"Well. The man doesn't know what he's got at home. Should have his head examined. As a matter of fact, why don't you bring him in? I'll take a look." She's touched, and says her favorite thing about Cottle is that he's only pretending to be a bastard. So say we all. "Well, while you're in the mood for tough love, maybe you are imagining things." He shakes a bottle at her. "You know, fatigue and antidepressants can make a hell of a paranoia cocktail." And they have been, after too many long nights and questions, whirling on the wall. "I felt like I needed to take something to keep from going completely crazy." He tells her she's not crazy and lights a cigarette, and now, with his permission, she begins to name the stars and moons upon the wall.

"What would you call someone who all but proposes to a man after he breaks her jaw?" A dirty girl. A Fool. A girl unable to admit the difference between love and guilt. A girl so in love with an idea that she refuses to see the reality; a girl driven sick and mad with dissonance. A girl willing to take what she is given, because she's never been given much. A girl who thinks love means building bars. A girl who engineered her own sadness and pain out of loneliness and obsession and fits of rage and violence. A girl who'd barely learned the world, before it was destroyed, and spends every moment trying to put it back together in a way that makes sense, a girl who tried to machine the engine of the world and make it run again. A person, like you and me, and Tory and Galen. Just a girl.

"That the last time he laid hands on you?" She nods with a defiant grin into space. "You want to hear something really sick? Sometimes I wish he would. Lay hands on me. At least then I'd..." She takes Cottle's cigarette from his hands, drags on it with unpracticed fingers. Just a girl. "I'd know he had some feelings about me." He snatches it back, and begs her to get some sleep, to clear her head of all this confusion. To find her way out of that room, crawling up the stars and moons.

Not the answer she was looking for. "Will do, Doc," she says breezily. "Thank you." Not the answer she was looking for, but perhaps it points the way to an answer. Perhaps there's a way out of that room, after all, between the moon and stars.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL & SUBLIME

(In which certain Pomegranates are shared among Lovers, on a ship named for Demeter and bound for Earth.)