Velocity's smile turned relieved and almost bashful for just a moment at Nickel's praise, before she cycled her optics when Nickel continued to speak. Her mouth dropped open into a silent "O" as she realized that Nickel was correct and that they had the wrong communicators. She took hers and started to hold out Nickel's in exchange with her other hand, when she actually processed the rest of what Nickel had said.

Her mouth snapped shut.

Dread flushed through her fuel lines like frozen acid rain before she'd even opened the most recent messages with her thumb, and it built and built and built as she scrolled through them. She didn't look up at Nickel again, not at first. She could feel her shoulders creeping up towards Nickel's audials and she forced them down again. She shouldn't react that way, anyway. What right did she have, when it was her own fault?

She shoved the comm unit into her subspace harder than was strictly necessary and threw up a smile that dug into her cheeks. "No! No, um, it's a friend? A friend that's just playing pretend to tease me and get a reaction. They don't mean it. It's fine. Everything is super, really and absolutely fine," she said, too quickly and too loudly.

She went silent for a pause that was barely the length of a human's long inhale, then asked, "...You didn't read the whole thing, did you?" Her hand that was still holding out Nickel's comm was starting to shake just a bit.