[ The question is a sting in a still-open wound, but it's the query of someone who knows what it means to abandon old lives, and it's one that has to be addressed. Vanessa may have faced her blockades head-on, but that was only because trying to sneak away had failed horribly. Lives had been endangered, and in the end the scales were never re-balanced. She'd conquered a mountain only to be felled by a chasm.

Having already experienced a bombardment of differing emotions since being discovered by the Doctor, Vanessa is primed for tears, but perhaps there's none left in her. Even as her voice cracks, her answer sounds hollow to her own ears. ]

Lives. Loves. Whatever small virtue I still carried within. I went to battle knowing that great evil could only be banished in the face of greater good, or...greater evil. [ She shakes her head. ] And I have never been very...good.