Besca listened quietly. It was all she could do, really; an unpleasant reality she’d thus far been able to bury under the mountain of other unpleasant realities. Quinn might as well have been across the sun for how far apart they were, how impossible it would be to reach her, and as someone with a scientific background and an extensive history ceding to futility, she should have been able to boldly face the fact that there was nothing she could do. 

She couldn’t, of course. 

But there wasn’t room for two breakdowns, and anyway, the thought of slipping into despair in front of Quinn filled her with an unmanageable amount of dread. So she shelved those impulses for now and decided to drown them in coffee later. 

She should have seen this coming, frankly. Cantimine shared too many similarities with Hovvi for this to go any other way. If it had been Dahlia down there instead, Besca would probably have needed to make this call herself just to make sure. At least with Quinn, she could always count on the girl to be upfront with what was bothering her. A selfish part of her lamented that, but it was the part that demanded she do her job in the cold, effective way that the Euserans or Helburkans did. If RISC had those resources, those numbers, she wondered how long it would have taken them to churn through Quinn and Dahlia for quicker, frictionless alternatives. The answer was not optimistic. 

When Quinn’s paper-thin composure finally gave way, there was nothing for several moments but quick, panicked breathing. Besca shut her eyes, resisted the urge to pull the phone away from her ear; sometimes it felt like her own lungs took the cue to shrivel up and choke her from the inside out. 

“[color=gray]I—[/color]” she cleared her throat. “[color=gray]I understand, hun. I do. When I first got to Runa, for a long time I didn’t…uhm…[/color]” again, more hoarsely. “[color=gray]I had trouble visiting big cities, being on boats, seeing Saviors. I spent a lot of time on the Aerie out of…self-defense, I guess. It never really went away, you just…see more of how a place [i]is[/i] rather than what you remember it could be. See the people as people, instead of shadows. See Saviors instead of monsters. It’s…hard.[/color]”

She sighed. When she was little, she used to wish the world was a gentler place, and after Westwel, she settled for wishing it was a place she could survive in. It wasn’t that she’d stopped wanting a kinder world, she’d just given up on it. Until Dahlia, until Quinn. Now, especially right now, she found herself wishing she could say more than what she needed to. 

“[color=gray]I want to tell you that Hovvi will never happen again. That you’ll never see anything so terrible in your life, and that you’ll always be able to stop the tragedies before they happen. I…can’t, tell you that. I can’t promise you that. I should, I know, maybe that’s what you need to hear right now, but I wouldn’t believe it.[/color]

“[color=gray]What I do believe, from the bottom of my heart, is that there’s no one I would trust more to [i]try[/i]. I don’t think a single person on this planet would fight harder, for the right reasons. Maybe you can’t understand how much that means right now, but for me it means a lot. This business with Casoban isn’t forever, Cantimine isn’t forever, but there will always be another fight. All I can tell you is that you will never be in those fights alone. Not really. Not ever.[/color]”