[It is not as if Hayame knows how to hold a hand any better. Liem makes his offer and takes her hand and all her effort must be put into not flushing or puttering- stupid, when she had made the offer to him without any change to her naturally stern and cold expression. But the idea of her coming to him to ask for help, of going to any man for help that would involve intimacy, is somehow different.

Still, she takes- or lets him take- her hand. She almost corrects him, tells him that this is not the way Cyrus had done it. The Tribune’s hand had been… warmer, for one, but more importantly he had completely intertwined their hands, lewdly sliding each finger in the spaces between the others, pressed their palms together…

She doesn’t, though. Not yet. Just because she’d offered didn’t mean she was ready. And Liem’s question that seems so irrelevant still demands her attention.]

No.

[The answer is easy. His hands are cooler, his callouses different from hers… but some are the same.]

To be a good warrior, one must also uphold the tenants of honor and loyalty outside of the battlefield.

[The dogma she had been raised on, that she had seized as a life raft to try and escape her circumstances. But she…]

- a good fighter can be any sort of man.

[She only called herself a warrior, these days. Not a good one.]