[It had been simple enough to process at the time. She'd overstepped her bounds and gotten too comfortable with what she was doing. Red pikmin were confident, but she'd never been a very good red pikmin, had she?. So she'd made a mistake and gotten punished for it. That was all. If she did't want it to happen again, then she just needed to stay out of the way. If she was quiet and kept mostly to herself, no one would have to be bothered again.

Everything only made sense if she deserved it, and she had needed it to make sense. She hadn't known any other way to parse it. Every time someone had left, she had gotten too close. Every other time she'd gotten hurt, it was because she was too loud again, so in her mind it had all tracked, even if those hadn't been the same.

Confronting the idea that they didn't deserve her was utterly baffling. To the point that she didn't know what to do, watching Noctis with wide eyes. Then the confusion began to bleed through, that careful mask of hers falling away bit by bit to reveal just how anxious and alone she was beneath it.]

But it's...

[True, she had been about to say, but she couldn't get the word out with him looking at her so intensely like that. Instead her mouth worked nervously, trying to muster up something else entirely in hesitant tones.]

... Do you really think so?

[She might have needed that a few more times.]