[ She sets the cup down heavily, her head turning away a second as Lexa talk - the struggle there, to be polite, to be kind - as Lexa talked of something far removed from what knew, from what she suspected Rhys went through. Her own cruelty, the urge to just laugh. Like the vault hunters would, as they picked their kill out from between their teeth.

Because she knows so many things, about Pandora. She knows it's valleys and its mountains. Its lava spewing volcanos and its windswept plains. Its scar of a eridium mine that pissed out purple chemical like children bled after taking a buzzsaw to the stomach. It is beautiful to her, it is a home, so far she home in the form of corrupted, cruel, distorted, and she knows - knows that sweet as Rhys might be to her, that to survive he would have paid the price same as everyone else. It bathed its people in fire and if you were found wanting there would be nothing left of you. Rhys would have gone through that to do half of what he said, to survive Jack no less. It would have broken him like it broke everyone else, over enough time.

She can't dislike him, and she won't accept being told to do so, either. ]

Pandora isn't just a hardship, Lexa, Jack isn't just someone you wished you hadn't talked to once. It's not just something you wake up from and brush off. I'm like this because I was made this way. So is Rhys. He might just be the only person that knows what I went through. He's definitely the only person that knows what Pandora is like and what it does to a person. Because assuming those things about others isn't just a bad habit you pick up, its what everyone does with power, every single chance they get.

[ she shrugs. ] Assuming that they'll hurt you is how you make it down the street.