kept flowing.

"Dorms," she somehow whimpered and whispered at the same time, squeezing her sister's hand a little harder. "Let's go back to the dorms." She was still shaking, but she managed to keep her eye open now, and she thought that maybe her legs had steadied themselves enough for her to walk now, at least enough to get back to her room. "I want to lie down for a while."

Amygdala Circuit

It felt like there was a storm cloud in Quinn's head.

Thunder and lightning and rain and wind all mixed together into a howling cacophony that rushed through the rest of her too, locking her in place like she was paralyzed. Like she was chained down in front of an oncoming train that knew she was there and didn't stop. Like she was at the bottom of a deep, dark well and floundering desperately as she slowly, surely sank below the surface. It made it hard, so hard, nigh-impossible, to think. To articulate ideas, not just to Dahlia, but even to herself. And each individual word that Dahlia said to her was like a pebble dropped into the well. They echoed down to her as though from a great distance. A faint plop, plop, plop, as she sank further, barely even audible above the deafening thunderclaps inside her.

Broken, broken, broken.

But that wasn't right, was it? She wasn't broken. Not really. Being broken meant that something had been there before to break. She was like—she was like a puppet. She wasn't putting herself together from shattered pieces. She was trying—trying, failing, succeeding, failing, trying again—not to fix herself, but to make an entirely new thing out of whole cloth. Figuring out who and what she really was past the layers and layers and layers of trauma and pain.

Who was she?

She didn't know.

She wanted so much to hug Dahlia. But her legs had turned completely to jelly, and a part of her knew that if she tried to get up to move to the other side of the booth she'd crumple before she even made it halfway. So instead she squeezed Dahlia's hand in the one that she'd taken and gently laid her head on the table, staring with nigh-unseeing eye out at the virtually actualized beach.

When she spoke her voice was weak and weepy and hard to understand through the still-flowing tears, but that utter defeat still filled it. She clamped her eye shut. "They—they d—didn't take anything f—from me. I'm...I'm just a d—doll."

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn went quiet. Her head pitched down again, looking at her feet as her fingers twisted in the hem of her shirt.

Remember: they can't hurt you now.

She'd thought the same. She'd thought that she was safe from them, far enough removed that it could only get better. But that...that wasn't really true, was it?

"You're wrong, Deelie," she said, in a voice that she seldom used. She sounded resigned sometimes. She sounded scared, or worried, or in pain. These were all voices that she used, and not uncommonly. But very rarely did she sound so defeated. "They can still hurt me. They still are."

She lapsed into silence again, an awkward quiet falling over the table as she tried and mostly failed to organize her scattering thoughts. When she spoke again, she seemed almost surprised that she was talking, confused by her own voice.

"When I—" She swallowed heavily, dropping a half-eaten piece of chicken back into the basket. "When I visited Roaki that first time, I..." More seconds that felt like minutes yawned in front of her.

"I didn't want people to listen in, so I...closed the door behind me. So when I went to leave—" Her shoulders started quaking gently, her voice followed suit. "The closed door and—and the white walls and...I—" She dropped her head into her hands, and her voice cut out. Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't cry.

She cried.

Amygdala Circuit

More or less dazed, Quinn sat back and started eating.

It was only then that she realized that she was genuinely very, very hungry. Sims always brought out the appetite in her somehow. Deelie had made a good choice with the chicken.

She didn't quite know where all that had come from, from what corner of her it had emerged. But it had felt...good. And it felt better knowing that her sister was...she was proud of her.

Pride had always been a bit of an unknown quantity to Quinn. She didn't really understand where it came from when it hit her; it would just pop up out of nowhere and blindside. And she understood it just as little, maybe even less, when someone else levied it to her. She didn't really get it, and she didn't know if she ever would. But that didn't stop that little warm glow in her chest when she made Dahlia so proud she cried. "Lil' light, huh," she mused to herself before snapping out of her reverie.

"Well...there was one thing." The faint hint of a smile about the corners of her mouth flickered out. And just like that, she was upset again.

"You said she wanted to...get to know me, right?"

She hesitated. She didn't really want to bring it up, especially since she'd made Deelie so happy, and she didn't want to think much more about it to begin with, especially not now. But it had come to mind a few minutes back when she was thinking about what she'd be asked. Her eye twitched at the end in a way that it hadn't for quite a while, and her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.

"...Will she ask about...about them?"

Amygdala Circuit

A similar pit opened in Quinn's stomach as Dahlia ordered for her. It wasn't that she didn't like what she'd ordered; honestly, she liked how Dane's did their chicken a lot, and she didn't mind orange soda any either. The fries were just a bonus. It was to be expected, Dahlia knew her tastes pretty well by this point. It was just...that it'd had to happen at all. She closed her eye and leaned back. She felt so powerless, like the anxiety and unease she'd fought so hard to shake off over the past weeks had her by the throat again and were choking her, clinging to her heels and dragging her down. She hated it. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair!

But what else could she do? She was lucky that she had Deelie there. Really lucky. Otherwise she didn't know what she would've eaten at all.

Ah, but now the topic had shifted to something more productive.

"Everyone wants to know why you didn’t kill the Helburkan girl! What’s up with that?"

Sparing a moment to give a halfhearted grin at Dahlia's voice, she settled again afterwards, going quiet for some time. How did she swerve a topic? Deelie made it sound so easy, and for her it probably was. But Quinn barely knew how to hold a conversation to begin with, much less how to control the flow of one. What did she want to talk about? What did she like talking about? She...she didn't know. But this was going to happen no matter what she wanted, so...she needed to try, right?

"Well," she started slowly, almost halfheartedly, "That's...not the kind of pilot that I am, or that I want to be, you know?" Unbeknownst to her, her voice started to pick up a bit; more animated, more engaged, louder, warmer. "It doesn't make any sense to me; shouldn't pilots be working together instead of tearing each other apart? I'm a pilot because I want to protect people. So I just don't understand why I would need to kill someone, or be killed by someone, for something that seemed so petty at the time, you know?"

She blinked, and realized that she'd been talking for longer than she intended and she'd gotten louder than she wanted. She realized people were staring at her and snapped her mouth shut.

"...Was that okay?"

Amygdala Circuit

For as much as Quinn loved Tohoki Grill, she also adored CB Dane's. For a very different reason, though, and one particularly relevant to the past few days. Tohoki gave off a gentle aura kind of like tranquility, and though it was nice, it wasn't quite what she really wanted today. Dane's was just...happy, an unrepentantly cheerful place to eat. So she nodded as Dahlia took charge, leaning subtly into her when she wrapped her arm around Quinn's shoulder. Snuggling into her, almost, as the two headed to lunch together.

When they arrived, it was just as welcoming as Quinn remembered. She'd only sat at a booth here a handful of times. Usually she loved the bar; though she still hadn't tried anything from the intimidating assortment of bottles that lay in neat rows behind it, talking to the people that ended up sitting next to her was always fun. But, she reflected, very conscious of the looks that were coming her way still, maybe not so much now.

So she picked up a menu, flipping idly through it. Just like Tohoki Grill, she still wasn't through trying everything on the menu. But she didn't really want to try something new today. She wanted something that she knew she liked.

"I think I'll get...um..." A brief spike of anxiety shot down her nerves, mild but pervasive, as she tried to make a decision. She shook her her head, keenly aware how pathetic it was not to be able to even choose what she wanted to eat and trying to clear the anxious fog from her head. "Or maybe I'll..."

Thankfully, Dahlia's question served to distract her for a moment, and she lifted her head from her arduous task to meet her sister's eyes. "I'm...I won't say I'm not nervous," she said tightly. Immediately after, the tension leaked out of her voice, replaced with...not hopelessness, but more...resignation.

"It's just...all she's going to talk about is the duel and Roaki, I know it. It's all anyone talks about." Perhaps it had been unwise for her to watch a bit more news in the past few days. It certainly hadn't made her feel any better about how people talked about her, both on and off the station.

She returned her attention to the menu, trying to decide what to eat and coming up empty until she just...gave up. Rubbing two fingers into her eye, she let a quiet sigh filled to the brim with disappointment slip out of her and folded the menu before looking down at her lap.

"Deelie, can...can you choose for me today?"