There's something more than Mei's sweet, flowery perfume in the air. There must be. Something even a MANTIS can't shrug off.
That's the only possible explanation for the heavy anticipation that frames her thoughts, the soft, squirming heat that fills her the longer she holds Kiana close, the devastating fragility of Mei's sunset eyes tracing her jawline, and above it all—
She's a free spirit, a drifter in the wind, the one who loves and the one who has learned how to be lonely. When she tells Tesla that she needs a walk, needs some fresh air, just wants to get out and clear her head and "did you know the shop on 8th Avenue is giving free samples? Ice-cream, Dr. Tesla! Free ice-cream!", what can Tesla do but be swept up in the gentle tide of her joy? Kiana is fierce and Kiana is gentle and Kiana is very very good at fooling even herself, so when Tesla sees a restless teenaged girl who thinks best through motion and loves food in all its forms, she hides her smile and shakes her flashy red gauntlet and demands that Kiana bring some back for her too or else she'll be on clean-up duty for a week.
(The thing is—Kiana will. She will return with Tesla's ice-cream. That's just the sort of girl she is. So, please. Forgive her for her trespasses. She has a heart bigger than the Moon; what else can it do but love?)
And so: Kiana skips off the Hyperion and out into the city, a bouncing streak of white-haired joy who bops her head to a playlist she filched from Theresa, almost causes a traffic accident sprinting across the road to rescue a puppy escaped from its leash, and disappears down a dirty alley with the easy grace of a girl who's lived half her life on the run.
Far away, Bronya, relaxing against the soft cushions of her bed with Seele's head in her lap and chatting about nothing except to hear the sweet sound of her voice, taps a couple of buttons on her phone in the middle of a mythic raid in Homu Fantasy: Kallen of the Resurrection. The last three cameras to see Kiana now see nothing at all, and the next five on the route she should have taken would swear before God that Kiana crossed their way.
You must understand. Before they are Anti-Entropy, before they are Valkyries, before, even, they are themselves: they are each other's. They have been since Nagazora.
It always comes back to Nagazora, doesn't it?
The bulky cast-iron fire door slams shut behind Kiana with an impressive clang, locking out the vibrant tremble of the city. She picks her way up the poorly-lit concrete stairs, breathing in mildew and breathing out hacking coughs. For a girl who once spent a month camping out in a sewer, she's still not very good with grime and dust. Thank goodness for Mei, whose nigh-ontologic cleanliness made mothballs cower at the sound of her footsteps.
Kiana crosses the fifth flight, the tenth flight, the twentieth flight, the fiftieth flight of stairs without even the shadow of sweat slipping down her neck or pooling beneath her arms. She climbs, in fact, to the 127[super]th[/super] floor before she stops, a complicated expression crossing her thin mouth and hollow cheeks as she brushes not-quite-imaginary stains off the lovely white button-down she's wearing. It's a little fancier than one might expect a sporty girl out to buy some ice-cream to wear, its sleeves just tight enough to flatter the firm curve of her biceps. Breathing out, Kiana runs a hand over her face.
When she looks up, it's with a smile like spilled sunshine.
She bounces through the nondescript fire exit and out onto the luscious purple carpets of a high-class hotel. A large man pushing a trolley wafting with the smell of freshly-grilled salmon and wine double-takes at the sight of her, but when he looks closer and sees the Kaslana in her—the midwinter snap of her hair, the gemstone sky of her eyes—he's halfway through a strange sort of salute before he realises and turns it into an awkward cough.
"Can I help you, Ms… I mean, miss?" he asks, visibly hesitating at the idea of naming her before seeming to decide it is best, perhaps, to avoid the idea of names at all.
"Oh, no, no, I'm fine!" Kiana says with hurried awkwardness, flapping her arms as if to shoo him away. More gently, she continues, "I know where I'm going."
"Very good then!" he replies, smoothing down the lapels of his dark suit with sweat-stained palms. "Goodbye!"
The man has almost sprinted to the other end of the marble-and-gilt hallway, his trolley rattling in front of him, when Kiana speaks again.
"Hey, don't worry. You're safe. I promise we won't destroy anything. Aunt Teri would yell at me if that happened! It's real scary. Nothing that short should be able to scream that loud!" She's grinning, rocking back on her heels, the very picture of harmlessness—the very picture of a girl who learned to be harmless the same way Bronya learned to field-strip a rifle in fifteen seconds beneath a Russian snowstorm.
Kiana even offers a thumbs-up and a wink to seal the deal, and it must settle the man somewhat, because he brushes one of his three remaining strands of hair out of his eyes and, chuckling awkwardly, says, "I dropped off some hot chocolate to her room a few minutes ago. Might still be hot if you're quick."
Kiana flashes him another grin, flicking a hand against her forelock before dashing off down the hall. "Aye aye, cap'n!"
As soon as she rounds the corner, she slows into a walk, glancing at the ornate paintings dotting the faux-marble walls and the hypnotising patterns playing across them from the, well, 'avant-garde' lighting system.
"We won't destroy anything," she repeats. Softer. Quieter. Like a secret. "Except each other, maybe."
There's a door at the end of the next hall. As expected of a swanky hotel, it's just as gorgeous as the ten other identical doors that dot down the walls—tasteful black wood, a glittering golden door knob, a sophisticated-looking intercom system and a tiny spec that's probably the viewing port so you can see if you're being visited by an escort or the cops. The number—413, which makes Kiana chuckle and mutter something about "birthday presents"—would be nothing special to anyone else.
Kiana knocks on the door, shave and a hair-cut, and waits for a response.
Only a few seconds later, it opens inwards.
Dark hair, dark smile, a darker dress.
Raiden Mei stands framed in the cool yellow lights of the room within.
Kiana allows herself a moment to forget: forget being Anti-Entropy, forget the thunder over Nagazora, forget that she had any other purpose in the world than to drag her gaze across the sharp lines of Mei's jaw, the stark beauty of her collarbones, the swell and sway of her body and the endless, sunset lightning of her eyes.
Mei drops the hand she'd half-raised toward Kiana's cheek, balling it into a fist by her side, and the moment is lost.
"Mei," Kiana says, almost unwillingly, like she wants to trap the syllable beneath her tongue, in the cage of her lungs, where no-one else may have it but her. "I missed you."
Mei flinches. It's well-hidden, buried like a body, some unwilling ghost of the girl Raiden Mei can no longer afford to be. But it's there. Kiana saw it. Mei knows she saw it. And that—well, maybe Kiana will have to break her promise about not destroying anything at all.
"Don't, Kiana," Mei says, shaking her head and turning away, back toward the room. The luxurious curtains of her hair whisper against the sleek fabric of her gorgeous black dress. "Come in. There's—I ordered hot chocolate. For you."
"I know," Kiana says, and it means I love you. "I got a hot tip on the way in!"
"Only you, Kiana. Only you."
Kiana follows her gir—follows Mei inside.
The door closes softly behind them.
Fu Hua is second.
Unlike Kiana, she needs no excuse to leave. She is older than history, older than bones, and far more importantly she is sensible. She is no erratic teenager with a penchant for passion and rebellion—if you asked her, she'd tell you that Fu Hua has never been better at anything than the rules. So when she leaves the Hyperion, it is with quiet nods to Theresa and Welt as the strategy meeting draws to a close and a quiet stroll through metal halls and past friendly, jumpsuit-clad technicians and down the thick steel ramp that leads to the concrete floor of the dock.
You would never think, to see her in her high-waisted shorts and looping belts and gauzy, diaphanous blouse, that you were admiring the greatest hero this world has ever known. You would never look into those delicate, cornflower eyes and realise fifty thousand years of furious vigil are looking back. But that is Fu Hua: she is small, and she is quiet, and she shames even Atlas, whose shoulders carry the weight of only a single sky.
She steps out of the way of a rush of giggling teenagers and taps one on the arm to point to the wallet they dropped twenty yards back. They shout a quick "Thank you!" and she smiles, nodding to them before falling back into the crowd. This is how Fu Hua slips through the madness of a city on the verge of waking: she slides between slick suits and slicker hairlines, offers half her coins and a blessing only she and the Shenzou National Museum of Early Antiquity remember the words of to a lonely beggar, and by some marvellously improbable series of coincidences completely avoids showing her face on any of the surveillance networks along her route through its well-paved streets.
(Even the dregs of Fenghuang Down would have been enough for this. But Fu Hua remembers, now, the fun of darting through London streets with Holmes at her side as they evaded Moriarty's thugs with nothing but a broken umbrella and a few well-placed circus posters. She remembers. How can she not try to reach out and hold that feeling in her hands again?)
Had Fu Hua been planning an infiltration, she might have stopped by the dry-cleaners three blocks away, given them the name 'Anka Ross', received a selection of cocktail dresses of various fits, and left a note behind apologising to Rita for stealing some of her work clothes now that they no longer operate together. She might have changed in a small alleyway, arranged her long, grey hair into architecturally unlikely loops that framed the smooth column of her neck, and sashayed her way through the hotel lobby like somebody was paying her to be there. But for this—there is no need.
She's invited.
The thought hollows out her stomach with something it takes her minutes to realise is fear. Not the sky-curdling kind of fear, not the worn, well-practiced, "Lixue can only accompany you for so long" kind of fear—the palm-trembling, glances-across-the-tabletop kind of fear. The one she'd thought Kiana had chased away with her lips, that day in her room when Fu Hua had asked her why Kiana had refused to let her remain alone and Kiana had said,
matter-of-factly,
as if it was the simplest thing in the world,
"Because I love you."
And yet: the fear remains. Fu Hua doesn't know what she's walking into. She's not, entirely, even sure why she's walking into it.
But she's still here, crossing the pristine tiles of the hotel lobby floor, the constellation of chandeliers warming the dull gold of her nian-beast belt-buckle to something closer to sunlight, a stark contrast to the cool, wintry freshness of the air-conditioner. The patrons who watch her go do not take much notice, simple as she seems next to their expensive finery; the guests of Jormungandr have more important things to eat alive than a(n admittedly pretty) Shenzou girl, so she makes it to the sleek, obsidian-panelled elevator entirely unmolested.
(The smarter ones—the ones who would have noticed the way their receptionists' and servers' and sommeliers' eyes followed her with religious ecstasy—are all out for the day. Something in the air mysteriously disagreed with them, it seemed, or they had pressing engagements anywhere else but in a building now home to their god's long-lost sister and two anthropomorphic apocalypses.)
The elevator hisses open and Fu Hua steps out onto soft, pressed-violet carpet that reminds her of the stately ceremony of an Emperor seven centuries dead. She takes a moment to admire the stained glass mosaic that stretches across the ceiling—of all things, it holds the image of a single sakura tree in the middle of a quaint Japanese temple—and a moment more to press her palms together and whisper an oath only thirteen souls have ever sworn. Then she straightens and picks her way through the wide, faux-marble halls until she reaches a black-and-gilt door identical to all the rest.
Number 413. It's slightly ajar, and—ah. Sparks crackle over the doorknob, drawn to the expensive metal; the inexplicable breeze that slowly widens the gap to reveal the room within is a hot gasp of summer. She should have expected this.
Fu Hua pushes the door the rest of the way open and steps into the looming quiet. Mei—Raiden Mei, tall, dark, and handsome in a way Fu Hua tried to avoid appreciating—stands defiant just in front of the frankly enormous bed, glaring at Kiana, who has turned entirely away and thrown her hands up in the air to reveal the way the Edge of Taixuan has sharpened her shoulders to something truly lethal. The hush that hangs over the room lingers like a wound, but Fu Hua could not tell you who had bled from it.
"Hello, Kiana," she says. "Hello, Mei."
Kiana, to whom awkwardness is a thing that happens to other people, lights up with a smile that tilts Fu Hua's lips, entirely of their own accord, into a matching curve. She practically launches herself across the room, a white-haired arrow from Cupid herself, and throws her arms around Fu Hua in a embrace as warm as the kisses she presses to the corners of her mouth. "Fu Hua! You came!"
Fu Hua settles into Kiana's body, hip against hip, waist against waist—a closeness unfamiliar but not unwelcome, at least until she remembers that Kiana's just covered her face in kisses right in front of Mei. She flicks her eyes to Mei's almost guiltily, half-pushing Kiana away, half-unwilling to let her go ever again.
(Kiana grins against Fu Hua's cheek. For the foremost martial artist on the planet, she is incredibly weak to physical affection. Kiana takes shameless advantage of it whenever she can, because she knows what it takes to become like that. Because she saw, with excruciating clarity, exactly what it took Fu Hua to become like that.
And because she likes touching her.
She really, really likes touching her.)
Mei is looking right at her.
Fu Hua's heart stutters in her throat.
Mei is looking at her and it's not with jealousy or rage or regret or even irritation.
No.
Mei is looking at her—
—the same way she's looking at Kiana.
Like she's something irrepressibly precious. Like the sky hangs on her smile and the fate of the earth sits in the corners of her eyes. Like there is nothing else, in that moment, but her.
Fu Hua sucks in a breath and drops her gaze to the carpet, her cheeks hot.
"Hello, Hua," Mei says. There should probably be a law against girls like Mei saying other girls' names like that—the syllables fall from her lips like a kiss, settling deep in the hollows of Fu Hua's stomach. "It's good to see you again."
"Y-You too," Fu Hua says, her tongue strangely thick, her heartbeat hammering like a zhangu. There's something more than Mei's sweet, flowery perfume in the air. There must be. Something even a MANTIS can't shrug off.
That's the only possible explanation for the heavy anticipation that frames her thoughts, the soft, squirming heat that fills her the longer she holds Kiana close, the devastating fragility of Mei's sunset eyes tracing her jawline, and above it all—
Above it all—
The horrible, horrible feeling—
—that nothing is going to go wrong.
Mei is third.
She does not need to leave at all, except perhaps to boot a laughing Raven—Natasha—out of the hotel room with a threat to toss her to Kalpas and have Klein throw away the key if she shows her face anywhere in the building for the next twenty-four hours. Naturally, Natasha acquiesces—if only after telling Mei to be safe and use protection, "there are still dangers if you're all girls!"
It gets her hurled bodily out the door with red lightning crackling from her jacket, but the shit-eating grin on her lips as she rolls to her feet suggests she thinks it's worth it. Inside, Mei sighs, collapsing onto the shimmering silk sheets as the door clicks shut and running a hand down her face. It's a posture unbecoming of Raiden Mei and far too human for the Herrscher of Thunder, but this, she supposes, is the problem—Kiana (always and always Kiana) has never failed to bring out the girl beneath them all, the scared, hungry thing just called Mei. And now (she hopes, she hopes, oh please she hopes) Hua is coming too; sweet, beautiful Hua, whose youth Mei has plundered without her consent and whose eternity Mei now fights against with a soul cast in thunder.
She cannot wait to see them.
She wants nothing more than to never see them again.
Mei pushes herself off the bed and stalks toward the shower. She's committed now. Two short texts sent in the witching hours, when humans are most easily mad and monsters are most easily made. A hotel and its slavish staff commandeered with only a raised eyebrow from Kevin and six hours of excited babbling from Elysia. A dress—almost as expensive as the ones she used to wear when Raiden was a name and not a curse—stretched over the back of a mahogany-and-velvet chaise lounge.
All the things that money can buy, spent in pursuit of the only thing it can't.
Once she's in the shower, caged between frosted-glass walls, the water falls softly on her skin. It warms her from the inside out, soothes the rumble of her stormsong breath, and washes away the grime of a last-minute rampage against Jackal's favourite mechs in Training Room Six.
She inhales;
exhales;
inhales;
exhales.
In for three, out for six: the rhythm of the sword, when your feet have bruised themselves against the scuffed wood of the dojo and your pride has bruised itself against a bokken that parried everywhere you were and struck everywhere you were not. It settles her, just as it always has. There's probably a poetry to it—Raiden Mei, this pale, empty thing of wrath and tears, soothed by a memory of the time her blade was too small to matter. But she's spent enough time on self-recrimination. There'll be moments enough for that later, when Kiana storms out of the room and leaves her alone with only Hua's disappointed stare for company. For now, there is only anticipation.
She steps from the shower, careful to keep the lightning bottled in her veins after an unfortunately frizzy accident in the early days of her ascension. It takes an inordinate amount of time to dry her hair, given how it falls in long, dark tresses past her knees, but eventually she manages it with the aid of a gleaming chrome hair-dryer, two gigantic white fluffy towels (one to dry, one to wrap), and her old battered hairbrush, now resting valiantly on the cool marble of the bathroom counter. Her skin requires far less attention, comparatively, and it's not too long before she's stepping into and pulling up her luxurious dress, savouring, for a moment, how lightly the satin sits on the swell of her hips.
In front of the ensuite's mirror, Mei turns slowly, watching the way the dark, shimmering fabric—like someone has cut the night from the sky and spilled it over her body—frames her collarbones, falls over her hips, and splits suggestively down the sides of her legs. It is shameful, but it is true: Raiden Mei, with smoke painted under her eyes and blood stained on her lips, is a beautiful thing. Most of the time, Mei has little use for it, but others—others she remembers the way Kiana's pupils would blow wide beneath her, how Hua-the-shadow would glance shyly at the fine bones of her fingers the same way she swore she caught Hua-the-student doing once upon a time.
(Life has taught Mei many, many things about desire.)
She smiles, studying the way it curves her mouth, and carefully sweeps a touch of gloss along her bottom lip where it wasn't quite perfect. It's a habit she learned from her father, back when she could remember where the cut he'd gotten cleaning up a glass she'd broken at seven years old actually was: if you're sure you're making a mistake, then make it well. The world respects many things, honey, he'd said, but it loves a performance most of all. Do a man a favour, and he will like you—give him a show, and he will remember you.
No: if Mei is going to invite the woman she loves enough to cut her from the sky for an illicit rendezvous alongside the woman of whom the meanest ghost is enough to soften her to smiling, then if nothing else she will make her intentions clear.
(She's lying, of course. Mei doesn't even know which fit of hungry desperation led her to all this, let alone what she intends by it. But, perhaps, that is the point—perhaps this is not a decision but a question, a flower curling towards the light and wondering if it will ever be allowed to bloom again.
Raiden Mei has made her choice.
But it is the right of all human life to hypocrisy.)
Time passes quickly after that. It seems like only minutes later that the hot star of Kiana's soul presses against her mind hundreds of metres below; only seconds until they are shouting at each other for the crime of loving too much; a single breath until Hua disarms them both with the simple sound of her voice.
Mei looks at Kiana, grinning smugly at how easily Hua has fallen into her arms; at Hua, whose shy blush at Mei's shameless attention curls her fingers to wanting; at herself, so much further away than the six feet that separate their bodies.
She looks—
—and she looks—
—and something in her cracks the way it did when she saw the scars on Kiana's back and the pills that lined her side of the bathroom counter and Hua forgot her for the fourth and fifth and sixth time.
It takes her two quick steps to reach Kiana and drag her close with a hand pressed into the firm heat of her stomach; three agonising seconds to bury Hua in a kiss as sudden as a storm; four hammered heartbeats until Hua kisses her back with delicious pliancy.
"M-Mei?" Hua stutters against her lips, sunrises on her cheeks, her skin incomprehensibly silken for such a stunning warrior when Mei slips the fingers of her other hand into one of the gaps in her loose chocolate blouse. Mei breathes in the smell of her: incense and an earthy sweetness that does unspeakable things to the warmth building beneath her bones. Somewhere beside her, Mei feels more than sees Kiana chuckle lowly and reach to do something with Hua's arm, but in this moment the whole of her attention is on how badly she wants to bite Hua's lower lip and watch her knees tremble. "What are you doing?"
"I was kissing you," Mei says, smoothing circles across Hua's waist beneath her shirt. "Do you want me to stop?"
"I—" Hua visibly collects herself, blinking twice to clear her eyes and gently fending off Kiana's questing hands. She looks at Mei again, and something about her deepens.
Maybe it's the solemn oceans of her eyes; maybe it's the way she holds herself like she is the needle about which the earth moves; maybe it's the impossible softness with which she laces their fingers together.
Maybe it's the way that not even Mei will ever truly know the violence it took Hua to become this gentle.
Whatever it is, Mei is transfixed.
But it is not Hua next who speaks.
"This won't solve anything, Mei," Kiana says, the same way the principal called her into her office and said your father's been arrested. Mei shifts her head to look at her—Kiana, who clearly tried to dress up for the evening but would have been laughed out of high society because of the mess she's made of her high ponytail—and is struck, suddenly, with the truth.
Kiana has outgrown her.
It used to be Mei to whom she would turn—Mei who had to manage Kiana and Bronya like squabbling sisters, Mei who had to remind Kiana to eat and do her homework, Mei in whose lap she cried on the Hyperion in those brief, terrible days of their Nagazora reunion, before the serpent and the storm.
But now Mei is the one who is reaching out.
"Come back to me," Kiana continues. "Come back to us."
It is so, so very Kiana, Mei thinks, that even when her eyes say she already knows the answer, her voice is thick with hope.
"I can't," she says, and does not cry. "There are things I need to do. Things that only I can do."
"No," Hua says now, squeezing Mei's hand. Her fingers are smaller, slightly, and fit perfectly between Mei's own. "If there is one thing I have learned at Kiana's side, Mei, it is that there should be nothing in the world that only one person can do. Loneliness looks strong only because there is nobody close enough to hear you scream."
"I know." Mei's voice does not tremble, the same way her hand did not tremble around her sword, in the moment before she cut Kiana from the sky. "Perhaps I might have said there are things that only I should do. It doesn't really matter."
(It is, of course, the only thing that matters.)
"Then why are you here?" Kiana asks. She's almost cheek-to-cheek with Mei now, breath warm against the shell of her ear. "Why are we here?"
Mei closes her eyes. The lights of the room—the glittering chandelier, the holographic torches recessed in the walls—seem, all at once, far too bright. "Because Hua was right. I didn't leave you for strength. I left you because that way it was easier to be weak."
What she does not say is this: if strength is the ability to watch Kiana die and to smile each time Hua forgets her face, Mei wants no part in it.
Rather than wait for a reply, Mei takes a hold of Kiana's jaw and tilts it just enough that she can kiss her way from her chin to her lips. The sound Kiana makes in her throat is something Mei can feel in her stomach. Kiana's eyelids flutter shut and her fingers fist in the fabric of Mei's dress, pulling it so taut that she thinks—based on Hua's soft, stunned oh—Hua might have realised what the fit of the dress prevented her from wearing.
"Ar—Are you," Kiana gasps out between kisses, lipstick blooms now staining her neck as well, like Mei has pressed roses into her skin, "sure about this, Mei?"
"No," says Mei, reaching blindly up to drag Hua closer, the lightning howling through her veins at the heat of Kiana's flesh now spilling out to split Hua's shirt open and let Mei finally, finally touch her.
"What I am sure about is that if you don't help me," Mei stumbles the three of them across the carpet and toward the bed, shoving Hua down by her slender shoulders onto the white sheets and savouring the way her bright eyes widen, like she hadn't realised she was allowed to be treated like this, "make Hua scream, I'm going to tie you to a chair and make you watch me do it alone."
She hears Kiana swallow and laughs, low and dark in her throat.
Even if everything else in the world is wrong, some things—
—some things, at least, remain the same.
This is how it ends:
Imagine Kiana, pressed against the glass windows that lead onto the decadent room's decadent balcony. Her shirt is, of course, long lost. Her pants are just ruined; perhaps ripped off so quickly the buttons flew everywhere, perhaps carefully, keenly cut apart by fingers that hooked into waistbands like claws. Her breath fogs the glass every time she gasps—and oh, how she gasps, with Mei behind her, pressed against her, pressed inside her, hot teeth against the bareness of her shoulders, the fragility of her neck.
Fu Hua is not so easily seen, until you notice the way Mei's cheeks are flushed, until you hear how the filthy, lovesick drama she whispers into Kiana's ears (as she tilts Kiana's head back, fingers spread possessively across her throat) often comes out more moaned than said. Then you realise Mei's dress is draped over her, hiding her, claiming her from the world, allowing her the privacy of her frantic devotion: the jaw-aching, fingernails-into-flesh way of praying.
One of Fu Hua's legs has slipped out to press her toes against Kiana's ankle, skin to skin, trying to anchor herself to a moment that will not survive the sun.
That is the way of things. The body is always desperate for what the heart cannot hold.
So Kiana closes her eyes and imagines; Mei's litany breaks and stutters like her breath; Fu Hua swallows loss beneath her tongue.
They bury the morning in each other's bodies. In this moment they love like they can bruise it into bone. It will not be enough. They know it will not be enough.
But they—they have to try.
first and most importantly, i know raiden ryoma didn't actually get arrested
secondly and least importantly, yes, i probably threw out a bunch of mei and kiana's characterisation with respect to their relationship from the buildup to chapter 25, but while 99% of that buildup absolutely fucking slapped and i simped to SS2 flamescion because of it, the fact mihoyo are just totally walking back my girl mei's bullshit instead of letting us stew in the drama got me on my own bullshit so here we are
