There's magic in recognizing a kindred spirit, and an even greater power in letting yourself love them. When it scares you, let it - that's your ego letting go.

I can't stand how much like my dreams you smell; it's torture. You are torture. You wear metal on your skin like you're made of it, and it bites at me every time you're around. No matter how many showers I take, I smell your scent on me, on this ship, while I'm trying to sleep. I don't understand it, and can't stand it. I can't stand how I want you so badly and don't at the same time, because you're what I've been looking for, and I don't know what it means to have found it.

Treatments worked well enough for us to get by. Most people lived into old age, but the medication, like everything else, has never been free. Life was a privilege, not a right, apparently. Something you had to struggle for when you were unlucky enough to be born at the intersection of poverty and bad genes.

During times of need, it was always the people with the least to give who ended up sacrificing the most.

And there I was, a woman who yearned so hard for the sky there had to be stars in my blood, yet I was stuck in Heliodor City, missing it all.