"You did. You told me so and everything."

She offers them a smile. For her friend, and for a wife. It is a different smile for each of them, but it is very much the same expression. Merely read at two different angles. Every muscle in her face is involved in this delicate choreography, this thing of warmth, or understanding, or compassion, or love, or Love, or sympathy, or empathy, or even a very tired satisfaction. She is everything in this singular gesture, forever shifting based on the mood and the thoughts of the two who watch her. 

The only thing that can be agreed upon is that she is very careful not to show teeth.

Bella lets her eyes drift shut, and turns her head to "watch" the horizon of this blood and oil and hydraulic liner soaked battlefield. She breathes in through her nose, tasting every chaotic note that sent her spiraling into pandemonium when she first touched down on this planet. But this time it feels like being born again. Like the first breath she took on the beach where she woke up alone, knowing nothing but her name and her own strength. 

It is different this time. There is less brine and more rot, less silicone and limestone and more oxidized iron and dust. But it is also the same. Something sharp and clear and wonderfully, deliciously cold, to the point where it is almost a shame to give it back to the world. Nevertheless she huffs and breathes again, and as her lungs fill a second time she opens her eyes.

It is unfair. She should not be the only one who is reborn, even if she is the only one who was corrupted enough to need it. It is not fair that the people she loves should be the ones to suffer for it, not when their love pours back into her and transforms her into... whatever you could call her now. Is this what it feels like to be a bomb that has finally been disarmed? Is this what it means to be a Diodekoi, absent the trigger for the terrible control an empire once sought to exert both with and over her? 

She casts her eyes around, watching great Plovers lighting up in bursts of heavy fire and thunder as wings of steel blot out the colors of the sky. She hears the howls of the pack and the storming of their boots across the ground. She smells the tension in the air and feels it pressing on her silken white fur. She can feel a laugh welling up inside of her, so powerful that it twists at her throat to be let out. 

But she lets it slip out of her as little more than a shaking of her shoulders and a not-quite-graceful clearing of her throat. It isn't right to be the only one laughing. And it isn't fair to subject her family to even more war and vengeance, to more smoke and more grand visions that require hands around a throat and fingers that gouge out other-- to more... Aphrodite.

She turns her head to the left, and sniffs. To the right, and sniffs again. 

"One... two? Two more? Well, that's not the heaviest load I've ever carried."

Gravity does not, of course, have a scent. But the path of a grav-rail [i]does.[/i] Ionized air follows everywhere the Azura go, and to a properly sensitive nose, their cities smell like nothing so much as a tub of chlorine. Finding one in a 'crowd' of them is a nightmare, but finding an Azura in a haystack is as simple as pointing and saying her name. 

Bella's feet dig into the soil. Her claws tear through a small stone as they grip and prepare for takeoff. And she runs. This is not the lethal technique of XIII that targets a path and then claws it to death so that the space she is standing in and the space she wants to go are next to one another. It is much, much faster than that. 

Now she moves as lightning does. Jagged and erratic, seemingly spreading across a vast plain of possible space all at once while nevertheless concentrated into a single obvious bolt. Too fast to follow, even for Human eyes, but slow enough to leave the impression of movement all the same. The wind rushes past her shoulders and through her hair without touching her charges. For Dolce and Redana, it is like riding in a bubble. For all the power in her feet none of the motion travels beyond her hips, nor indeed even into the ground itself as she passes by both traceless and formless.

This is how she is able to cut off Dyssia's retreat before it can really begin. And only now in the moment of her sudden halt does the air scream her name, and the ground split under her might. She carves a gash in each, and flashes a smirk to the friend who was left behind.

"What the fuck happened while I was gone? How'd you manage to piss her off [i]this[/i] much?"

Her eyes follow the path backwards to the wreckage of the Corpse of Nero's palace. And now she really does laugh. As loud and as jubilant as Mosaic ever managed.

"But it looks like I owe you several favors. Come on then. You're dying and exhausted and your stupid rail moves slower than these fucking rocks. Are you actually trying to escape? Then get on my back already. Or would you like to meet Her Imperial Highness on the other side, too?"