Nod.

"Fair enough. You know more about the situation and the decisions it made than I do. I'm just - very aware of the possible failstates that can occur when someone is in charge of their own mind's layouts. It's terribly easy to forget all of the things that don't fit in with your worldview."

"Yeah. It's not safe to have around humans. But it's not evil, either."

"No. I'm sorry if I implied that I thought it was."

"You kind of did.

I am, like, ninety-five percent Edie Lehnsherr and five percent slime mold hivemind thing. I'm still me, but there's some of it tacked on, too. I--I get its point of view. And I don't agree with it, but--"

She nods.

"Yeah. Sorry. I'm - a bit badly socialized. ... More than a bit."

"It's okay."

"Do you want a hug?"

"Yes," she mumbles, in a small voice, to the floor.

Emily hugs her.

Yvette crumples into the hug and tries very hard not to sob.

For the most part, she'd been putting her emotions on hold - in a very human way, not in the 'I can turn my emotions off when I want to' way that is available to her. Now here they are, all in a rush, all together. Relief at finally being home, the final end of the omnipresent all-encompassing dread of being stranded alone in an impossibly vast multiverse, like she's a puppet that has suddenly lost all of the strings holding her up. Then there's the other familiar kind of terror, the one whispering that maybe she messed up, maybe she changed too much, maybe she's too strange and alien now. Maybe her parents will hurt to look at her and her sister won't know how to connect with her and she'll say the wrong things because she's been fundamentally disconnected from everything that she holds dear. Then there are the more immediate emotions - anger at something strange and alien touching her home while she was away, anguish at the whole world moving on without her, annoyance that she can't just go completely home because there's a mess she needs to deal with, and she doesn't seem to know how to say the things she means, because words are hard, and feelings are hard, and people are hard, and she's probably the most powerful woman in the world so why does she feel so lost?

She does not succeed at not sobbing. Her tears follow the starscape theme.

Five years.

Emily tries to imagine five years without her family, five years not knowing if Mama and Dad and Edie were alive or dead--

and she came. So fucking close. To dying. To Edie dying. To their parents having the face the news, sir, ma'am, your girls are gone forever--

or worse, that fucking thing using their bodies to kill them too--

Emily's arms tighten around the other woman and she lets out a sob of her own.

"Want to just cry on each other about how everything is terrifying and we're all lucky to be alive?" she hiccups wryly, between sobs.

Wordless nodding.

"A-awesome."

Yep, okay, time to just openly and unrepentantly sob on a person she barely knows.

Well, the person she barely knows is openly and unrepentantly sobbing on her, back, so.

They have such a kinship! A kinship of sobbing unrepentantly on each other, having had horrible shit happening to them, fear of loss of the people they love, isolation from the world, and becoming something more than human with some unsettling implications. They can just. Cry about that. For a while.

Yvette is so good at plans!

She definitely feels that way! And she even had the sense to set her motes looking for thingbits before she indulged in crying. It is very efficient and she is kind of proud.

The crying eventually bleeds into snuggled sniffles. Yvette is not going to un-snuggle on her own, but if Emily seems to want to, they don't have to literally stay like that forever.

She has the presence of mind to send a mote to check on Edie.

Edie is standing a respectful distance away looking like she might like to join the hug but isn't sure how Yvette would feel about that.

Well goodness, that won't do. Yvette picks her head up from Emily's shoulder to smile encouragingly at Edie.

--Okay. Hug!

Eee!

So many hugs! She's still sniffling a little, but now she's smiling. The black tears that have leaked onto Emily clean themselves up politely. It seems preferable to leaving large void-of-stars stains all over everything she's cried on.

Probably!

"So what's your family like?" Edie asks after a little while.

"My father's a professor that teaches chemical engineering at Lancaster university. Or, well. Was. My mother's less easy to categorize but the sort of person that you can trust to do the thing she set out to do. My sister's - well, she was my best friend, anyway. I don't know what she'd be, now. I hope she got the degree in linguistics she wanted."

Nod.

"I hope so too."