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Owner Pose
Xion Xion often texted Lilian normal things, like pictures of flowers, and latte art, and shots of rampantly domestic things in the geometrically white castle the Nobodies lived in, or of her constant churn of temp work she took on just to experience things - and people.

Sometimes she engaged in conversations - usually it was just photos, sent like a scrapbook of pictures. It was different, this night.

Xion > Lilian, would you like to talk?
Xion > I know that's a terrible intro.
Xion > Could we talk?
Xion > Oh, that's worse actually.
Xion > Lilian. I'd like to ask you a question that's important to me.

Xion > Do feelings rot?
Xion > ...
Xion > I don't think I can do this with my thumbs.

Xion > Meet me at your house? I'll be in 'my' room.

At Lilian's manor home, Xion sits inside her appointed room, dressed in black t-shirt under a short-sleeved rich blue shirt with a shooting star sparkling with a faded trail of yellow stripes behind a big orange round-edged star. The distress to the shirt has given it a threadbare softness and several orange chunks missing from the middle of the mostly-orange star as the screening peels. Beneath that, a black knee-length skirt, black leggings and no shoes - though a pair of black and white sneakers are tucked neatly by the door in a cubby.

The noirette wears a loose beanie cap - it's the end of February! - that matches her hair, with two pins stuck into the rolled brim: a metal etch whiteskull and crossed bones, with large doormouse ears around the skull in white negative space, and a blue and yellow pop plastic pin declaring her the ARCADE QUEEN in fire red clipart text. The doormouse skull pin is over her left bangs, and the Arcade Queen hangs besides it above her left temple.
Lilian Rook Lilian: > I'm open to talk whenever I have the time.
Lilian: > Though, maybe don't say it that way. I feel as if I'm about to get in trouble.
Lilian: > That was a joke, by the way.

Lilian: > No. But they can be poisoned.

    Lilian is at home. Her willingness to be there changes by the day and with the mood, like weather. Nominally, it's to 'catch up on studies missed' while she was becoming Something Else, but she's already done that long ago, and has been trickling in assignments at double pace just so it doesn't look as if she cheated.

    She sort of did, but in a way that doesn't count. Really, she's just been at a desk with her computer, chewing on pens and staring at a thesis page, while thinking about other things. Something totally irrelevant, that cannot really affect her in any way, but which occupies her thoughts at random times throughout the day regardless, much to her displeasure.

    Yeah. Yeah talking to Xion would be a nice change. She drops her mashed up pen --plastic, after she'd recently broken a fountain pen with her teeth-- pushes her chair out, and moves.

    Indoors, Lilian wears only a slim and shape-hugging white turtleneck sweater over something irrelevant beneath, thick blackout tights and a long wool skirt in dark red serving to combat the perpetual slight indoors chill together. Night Mist's pendant hangs outside her clothing here, as does her black-striped Sapient Heuristics wristband. No, she does not take the hairpin off at home. Although there is, as most days, nobody home but the staff, who have already largely retired for the day, Lilian makes sure to get up and close the door first, before finding a slightly more uncomfortable perch than Xion. That's how you show it's serious.

    She can't think of anything to break the ice with other than Xion's outfit. "Goodness. You've had a busy day, by the looks of you."
Xion Xion looks up when Lilian enters, blue eyes tracking up to the Sapient Heuristics band and -- has no idea what it is. No, she sees something else and is concerned for several moments on Lilian's approach, blinking and inspecting Lilian's wrist as she passes.

It's... only black-striped. Exhaling in a relief, Xion smiles up the rest of the way at Lilian as she settles opposite. "A busy day?" She looks down at her outfit, drops her hands in her lap, and considers them, then up. "Huh, well, I guess I did a bunch of stuff today."

Xion squints, giving a strong attention to Lilian's face for a long, intense-staring moment. Across the moment, her eyes change from 'studious stare' to a softly admiring gaze, her face relaxing.

"Sorry, my..." Xion lifts her hands from her lap, wiggling her thumbs guiltily, her palms encroached on by her black sleeves. "... dumb digits don't work right typing like that, and I didn't want to dictate it to Wendy's Woman because I think she'd make fun of me."

Her phone, physically besides her, buzzes with an alert on cue.

Dropping her hands back down onto the bed to grip the edge of the cushion instead, Xion continues to favor Lilian but her eyes drift down. Chewing on her bottom lip before continuing, she takes a bracing breath and goes for it.

"I thought that after a while, it'd wear off, the feeling, since we went from hanging out all the time, to not. But just asking became really hard, makes me *feel* so weird, that I don't know how to say it. What I want to say. But..."

A choking kind of laugh. "That doesn't come out with my thumbs, like I said." The flash of humor rights her, squeezing creakingly against the cushion to either side of her to bleed off the tension she feels. "I'm still curious what it'd be like to hold hands and touch that stupid magic test we did a million years ago. Or..." Her voice drops, with her chin. "... you know." Does she? "Other stuff too."
Lilian Rook     Lilian catches Xion's stare, and lifts her hand to her hair uncomfortably, where fingers in locks will mostly shield the band from view. "Is there something the matter, Xion? You look like you've seen something disquieting. If you've come all the way out here --I know it's not really far out of your way, I mean emotionally-- then I'll do my best to keep things comfortable, you know. You only have to ask."

    It's polite. It's efficient. It's a flexible approach that goes to many outs and many ins. But Lilian still seems restless. Xion's scrutinizing stare puts her off, at first. Her back straightens. Her green gaze focuses in. Her lips set to a careful neutral. Her fingertips slide back down the side of her neck, waiting at tense rest. It really has been a while. It isn't quite the same face that Xion looked on before. A little older, in the way of someone nearly done growing up. A little scarred, in one place in a way that someone would leave to never forget. A little more alive, in the way of life behind the eyes and under the skin and in the corners of the mouth that is somehow nebulously closer to 'exposed' than 'veiled', in a way it wasn't always.

    But it hasn't been that long. A lot has changed, but Lilian is Lilian. It takes her but a moment, to visibly, silently remember something. Her posture shifts from one withstanding scrutiny, easily, to showing a smile for the sake of showing it. Something softer, warmer, wider, than she might normally. One that reaches her eyes and lowers her lashes by degrees, hair sliding over shoulder with the tilt of her head. It's important that Xion know. The old Lilian knew, but wasn't quite so quick to accommodate.

    Her eyes wander to the phone slightly before it rings. She gazes back curiously. "You can take that, if you want." says Lilian. It sounds, simultaneously, that she wouldn't mind, but she'd feel a little lonely if Xion did. "I understand. It's different when I write from when I speak, too. Messages, words on a page, are a different language. It's hard to speak both, to the fluency you can express hard thoughts with either-or."

    And then Xion gets to what she means to say, and Lilian's eyes widen by degrees. "Ah." she mouths, and leaves it at that for a moment. "I'd worried it'd be . . . Well, we do seem to only ever talk about terribly heavy things like this, don't we?" She laughs. It sounds perfectly sincere, but it's also a deflection. Even Xion can tell, because Lilian winces with the subtle twitch of feeling bad about something; a feeling she doesn't experience often enough to get used to. She can barely name it. "I've thought about it too. The difference. I talk about you all the time, you know. When people come to you, I repeat things I've learned from you, and I always have such warm things to say about the time we spent together. It bothered me, a little bit, to realize that we seldom spend it right now." She chooses not to say 'any more', and the choice is palpable.
Lilian Rook     The second laugh that follows is almost apologetic. An awkward laugh for making Xion laugh so awkwardly. "I remember you saying that. I remember that moment so vividly. I thought it was beautiful at the time. I never . . . dared ask how literal you were being." Lilian slides from her seat, one leg slightly before the other. She paces softly across the room, and sits herself down again next to Xion. Her fingers fidget in a curled fist at her side. "That's . . ." She takes a deep breath. "Yeah. I suppose it's mostly my fault. I didn't get cold on purpose. You didn't do anything wrong. I was just . . ."

    "Scared? Without realizing it. Without naming it. I didn't want to look at the thought." Lilian says, and the slow blink of her own honesty surprising her leaves her in stunned silence for ten full seconds. "I didn't even think about it, but after that moment, I think you just became . . . too much for me. Too beautiful. Too genuine, for someone like me. The way you lived your life so sincerely, the way you wore your heart on your sleeve, I think it burnt me, and I was scared of putting my hand near the stove again. I got to see the real you, and I was shy of those beautiful and complex and confusing things inside of you, like I could barely keep up with talking to you anymore. As if I realized you were so much more than me. So . . . pure. And so rich inside. I was afraid that you could see things I was too afraid and bitter and broken to."

    She takes in a deep breath. "Other stuff would be nice. I'm trying to get over silly fears like that. It's my 'arc'." A weak smile.
Xion Xion, for all the period, almost seems eerily the same. At least, this Xion. Perhaps she was the same as from the day she said the words she fretted now about, having aged not one second since - an image, in the mind, seen as.

Xion. A little bit of an uptilt to her gaze, the droop of her beanie slanting with the slight tilt of her head so as to be parallel with the ground. She worries, a blind fumbling, as Lilian sits up.

The comment to her phone gets her to pick it up and show the screen. With an activation - the time, and an alert from what appears to be the Wendys mascot without pupils in her eyes and more mecha stylings sending the message 'BITCH' underneath. Xion smiles apologetically behind it. "It's not a call. It's just my phone. One of the powers I picked up is a whole person, but she mostly just lives in the cloud around me."

A moment of Xion weirdness passes, and Lilian shares more. There are long, aching moments, as Xion's eyes waver, seeking, searching, finding, and still being confused.

'Ah.'

Xion's gaze turns resolute. As if fighting - determined to prove.
As if struck. She resists, for a moment, and is rewarded. A third awkward laugh, this time a little relieved. "It's okay. We don't really talk much, so we haven't run out of the heavy stuff." Xion suggests, though it's half-formed, an apology for strange, twisting, wrenching feelings.

The battle is inside of her.

And Lilian has such things to say about her. Things with weight, and fact, and feeling too. Xion tries to soften - does, more than her simple tries, but it trembles on something else, a fulcrum within that is irregularly formed.

"Hearts are so hard. Some days, some nights, I want to be done with it. I wanted to be alive, not have all these..." Xion lifts her right hand from the bed, opposite Lilian, and strikes the hand over her heart like she wielded a sword, fingers curled and thumb hooked. Twisting at the wrist, her hand lingers against her breast while she breathes, pantomiming an emotional sort of unmaking.

"... these things, in me. But I have them."

Lilian, besides her, causes Xion to fall backwards, partially overcome, mostly just dramatic. "Lilian. Please don't?" She waits, spacing for breath. "It actually means a lot to me, now, if you don't. Those things you, say..." The back of her palm falls over her eyes, draped across her bed-planted skull. "It doesn't make me feel better. The things that tear at Lilian. The... The drops of blood you're willing to feed me tenderly, I don't want them. I want..." She pleads, and falls to silence. A hard swallow wets a dry throat.

"I was angry. At the test. I didn't like the rules, because it was something that was important to you. And I got a bad score. I didn't get an impressive color or a nice result. And... I felt like I failed you. Because of something I didn't technically have. Instead, I had this, tremendous thing, inside of me, and it wasn't right for the test to show."

"I was making it so complicated, too. I wanted to matter, to you. I wanted to know I mattered, and the parties didn't make me feel it. The victories didn't, just..."

Xion tries to laugh, cough, and choke all at roughly the same time and even she can't go three ways at once. "I can see that you're not bitter and broken. You thought such poetry about me, did we really avoid each other because we thought it'd be better for the other? With Tamamo, I--"
Lilian Rook     "They are." Lilian sighs. Her exhalation carries the most of the weight of the past year in the space of a single breath. "They really are." she nearly croaks. "Cultivating the garden of feeling, pulling out the weeds and growing things in just the right way, is one of the joys of living. But that doesn't help to hear when most of it is tangled up thorns. It just sort of sucks." She finishes with her favoured Americanism.

    She flinches, at the word 'don't'.

    "Sorr-- Apologies. I'm not used to . . . sorting out what to share and what not to." says Lilian, tensely. "Since I never share anything, usually." She winces at her own words. "Looking back on that, I remember I was very proud to show you all. It was something important to me, that told me I mattered. It gave me a good score, and wanted to show that off, that I meant something. I didn't really think it through, how it'd affect you. Or anyone. I didn't think much about other people's feelings back then. I'm sorry that it stuck in your heart that way. I'm sorry that it ever made you feel that way. And I want to see what's inside you. Not 'if it matters that much to you', I just do. I'm sorry for not giving you the chance. I don't know whether it was on purpose or not."

    Lilian takes a deep breath. She needs it, to brace against her own feelings. To brace against the deeply unhelpful feelings bubbling up within her, squeezing her fists tight to keep her fingers from shaking, in the wake of the cold adrenaline of 'don't'. Then it comes all out at once, in a sharp, jarring hiss of unready confusion. She dares turning to look.

    "With Tamamo?"
Xion "It's okay." Xion softens, realizing she set a hard border when Lilian was being very expressive.

"You can talk out your feelings. What I mean..." Xion can speak about this easier. It's not about her, it's about someone she cherishes greatly. "Is that you don't have to hurt yourself because it appeases me."

Xion reaches with her free left hand to take Lilian's, lacing fingers together. With her right hand over her eyes, she doesn't have anything else to hide. Her eyes might betray her, wavered under her palm and arm's cover, but kept hidden beneath intervening limb.

"You can apologize too. If it feels right, and it keeps feeling right after, it's fine. I just know I don't need you hurt for my benefit. I..."

Xion laughs, more of a chuckle now. "Lilian, I'm not going to run away, disappear."

"I was ready to die for you twice. I-... Three? Mmn." Uncertain, Xion feels like it's three but can't place the feeling as anything but local. In her thoughtfulness, the statement stands alone for a moment.

'With Tamammo?'
Between the curl of her index and middle finger, an single blue eye catches Lilian's.

"... Well you and Tamamo were being really involved, and by the time I could say anything you were already settled, and then, we didn't after Scathach's island," Didn't a lot of things. "-and then... I thought maybe we'd do more than... hang out again if I just made your dreams come true, or something stupid. I've lost the thread."

"I thought you'd notice." Xion murmurs, and her peeking eye looks away into her knuckle.
Lilian Rook     "I'm not." Lilian replies to Xion, a little too fast. Then, more measured, "Well, a little. I don't know how else to show how much I mean it. That's the price of lying all the time. It feels fake, even to me, unless it hurts." A deep breath. "But you're right that I was doing something unnecessary. It's . . ." She looks away, out the window, even curtained as it is. "Something difficult to talk about, that I likely don't even need to. It doesn't matter. Between us. Or I hope so, at least."

    Her hand recoils a hairsbreadth at first, at the touch. But without looking away from the window, her fingers slide easily into Xion's.

    "It feels as if I owe you something at least." says Lilian. Her head hangs to one side, her spare hand running uncomfortably through her hair again, fiddling with her necklace, pulling up her collar higher over her throat. "I'm more worried that you won't know when to run. I don't know how else to explain it. Just, the thought that there might not be any reason, that I'm not worth--" She cuts off, and swallows. "No, I'm doing it again. But it does feel right to say sorry for those things that I'm actually sorry for. I won't say it for anything else."

    A long, long pause.

    "Thank you." says Lilian. Turning back from the window, staring straight ahead, she pushes a weak and slightly guilty smile to her lips, looking down at the floor. "That's sort of a heavy thing to say, Xion. But I understand what you meant by it. So thank you." Xion's single blue catches the corner of Lilian's green, snapped to the very corner of her vision, unwilling to turn her head, but unable to look away. A beacon of intensity, set into a face like still water, practically glowing with electric tension. She senses it. The heaviest words Xion has spoken to her.

    Another deep breath. A count to ten. A tension in her hand that mirrors the squeeze in every inch of her body, released all at once with her exhale. Lilian turns her face to Xion, and so gently it's as if she fears she might shatter, she takes Xion's screening hand into hers, fingertips stroking down her knuckles to her wrist. "So, again. I'm sorry, for not . . . for noticing, but not daring to ask. Not risking it. And thank you, for staking your heart to heal mine. I didn't thank you enough, because I was so ashamed after everything that happened, but it really was your doing that got me here. You put me in the place where I can finally start to make those dreams come true."

    Her fingers trace down Xion's wrist to the base, then slip off of her arm, as if loosing their grip. Her hand falls nearly into Xion's lap, her strength spent and done with. Then it stops, and rises. Gingerly. Perhaps even fearfully. As if it could be pulled back fast enough to outrun the consequences. Lilian's hand rises to Xion's chin, and slides along the contour of her jaw, gently turning her face toward.

    "Tamamo understood back then, didn't she?"
Xion "It's okay if the mechanism is dirty, Lilian." Xion returns, not-quite bashful - delicate. "It's something that does a lot of work... And it's still under construction, right?" The noirette's voice chases hopefully.

"Exploring these things is given to us, because we're the ones feeling strange inside, getting such strange signals from an unruly, demanding thing." That she won't name, but she admits, maybe at least here, that has been troubling her.

"Lilian, did you know?" Xion's voice, face covered, lifts up into the air, besides Lilian, near the window-out. A response, to what she's actually sorry for, for the fear of running away before it's too late.

A response, to thanks. "Lilian, I-" Their hands, one hand, held, become the promise of two.

Xion's attention focuses 'away', inward, on the metaphor or feeling of something, and then she's caught up in that and the apology after 'heavy things'.

"You *did* notice." Xion groans, frustrated and relieved both. "Well. Then you should be sorry for that." She adds, another laugh, less nervous.

"As opposed to you not noticing, I think it's better. But..." Unfocused and knuckle-glanced, her covering hand is raked-across, fingers and dragging, jagged, maddening lines of subtlety. From behind her cover, her one quarter-visible eye snaps on, and her hand trembles half-closed once, when her sensitive wrist is brushed against.

Her hand, melted from its perch on her face, rolls along the valley of her nose and brow uncertainly. Lilian's hand needs no strength at all to find Xion's chin, her unsettled shield rolling down her nose and rotating to thumb up the noirette's cheek and palm down, a confirming rest on Lilian's lifting wrist. Underneath her jaw, by her neck, a tiny warm pulse beats away, quick to tempo.

"If you're hearing my heart instead of my head, Lilian, you know... I didn't stake that on you." A beat, warm. "That's my winnings from staking my life. Do you like it?" Her grin is rubbed about by the pressure on her cheeks. "We did make a beautiful color together, didn't we?" Xion asks, curious, expectant.
Lilian Rook     "It's a work in progress." Lilian agrees with Xion, and her assent is as easily-come as it is absolute. "I don't know if it'll ever be done, but I'm . . . looking forward to seeing it evolve. Like the rest of me did. It has to." She breathes out a little shakily. "I'm looking forward to the day this is a lot easier, hah."

    Her laughter turns withdrawn; guilty, a little bit, nearly bashful, if Lilian could ever be such a thing; when Xion groans. A gentle wince jumps to her face, and then runs back to ground, like a jolt of electricity. A searching look, braced and a little tense. But her hand doesn't fall away too. "I am. It was a little cold of me, wasn't it? Or was it cowardly? Arrogant? Awkward? I suppose I'd have to leave you to judge it, but I really do mean that sorry. It was just something I felt like was beyond me. In a realm I wasn't supposed to touch. That you'd lose interest anyways, once you knew more."

    "I'm . . . sort of glad, I think. That you didn't. Out of all the people I like, you're one of the few I really do care how much you like me back. I don't know what we have, but I think it's important. Maybe it's even more important precisely because it's so hard to put a name to." Her fingers lower by degrees with Xion's gentle weight on her wrist, alighting on that fluttering pulse. Lilian breathes deep, as if of fresh, cold air. Her eyes lid. Her fingers freeze. For a moment, she is far away in her head, and viscerally present at the same time.

    She blinks awake at Xion with a sense of warmth. A subtle psychic surge, like pleasant heat and tingling pins and needles rushing through the limbs after a first swallow of steaming caocao after coming in from the winter. Like sunbeams so warm they prickle, coming through the parted curtains onto cool and clammy skin. The nerves sing, with the pleasurable ache of easing tension.

    "I love it." says Lilian, and she means it, from somewhere deep in her chest, like her heart were bound up with her throat. "You've really become so much, in this short a time. It feels like you become more; more beautiful, whenever I look away. So much it's a little frightening. But it makes me happy; very, very happy, that I got to know you. That you see something in me that matters too. I think whatever it is that we make together, it really is beautiful. It is and it was and it will be."

    Taken into the moment, sucked into its inexorable gravity, Lilian leans forward. Her face is magnetized in the same direction as her hand. The intensity of closeness only accelerates it, like gravity. There is one moment, where she reaches the event horizon; the point of no return for what she is about to do; and she flinches, slows. The ghost of some deeply buried fear bubbles up in her chest and squeezes her heart, closing her throat and widening her eyes in guilty tension. Then, it melts, and the moment passes, and Lilian leans all the way in.

    Her other hand rises up to join its twin, cupping Xion's face in both, and her lips narrowly miss Xion's cheek to find their opposite, pressing in with something between need and relief; careless abandon and transgressive gratitude. A terrible, stupid idea, but that feels nothing but right. A thrilling sense of abandon that is so dearly well past due.
Xion "Aren't we all?" Helpless before the truth, Xion can only agree with the absolute. Emotion like degassing escapes in her in bubble pops of breathy laughter, little tremors of involuntary flutters, and the quickening of a maddening red beat.

In a moment, Xion understood why hearts were terrifying things.
In a moment, Xion understood why hearts were wonderful things.

"You don't have to leave me to judge it." The dark-haired girl murmurs, captured in a vulnerable sprawl of legs over the edge of a precipice, and hands about the corners of her chin. "Cowardly, because you didn't want to lose it. Arrogant, for..." More laughter, this time chin liftingly, back archingly, effusive.

Arrogant. For everything. Could there be any word for such pride? "...well." Xion's eyes twinkle, wet and wavering. "Yes. A little awkward. When I pinned your third master's shield to her door with your first master's spear, I *thought* you'd get the message, but..." Her eyes blink and drift away, and she hiccups softly, flush-cheeked.

To press into Xion psychically is to touch a strange receptor, searching and touching-back, the non-newtonian fluid of mental contact. To pour impulse on to her firms her shape in space, but gentle pulses penetrate, permeate.

Fizzed along her nerves, Xion squirms just lightly, smirking with a devilish sense. Lilian knows. She's said it. She's declared it. She can't take it back, because it's out in the open.

"You love it. And, you can name that." Love, the nameable feeling, echoes back, knowable and known. Lilian has known it for years, now, and it is familiar, but now it has a name. It is, was, will be. "You know what that means." Her eyes plead, but not for understanding. She is understood... "Right?" Is she? What a heartbeat means, what it sounds like, what it feels like for Xion, is: "You--"

She sees the tumble of hair and the fall of eyes and nose, wide eyed for an unfettered and honest moment beneath. Looking-down, caught in a gravity, Xion's surprise at the unknown and warm unknowable swiftly melts, with guilt, under the thundering heat at her neck, and a needy press against her face.

She had been waiting, and a kiss is permission. If it happened, then, it has to be okay.

Accepting the 'transgression', Xion does not act with the same, matched abandon. The fingers arched and gentle about her chin and neck feel the hot thunder of her neck, the leaning and indulgence of her chin and cheeks to Lilian's seeking, and the roll of her shoulders under the motion of her accepting, eager kiss in return. her arms, hands splay-fingered, slide around Lilian's sides and take their time sliding forearms about her opposite's lower back to lace her fingers there rest her palms there, embraced.
Lilian Rook     Lilian flinches, just a little, at the word 'cowardly', but doesn't break away. She laughs subvocally at 'awkward'. "Sorry again, then. Girls like me have a late awkward phase. You know where boys are oblivious, girls prefer ambiguity; it's just hard for my type to believe, and risk being wrong. It's not your fault I learned to be that way. But I think I'm permitted to have one way of being sort of pathetic." Attempted self-affirmation. Solidity. A buttressing admission adjacent to pride. There's belonging, in being the same kind of disaster as other women.

    "I can. I can say that I love this feeling. I love being with you. I love spending time together, talking sharing, creating, even . . . I just love . . ." Lilian doesn't finish before the moment strikes.

    She leans so fully into Xion that there's no need. The touch of her lips expresses what their motion can't. Her hands cup Xion's face just to feel it; to know the shape of that human thing that so often eludes her, in this moment. As Xion's arms slide down her back, she moves, emboldened. Her thigh rolls against the bed, one leg swinging over Xion's, knee planting on the opposite side. She rises over her, tilting Xion's head up and her own down, her hair spilling forward from her shoulders and coiling on Xion's arms. So much weight, so much tension, seeks release all at once, that the moment carries on until Lilian has pushes Xion down to her back, having to release her face to support herself with the palms of her hands, and catch her breath.

    "Yes. I know that one. Out of all the feelings I've learned since coming here, that one is my favourite. I want to know more about it. Everything about it. And I can't do that if I stay afraid of what people will think, about me being . . . different. So I just won't. Let's see all the colours we make together, alright?"