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Sometimes things fall off during battle and don't change back-the detritus of other lives. The brooch is one of them.
It's a simple cameo brooch with a face that when Outis picks it up feels like a bullet straight into her heart.
She can feel the letters engraved on the back. P. Earnshaw. She feels a sharp sudden anger that this other Penelope married someone else, left the other Outis to pine as her servant. Then again, the Outis of that world would have stayed closer to her than Outis had. She'd never had the war.
Everything about this hit home too hard. The storms, yes, but more than that, the homecoming. Outis would likely have a warmer reception(would she, though? She remembered the idiot doctor at K Corp and how much she had hated what she had in common with him, a moment of honesty-would they remember her?), but-
In any other situation, she would have excoriated Heathcliff for this, for more ridiculous impulsive acts and nearly starting a fight with an Association and performing poorly in battle. But now, what if... Penelope was her age. The City was the City. Heathcliff had found his love dead after three or four years. She had been gone for twelve. If Penelope was dead, she might not even have the chance to see her funeral.
It was for the best. Odysseus did not have control of her life. Outis, even after discarding her identity, had only a little more. Even leaving Penelope the first time had been for her protection, in a way, and if she had gone back to her like that, a pawn of the Wings, giving them more ways to control her-putting the two of them in the path of danger...
"Outis? Are you well?"
Yi Sang. Not the worst to find her-not a challenge to her authority, open about what he was. She disliked how much he'd been meddling with the rest of them lately, but it was certainly more use than he'd been at first. The brooch faded away to nothing in her hand.
"Perfectly fine."
"Was there an issue with the Identity?"
The others didn't have that much of a head on them, but Outis was already striding down the impossible, twisting corridor to catch up. "We can discuss technical issues when we aren't on hostile ground, Yi Sang. Keep up." She put Penelope out of her mind. She had been doing so for a long time.