There was. A name. There was a name. There was a name on her lips, on the day that she was born. She was screaming it as she was waking up. Or had she been falling asleep? She can't remember. A skull splitting pain pierces her brain like a drill. She can't remember. She can't! Remember!

...They wrote the name on her forehead so that she would remember. It was the most important name on her list of thousands. In desperation she reaches for her head, claws scrabbling across the blood smear where it ought to be, but all that's there are white hot lances of pain. The name. The name! Where is it? What is it?! Give it to her! But it's gone. It's gone. There should be a name and it's gone. And all that's left is pain. All that's left is longing. All that's left is --

[i]flustered bewilderment and trembling hands when it was time to wash the same gym clothes she'd cleaned a hundred times before. The stillness of a movie theater that she could not in all her life imagine deserving to inhabit, emptied just for her and the girl without a name. The fluttering of violet-black butterfly wings in a garden too beautiful to pay attention to history lessons in. A bouquet of rose-scented perfume. The pounding of her heart as she snuck under the covers of the nameless girl's bed for the first time. The look of betrayal and hurt on her face when she finally got the medicine she needed forced down her throat. The tears in her eyes before she shut that closet door. The screaming match. The graceless but somehow perfect smile of a girl as her head shone like an angel's. She opened the Box and set her free and her smile was brighter than the sun's just before she fell and --[/i]

Bella opens her eyes for the first time in a lifetime. Not looking up from a pit or trapped inside the body of an assassin, but here in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield and a strange desert planet she'd never known before. The face in front of her isn't smiling this time. Her eyes are older, and mismatched green and blue where they ought to be simple little oceans unto themselves. She's more beautiful than pretty, more tragic than heroic, and not half so wise as she ought to be for all of her adventures. But she has a name, something Bella could never forget even if you tortured her and whittled her down into nothing but a barely beating heart.

"REDANA!"

She screams and struggles against her body. Her hands around her Princesses' throat. Redana doesn't say anything in response; she can't with her windpipe rolling under Bella's thumbs. Her claws bite into the skin and she can only scream the name, again and again and again, and wrench backwards with all her might only to crawl further and further forward to a thing she can't take back. Redana, Redana, Redana! She'd been screaming it with all her strength back then. Redana, Redana, Redana! Calling for the only person who could save her. 

And she came. After everything she'd said, she came. After everything she'd done, she came. All the lives she took, all her imperfections laid bare, the monster revealed where the Princess had only wanted a silly little pet, but even still she came. That. Idiot!

Bella squeezes her eyes shut tight again, and screams. It's a horrible thing to listen to, tortured and quivering and very, deeply human. Her body convulses with the pain of a thousand hot knives flaying her skin. Slipping under sinew and ripping, tearing. [i]Popping.[/i] Her ears shudder and clamp shut to drown out the chorus of wet tearing noises and pitiful moans, but how can she drown it out when it all belongs to her? Her body longs to collapse. Her brain screams at her to sink back into her skin, just stop before she kills herself. She pulls harder.

The Diodekoi armor unfurls at her back like a flower. Folds of spikes and chitin unfurl in layer after layer, revealing the now black-stained muscle fibers still quivering and fighting to hold her in place. She wrenches with every spare speck of might left inside her body, and with one final explosion of pain, XIII and Bella part ways forever. 

Her skin feels frozen in the cold rain. Her fur feels sticky and clumped, like her hair, soaked through with blood in every weave of its clumsy braid. About her body what had been pristine white robes have turned translucent pink that sticks to her skin and does nothing to protect her like her skin... no. Like the armor had. She lifts a foot and kicks the Diodekoi away from Redana's body, but the jerkiness and unfamiliarity of the motion makes her slip, and all she does is make it collapse on top of her. 

"...Whatever. You. Obviously need it more than I do. Idiot."

She doesn't smile. Doesn't cry. Bella simply looks down at her hands. At the claws on her hands that seem less sharp and deadly than the ones she'd had just minutes ago, and all the less for the mutilated stubs her index and middle fingers ended in once again. She didn't even have any talons to cover them with, her only jewelry was the worthless gold bracelets about her wrists and arms, and the circlet squeezing against her forehead. She lifts her arms to put it straight, at the very least.

Her ear twitches. Her back arches. Bella pivots on her bare feet and she lashes it with both her useless hands to turn aside the thunderbolt that is Sagakhan's tail. She can't keep the wince off her face. Her wrist feels numb. But even so, she snarls and hunches low to the ground, as if about to pounce.

"You can't have her," Bella says, and her voice is soft and strong and finally hers again, "Redana's [i]mine.[/i]"