[ She has been blessed, many times in her life - she had always done her best to remember that. That she had a father who loved her, and a mother that though she had died when Lakshmi had been so young - a girl who was still then only Manu, sought to remember her always.

And her father - her father had a heart enough to have taken Nyx and his family in, without question. He, in turn, would have urged her to do the same. She did not learn her generosity from a position of privilege. He would have told her what was right.

If only she had been ever able to do what she ought to have: and cut his body down from where the British swung him high. A pause, no more than an inhale and a blank. From another, it would be nothing - but for how deep that wound goes and how much she never looks back - it is too much. She lets out a shaky laugh.

She carries on, as she does best. Like it does not touch her. A bemused flick of her fingers, angleing away anything else. Brutal necessity, that soldier to soldier, was simply the price that was called for sometimes. Offhand dismissive, in order to carve herself out of such things like she does not care for the flesh underneath. ] I am glad you had them. Perhaps between our two sets, a whole family could be made. I do not remember much of my mother, and my brother was born - when I had to depart.

[ Simplest way to put it, when the echo comes, do you not understand, I can never return? ]