Rule by KaiYves

14022: "I'm only going to say this once, children. No harassing Te Aihe because she's gone to the Swiss!"~ America
14022a: "REDACTED!"~ Nina
14022b: "Nina, we've been over this. You know better."~ Suffering dadboat

((Taking things in a different direction than you probably intended, but…))

"I… I just… it's hard. To see you both like that, it just… it just reminds me…" Nina bit her tongue, blinking away tears. Her outburst had been emotional, uncontrolled. She hadn't thought she'd react like that on seeing the video feed of Dean and Aihe— or whatever alias she might be using— in their new uniforms with the red flaming Alinghi spiral.

Something else surged up inside of Nina— shame. She didn't do that anymore. She hadn't done that in years, no, more than a decade now, really. She liked to think she'd grown up in the past twenty years, that in Auckland she'd just been childish but she'd never act like that now. (She hadn't physically aged very much, of course, her hull was in too good a condition for that.)

Guiltily, Nina Murray— NZL 82 "New Zealand"— looked away from the screen, her sky-blue eyes frantically sweeping around her office. Binders, bookshelves, ledgers, the calendar on the wall… This was the life she had made for herself here in Mexico, working as a charter boat in the Gulf of California. Not the life she'd dreamed of as a young yachtgirl, no, but a satisfying one here in Cabo.

Cabo had been an opportunity to start over, the obscurity comforting. Here, so far from Auckland, nobody had called her a loser or a failure. How many of her guests even knew what the America's Cup was at all? If she stowed her rigging, all anybody knew was that she was Nina Murray, a Kiwi expat helping give sailing tours.

Nina still stayed in touch with big sis Bree, of course. She still cheered for her younger siblings when they raced wherever in the world they happened to be, and still told people she had been part of Team New Zealand with pride. She traveled home to Auckland to see her family on holidays— but less frequently since the start of the war.

She was a businesswoman now, a manager in the charter company that had purchased her hull 15 years ago. She wrote tourism industry reports and she had 400 connections on LinkedIn, darn it!

And here she was, acting up at the sight of a sports team logo like she was two years old again!

Nina had told herself that she held no grudge against Team Alinghi anymore, that that part of her life was over and didn't matter. She cringed when she thought of how she had once fantasized about setting a wild kea on Alexia Bianchi and punching the smug grin off Russell Coutts' face. She had been infected by the same blind nationalism that had led people to make death threats against Coutts and Butterworth, deface their property, and harass their families.

The same toxic anger and resentment that had gotten Coutts kidnapped by Abyssals, and almost turned Abyssal himself. The Abyssals were what a real enemy looked like, and the Alinghi sisters had done their part to defeat the yacht-Abyssals just the same as anyone else.

Was she turning Abyssal? Nina frantically looked at her hands, only to see them as tanned and calloused as usual.

"Nina?" She heard a soft, familiar voice from her laptop and looked back at the video call.

Dean Barker was no longer the fresh-faced twenty-nine-year-old prodigy who had struggled with his words to her in that hangar on the Auckland waterfront. The man who stared back at her was pushing fifty, his face well-lined and weathered by sun and salt. In the two decades since, Dean had become a father to four human children and a metaphorical one to more than a dozen shipfolk, a veteran of four more Cup campaigns, and a cancer survivor. For the moment, he looked to be retired from top-level competition, content to coach for Team Alinghi and race locally in New Zealand with his human daughter Mina.

It… well, it hurt Nina. Thinking that Dean was so much older and yet hadn't won the Cup ever again, even after getting so bloody close so many times. Knowing that he'd had to leave Team New Zealand and become a nomadic hired gun, moving to Japan and then America and now Switzerland (well, Spain, really, Alinghi weren't practicing at home). Seeing him wear the same red spiral that had been around the eye of the woman who had defeated her, seeing a sister she'd never met face-to-face with the same spiral painted around her eye.

"Nina, what happened?" Dean looked concerned now, aware that this behavior was unusual. So did Te Aihe, although the younger sailgirl knew the IACC only from such video calls. "This isn't like you."

"I know!" Nina blurted out, the words burbling at their edges with tears and the congestion they bring. "I'm sorry, Deano. I'm sorry. But I just saw the uniform and something— something— ugh!" She grunted, unable to finish the sentence.

"I knew it might be hard for you. It still feels weird for me." Dean said, shaking his head. He still looked like a hawk with his spiked bangs and beak nose, a more grizzled sort of raptor now. "We all take that sort of rhetoric into our minds a bit, the mindset of war, that Alinghi were the great enemy. But Brad has always been my friend, you know that. He and Ernesto aren't bad people, and someone needs to coach these young folks. Brad wanted me and Aihe to do it."

"Yeah." Nina said, nodding as she bit her upper lip. "But if you had the choice— do you wish you were— do you ever wish we'd won so it wasn't like this?" She asked, almost in a whisper.

Dean's face creased in a small, sad smile. "Well, Nina… of course I would have liked to win in 2003. But I don't dwell on that anymore." His voice rose, as he looked her in the eyes, sky-blue meeting sky-blue "And I don't blame you for it."

Nina smiled weakly. "You're still proud of me."

"Of course."