At the goose's sobbing, trembling, at her breakdown, Azure felt her own inner self shaking. It was as if the foundations that had built her were threatening to collapse, a building in an earthquake; and as if in reaction, she stood all that much sterner, composed, and silent.

If she herself felt as though she were breaking, then she had to act strong so that she didn't.

Her voice again came clear, a response to Rift, as she stared sidelong at where he stood in the foliage. Her tone was a little baleful.

"I wasn't going to ask you to kill her," she said reproachfully. "I was going to ask if you knew how to deal with this. If she gets like this a lot," she added, nodding her beak toward the cage.

But he'd asked her to leave, and there was some form of relief in that. She realized, now, that she'd never get the real closure that she wanted. Words would never make all that had happened magically okay. Nothing would resolve itself into a gentle normalcy, not for them. Yet for a moment, still, she lingered--reluctant to leave family--family of any kind--behind in this state. Caged, frantic.

"Maybe you should let her, though," she added bluntly. "If she wants to die anyway." It seemed a waste--though she didn't say it--to keep her trapped, stressed, suffering, just to parade her around in front of strangers and ask them to decide that she would die anyway.

She watched Blackberry pensively for a long moment, then shook her head and turned to Rift. "Well, you took responsibility for her well-being, so I trust you to fix it," she said, in her most clipped tone. And then she turned to leave.

She made it into the shadows beneath the bushes, and paused there in the murky half-dark beneath the trees. And she thought, for a moment. Thought about the pity she held, the hurt that had wracked her whole life, and the revelation that Blackberry had just revealed to her. She wished she knew who her real mother had been--she wished she'd really known her. And this--all of this-... it was such a mess. And yet still, beyond all her anger, she still felt regret.

Azure took a breath, stifling her fury for a moment to half-turn, looking back at the cage with one eye. To say the last thing she'd likely ever say to Blackberry--unless a trial came; and there was no telling, even then, that they might have a chance to speak.

She waited for a lull in the goose's sobbing, so that she might have a chance to hear, even if she ignored what Azure had to say.

"I'm sorry things happened like they did. I'm sorry it wasn't another way. I'd have very much liked a family." It was genuine, though reluctantly said, half-hissed pain and some show of maturity, this reaching out, this cutting through her own anger.

Then she was gone, a rustle in the bushes, heading back to the new life she was trying to carve out for herself in the caves.

It would be harder, now, but easier in other ways, not to let this old past drag her down. Blackberry had greatly wronged her--but she'd always felt as though she were the broken one. Now, knowing of the murder of her true parent, of the insanity of the goose, she felt something else. The pain was there, yes--it always would be, sharp and throbbing--but there was something new, there, for Azure.

She felt free.