Bella's stare is blank. For a moment that's all she offers. And then the smile creeps across her lips. It spreads up her cheeks, into her eyes so that they glitter like the depths of space. It crawls down her throat until she can't hold it there any longer and she trembles with the beginnings of laughter. Where it starts it catches, like a fever, like wildfire, like the raging waves of the endless sea.

She has to catch her forehead with her palm to keep from doubling over into piles of crab. To keep her hair from tumbling down over her face and into sauce or brine or... whatever the fuck. Don't talk to her right now. A snicker turns into a chuckle turns into a laugh turns into full on breathless guffawing in the span of one tail's mirthful twitch. 

The noises escaping her can't be described in terms of pure joy. They're too amused, too uncontrolled, so hard and so full is on the verge of tears without ever quite spilling over. But still. It's clear and bright and musical, even if that music mostly resembles a jam session at a percussionists convention. She is so concerned with not toppling forward that she nearly pushes herself backward instead, and has to catch herself with her other hand, which crushes a pile of discarded shells into powder so fine it's now impossible to repurpose into leftover ship supplies.

And still she laughs. And laughs. And laughs. She finds the air for it all. It is all the good that air can do in her lungs. There is no point to breathing but to laugh. She holds her face like she's afraid it's going to split and expunge some new god, and she laughs. Her brilliant, glittering Auspex shines in red from between her fingertips and somehow it laughs too. In on the joke. 

"Oh gods," she manages at last, "Holy [i]shit.[/i] No sweetheart, not like that. Dany couldn't pull that off with a thousand years of practice. She'd... you'd have caught fire trying. I mean, you did try I guess. You were constantly in etiquette lessons that I had to keep sneaking you the answers when nobody was looking so you wouldn't get disciplined. And even then you blew off everything you thought you could get away with to spend more time in the gymnasium. Training for the Olympics and for... this, I guess. Adventure."

The laughter has fallen from her face and her posture now. Bella is careful, proper, delicate, demure, and above all clean as she takes the first bites of offered crab, and precise when she chews. With every bite she waits a moment before cleansing her mouth with water, or with sub-par wine. In every action she is noble. Imperial. She is what she was made to be. Watching a new Dany be what she chose, entirely. 

No more smiles, now. She stretches out a hand, across the blanket, across the spread, across the galaxy. Across the Lethe.

"But you don't... actually remember, do you? You didn't get everything stuffed back inside your head like me. You don't remember the garden, or watching me chase the butterflies in there when we were kids. What about the bells? Do you... were you told about them?"

She does not pull her hand back. Nor does she push it the rest of the forward into Ember's. And from the look on her face, it's not clear if she'd rather the answers be 'yes' or 'no'.