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Oh. It was her.

Daphne was trying to be strong. She was trying to go and face Chaos head on, despite the fact that parts of her didn't even know if this was worth fighting anymore.

Would she be happier if she just-

No.

She kept cutting off those thoughts if they popped up, but seeing the Captain again made her heart twist in her chest.

"I won't kick you," she said, because of all of the things that had happened in their previous encounter, that had not been the most mature thing for her to do. "If you don't try to tell me to join the Negaverse."

"I'm glad you don't want me to be a shell?" said Daphne, blinking. She wasn't sure that she knew where that was coming from, she didn't think she'd said anything about it before.

If anything, she thought she might feel like a shell now with how hard it had been to chase away the sadness over the last few months.

Not that she could take the other path, even if it was-

No. Not even thinking about that.

"Should we try again, with everything?" she asked, and then reached out a hand in the Earth custom. "My name is Daphne."

A moment passed and, then she decided to be at least somewhat honest. "And I don't know if I'm better. I'm trying to plan a funeral for my family, who I've recently found out have been dead for a thousand years, so that's where I'm at."

This time, Daphne didn't pull away from the hug. She hugged back, squeezing just as tight as she was being squeezed. She needed this. She needed this so badly, and it was fine, wasn't it?

Retzian had said that she wasn't going to corrupt her. The feeling of Chaos was still making her head swim, but it wasn't like she was giving in to it. She was just hugging someone real, someone who understood things in a way that some of the others didn't.

"It's not like Earth funerals," she told her as she did, eventually, back up just enough to breathe. "It's nothing expensive. I just need to cremate the remains and bring them to the savanna."

She paused, tears pricking at her eyes again, because of course they were.

"I just have to find the remains, first, and I don't know where they are, and my world is full of Chaos."

An Earth funeral as an in between step? That was something that Daphne hadn't thought of before, but she found herself nodding. She'd seen people laying flowers on gravestones, and talking to them.

She didn't like the idea of the boxes, the caskets that tried to keep bodies away from the soil and the plants and the life that they were meant to be returning to, but a stone where she could remember her loved ones by? That, she thought, would be okay.

"It's a good idea," she said. "I think I would like that, while we work on the rest."

It just slipped out, that we. She didn't even think about it.

She stepped away to more of a conversational distance as she added, "And yes, my world is mostly savanna. I'm still not used to how cold it is here."

"I think-" and she trailed off for a moment as she did think. "I think it would be okay if it just said for my family. Otherwise it would be a lot of names, and it doesn't really need that. It's not where they are, it's just somewhere to remember them."

Anyway, she knew the names. She could whisper them as she sat in front of the stone, as she laid flowers.

She could talk about her world, too.

"We have some animals like that," she said, "But they might be different from what you're thinking? The giraffes here are much bigger. Ours are-" she made a motion with her hand of something less than a foot tall, something that could have sat in the palm of her hand. "They scurry through the grasses and use their long necks to eat the tops of flowers instead of the stems. Which, yes," she added, before Retzian could ask, "Is adorable. People like them as pets."

A second passed. Her gaze was somewhere far away, although without really noticing it, she had stopped crying. "Cats are the most sacred. There are lots of different species. Lots of sizes, and colors."

Could she get it fixed up?

The giraffes were probably gone, too, but she didn't want to tell Retzian that right now. She just wanted to enjoy the hug and hold onto the hope, for just this once, that maybe she could work on making things a little more okay.

"Yeah," she murmured, into the final hug. "I can tell you more, later. I can show you some of it."

If Retzian was already Chaos, how would she react to the current state of the world? Daphne wasn't sure she wanted to find out. It would be better to wait and show her if she could do something about the Chaos, if she could get everything to be at least a little bit alive.

"And, Retzian?"

When she pulled away, she was smiling. "Thank you. For everything."