The unseeing panic in Quinn's eye began to abate as she listened to Besca baring her soul. Her rapid hyperventilation slowed, and while she was still breathing very hard and couldn't find the calm to take those three deep breaths as yet, she was at least calm[i]er.[/i] Her nerves, though they jangled, no longer whipped and crack through her body, and the bottle of terror was plugged with a stopper again.

She...hadn't considered, really, how much Besca would have been affected by Westwel. Which was silly, of course; she and Dahlia were still tortured by memories of Hovvi, so why wouldn't Besca have beeen struck in the same way? Quinn still had a habit of thinking of her as someone infallible or invincible; but ever time she heard someething like this, it struck her how wrong that was more and more.

And yet, at Besca's insistence that she trusted nobody else over Quinn to try to do the right thing, she still felt a deep-rootedd glow. She was struck with a feeeling at once familiar and foreign, the same one that had taken hold when Besca had told her that she was her hero. An expectation but not a cruel one, and a hope that hurt her heart to feel.

As her breathing slowed and steadied further, she stared up at and [i]past[/i] the ceiling, imagining herself peering through space and seeing the Aerie as it sailed above Runa. She closed her eye gently and finally took one, two, three long, exaggeerated breaths, the third of which was released in a long, drawn-out sigh. A moment or two later, she finally broke the minutes-long quiet with a voice that was very small and scared, like a lost child. "[color=ffe63d]Besca?[/color]" The silence stretched for a few moments more before she finished the thought:

"[color=ffe63d]Do...do you miss me?[/color]"