There's the girl

The party buzzed around her, an ever shifting, ever changing hive of activity that swarmed about her like some intricate dance. She moved among them as a ghost might, unnoticed and unremarked upon, silent as the dead in their graves. There was something wrong about that, about the silence, but Aegle couldn't quite say what. It didn't seem terribly important.
"There she is!" Someone cried. As one, the crowd parted, its constituents turning to look at her, to reveal a man in a thick armless sweater with lustrous brown hair tending towards gray. He had a broad smile on his lips, showing off just about every tooth in his head, and held his hands out toward her with long and nimble fingers splayed, like he might be about to grab hold of something.
"Daddy?" Aegle asked, mimicking the paunchy man's smile, raising her own hands up to take his, grabbing hold of his index.
"How's m'little clockwork angel?" He asked her, guiding her closer, joints popping in his fingers as he dragged her in, "Enjoying y'party?"
A bit of puzzlement, strangely muted, played across the back yard of Aegle's mind.
"My party?" She asked, before the feeling of rightness about it all could stop her. Her father smiled more broadly, the corners of his emerald eyes fracturing into a webwork of deep laugh lines.
"Course," He chuckled, deep and throaty, "Can't have a birthday without a party, yeah?"
Aegle chuckled too, picking up the song from his first few notes, "Yeah." She agreed.
She hugged him, arms crushing tightly down around his shoulders, and he crushed her the same way, squeezing until a little squeak escaped her lips. A small giggle trailed out after it as he put her back down.
"Missed givin' you those." Her father said. Aegle frowned, and was just about to ask him what he meant, when a shout cut through the buzzing around them. From out of the swarm, came a younger man dressed in the gunmetal gray of military rank and file, chevrons blazing pale red across his shoulder pads.
"Found you!" Aaron said, his split lips splitting into a narrow smile. Aegle flung herself at him, catching him around the shoulders. Spinning with the impact, he swung her about like she weighed nothing at all, then planted her down with the grace of a dancer. His eyes flickered for a moment, his sedate smile creasing in a bit deeper, and he clapped his hand down on her head, mussing her hair.
Aegle squawked, fended him off with a few hard slaps, then grabbed her braid protectively. She got a better look at her hands as she did it, and a sudden sense of unreality crashed across the shore of her mind.
"Hows's the party?" Aaron asked, calling her attention off the sure and steady digits to meet his steely, shimmering jade eyes.
"S'good," She answered then, on reflex, "Can't have a birthday without one, y'know?"
Aaron's grin tugged up higher on one corner, showing off his dogtooth, and he reached out to muss her hair again. Aegle squealed, giggling, and guarded the incoming hand, flinging it wide with her forearm. The sense of unreality washed over her again, eating away at the ground beneath her feet but, before she could think about it, a warm hand touched down on her shoulder.
"Leave off, wouldya." Paeon said, standing beside her, "Y'know how long it takes her, braidin' her hair."
Aegle frowned. It didn't take long at all. She was quite good at it. Wasn't she?
Aaron put up his hands, grinning in defeat, "Alright, white knight." He chuckled, sounding an awful lot like their father. His pale green eyes shifted back to Aegle, and he slapped his hands together with rough finality.
"Gonna go see what's to drink, yeah?" he said, as though asking for permission.
"Sure." Aegle permitted, giving him a wiggly wave with one perfectly steady hand. Aaron threw them both a salute, then disappeared into the crowd.
"Sure is a lot of people here." Aegle said when he was gone, eyes tracking up to Paeon, still stood patiently at her side. Her brother arched an eyebrow, before his mobile features broke out into a smile that creased the corner of his bespectacled eyes. He was dressed in a white support suit, the jacket open at the front to reveal a cool blue shirt beneath.
"Course there is," He said, "S'not every year y'turn twenty."
Aegle blinked, "M'Twenty?!" She blurted, mouth hanging open.
Paeon laughed, and checked his watch, "Only for the last sixteen hours, y'are."
The watch's face blinked red as he dropped his hand back down, a very large number flashing on the screen.
Aegle felt suddenly faint. Her chest ached gently, and it was hard to breathe.
Paeon looked concerned, and turned to better face her, "Hey," He said, soft and gentle, "Y'alright."
"Yeah," Aegle said, waving him off even as his free hand found her other shoulder, "Yeah, s'nothin'. Just a bit dizzy, s'all..."
A small smile crept into place, and Paeon lightly clapped both her shoulders, "Good. The last thing we need is a speed wobble."
Aegle smiled to match his, but it felt forced, like she was trying to lift a weight with the corners of her mouth.
"S'Vulc here too?" She asked him, twisting free of the sinuous doubt coiling about her.
Paeon's smile sagged a little, "Outside. By the bar."
She followed the direction of his eyes and saw, for the first time, where they were. A set of frosted double doors opened out onto a stone porch, itself abutting upon an expansive backyard that dipped and rolled all the way out to a tall fence of black metal. A bar of polished wood and brass fittings, which she didn't remember being there, ran perpendicular to the exterior wall. Among those seated at it, she saw the swept back hair and long, nimble fingers curled around a tumbler full of something dark.
Of all her brothers, Vulcan looked the most like their father, which was why it was so strange to see a glass in his hands.
He looked up as she and Paeon drew closer. Paeon, holding a finger up to his lips, reached across the bar with his free hand and palmed a bottle from the other side.
"Stuff'll kill ya," Vulcan muttered, eyes the color of moss sliding off of Paeon's smile to find Aegle at his side. "Hello birthday girl."
"Heya." Aegle's voice suddenly felt tight, staring into those strangely haunted eyes. A tired smile drew itself across his lips, scored into the hard lines of his face like a glass-cutter's knife. It seemed brittle and wont to crack at any moment. A revulsion tugged up at her guts, a feeling of falling, as she stared into that face.
"Y'made it." He said quietly.
"Course," She said uncertainly, feeling strangely awkward, clumsy beneath her brother's sad eyes, "Like y'could have the birthday party without me."
Vulcan dipped his head, a small nod, then tucked back the last dregs of his glass and put his back to the bar, "Not wrong, but not right. We could still have a celebration, it just wouldn't be a birthday party."
Aegle's smile twisted a little. Her shoulders felt heavy and her back had begun to ache. Her hands hurt. She wanted to look down and check them, but she couldn't look away from Vulcan's sad eyes.
"What kinda celebration?" She asked unwillingly, more compelled by expectation than any desire for an answer.
Vulcan's brittle smile pulled wider, and she could practically hear the cracking.
"Plenty of things to celebrate." He told her, then tucked back the last dregs of his glass. Aegle felt a wave of dizziness again.
"Like what?" The words were dragged out of her, hushed and weak.
"Life."
"Whose?"
Vulcan tucked back the last dregs of his glass, then set it aside, "Who else? You're the birthday girl."

Aegle took a step back from Vulcan, confused. Searching, she looked to Paeon. He looked back, beer forgotten in his hand, watching her with the same glass smile, the same sad eyes. Through the sliding doors, she saw Aaron watching. She was about to go to him when she saw his face. Not smiling, but hard. Hard and defiant. Past him, the crowd parted and she saw her father seated alone on a chair that looked out of place among the rest of the house's furnishings. Not knowing she was looking, not knowing she could see, he held his face in his hands and shuddered, rocking slowly back and forth.
Aegle's breath caught in her throat, her heart swooped, and the dizziness slammed through her from head to heel. She staggered back, away from her brothers and their sad, angry eyes, from her father and his silent tears, and ran right into her mother's waiting arms.
"Woah there," She soothed, hand stroking her hair, arm wrapped snug around her sagging shoulders, "Where's the fire?"
"Mommy," Aegle pleaded, face buried against her mother's chest, "Something's wrong."
"Honey..." Sweet concern, dripping like honey from each syllable, "It's alright. It will all be alright."
But it wouldn't. Nothing would ever be alright ever again.
Shoving herself free, Aegle saw her mother's clear blue eyes, bloodshot and puffy around the edges. She saw the veil over her face, the black dress she wore.

She tore free, stumbled past, and out onto the rolling yard. Her feet crunched through the ankle deep snow as she staggered, step by labored step, trying to put as much distance between herself and her family as possible. The snow got deeper, it dragged at her feet as she tried to lift them, making each step harder than the last. Until finally she couldn't keep upright at all. She fell into the cold snow. It fell over her, closed around her, weighed her down till she could barely breathe. It was all she could do to get her head up, to roll onto her back. She lay like that, staring up at the night sky overhead, at the broad sweep of stars that dotted the distant heavens, at the great black spaces in between. She lay like that, feeling her arms grow stiff, her legs grow still, felt the cold creeping in, and thought about how vast it all was. With the last of her strength, she lifted her head and looked at the trail she'd cut through the snow, between where she lay and a house, dead and empty, and thought about how small it was, compared with the sky above. Then she fell back, eyes open, and smiled. And started to laugh.

Aegle's eyes opened and let in the light and, with it, half a dozen aches and pains clamored for her attention. She groaned dryly, fingers trembling, and blinked the haze from her vision. A familiar sight gradually took focus around her. The partitioning curtains surrounding her on three sides, the cool stainless steel bar that ringed all four sides of her bed, the off-color walls and placidly lit ceiling, it all looked much the same as it had in Atlas. She supposed hospitals must look much the same all across Remnant.
Little by little a smile formed on her lips. So she hadn't died after all. She wondered how close she'd cut it this time.

Sniffling, she inched the smile a bit wider, and took better stock of her surroundings. There was the IV at her bed side, its pointed tail sunk into one exposed arm. She recognized the saline solution immediately, and which gave her some guess as to how long she'd been out. On the other side of the bed was the heart monitor, its tendrils trailing to the clasp on her middle finger and the few nodes that made hard lumps beneath her gown. It was set to silent, so at least she wouldn't have to listen to the beeping play counter-point to the throbbing in her ears. With a bit of effort, she lifted her head enough to look down her body. No wreathes of flowers were evident. Good. Maybe they hadn't phoned her parents after all.
Aegle sagged back, sighed, and looked up at the ceiling. She would have to let them know she was awake soon, if only to get a proper drink of water and get the catheter removed, but she didn't have to do it right away. The sooner she did, the sooner she would have to explain herself, and she didn't know if she was ready for that just yet.

She must have drifted off because, next thing she knew, there was a voice on the other side of the curtain. Blink the fuzz away, Aegle looked in that direction.
"... fetch you some food and water, so take it easy."
It didn't sound directed at her. There was a creak, as if someone were lying back in bed, and the harsh hiss of curtains being tugged closed, followed by the hasty retreat of sensible footwear across the tiled floor.
Aegle's sleep muddled brain pieced the exchange together with all the haste of continental drift, only really putting it all together long after the nurse's footsteps had dwindled to silence. She wasn't alone. Furthermore, whomever was there with her was hurt just about as bad as she was, if they needed someone else getting them food and drink. That wasn't too surprising, it was a huntsman academy after all and, even if Beacon wasn't half so hard on its students as Atlas was purported to be, accidents were bound to happen.
"Hey?" she said hoarsely, her words tasting like salt on her dry tongue. She shuddered a cough, which made her chest and her jaw ache, then cleared her throat and tried again, "Hey?"
It came out a little louder the second time, but still wasn't likely to call in much notice. She was just about to force her voice a bit louder, was gathering the strength to do so, when her heart monitor gave a faint warning ping. Aegle stopped immediately, and the roaring that had been gathering in her ears dropped back down to a gentle throb.
"Stupid beepy-do." She muttered, eyes sagging closed with the sudden dearth of effort. After a moment wetting her mouth, she tried a third time, "Hey, you awake?"

It seemed like she had wait an eternity for an answer which, when it did come, hardly seemed worth it.
Only a quiet "Yeah...", unreadable and curt. Aegle waited for more, but only silence followed. Maybe she didn't want to talk.
"Shy, huh? Or maybe y'just hurt," She asked with a tired smile, eyes half lidded as she emptied her lungs into each word, "S'alright. I can talk enough for the both of us."
She thought about what she should say for a moment, not really having an anecdote available for this particular sort of situation. She paused thoughtfully. That actually wasn't wholly accurate was it. There was her and Arjenta, the sad eyed girl she'd shared a room with all those years ago.
Blowing out a breath, Aegle decided that probably wasn't the sort of story she should go about sharing.
"M'Aegle," Deciding it would be best not to think, but to act, Aegle just jumped right into it, "S'only my first year, what d'ya think of that? D'ya know where we are anyway? I figure it's the infirmary, y'know, but it could be a hospital in Vale too. Can't see a window, yeah? Actually, it's only my first month. Can y'believe that. Only been here a month and they got me in bed."
She giggled, then winced and coughed and thought it might have been better if she hadn't.
"Really did a number on m'self." She said once the coughing passed, that same conversational lightness in her tone. "Hope y'not too badly hurt. S'alright if y'are, but I'm'a pretend y'aint, cause my daddy always said y'gotta hope for the best."
She cleared her throat and in a deeper voice, "Y'gotta look for the best things in life, otherwise you'll never find 'em..." trailing off to a raspy hush at the end, Aegle pulled in as deep a breath as she could, until the tickle at the back of her throat made her stop.
"Figure he's right. He's usually right. He's pretty smart, y'know? Does important sciency things for Atlas."

Aegle allowed a brief silence there, both to catch her breath and to wait on any sort of answer. The curtains rustled, indifferent to her monologue, and the voice on the other side remained wordlessly silent.
"Hope y'not hurt." She said finally, more gently, "S'no fun bein' hurt, when all y'can do to get better is wait. I hope y'here for some other reason. Some reason that y'can fix." Though she really couldn't think of any reason other than being hurt or sick, for being in a hospital bed.
"I say some pretty stupid stuff, huh?" Aegle asked, grinning broad despite the pain in her jaw, "Feel free 'n step in any time, yeah? Save me from myself, y'know?"

Though she'd said it rhetorically, not really expecting anything in the way of a reply, Aegle got one.
"I wanted to," Said the voice beyond the curtain, tight with emotion, "I tried to make my legs work, but I just didn't have the strength."
That admission rolled out into the open like a live grenade, charged on significance that detonated bright and hot.
"You were so kind to me," She continued and, with every word, her wracked voice grew more familiar, her out of kingdom accent more recognizable, "but I couldn't help you at all." The curtain gave a nervous flutter, as though someone had taken hold of it from the other side. Or perhaps that had merely been the hand closing around Aegle's heart.
"I should have stayed up there longer, or," The hauntingly familiar voice continued, a hitch in her breathing serving as punctuation to her agonized confession, "Or something." She finished lamely, though with a bitter twist in her tone.
"A-and yeah," she said after a few quiet moments, finding Aegle just as stunned, "This is the school infirmary."

She said nothing more and Aegle, too surprised by this turn of events, said nothing either. For a few moments that seemed to go on forever, there was naught but silence between the two of them. Silence, and a curtained partition. Then the heart monitor gave a quiet ping, shocking a gasp out of Aegle, who only then realized she had been holding her breath as she waited for the silence to end.
That realization, accompanied by the quickening of her heart, wracked out a quiet chuckle. A chuckle which, as the utter absurdity of the situation started to really sink in, hitched up into a weak guffaw. Within seconds, Aegle was pinned back in her bed, weighed down by her mirth, shuddering out of her in sputtering giggles that hurt all the way from her jaw to her hips. They sounded pained, even to her own ears, but also filled with a sort of inexplicable delight, that no words in existence might wholly describe.
"Oh Gods," Aegle heaved between spasmodic tremors, her eyes narrowed down to watering emerald slits, tears running little trails down her bruised cheeks, "S'you. A'course it's you."
That was all she could manage before devolving into even deeper, more breathless laughter. Her heart monitor chimed again, warningly this time, and Aegle spluttered senselessly at it. She imagined it looming over her bed, wagging one of its long fingers, tipped with a pulse cup, and descended deeper into hysterics.
"Too funny," She gasped between wheezes of gut wrenching hilarity, "Too Funny. S'too bloody funny."

Her heart gave an agonized little flutter, and the heart monitor shrilled in alarm, but that only made it worse. That only made it more funny. Wouldn't that be it though, to die laughing because she was sharing a hospital room with a girl who'd been beaten up by the same man who'd beaten Aegle? A man who Aegle had fought, knowing she couldn't win? All to prove he wouldn't kill her? How perfectly, beautifully pointless.
Aegle clutched her chest with one hand, gripped tight at the bed sheets with the other, and heaved heavy, urgent, heedless peels of laughter up into the air, only to have them crash right down on her aching heart.

Whether it was uncharacteristic self-control, or merely the sobriety that came with being close to having an actual heart attack, Aegle found somewhere the strength to reel herself back in. She breathed out unevenly, sucked in slow swooping breaths, and her laughs tapered slowly off into chuckles, which dwindled down to giggles, before finally falling back silent, aching, and utterly exhausted.
The heart monitor pinged peevishly at her, as her cardiac rhythm returned to something approaching normal, and Aegle had to bite down the soft snigger she wanted to give in answer.
"Oooh Gods," She groaned, still shaking a little from the exertion, "I freakin' needed that..."
She got one trembling hand up and swiped ineffectually at her tear streaked cheeks, then gave up and lounged back, utterly spent.
"Guess he hurt ya worse'n I thought," She murmured, just as though she hadn't been going mad with laughter mere moments prior. Suddenly too weak to even turn her head, Aegle directed her words up to the ceiling, "Y'reckon y'even could've helped anyway? If he got ya so bad that they put ya in here with me?"

The silence that followed was all the answer Aegle's question required.
"I..." Lily's voice, hesitant, guilt ridden, "I could have. If I had reacted earlier, before I had lost so much blood."
That notion fizzled out between them with nary a sound, holding about as much weight as a puff of smoke. It wasn't just a stupid thing to think, it presupposed that Aegle had even wanted Lily's help to begin with.
"And," Lily continued, voice reaching greater depths of self loathing, "I am in here because of me, not because of him. If I had recovered better from his attack, I wouldn't have busted my arm up so badly. If I had utilized my weapon differently, he wouldn't have captured me, and I wouldn't have had to break my thumb and tear up my wrist and palm ripping my hand out of my locked in weapon. The blood loss from the damaged hand is what did me in more than anything he did to me."
She fell silent again, her own words as stones, weighing her down. Aegle's aching jaw worked, the soft grit of pain lancing through her skull, keeping her sharp. It wasn't like she thought Lily was wrong. It was her own weakness, her own inexperience, her own bad instincts, and her own refusal to back down which had landed her here. She'd made a foolish decision and she had to reap the consequences. Such was life.

"If I hadn't started that whole thing, neither of us would be in here right now," The muttered confession came across, barely audible. Probably Aegle wouldn't have heard it at all, if she hadn't been listening for it. The idea kindled a bit of anger inside of the small Atlesian, that this faunus was trying to take responsibility for what Aegle had done. She guessed there would be a lot of that in the coming hours, in the coming days, people trying to shift the blame away from Aegle and onto someone else.

That thought made her almost as angry.

"You know him, right?" Asked the faunus girl after some silence, doubtless having decided Aegle had no input on her own self-loathing, "The way he fought you, the way he looked while fighting you, it wasn't the way you look at..." She trailed off. Whether through self-consciousness or simply self-doubt, she spent a few moments rethinking her words.
After a couple of false starts, Lily continued on what she doubtless felt to be a more considered course, "It was more familiar, less..." She fell silent again.
Aegle didn't want to explain herself to Lily. She didn't want to explain herself to anyone. She already knew the conclusions which might be drawn if she tried. Try as she might however, she couldn't just leave the question hanging. She couldn't just ignore Lily's curiosity. She owed the girl nothing, and she knew it. She was under no obligation to answer Lily's questions. Still, she felt she should.
Absurd.
"Met'm couple of weeks back. Just before I met you..." She winced as her clumsy jaw brought her teeth down on her wagging tongue. Not everything had slipped back into place so well as it might have, it seemed.
"We talked 'bout art, y'know?"
Aegle thought about that encounter, about the fear in Carmine's eyes when he woke the dragon that lived in Solomon's heart, the sad eye and fatalistic air the Commander had possessed. The stretched out longing she felt from him, as he stared into the paintings on the wall and tried to work out what they meant. How she had later imagined him looking at the rest of the world the same way, in search of a meaning that just wasn't there. Compressing that whole experience into some digestible for someone who had not been there was a task utterly beyond Aegle's eloquence to accomplish, had she even wanted to share something so personal with the stranger on the other side of the curtain.
"He said he thought I was a lot smarter than I give myself credit for." she said instead, in substitute summation, "I dinnae though. Seems like neither of us is too smart for fightin' him, y'know?"
She tried to make that last bit a joke, but her implied condemnation of Lily's actions was not wholly accidental. Just as the condemnation of her own actions wasn't.
"Did y'see the end?" She asked after a few moments of silent reflection. She'd been in no real condition to appreciate what result her actions had, after all.

"I didn't," Lily replied regretfully, "Tried to get up, fell instead. Couldn't see anything from the floor."
Aegle blew out a soft sigh. Not that it was Lily's fault, but she was still disappointed. If only she had been able to hold out a little longer, but she had been pushing things as it was. The fact that Aegle hadn't actually had a heart attack was nothing short of a miracle and the presence of the heart monitor suggested to her that it had been a very near thing indeed.
"As for being dumb," Lily's voice drifted over from the other side of the curtain once more, pulling Aegle out from her momentary regret, "I don't think either of us is."
Aegle quirked a grin. She wasn't sure that many people would agree, least of all where she herself was concerned. Her smile stiffened a little, considering the conversation she would have to have once her brothers found out, once her parents did.
"I got exactly what I asked for," Lily told her, "What I wanted. I got to see exactly where I stand and that information is vital. Thankfully here, these injuries won't be fatal ones. Even so, some fights are worth fighting. If you don't know whether you'd win or not, or if you have a goal that can still be accomplished in failure, then that's not a stupid fight right?"
Aegle tried to laugh, but a jagged ache along her side and jaw turned the sound to a sort of stifled cough instead. Clearly, her body was not all that interested in more humor. Teeth gritted, she pressed back in her bed and sighed out through her nose instead. She wasn't sure she agreed. She had know she had no chance of winning, had known that or her plan to work, she needed to lose. She had still tried though. She had pitted herself against the Commander in earnest, and been found as utterly wanting as Lily. More so even. Lily might have been hurt, but she had not nearly been killed in the attempt. Aegle had no illusions; She was fortunate to still be alive.
That thought brought the grin back to her lips, though it was a grin tinged sardonic and ironic.
'Yeah, you're the luckiest girl in the world, inn't ya?'

A quiet sound from the far side of the curtain drew Aegle out of her momentary self pity, and she looked across just in time to see the curtain whisper aside, revealing the faunus girl beyond.
"There we go," Said Lily, as she turned to face Aegle where she lay. She was dressed in the same back slit gown as Aegle, though it didn't look nearly so baggy on her. Her arm was locked in a cast up to the protruding fingers of her hand, with the other laced up in bandaging. Her face had the faint discoloration that came with recent bruising, especially around her eyes. All in all though, she looked pretty well for the ordeal she had been through. She certainly looked far better than Aegle felt.

Putting on a friendly grin that only partly belied her self-consciousness, Aegle dipped her chin in a small nod. She would have been just as happy if that curtain had remained closed, she reckoned. Her own face was a patchwork of bruising, a quilt of deep purple and pungent yellow, on pale white, most of it glossy from her teary laughter a few minutes prior. Without her hoodie and her brace, she was a shrunken and twisted thing, her head tugged perpetually down on one side, her own shoulder pulled crookedly up on the other. Her hands flexed reflexively, trying to hide the scarring on her knuckles, the way her fingers trembled when at rest. Her front of orange hair, deprived of the maintenance it required to hold its absurd shape, hung limply across one side of her stubbly head, and stuck to her forehead and scalp with sweat.
"Much better." Aegle said quietly, meeting Lily's grey blue eyes, her grin twisting even wider, aching along the plum colored swatch on the one side of her jaw. She wondered if the faunus girl would notice how still she lay and how that might juxtapose with the animated manner she was probably expecting. She wondered if Lily would think her more hurt than she really was, simply because she couldn't sit up. Absurdly, she wished that her arms had been left under the covers, so that the faunus girl could not see the bruises and shadows of bruises that ran all along them, could not see the outline of bone where most people had muscle. As pointless as it was to want such a thing, she could not help regret being seen this way.

Try as she might, Aegle could not think of what else to say. She'd done this too many times, and was too used to the inevitable reaction Lily would have, to even want to bother.
In the end, all she tried for was a somewhat lame, "Y'look well, all things considered. S'nice t'see y'can still stand."

"My mom always said a cat always lands on her feet" Lily answered in a hush, like all the wind had been yanked out of her, as she mantled painfully back onto her bed, and settled facing Aegle, "But I might not have if not for you." She tried to meet Aegle's gaze, but her grey blue eyes seemed to struggle against the some unseen weight, constantly dragging them down.
"I was gonna keep fighting him," Lily admitted, though Aegle could tell she wasn't really thinking about the words coming out of her mouth, "I hadn't realized the fighting was done yet. Was gonna try to kick his teeth in next."
The faunus girl's face contorted in a muted grimace, as though she were imagining what that might have felt like, as if she were wondering what had happened to Aegle to leave her in such a ruined state, "Might've earned myself a broken leg for the trouble. Everyone else could see the fight was done, I should have too."
Swallowing, Lily's leaded gaze flicked up from the slow dip it had been tracking down Aegle's emaciated arms, "maybe I really was being kinda dumb."

Lily seemed to realize something, "Ah- I'm sorry," she said, and Aegle's sickly grin twisted a tiny bit wider, "and thank you."
Lily's gaze went wayward again, finding it too hard to look at Aegle, too hard to not look at her body, embarrassed by a desire too look and the sick fascination which came with it.
"I still think I'd do it again though," she murmured, "What about you?"
Aegle grinned even wider. It hurt. It hurt a lot.
"In a heartbeat." She said without hesitation, then bubbled up a weak gust of laughter at the joke only she was going to get. Closing her eyes as the resulting pain crashed through her like waves on a rocky shore, Aegle drew as deep a breath as her body might accommodate, fingers flexing on her blankets.

She shouldn't have been upset. She'd expected it after all, that haunted realization that there was something abnormal, something wrong, about her. She shouldn't have taken it personally, because she knew with the utmost certainty that Lily hadn't meant any offense by it. It still hurt though, to be looked at that way. To be told by a strangers gaze that you were damaged, that you were broken...
Aegle sighed out the breath she'd drawn in. She'd been seeing that same look for going eight years, half her life, and it still hurt. It hurt to be reminded that she would never be able to hide what had happened to her. And, like all hurts, it made it hard not to hurt back.

"That stuff y'were sayin' durin' the fight," Aegle said, opening her eyes, wondering if Lily would be able to meet them, "About how the weak get eaten by the strong," She showed a jagged smile, a ragged slash of too many white teeth, that was nothing short of agonizing to make, "D'ya actually believe that?"

From the way Lily looked at her, Aegle could tell the punch had landed. There was a staggered moment where the faunus girl didn't seem sure hot to respond, and the the bedridden human's grin twisted a little wider.
"N-no..." Lily confessed after a moment, looking very much like she wished Aegle hadn't asked that question, which of course was exactly why she had asked it.
"Well, no and yes," Her gaze slid away and found something far off to look at instead, "It's really a lot more random than that."
Shaking her head, her eyes still distant, unable to meet Aegle's gaze, Lily said, "Sometimes the strong die because of the weak, sometimes the weak escape, and sometimes the strong starve.
"To be honest," Sighed the faunus, reluctance spread over her answer like a gaudy coat of paint, "They were old words from a tribe that abandoned me. I don't really care what they thought, but the words sorta felt right at the time."
Her eyes shivered briefly in Aegle's direction, without ever losing that far flung look, like she wanted to know what the human girl might think of that but hadn't the nerve to actually find out.
"I..." She murmured, tasting her words, and finding them quite bitter, "I don't really like what I remember about the tribe, and..." Lily trailed off into silence. After a moment, she tipped over onto her bed and rolled onto her back with the laborious effort of the recently injured.
"And," She began again, voice gone almost as distant as her eyes had been a moment before, "They all got wiped out later anyway, so what did they know?"
There was an ache there, Aegle thought, a scar of numbed detachment grown over a wound still tender to the touch. She felt strangely embarrassed to glimpse it, just as she felt guilty to have provoked it. She watched Lily for a few moments, thinking about what she said, wondering if she should apologize.
Then she decided that, while she might have been sorry for dredging up a painful part of Lily's past, she was not sorry for asking the question that had done it.

Fingers flexing, Aegle swallowed and wetted her too-dry tongue, though her voice still came out creaky and arid as the dunes of Vacuo, "S'the only way it ever is, I reckon..."
She tried to roll her shoulders, to ease the tension gradually forming between them, but managed little more than a slight shifting atop her pillow.
"The world's full of random, yeah?" Blowing out a quiet sigh, less an exhalation and more simply letting the weight of her chest deflate her tired lungs, Aegle let her head roll on her pillow and looked up to the ceiling as well. Her thoughts went back to a memory only a few weeks old, of a ladder made of brilliant colors, of a field of white, each with their own meanings and no meaning at all. It was strange to hear such similar sentiment from two seemingly disparate people. Was that random chance as well?
She thought about Lily, about what she'd just said, and about the breadth of that personal experience. She couldn't imagine being abandoned by her tribe, which was just a big family by Aegle's understanding of the word, but she could well imagine the end result. A seemingly random destruction, governed by nothing more than the fickle whim of an abjectly vast and uncaring universe. There was only one constant in life, after all. She imagined the faunus girl, set apart on her own little island, surrounded on all sides by dark and uncaring waters, which might just as easily drown her as carry her back home. Suddenly, Aegle wanted to reach out and take Lily's hand, to provide some tangible sense that she wasn't alone, and whatever feeble comfort that might come with that knowledge. Her momentary meanness, the 'punishment' she'd perpetrated on the faunus girl, for no other crime than the one everyone committed against her, felt exceedingly petty now. There had been nothing random about that, she reflected, only a lashing out that had been completely within Aegle's control.
'The world doesn't play fair, and it doesn't make sense,' she heard the Commander say, saw his sad eye fill with feverish, almost malicious intensity, 'Not unless you grab it by the throat and you force it to.'

After a few moments of silence, Aegle shifted again and looked across at the faunus girl, at Lily. She drew a deep breath, inched her hands out to the rails that surrounded her bed, and took hold of the cool metal as firmly as she was able. Then, with a grunt of effort that was immediately answered by an discouraging ping from the heart monitor, she levered herself shakily to sitting. One arm still holding her up, she tugged out the IV, tugged off the sensors, and set the monitor off in a paroxysm of shrill trilling.
Little motes of cinder formed along the exposed skin of her arms, danced across the pale and plum colored flesh of her face, as she hefted her legs, one at a time, over the bed's edge. Then she spilled out of the infirmary cot like a tipped out doll, to stagger the short distance between her bed and Lily's. With the combined strength of arms and legs, she kept herself from falling and braced herself on the side of the Faunus girl's bed. Then, with trembling effort, she snatched out at Lily's hand and shone the faunus a fierce smile.
"S'alright, yeah?" She said, voice light and full with energy, while her eyes blazed a lingering green above the spark-flaking flesh of her face. Her gnarled fingers gave Lily's hand a fierce squeeze, not especially tight but desperately firm.

A faint tremor rolled through her then, and Aegle's grip relaxed slightly. With effort that felt monumental, even through the insulation of her semblance, Aegle leaned further over the edge of Lily's bed, letting it take more of her trembling weight, and forced her grin even wider.
"Y'don't let y'hurts stop ya, yeah? Y'let 'em be the reason y'keep goin'." Her eyes twinkled, her hair fluttered, as though caught in an updraft of heat.

The fire in Aegle's eyes abruptly winked out, the sparks all across her body danced into nothingness from skin that no longer glowed. She slouched forward, kept from falling atop Lily only by the arm caught between her and the bed. Her expression, at once lively and rapturous, turned tired and discomforted once more, but her grin didn't change. Nor did she stop squeezing Lily's hand.
"S'the nice thing, innit?" She asked quietly, hushed, barely able to hear her own voice over the alarmed hammering of her heart, "If the world don't make sense, if it's all random," She forced her grin wider still, wider than it had been even while her skin seemed to burn from the fire trapped within, till it showed off every tooth in her head, "Y'get t'decide what it means. What it all means. You get to decide."