As soon as she had executed said direct call-out, Yara already began to look uncertain about the whole affair, as though not telling someone you had historically established a relationship of trust with when they were being terrible might have been the more knightly option somehow. But she was having her own thoughts about being brave, and given that no particular action of hers had seemed to work as intended up until the previous trial, her bravery levels could only stand to increase.
When Yasei agreed, the look she returned was some bizarre amalgamation of a smile and a wince all at once — she hadn’t wanted a personal apology (and was uncomfortable enough with the fact that she had received one that she was tempted to set it entirely aside), but the implicit promise of less terrible behaviour shepherded before it a slow, disorganised wave of relief. Even if she had been severely remiss in recognising potentially terrible tendencies in Yasei beforehand, the differential between her remarks at the trial and now was still vast enough to occasion no other response.
That thirty seconds of silence hardly went unused on Yara’s end, either. Slowly, her posture relaxed against the wall, her legs stretched out before her in a way that almost diametrically opposed Yasei’s body language. The final I’m glad was enough to make her smile an entirely open one — the first she recalled in a long stretch markedly devoid of what had usually come instinctively.
"Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re g—” She started, the side of her head gently resting against the wall beside her as it turned to face Yasei — then she properly processed the rest of her words. Her smile didn’t quite invert itself, but it at least flickered into something that markedly less resembled a smile.
"Uh, not to say I don’t appreciate the overall feel of the thing you’re getting at here, but," she started, her eyebrows launching into a brief and very uncertain dance routine at the thought of verbalising what she wanted to verbalise. "Yeah, they would have been a loss. Defs. The fact that we’ve all gotten to know each other in this whole, like— mutual killing sitch kinda throws things out of order, I guess, but we’re all people, and we would have been a class, instead of seeing each other as threats, or in the… useful-not-useful investigation-type binary thing, so— you don’t need me to tell you this, I’m guessing. My bad, just… would’ve felt weird about not saying it, you know?”
At a slight want for oxygen for an unnerving moment, she paused, the breastplate of her armour visibly shifting with the inhale before she, predictably, launched into the rambling again.
"And… whatever would have happened wouldn’t have been your fault specifically," she said a little more quietly, trying not to focus on how the element of fault might or might not have pertained to herself. "I think we’ve all been doing a wicked good job, given… the circumstances. Like you said. Kind of out of our hands, with the whole murder robot thing, so no point in sweating it now, right." Before she could go any further, she glanced up apologetically, cutting herself off before the next tangent could even begin. "I’m… kind of rambling here, aren’t I? Sorry. Okay. Question.”
It was hardly a question that had escaped her own consideration, and yet voicing the answer to someone else was another matter entirely. Suddenly she looked very vulnerable slumped against the wall, even in full-body armour. She hardly expected Yasei to mercilessly shoot her down, so perhaps her anxiety on the matter was more to do with herself. And that was more self-analysis than she was currently capable of, so back to the rambling it was.
"I think—" Yara started, then stopped, drumming the fingers of her gauntlets audibly on the outside of her thigh. Her next words were delivered with nothing but absolute conviction, but they still required organising, as did everything. "I think that if anyone knows, they’re defs on their way. No ifs about it. Kinda abstract to think about from the inside, but it’s not like any human could just sit by, right?” A pause — this was the part where she debatably wasn’t offering the answer Yasei expected, though it wasn’t pessimistic so much as perceptive in a way the Yara of the past’s absolute optimism had sometimes (read: always) fettered.
"But also, I’ve been thinking — they’re not here yet, so. I could probably be doing more, and we could all be trying way harder to pull together on this. You know, like some kind of… team.” She smiled to the side, almost out of embarrassment; what would a known and noted cynic have to say to that? “You know, I get this feeling like this whole set-up’s unravelling mega hard, with the Mifune-san thing and the Ashinano-san thing, and the. Whatever that was last trial, even. If we just kind of push at it, like, together, I seriously think… there’s no way this can go on for much longer.”
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