[People keep saying that. "They're using us." "We're being used." But Hayame has always been property, a tool, and the only fate such a thing could expect was use. ... She doesn't understand, in a way, why they always sound so angry, bitter, or surprised.

What she also doesn't understand... is not having to justify her own survival. It was another thing she had simply... always had to do. The moment she was not useful, the moment she became a liability... it had always been a fact of her life that it would end. Either she would be put down, a mercy, or she would have the arms flensed from her shoulders and whatever fate came after would be one she knew would be worse than death. She had fought every day to prove that she deserved to live.

That she deserved to be used.

Her gaze, haunted by the Discord built up in her shard, drops to her hand. The sandwich is gone. He says she doesn't have to justify her survival. If she said it aloud-]

Someone told me once...

[Not "someone"-- a good man, the best man she had ever known]

That I should want to live in a world where I could feel happy to be alive.

[To have survived. Half-drowned, saved an inch from a death she had deliberately threw herself towards in the hope of taking an enemy with her, and he had told her that. That her life was... precious.

And now, she's desperate enough to turn her head back up, her remaining eye and the empty socket where one had used to be turned up towards a cripple on horseback to ask,]

... Are you happy?