"Medication might be necessary. I would have already implemented it if I didn't think it would cause a great deal of initial stress." Slaine did not eat his meals often, and it was difficult to gauge when he would. He showed no preference in what he ate, and no foreseeable pattern to when he did. As with everything else, Slaine's sporadic eating habits were unpredictable. Slipping medication into his food was thus unlikely to produce results. The alternative was force, something they had thus refrained from using in any real capacity. Force was not his intent, but as it had been in the war, Slaine refused to rise to any other bait. Inaho looked over the documents in front of him, and puffed just a small bit of air out of his nose. "If force is necessary, it would be more beneficial and less intrusive to start implementing regular food consumption first. It might give us an indication of how much resistance we will face, and a regular diet might normalize his moods." Inaho doubted it, but it was a possibility.

"Nao-kun," his older sister groaned. "It's time for bed."

Inaho did not look up from the papers spread out on the table. "I slept on the shuttle. I'm not tired." He hadn't slept much on the shuttle, to many people around, to many of them seemingly fretting over his injuries. He had to stay awake to rebuff their concerns, but it was a reasonable thing to tell his sister. His shoulder also hurt, which was not abnormal, but would make sleep difficult. "I'll be quiet Yuki-nee. Sleep well."

His sister gave an exasperated groan, before ambling over towards him. She placed herself behind him, still standing, so that when she looked down at him, her hair hung around his face. "I'm staying up if you are." She stuck out her tongue at him as he blinked up at her.

"Childishness is unbecoming for grown women."

His sister rolled her eyes before smiling down at him. Then all smiles were gone from her face when she looked over the spread documents. "He was cooperative while you were gone. Relatively. I went in blind, but as you can tell, he did respond."

If it was jealousy that tickled his sides, Inaho mentally reminded himself how his sister's intervention had ended, and the emotion was gone. He then amended that Yuki-nee had done very little without his support and supervision, so that whatever outcome had resulted, was both of their doing. Jealousy wasn't quite what he'd describe the feeling as anyway. "Most men prefer females."

Yuki-nee scoffed, and then laughed. "I don't think prefer is the word. He's scared of girls."

Inaho looked back down at the papers in front of him, not really looking at any one page of data. "Some imposed sense of chivalry seems more likely than fear. Such a concept does not seem so foreign now that I have visited Mars."

Yuki-nee hummed, before moving to the other side of the table, and folding her arms over her chest. "Imposed? Don't you mean self-imposed?"

Inaho blinked, and looked at his sister. "Perhaps at this point." He then turned back to the papers in front of him. "Aggression increased with the addition of female guards, but general responses also increased."

"Chivalry, huh?" Yuki-nee seemed to roll the word around her mouth, letting silence fill the room before she spoke again. "I guess that makes sense." She turned to look at him. "Do you think he didn't want to answer, but that this chivalry made him more responsive?"

Another puff of air escaped Inaho's nose, but it was likely the only indicator of his actual conclusions. "The decision was made to see how Slaine would react. I think with the data gathered, it seems safe to conclude that the added aggression is in direct relation to a conflict of interest between egos."

"So half of him is saying 'don't talk', and the other side is saying 'well you have to talk to women'?" Yuki-nee sighed, before shifting her weight to a different foot. "Nao-kun, he isn't a science experiment. How long are you going to keep doing this? Do you have an end goal?"

Inaho sat back in his chair, his left arm moving down to the cast, only to stop half way and going limp beside him. It itched, but it wasn't something he could help. "I have some understanding of what success will look like."

His sister didn't look like she believed him. With how he'd said it, he wasn't too surprised by that. "Nao-kun, he isn't a pet-"

"I've never-"

"Nao-kun, you were just talking about force feeding him! What are you going to do, feed him with a dropper like a baby bird that fell out of its nest? He's a 19 year old mass murder, he isn't a pet project." Her tone was harsh, but also light. There was softness, behind the edges of her words. Sometimes his sister still baffled him.

The two of them fell into silence. Inaho could feel Yuki-nee's eyes boring into him, imploring him to at least tell her why. He had neglected to do so, but he doubted his sister would find the answer logical. "By your logic, I am also a mass murderer."

His sister seemed unconcerned by the statement. "And so am I. That isn't my point Nao-kun." She moved closer to him, and placed a hand on his shoulder, the one that wasn't in pain. "My point is that you need to try empathizing. That's hard for you. What would you want, if you were in his shoes?"

It was hard. He couldn't simply hypothesize an answer. "I wouldn't make the mistakes he has."

Yuki-nee smiled, and a breath of air that could have been a laugh puffed out of her nose. "We both know that. But try to think about it, okay? I don't know why you want to do this, and I don't like it, but I want you to be happy. This is distressing you. If leaving it in the hands of someone who is more qualified will do that, I think it's a good idea."

He couldn't tell her that it was his responsibility, just like he couldn't tell her that Seylum was just as much a part of him and he was of her. He certainly couldn't tell Yuki-nee that this was Seylum's wish, that she had wanted this done, and entrusted it to him, thus linking he and Slaine Troyard. It was irrational, and he knew it. But it had been Seylum's request, the only expression of faith she could give to him now, and he would not betray that. Just as Seylum was a part of him now, Slaine Troyard also had to become part of him, even if he had no idea how to go about doing that. He didn't know how he came to regard Seylum that way either, he'd found it baffling from the beginning, but after she'd been shot, his bafflement hadn't mattered. It still didn't, because Seylum would always be a part of him, but it didn't help him try and figure out how to go about doing that with Slaine. But he couldn't tell Yuki-nee that, couldn't express that that was his end goal. Because it was illogical, and immaterial. It wasn't something he would just wake up and know, there were too many variables, and Inaho didn't do illogical. But there he was. Yuki-nee was right, there were a host of other people more suited to this task than he was, but he wasn't going give it up for anything.