Participants:
| Scene Title | Demons In A Wine Cellar |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Asami and Yi-Min find themselves in another enclosed space together and are forced to find a way forward. |
| Date | March 18, 2021 |
Petrelli Residence
Upper East Side
When Asami flees the situation upstairs in the Petrelli household, the conflict, the pain and frustration, she doesn't expect to find more of it below. She should have, truly, but her own mind is buzzing too much to effectively heard others', her own emotional state erratic after everything that's happened. Not just today, but… everything over these last two months.
Violette insisted to her that Asi is the real one of the two of them. Then why's her strength sometimes feel so foreign? Why doesn't she always feel like her, now that she knows better?
She's invisible, still, as she clambers messily down the stairwell into the wine cellar of a basement, one dimly lit and vaguely musty despite its climate control. She sniffs, wiping at the corner of her eye with the side of a hand only she sees, and her eyes aren't up in observance of the rest of the wine cellar when her feet hit the smooth concrete floor. She doesn't expect anyone else down here among the rows and rows of expensive collectables–
Until at last she does and she lets out a start, flinching back the direction she came, and startling herself into visibility, which bleeds from her in several spots until she's wholly visible, looking taken aback.
"Yi-Min," Asami stammers, completely out of sorts. "Wh–what are you–?" She looks past Yi-Min to a certain wall in the basement, and then back to the other woman down here once more.
She looks hesitant. In her eyes gleam something that had never been present in their last surprise encounter with each other. It looks oddly like– of all things–
fear.
"aaaaAAAAA!"
From where she had been standing statue-like, staring with an empty misery right through a rack of exquisite-looking Australian Sauvignon Blancs, Yi-Min twists towards the voice at her back as though she'd actually been struck.
As it turns out, of course, Asami hadn't been the only one with the idea to come all the way down here for the chance to be miserable in peace. Yi-Min's adrenaline from the events at Little Darlings might have long since faded, but the constant, high-strung nebula of emotions surrounding her has not— and as her gaze lands on the woman who has inspired the most turbulent emotions she has ever experienced in this one lifetime, she launches into a visceral barrage of obscenities in blended Taiwanese, Mandarin, and English.
Even when Yi-Min just as abruptly calms down again a minute later, she does not mask her fear, nor her accusatory hostility. Through that same instinct, one of her hands gropes its way onto her holstered revolver, though it goes no farther.
"What do you think you're here to do n-?" No. No, that likely wasn't… fair, given everything that had just transpired. Yi-Min forces herself to take her voice down one level, sucking in a breathful of air through bared teeth.
Instead, she merely emits a quiet sort of growl. "What do you want?"
Asami jolts when Yi-Min reaches for the gun. Her brief foray into not having abilities which rendered her relatively invulnerable left its mark, even if none could be found on her now. What the other woman did to her with her nascent ability also hasn't been forgotten, either, the here and now shouting much louder than memories of the other world.
Though they're there, too, in the background. Maybe some day they could share a laugh with each other– where Asi can confess to the circles of being intimidated by Yi-Min each time they met each other again. The humorous cycle of similarities, and the absolute reality of her being terrifying in each iteration of herself.
That's all so distant from her in this moment.
"I'm–" she starts to defend herself, and then she looks away, shutting down entirely. She looks tired. "Nothing," she insists, and her hands begin to lower back to her sides from where they'd started to raise defensively. Even so, she practically slinks in the wide berth she cuts around Yi-Min as she heads toward the back of the basement, toward a particular rack of wine in particular.
She hesitates in front of it, and almost looks over her shoulder toward Yi-Min, but pulls one of the bottles of wine forward anyway. Underneath is a small numberpad, which she types a code into, and the wall hisses and swings out open. Asami waits through the process patiently, pulls the winerack by its custom wooden structure gingerly to swing the door open farther as a motion-activated light winks on inside the entire room hidden behind the door made up of winerack.
"I just…" But she can't even summon the rest of that statement. "I don't know," Asami deflects instead. The inside of the hidden panic room is lived-in, though well-kept. A cot in the corner has several blankets and a pillow strewn over it. Folded pairs of borrowed clothing lay in a stack just underneath it. A pair of winter boots sit at its foot. She steps over the threshold as though coming home.
It's a strange thing.
This world’s humble florist, seemingly so far from the coldly focused woman Asi had first met in Dr. Yeh, who had once approached her for assistance against Praxis Heavy Industries. Then: the far more blithe, ever-so-subtly mischievous friend Asi had shared late-night drinks with.
But the murmurs in the background and the ‘now’ are aligned to Asami in yet another way: at the heart of it, this is the primordial core of Yi-Min that underlies every possible version of her. This is what Yi-Min Yeh looks like when every single one of her nearest, dearest devotions has been excoriated from her embrace, leaving behind only some sort of remnant of herself that is flayed beyond recognition.
And like Asami, that remnant is tired. So very tired. Yi-Min's hatred is there because it is an easy possession in the void, perhaps the easiest, and it still burns through her half-lidded eyes as she warily watches her counterpart pick her way through the racks.
There comes a jolt of a moment when Yi-Min feels it flare: the despair-filled desire to finish what she had attempted to start not so long ago, foolishness be damned. That one, opportune moment when Asami takes her eyes away, turning her back to touch that bottle of wine, her own fingers wrench tight again around the handle of her revolver. She nearly—
So nearly.
Instead, her eyes fluttering closed from the weight of a new inexplicable bitterness, Yi-Min asks a question.
"You… really think you are doing the right thing, don't you?"
Asami stops in the threshold, turns to look back. She feels that intent behind her begin to bloom without fully taking root, and she aches from it. There's not an answer that feels sufficient, not one that'll make anyone else believe what she does and what she knows. At least, in this moment it feels that way. It's apparent she struggles, her head shaking to herself, before her eyes finally find Yi-Min.
"Not leaving us to a world that's breaking apart? That would kill us, if we let our guard down, so we go back to being placid and complacent for it, so god knows what can happen to our brains in the process?" She sounds miserable– it sounds like an existence she wishes weren't true.
Something's happened in the time Asami came to grips with her second set of memories.
"Getting us back to the real world, to our real selves, our real lives, it just…" She trails off for a moment and rests her hand against the seam of the panic room door. "I don't see another choice. Leaving any of you here isn't one I want to make, but if the world itself coming to attack us isn't enough of a wake-up call, I… I don't know." Asami shakes her head once. "I'm not going to drag any of you," sounds like an apology somehow.
This is, apparently, not the answer that Yi-Min had been looking for. Her growl from before returns, intensified into a snarl as she takes several steps towards the opened panic-room door and Asami. Her voice is a hateful hiss. "What the hell do you even mean, you don't know? You were the one who dragged us all into this mess. You started us all down this path of destruction. Don't you dare— DARE, tell me now that you aren't sure of the solution to get us out."
Yi-Min's previously laser-focused murderous intent liquefies into a much simpler rage, flowing and all-encompassing. Both her hands lift towards her face, curl into helpless claws.
"What even happened to you? That monster who forced herself on me in my shop— who dug her slimy little fingers into my brain like a child picking apart a toy that wasn't hers—"
The mere possibility that Asami could just leave them inside this collapsing hellhole they're all scrabbling to get out of immediately becomes too much for Yi-Min to bear. The final spadeful of 'fuck you' dirt tossed onto the coffin.
"Try again. That isn’t fucking good enough."
The rise of anger against her digs Asami's heels in, even if she doesn't know why. Strength she didn't think she'd have begins to rise in her as she meets Yi-Min's gaze when she storms closer.
"I know what needs done to get us out!" she raises her voice in first reply, uninterested in being spoken over. "I fucking said what needs done– we need to leave New York, stretch the simulation of this world to its limits, and fucking break it." Her posture isn't ramrod straight as Asi's would be. Instead, she gestures a hand off toward an unknowable distance. "We need to get as far as Las Vegas, because something out that way is our next step to getting out."
The accusation that she's fallen apart in some way sees her quickly seek to cover it over. There's no weakness here, her posture suddenly screams. One foot shifts in front of her, shoulder turning with it. "That monster?" she challenges. "Had a mission. One to find everyone like us, to free you all from the delusion that this is the life you're meant to be living."
And as she sweeps a hand to their general surroundings, she indeed for a moment looks as crazed as she did then.
"… Except it's not as fucking simple as that." Her arm drops, some of her defeatedness coming back with a shrug. "All I did was blind the system to you, get you a step closer to freedom– certainly– but sound like a crazy person while I did it. I was desperate to be believed, desperate to not be alone, and all I did was hurt people in that process." Tongue to cheek, she looks away for a second and then back again before turning her hands out in a more American gesture than Asi ever would. "And even if I've thought on it, reconsidered– realized that after everything I've been through, maybe I have the tools to help you remember the outside world like I do…"
"I've absolutely lost the right for any kind of trust like that, haven't I." Asami's arms swing back down by her side. "So I just have to hope that the ravings of a madwoman who's seen things you haven't is enough to motivate you– that the world falling apart around us makes it look less enticing to stay here."
"I don't know," Asi repeats flatly, without humor.
At first Yi-Min just shakes her head slowly at this onslaught, taking one step backwards in spite of herself when Asami's posture grows more combative. But there she halts again, her slitted eyes emanating nothing less then the purest loathing as her own stance slinks into a more tensely guarded one to match.
Now that the Japanese woman has finally turned to face her directly, she can see something else that is causing Yi-Min's gaze to stay so transfixed on hers, burning with the intensity of a naked flame. It's inseparably twinned with the loathing, the two elements nurturing each other perhaps, but it is patently there all the same—
Desperation.
"Whatever your intent, whatever your aim may have been, in the end, so far you have only succeeded in taking away everything many of us had." Yi-Min stonily repeats a version of the same line she had spit like a curse at Asami back at Little Darlings. It was an impassioned lament then– born of internal agony that is still obvious even though now she says it again that much more quietly. More flatly, too, her voice trembling just slightly from the effort of cordoning off her sorrow from her much colder rage.
"You sad, mad devil of a woman. Yes, of course I don't trust you! But this has gone so far beyond a matter of trust. It is through your actions that I have lost everything I once had here. So, it is only fair that now you show me everything I stand to gain."
If only further deception is forthcoming, further despair, it is not as though Yi-Min has anything whatsoever left to lose. She throws her arms wide, a sardonic invitation for an embrace that nevertheless indicates Asami is (for the moment) free to step in without fear of physical retaliation.
“…Show me.”
For a moment, Asami doubts. But that's where her instinct as Asi rises, unwilling to let a moment of opportunity so clearly spotted pass her by.
She leaves her intended path behind and strides to Yi-Min in several languid paces, her eyes intent. She hears the anguish the Taiwanese woman hasn't given voice to, the one that turned everything she had here on its head. Her eyes begin to shift from earthen hues to warmer chocolate. "You stand to gain back your Kara– the real one," Asi murmurs, and with a tilt of her head, lifts one hand to hold it away from but near Yi-Min's head, eyes shifting to the same molten gold as before.
She sees what's broken. She sees what she has to fix.
But this time, she resolves to do it gently. Or at least as gently as she can. Yi-Min's vision swims regardless, and her surroundings feel ever so distant as she's flung back to somewhere else more damp than musty– somewhere just as dimly lit– somewhere where–
"My ties to the Vanguard run much deeper than my ties to Praxis. They always have. When I heard rumors that I'd be able to see old friends I'd thought dead— well. I couldn't turn down the chance."
"All right," Kara allows while she takes a sip of the dark drink, taking a moment to savor the flavor across her palette.
Next question.
"Sure, your ties might be there, but what about your beliefs?" she asks openly enough. "I didn't sign on with this, drag my ass from one coast to the other, to go on a Vanguard reunion tour." Nefarious, world-altering intentions behind said tour implied, there. "So, if that's your goal, then we'll always be a little at odds with each other."
This is enough to cause an openly bright laugh from Yi-Min, who takes one more sneaky drink and then deposits the bottle back into position right next to her, within the most convenient reach possible. "That's fair. I should have elaborated. I was talking about the individuals within the Vanguard: Hector, Eileen. The Vanguard itself… is not something I want back, I assure you. But the relationships built from that time, I don't want to lose."
Like the one with that dearly possessed woman whom even now she calls 'little sister.'
Funny thing, how attempting genocide brings people together.
"If you do or don't, I don't really give a damn. What does concern me is if you use our resources," such as her carefully-grown armory, "to go about it."
"There's plenty enough people out here we're supporting without having resources drawn away for that," Kara insists, taking another, slower sip before setting her glass aside. "So." Her hand braces itself against her knee before lifting briefly to gesture to Yi-Min.
"We did lose our Praxis man, yes. To that robot we ran into the other day, actually. Glad we haven't lost you in a similar way yet." It's said lightly enough to be construed as affection of some kind, accompanied by a very stiff smile.
"So is this your first time in the States, then?"
Somewhere where she made her first connection, her first steps down a path that twined her with another. Here, she's never seen her Kara wear so stern a face as this one does, one so unfriendly. But there at the end, there's that smile, that hint of the warm, fiercely protective woman she knows well.
And then there's suddenly only Asami, who draws her hand back hesitantly, her eyes a darkened brown again. She looks at Yi-Min intently, gaze darting back and forth between her eyes. A hesitant, tense moment passes. "I don't know what you saw," she admits, seeming surprised by that. "I don't want to overwhelm you."
"But I can bring back more, if not all of it, if you're ready," Asi offers, her head tilting slightly as she wonders at what the nature of what Yi-Min saw was.
Yi-Min had been bracing for a tumultuous ordeal, but she still is not fully expecting the plunge into an ocean of time and space that draws her elsewhere.
The visions that crystallize before her mind's eye are simultaneously alien and comfortable, wholly unfamiliar to her and yet as intimate as a second skin—
Pieces gradually fall into place, not all with total structural sense at first. The same goes for the variegated thoughts drifting across her mindscape. She was— is— not Ms. Yeh, but Dr. Yeh. Death had followed in her wake as easily and freely as it does for Yi-Shan here, brought to fruition with lies and with poison.
Vanguard. Praxis. Eileen. Sága. Sunflowers. Providence.
And consistently at the center of the maelstrom, a certain beloved figure…
Kara, who looks damn good in combat gear.
Bewildered certitude grows in her, haltingly at first as she reaches with renewed wonder for each fragment that is given over to her. The hesitance never fully fades, but nonetheless, she finds herself instinctually folding them back into the core of her being, each one rendering her soul just that tiny bit more complete.
When the spell is lifted, Yi-Min has to take a long, long breath to steady herself, blinking as the dismal solidity of the cellar surrounds her on all sides once again. When she can, she darts an equally surprised glance to Asami at the remark that she doesn't know what had been seen, her fine eyebrows arching upwards slightly. But it isn’t a question she wishes to dwell on for too long now.
Still mildly breathless, Yi-Min dips her chin in a deepening nod towards Asami, flicking an oblique look to the other woman's eyes but not withdrawing from the sight. "Go on. I… need to see more." So much more.
Asami blinks several more times in surprise for her part, but she nods. There's no small amount of relief that Yi-Min isn't fighting her, that memories of her true life aren't a horror causing her to push her away. Starting with Kara was the right choice, she notes, exhaling slowly as she tries to hone her thoughts toward what to search for next. Does she reach again for a topic, or does she simply try to wipe away the oblique layers over Yi-Min's memory wholesale?
Selfishly, she prioritizes events sooner over anything foundational for Yi-Min. She went through much to become the person Asi remembers, having had to walk paths to reach the end of them and set them on fire. Doing things out of order could jeopardize that.
Memories of herself, though… those were all in recent times, that she knows of. They'll do. Her eyes begin to warm to a golden color once more, and she lifts her hand, fingers arching as she focuses on inverting the ability to negate memory.
When Yi-Min is thrust back into the past again, reliving experiences, this time it's not just a single vignette that plays out, but several. Memories return in the span of a blink, ones that stretch over hours, days, months rather than a single recaptured moment. Yi-Min remembers enlisting the help of a technopath to take down a corporation she once didn't mind working for; remembers the drinks after in the months between her, Asi, and Chess as they three managed to find their way in the world after all they'd endured. With those key moments as focal points to begin scrubbing back from, surrounding blocks on memories slowly begin to chip away, floating back one by one to reveal the light of life hidden over events both following those encounters and preceding them.
Yi-Min remembers the day she left prison, leaving to greet Nicole– who had brought Kara with her.
Yi-Min remembers the last night before there's suddenly nothing– one in the warm of summer where she stayed up late to read while Kara slept beside her, one arm curled over her lap and around her side to keep her close.
Yi-Min remembers moments spent among the Vanguard, building relationships she would return to a lifetime later after its falling…
Yi-Min remembers why she began to hate those like herself in the first place. Memories of when she realizes what she'd done, what she'd lost, serve as an anchor point that stretches across the rest of her life, influencing who she became and what she did.
It throws into sudden, jagged relief how wrong and unusual her life was here, bringing her back to the present like a knife's been driven through her heart. The pain begs for a clinging to a more comfortable lie just as much as it highlights how false all this was to begin with.
She remembers Yi-Shan is dead.
Almost as though to drive the point home from the very beginning, Yi-Min is thrown back into the midst of that room, as real as though it happened yesterday. The humid high-rise in Taiwan: a golden, restless morning after a sweltering summer night. A young Yi-Min rolling over in her bed, fixing her tousled hair, trotting over to Yi-Shan's bed on the other side of the room to mischievously rouse her brother, too— slap him awake, perhaps.
The annoyance, then growing trepidation, then panic when she observed that he remained lifeless.
In her lifetime over in that other world, Yi-Min had had approximately thirty years to come to terms with the cleft in her heart, adopting the purpose granted to her by the Vanguard as both armor and sword. Nearly every day without fail, she had honored a photograph of her little brother at a household shrine she still takes great pains to establish no matter where she goes in the world. Over a great deal of time, she had been able to learn to live with the permanent pain she would bear for the rest of her life. Acceptance of a sort, if never normalcy.
But here, there is only fresh wound compounded upon fresh wound: cruelly variant forms of the same, senseless slaughter revisited upon her again and again. First in the garage only a few days ago, and now…
Now Yi-Min begins to struggle against the ability being used on her, a succession of indescribable emotions starting to jar at the borders of the memories she is being shown. Innocuously at first, but then with more conscious mental claws that carve and tear in futility at the fabric of what she is being made to see.
"Asi?" she asks aloud without even realizing she has switched names for Asami, newer memories slipping through and cratering into old ones and pulverizing everything together into one single, temporarily indiscernible farrago of grief. "Why?"
"為什麼?" she keens again to no one, now— just as she had stood and begged of the universe in a child's small bare feet all those years ago, reaching out to anything in all of existence in search of an answer that just isn't possible.
Why?
Being physically close already makes the shift an easy one for Asi. Her hand moves from around Yi-Min's head and she closes her arms around the other woman's shoulders instead, holding on comfortingly. The memories themselves weren't something she saw, but she can hear the grief in Yi-Min's thoughts fine just now that her focus isn't so occupied.
"I'm sorry," Asami murmurs as she only embraces her more fiercely. Tears spring to her own eyes, knowing that what she's done is the right thing even if it's a painful one– even if she knows that in some ways this life here would be more appealing than the one that's true ever would.
Even in the depths of its unfulfilledness, it never touched on the pain the levels felt by their outside selves. Not until the simulation began to unravel against them.
Asi had ruined everything. And she's so very sorry about that, because real or not, it's still the loss of a sense of peace for some– a sense of belonging they may never be able to get back.
"The people who did this to us– their cruelty is unmatched. I'm sorry exposing their lie hurts so badly. It was easier for them to hold us when this other world they've built for us was… compelling. Even if we might have started to remember, it was easier to feel the truth was the dream, rather than the falsehood."
All of it is nearly too much to bear for Yi-Min. It's certainly too much to process in any conversationally limited span of time, and for one increasingly wild minute, she just clings tightly to Asami's— Asi's—arms in all of their eye-opening familiarity compared to just several minutes prior.
For the wholeness of its duration, measured in heartbeats, Asi's embrace feels to Yi-Min as though it is the one, solid, really real thing left to cleave to when all other footing has just been pulled out from beneath her. So this is just what she does, in spite of the part of her heart that still beats in protest, still howls in her delirium of shock and betrayal.
But those things, too, are beginning to bleed together into a maelstrom that begs new direction.
Yi-Min's tear-shrouded gaze begins to take on a new sheen as it focuses somewhere into the distance past Asi's shoulder; her hand tightens as it shifts positions slightly on the other woman's back. The next time she repeats "Why," in a quieter tone, the innate source of the remark comes not from the florist, but from the doctor.
When Yi-Min pulls back, it's to look Asami straight in the eyes with a clinical, calmly wondering look that Asi has seen before. Together the florist and the doctor search, as one, for the famed vindictiveness Dr. Yeh had once sought out from the Oni.
An idea is beginning to form in Yi-Min's head, one she barely dares to probe at for fear that any possibility behind its frame will simply disintegrate.
"…告訴我." Tell me. "What is your plan, once you get to Las Vegas? What more can you say, about… 'the people who did this to us?'"
It's so strange, the way Yi-Min comes back to her in this moment. It's everything she'd hoped for. A shoulder to lean on in return, someone she can cling to and remind herself who she is supposed to be by being near. Asami's overwhelmedness takes nearly as long as Yi-Min's to cycle down, and she begins to put her composure back together… but when Yi-Min pulls back, Asami has to not even the corner of, but her entire eye to swipe away tears. She'll get back to being herself, she's sure, eventually…
There's just been a lot of still living here in this reality, even with her memories to guide her.
"The people who did this to us," she says as she looks down at her fingers, wiping the inside of her eye. "They're primarily members of a bleeding edge tech corporation called Crito Corporate. They've kidnapped us and put us under to make use of our abilities for their ends rather than ours. They put us in this simulation to keep us sedate while they leverage our bodies for their own purposes."
"They are terrified of what we might do if we wake up," Asi goes on to explain, her voice calming as she goes, growing cooler. "And what's waiting for us for Vegas will give us a way out. We're going to crash the entire simulation, my friend." She rubs her fingertips together and looks up at Yi-Min with a hardening gaze. "Stretch it until it snaps, and in that chaos, emerge on the other side."
"A friend of mine, another technopath, is also trapped here," she explains calmly. "He's going to help us shove the door open when the time comes."
"Crito?" Yi-Min immediately looks startled, then alarmed. As (newly-remembered) head of Raytech's biotechnology division, she is no stranger to the name, nor the work that Crito Corporate has done in the field. Indeed, she had considered herself rather up-to-date on their more well-known achievements, following their name in the public eye with interest. Little could she ever have expected—
Ice floods into Yi-Min's veins, as an ancient fear both hers and not hers is resurrected in her bones. Her searching gaze grows a knife's edge. "What on earth do they want our abilities for?" But as the question leaves her, she's not sure the answer even matters.
Because Yi-Min can already see her response to whatever it is narrowing into only one, single path that stretches before her. "They should be terrified," she concurs with a gravity that surprises her. It's a promise drawn from deep inside her, from a part of her that she previously didn't even know existed. At the last statement, the rainbow of thoughts, of emotions vying for expression in her gaze all focus on Asi once more.
"Your… friend. Does he have a body on the outside?" The implied question that trails onwards is left unsaid, but it's rather clear. If he does not, can he get out?
Asi's expression falls, her gaze hiding. She tries to say something, put a hopeful bent on the situation, but she ends up closing her eyes, tongue finding itself glued to the roof of her mouth. All she can do to answer is shake her head, once. "I'm…" Once the information is shared, she can slowly start voicing her thoughts again. "Working on figuring that out on the fly. I don't want to leave him here."
"He's been stuck in one hellhole after another, working for manipulative group after the other. Often at either metaphorical or physical gunpoint. It… it seems to be the lot for those with our ability. We're too valuable, too powerful to not be chained in some way."
"He deserves freedom, too. We all do."
Asi exhales out hard and looks up to Yi-Min again, expression smoothing over. "You're welcome with us when we set out tomorrow. We're heading south to DC before cutting West."
Even though Asami does not come straight out with a positive answer, even hearing her uncertainty is useful in its own right.
It means that the answer may not be an outright 'no.'
Yi-Min knows she is huffing smoke from a pipe dream, knows just how far she is stretching, but the increasingly unsteady light in her eyes would have anyone fooled. She bares her teeth in a strange grimace, a lean flash of white against the dark. It seems like she is barely even looking at Asami at this point: to her, the ambiguity of the other woman's words is far less interesting than the implication they carry.
"No. No, I think I will make my own plans." This is said with a finality that seems all but absolute, though the fact that Yi-Min is making this acquiescence at all speaks of just how far this conversation had come.
And then, at last, Yi-Min's gaze lowers to meet Asami's— an expression of intimacy and loftiness in precisely equal measure.
"I need time to think. To prepare. But, please. Keep me updated on your friend, and your plans for giving him… freedom from this place. I want to know everything." Everything.
Asi hesitates for only a moment, a hitched draw-in of breath. Through the powers Asami has ripped into being and copied from others, she can feel the edges of Yi-Min's thoughts and see the shape of Yi-Shan. Her tongue presses to the back of her teeth to throw caution, but in the end, she opts against it.
Whatever took them forward. Whatever took them out. She can't control Yi-Min's motivations, only be grateful enough to have driven her toward that outcome at last.
She presses her lips together in the faint assurance of a smile. "Of course," Asi promises.