[b][center][h2][color=magenta]Reya Wyatt[/color][/h2][/center][/b]


Reya felt Tarak’ s firm grip on her shoulder and put her hand on top of his, letting herself drift back and lean into him as the Colonel spoke. There wasn’t any discernible emotion on her face. She just breathed and listened to the words, feeling Tarak’s chest rise and fall gently against her back. The Colonel had believed her and yet something about it felt surreal, similar to when she had first seen the markings that Lena had left etched into the wall. The Knights had success across the board and now they were in a whole new facility, ramshackle as it might have been, that was a substantial upgrade from the accommodations offered by the exquisite Espian caves. Still though, she couldn’t remove a sinking feeling from the back of her mind. She wasn’t trained for war and sometimes it felt as though no one really cared how she felt about it. A firm voice from the back of her mind chided her that she knew better. Sunny cared even though she was a child. She thought Ziska, despite her flamboyance, genuinely did as well. Her grip on Tarak’s hand tightened slightly and her shoulders sank a bit as she let out a quiet sigh. He was becoming more and more the bedrock for her sense of stability, but darkly she wondered which version of her he really saw. The Combine engineer or the person that had walked off that APC after their first raid. 

Ingrid’s words caused her glance to cut towards the shorter woman, breaking her mind out of its drift. There was a well of fire within her at the mention of breaking down their captured nuclear warhead and her brow only twitched as she managed to suppress the absolute ferocity that she felt in her chest at that sentiment. For the last several hours, she’d had to ride along and work with the Duchess and to some extent she knew what she was getting into when dealing with Ingrid, however this questioning of the Colonel felt like a step far out of her lane. According to the intelligence gathered, there was a high likelihood of [i]two more[/i] warheads on the planet and she really thought the Knights should just take theirs apart because, “[i]reasons[/i]”? No, it was just like the Colonel explained. That weapon truly was an “ace in the hole” and in her mind, she could visualize the foreign expression of downturned cards from having watched matches played by Ziska, Tarak and the tank crew of the crude, ancient game. The concept to her was much more straightforward though: Better to have it and not need it than to need it and have discarded it because of “morals” or some suicidal sense of righteousness. This was the Inner-Sphere and she understood her history. There were plenty of dead still clinging to those notions.

She turned her head and reached behind to pull Tarak’s head down and whisper in his ear, feeling the coarseness of his hair under her fingers. On the tip of her tongue, she wanted to describe to him how satisfying it would be to put that nuclear warhead straight through the cockpit of the Crimson Fists’ lead Battlemaster and the rest of their mechs in one beautiful, violent rush of hellfire, but she relented as he leaned in to listen. “[color=magenta]I’m glad you're back.[/color]" She said softly in his ear.