Light's so dim there's no color anywhere. Air's so soft all the sound's being pushed through a jar. So clean there's nothing to smell besides  moss and water. It's even the sort of still, lukewarm mediocrity that doesn't feel like anything on her skin. Bella slumps backwards and clunks her head against a crumbling dais without feeling anything harder than a gentle push back. This is all that her high was leading her toward. Is this what it was supposed to be? The world's gone muted, but she's stuck living in it. Why?

Her face itches. Every little wrinkle of her nose or twitching of her lips makes the cuts across her face burn and crawl with the sensation of dozens of tiny hooks pulling them open. She forces herself into an expression of exhausted stillness to make it go away. The itching returns half a second later. She snorts and rolls her eyes: pain again. No victories, is that it? No matter how tiny.

She is vaguely aware of a thick wetness oozing across her nose and cheek. She lazily plucks the talons off of her right hand and flicks them somewhere on the ground in front of her. They clink without any fanfare and then disappear into the murk forever, for all she cares. The hand lifts. Her oldest imperfections slide roughly across the screaming lines of her newest ones. All her fault. All of them, her fault. She wipes again, and again, with increasing franticness, ignoring the fire under her skin spitting angry sparks every place she touches so that she can keep working at the awful stuff dripping everywhere.

She doesn't clean herself so much as she smears the blood all across her skin until it's impossible to tell without already knowing where on the death mask she's calling a face the blood is actually coming from and where it's simply gone. She is not beautiful. Her hair is matted and burned in places. Her clothes are torn. Her fur is sticky and clumped with sap and other horrors besides. Her face is a wound with one glassy cat eye rolling around in it, and an evil red star burning in place next to that. 

The Auspex turns on Apollo and unlocks no secrets from that smile. Whether it turns all of Bella's senses onto the question or unfolds and pushes her past her breaking point three times over, that expression will not yield to it. An artifact such as itself can no more understand the faces of the divine than one like Birmingham could save itself. 

And so, Apollo smiles in the dark. And so, Apollo smiles in the muffling, sterile air. And so, Apollo watches Bella who is tired and hurt and bloodied, and he smiles. Her reward. He smiles away her pain. He smiles away her pride. He smiles as her tail droops limply to the floor. He smiles when she tears off her other set of talons to throw at his stupid godly face. He smiles when she misses. She smiles at her frustrated scream.

Always the same. The same stupid face that stayed unchanging whether everything was perfect or crumbling to dust. Never really caring, never really helping, never really doing any fucking thing at all but showing the same bullshit enigma at extremely stupid people who decided to call it compassion because they were too stupid to admit they didn't have any idea what the fuck he was smiling about. 

What an empty gesture. What a pathetic god. What a pointless universe they'd built. What useless people they'd filled it with. A warm bed and a smiling girl clumsily patting her head was worth the same as a ship to sail the stars with a command full of breathless worshippers gawking at her in awe. And each of those was worth the same in trade, which was nothing whatsoever. Being brave felt hollow, just like saving Redana felt hollow and killing the Yakanov felt hollow. All any of it got her was a smile. The exact same smile he'd be wearing anyway. 

Bella pushes herself away so that she can sit and look in the other direction. She doesn't want to see it anymore. That stupid smile makes her want to scream, and twisting her face that much hurts too much to be worth it. Whatever else she did with the rest of her life, she at least wanted to hurt as little as possible. So she stares into the empty dark while her claws trace tiny new gashes into her ruined clothes. They find the bells at her belt, and she squeezes them until her palm twitches against the sudden pulse of a thing giving up and collapsing into scrap, and her ears twitch at the sharp crack that means she's killed another thing that was meant to be beautiful.

Come to think of it? Come to think of it, this ship was filled with some truly excellent wines. She could stay here, if nobody made her leave. She could stay here for as long as it took, and let the wine keep her from hurting while it happened. All she needed to do is...

Her ears perk up and bend in the direction of a single, heavy footstep. Her divine eye shines in the dark to catch the frightened silhouette in the doorway. Bella's face twists into a mocking sneer that manages to feel good even despite the thunderstorm dancing across her burned out nerves. 

"Too fucking late," she croaks, "Just like always."