By the time Pyrrha reaches the beach, she no longer feels Alecto hurting John. John is— elsewhere. John is back, but John has lost center stage on his fifth return to the company he keeps. His heart beats with Pyrrha's, and she knows how he is well enough to trust it to be well enough alone.

Her smile grows out of her gaunt face, cracking that shaved head, and beaming through red cracks in brown color. It's not the face most people think of her with, not that Alecto has once thought the way most people think. It's with joy and the weight of sadness that defies easy explanation that she brushes back a golden lock.

"Do you recognize me?" Pyrrha asks. She stabs the palm of one hand with the tip of her spear, condensed in its shorter form. This she spins around and jams into the wound before her blood freezes entirely. In moments, the wound closes up and her pale blue green blood solidifies on her weapon. Extending it to full length, something she can only do because of John's help, she breaks off the end, much as Duty did to demonstrate to D, only this end is her blood as well as her bone. Her story in the shape of her body, ten thousand years and ten seconds old between them. This fragment of herself she holds out in offer to Alecto.