If they had met at Brunnhold, Aurelie realized with a start, they might very well have been here when she was. She wasn't sure how old they were, but Uzoji at least had looked to her no older than her sister. Aurelie was no great reader of age, but as long as they were any younger--and she would have been here, at least, for part of it. Many, many people were, it was just such a strange thought. Brunnhold was no small University, a city unto itself, and yet still. Strange.
She did not care for it. No, Aurelie didn't think as she would have. Bastia, she knew, was not so different from Anaxas. And if she'd gone to school here--well. It would have been different, Aurelie thought diplomatically. But they were friends now. Friends even though she didn't understand. Aurelie chewed this new piece of knowledge over, hopeful and afraid.
Would it be selfish if she still refused to go with her sister, but wanted to be her friend again all the same? Wanted Ana to trust her, like she thought friends ought to? There was little likelihood that Ana really, truly trusted her. Not in the way she wanted, no-- the way she needed her sister to trust her. The kind of trust that came with respect. Ana loved her, Aurelie thought, but didn't respect her. Not even her fears.
"That's--that's good. That you--that it worked out, in the end," she offered haltingly. She looked down at her hands, tying themselves into knots in her lap, then back at Aremu's face. She couldn't--she couldn't say all of it. She hadn't said, yet, to anyone, what her sister had... No, she wouldn't tell anyone. Some people because it would hurt them to know that Ana had asked. Others because she was afraid of what they'd think of her when she admitted that she'd turned her down. Aremu, she thought, was easy to trust, and it made it tempting. Not just because he'd proven to be both honest and kind in these brief conversations, but because he would then leave. That seemed unfair to her, to say something only because she knew there would be no consequence to it.
"I'm--I'm just... We were very close, my sister and I. When I was--before. And she came back to--to tell me... Well. Similar... similar news, really. Er. And ask me--ask me to do something I can't. That's all. I don't know if she... if she would..." Aurelie shook her head, ashamed to have said so much. This was horrid, she just kept talking about herself. Her interests, her worries, her problems.
"Er, but that's. Neither here nor there, I... D-do you have, er, siblings? Ah, I mean. Uhm." The question wasn't something she would normally ask, really. The subject of families among the gated population at Brunnhold was complicated at best. Even Aurelie, who loved her family very much, hesitated to talk about them. She had forgotten to consider, for a moment, that this might not be one of the ways in which their two cultures differed. By the time she had, it was too late and the question had left her mouth.