Redana is still poisoned. She has to be. The tightness in her stomach, the way her throat is closed up, the frantic beating of her heart and sweat dripping off her sides. The poison courses through her veins, and it laps against the locked door in her heart. Behind the door is a world where everything is broken forever because she forced her best friend in the whole world to kiss her. Behind the door is a world where Bella becomes small and quiet and not fun any more, because Redana was a bad girl. Locking the door is [i]don’t be naughty with your servitors[/i] and [i]your highness, please accept my suit[/i] and the ways that Bella would stiffen and try not to run away when she brought her face close, and Redana might be dumb but she knows, okay? She knows Bella doesn’t want her. Not like— not that way.

And Bella being her best friend is— was. Was the most important thing in the whole world. So that kiss can’t have happened. It’s the forbidden thing, the freedom she doesn’t even dream about because it’s impossible, not in the way that going to space is impossible but in the way that being her father is impossible. And the poison surges through her, an acid sea.

And now she knows, too, that Bella was never her friend. All those flinches were— she must have been [i]disgusted[/i] whenever Redana got too close, dared to touch her hand, rested her head on Bella’s shoulder. She was such a good actress. She had Redana fooled the whole time. Hiding all of that contempt and bile and venom behind polite, strained smiles. It wasn’t just that Bella was straight as an arrow, it was that she was roiling with hatred for her charge for, for [i]so[/i] long, and Redana really was dumb, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she just.

That. Over and over. The shark beneath the sea of her thoughts. [i]She hated you. She hated you. She hated you.[/i]

And still the poison burns.

“Don’t do that,” Dany says, and her voice is small and raw and hurt. “Please.” She doesn’t explain what [i]that[/i] is. The words would break her like taking a sledgehammer to stained glass. So instead she changes the subject. When her hand rests on the table, next to the plate of pancakes, it shakes. “And I don’t. Didn’t. Whatever the Hunt and the Harvest and the Heart is. Are. Whatever.”

(And here the Auspex cheerfully shows her— what, exactly? If anything?)

“But I’m still going. I’m not going to stop. I have friends who don’t hate me and—“

She stops. She wouldn’t be Redana if she didn’t. “I’m sorry,” she says, and then coughs out the last of the venom; it shines on her lower lip, where the punctures are already closed. “I didn’t mean— I guess you didn’t hate me. I think. I don’t know. Because all of you were putting on a show for me the whole time. Pretending. And just... I’m not going back with you, Mynx. I’m sorry. I have to see this through.”

But she doesn’t yell for help, or tell her to get out, or anything like that. She sits and looks at Mynx with those sad eyes, and waits for the next part of the performance.

Then: “would you like some of the pancakes? Or some milk?” Because Redana is still Redana, whether or not she’s changed.