"I have [i]never[/i] met anyone who can fight like you can," Redana says, plopping down right on the stone in a tangle of limbs, watching as this Princess-like-a-cake cleans off every place where she had Bella dead to rights. "And we have been fighting for a [i]very[/i] long time." In that sentence she bears the weight of the Eater-of-Worlds, of mad robots and marooned fleets, of assassins and their Mistress. Of being run through, poisoned, torn apart like Dionysus. Only the good fortune of her birth has stopped her from being a patchwork woman of scars and old wounds, and Bella...

Bella put herself through all that and more.

To get here.

Under this vast and beautiful sky.

Under these stars, diamond pinpricks in a thousand necklaces across the throat of Night. Under these shining clouds which dance on the hilltops. Under the shadow of these vast towers leading up into the docks, the prison of becoming, the mines, and beyond them, an empire of the living, and beyond them, an empire of the dead. All running from here, a place they could have stayed. A place [i]we[/i] could have stayed.

In her heart, suddenly, she can see it. She can see a home shaped to run along a hillside, and everything in the house is beautiful for the sake of being beautiful. She can see paths and forests and fields to run through. She can see meeting a girl who still has her fur across her body and still has her claws. She can see what the two of them could have been if they had been born here, free to be themselves. Free to [i]want[/i] in the mysterious way that Yue and Chen can, not in the broken way of Aphrodite.

And that Redana would have had all! the! feelings! She would have gotten herself into scrapes, and dragged a complaining Bella -- or whatever her name would have been, if she could have been given a true and good one by her parents, not a number -- halfway across this world. Maybe even further, if it wouldn't have made them both late for dinner.

But how do you scale that? How do you make that true of everyone? How do you take a world like Gaia and spread it across the stars without something being lost, something breaking, something coming undone? That's the work of a [i]lifetime.[/i] And once you know how, how do you keep that desire while learning the ways of [i]this[/i] desire?

(There's someone who [i]knows.[/i] Who [i]learned.[/i])

She pushes herself up and off her palms, bounding up with a swish of her tail, and she offers her hands to Bella, and her blue eye shines like a star. "I think I understand, a little. May I show... you, and them, and the stars?" She reaches out, offering, not demanding, an invitation for the woman she loves.

Because this isn't even really a place to fight.

This is a place to [i]dance.[/i]

There's no music except the song in their hearts and the song under the stars and the sunshards. Maybe it's instinct that causes Bella to follow, at least at first, as Redana interlaces their fingers and guides her into the center of that ring of swords. But by the time that she's guiding Bella's hands around her waist for the lift, it's not just instinct.

It's love.

Even here, no, perhaps especially here, it is not hard to see how Bella has made her body a knot of old wounds. Where she must step carefully, where she struggles to extend to her fullest but does so anyway, where Redana pulls her back and avoids causing her further harm. But there's something in the steps which Redana chooses which hint at where she might be able to build, in time, the strength to move like that again.

Eventually, the dance (at least the first one) comes to an end with Redana resting her head on Bella, in the sort of way that might drive helpless lesbians mad with envy at the softness of her resting place. And she listens as hard as she's ever done anything for the beat of her wife's heart.