"Oh," Miranda says, and her voice just gets smaller, shrinks inwards on itself, on this moment, makes her seem too young and the world around them too old, too big.
She's still staring out across the night, out at stars that twinkle dully in the urban haze, at clouds that streak across the sky like smears of grey paint, at the dark place where the moon is hanging, but can only be seen by looking at where the stars aren't. Somewhere above them, there is a small light, blinking and tracing a slow path across the night, a plane flying overhead, accompanying someone else to some other business.
Beneath it all, what is Miranda? She's still standing here, the world strangely quiet around them, quiet for a night like this, out here. She lifts her hands just to tug on her own fingers, worrying herself with her own claws, hooking her thumbs against the opposing pairs. So much time, so much to consider. She's just one part, standing here, and she doesn't know how to justify herself in front of it all, how to make it all be worth something, how to make it make sense.
She's still not looking at Amira. She doesn't want to. It's childish, she knows, stupid and simple in the childish way, not wanting to look at her because it's easier, then, because then she's not really saying these words to Amira, not really saying them to anyone, that she can cut them down into a shape that can be digested. It's better this way, she thinks too. Better if Amira doesn't know what Miranda would wish for, because Miranda doesn't know how she would say it either, how she would make it come out of her mouth and mind, how she would be able to look at it afterwards.
"That is okay, I think. Or, it is about what I expected, really." There's a faint quiver in her voice, something so small and so uncertain that it almost sounds like a stutter, for a moment. That Miranda could stutter is a thought so odd, so strange, that it's what lends its main credence to the thought that it's not a stutter.
Miranda looks down at her hands now, at her tail as it begins to curl around her own legs.
It feels like a strange reminder, that Miranda really is a youngest sister, the baby of her family, that all her siblings are so much older than her, more experienced, more knowledgeable in such things. She's the smallest, in more ways than one, and there's something in her gaze, the way she stares down at herself, that makes it ache like a bruise under the ribs, impossible to ignore with every breath.
She doesn't follow it up with another question. Miranda can only assume that if she doesn't ask, Amira won't mention it, and then neither of them will have to look at it, especially if it doesn't matter anyways, especially if she really just got her hopes up for nothing.