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[unfazeable]

And ▒▓█t are we doing, G▒briel?

[her voice is quiet this time, and it's not just the jitter of energy rending through the soundwaves.]

Th▒s isn't your fau▓t. █▓at other thing w▒sn't, either. ▒▒st the house, isn't it? And p▓█ple mucking with stuff we don't und█▓stand.

cw sa allusion

[cryptofascist]

[ Gabriel scans the control room: the people and the monitors. The tempo of constrained panic hasn't changed. On one screen, Andor's and Guevara's wedding is carrying on calmly. With the crisis yet to break containment, Gabriel turns his back on the situation. ]

I was arrogant. And reckless. [ And in pain. He took the ill-ease festering inside him, cured it and strapped it around her neck. That was his fault. ] And I shouldn't have left you there.

[ What may have happened to her haunts him as doggedly as the certainty of what did. To say nothing of the humiliation she may have felt. ]

[unfazeable]

[the static has a gait to it now. dut-dutdut-dut. dut-dutdut-dut. winnowing in and out of an invisible wind. ava doesn't answer for longer than she failed to answer before, but not long enough that anyone could conceivably think she did go ahead and die of dehydration.]

█▓ybe I don't know wh▒t arrog▓▓t an█ reckl▒▒s mean in space. It was an a█▓ward sit▒▒tion, and I—

[she did not have a plan for this sentence before going in, which she sees now, was a fatal error, wont to set her face burning. her voice drops into a parched whisper.]

—I mean, I act█d like—what I d█▓ was fucked up ▒nd—

[cryptofascist]

[ Over their mangled connection, it's impossible to tell hesitation from lapsed signal. He hears it in the crackled of her voice, though. It's a fair quandary: What does an adequate apology sound like when you're sorry for someone that wasn't you? ]

Ava. It's okay. [ And it is. It pains him, having to forgive her, when she didn't do anything wrong. But it, unlike the material lifelines out of his grasp, is within his power to give. So he speaks not just quietly, but softly. ] It's alright. If a part of the real you was in there that night, I never assumed that was it.