Nakamura Kai. The sight of that man, full and healthy, standing there in uniform like nothing had happened at all just as handsome as the day that Yuzuki had first met the pilot, caused her soul to resonate. It was not a painful feeling, though it did sting. It was like being beat to death with velvet - not that she had any idea, but it did seem like the correct analogy.
It also warmed her cheeks, coloring her face and her neck a pale rose as she blushed furiously, suddenly aware of everything at once but with no idea of where to look. Yuzuki found herself looking at Miyoko. She registered the sensor specialist's offer, and her ears perked up.
"Thank you," she managed, eyes darting over Miyoko's facial structure briefly, keenly aware of Kai's attention. The other nekovalkyrja was certainly beautiful. Right-sized. Not awkward at all. Even the way she spoke was pretty. Yuzuki was painfully cognizant of the difference between the two of them. It was a fairly large gap, after all.
Yuzuki suddenly realized that she'd left her mouth slightly open. She shut it.
She had to think about moving. Yuzuki didn't like having to think about moving. But when she turned her head back towards Kai, and forced herself to look him in the eyes, the sprite was glad for the control it afforded her. Tearless, she met his gaze, and only glanced away once. It was the hair. It made him look, well - it wasn't that she didn't like it. It was that...
She'd cut it. She'd cut it, and it was still there, and there was a corpse in the bay. Yuzuki met his eyes again, bravely.
This was the same Kai. Yuzuki was too pragmatic to believe anything different - Junko had come back just the same, and had even talked a little about her experience with death, so Yuzuki didn't worry about the myriad of questions that soul savior technology elicited. It was all immaterial because whatever a person chose to believe it worked. What did bother her, what pained her, was that Kai wouldn't remember anything. The most warm, intimate moments of Yuzuki's life were doomed to be unshared. For Kai, those things, those bits of memory flotsam that kept Yuzuki afloat in this tempest tossed jaunt through watery horror-inducing dream-raping hell, had never happened.
To her, Kai was... something special. But to Kai, she was probably just another nekovalkyrja on a ship full of nekovalkyrja - Just another sprite who he could talk to about his family and his absurd plans for mechanical walking coffee tables. That's what Yuzuki was - a coffee table Nekovalkyrja. Just one in a million trillian billion.
Snap out of it, Yuzu.
"Yea," Yuzuki answered, tearing her eyes off of him and beginning to walk, "I got a while. Let's go to the armor bay. I found your armor, yesterday."
She tried to act normal. To walk normal. To be normal, as if nothing had happened at all between them. At any time.
But after turning a corner in a daze, halfway to the armor bay, she bumped into a low, unsecured trouble light and realized that her body wasn't agreeing with her, her temperature was rising, and she was, at best, a couple of seconds away from breaking down in front of the only real person who had ever just accepted her as she was.
She rubbed her head, and covered her eyes, and just stood there.
She'd compose herself. She had to compose herself.
"Ita."
