Takashi - who frankly is also Riventon right now, with the wild purple tinges in his hair and the tallness - is out responding to some interesting readings from the network he'd set up around the city so long ago. Ever since Hannah had broken the ice and gotten him out, he'd had an easier time leaving for things like food, sleep, and Projects.
Not being a Puella meant that the search for Labrynths was more an inexact investigation of energy anomalies than a game of Hot and Cold. And that's why he's in the south of Uminari City near Verone. But what he's found isn't a Labrynth. All the same, it's not something he can ignore.
In the sunset-shaded darkness of an off-street where most mundanes have avoided, there's two figures. A massive, hulking, gorilla-like youma looming large and terrifying over a small shivering hump in the road. That hump, though, is not so much a hump as it is a woman, and she's crouched over her small child, protecting him from the youma.
There's a few things that'll rouse Takashi to action, and one of those things is 'pretty much anything that follows the idea of motherly love'. It's not even a moment of thought or hesitation before he's leaping into the air, drawing a surge of energy in a flat line out of his device that becomes a long, crackling with red lightning blade - and plunging it through the fearsome looking but jobber-tier youma to eliminate it. By the time Takashi's finished the motion, turned on his heel, and the energy blade has dissapated, the woman's passed out - she apparently only held up through the Youma's passive dark energy out of fear for her child.
"Tch. I'm really not supposta' be doing this sorta thing now, lady." he says to her unconscious form, but he picks her up and leans her against the tree, putting the small child in her arms.
Takashi isn't the only one who's been searching for Labrynths. He's just the one who's more systematic about it. He's outsourced it to his network. Kunzite only has his own powers to work with -- the quiet distortion of energies leaking into and sometimes out of those warped little pocket worlds. He hasn't seen any signs of them for weeks. After talking with Kyouko and Homura and Madoka, he's no longer surprised. But the faint trickle he does pick up is worth investigating --
-- and he's late.
Takashi's crouched over; the dim light and the position make the tallness and the tinge to his hair less visible, make him more recognizable as Takashi than as the other. Familiar. The rush of darkness from the blade Takashi's wielding is all too familiar, too.
On the other hand -- he's pulling the woman out of the road. Settling the child with her, not taking it off with him. Those are better signs.
Which means that Kunzite calls his shadows in the dim to hunt for the possibility of more dark energy sources elsewhere, to try to pick up any more darkness emanating or passive drain. Youma of that level sometimes aren't alone; sometimes have supervisors that might get involved. But he keeps them at a polite range. Not where they'll trouble Takashi.
He doesn't doubt that Takashi will pick up the presence of power in use, all the same, nor whose signature it is. It's not the best form of greeting. But it's better than calling either a name he's discarded, or one he might still want to keep to himself.
At least right now the only dark energy is coming from the boy he's greeting with his spreading shadows. He rounds on him quickly, fixating on him. Kunzite isn't a youma - Kunzite's a threat. Kunzite can fight Takashi to at least a stalemate - or could the last time they engaged each other, when Kunzite was in his other body. Still, Takashi's unwilling to take any chances. Neither is Axion.
The device bursts a blast of dark blue negative energy in front of it, which Takashi punches first one arm through, then the other. That energy continues to coat his arms and body, before he pushes himself through it completly - arriving on the other side as Riventon, though his facial features are far less distorted and extended by the henshin magic, since Takashi has largely given up hiding his identity. He's got Riventon's elaborate Barrier Lab Coat on though, and he's not hiding any sort of energy signature anymore like he does as Takashi.
"If you've come to try to deal with me before I cause trouble for your friends I think you'll find you've bitten off more than you can chew and you're probably going to wish you'd never lost the strength you once had." Riventon says, though the posture he's taking is decidedly aware and defensive, rather than just hurling energy around like mad. He has, after all, fought Kunzite before.
"Haven't you and your allies caused me enough harm and hurt for one month? So what is it? Have you come to try to eliminate me, or are you the bearer of even more bad news?" His voice is increasingly less-rational and stable.
The sharpness of the reaction isn't a surprise. The details of the reaction --
Kunzite's forsaken the high ground, for once. Further down the road. Out of immediate melee, though both of them are fast enough to change that in an instant. Not so far that Riventon can't see the older boy's eyes widen.
He'd caught a hint that Riventon might have unexpected long-term goals. He hadn't figured on their being that unexpected.
"No," he says a moment later, when he's drawn on his habitually level tone to cover his lack of equilibrium. Draws in his shadows, too, and lets them settle around him in a parallel to the dark energy cloaking Riventon. "I came for the same reason you did, I think. But you were faster."
He's Riventon.
He's Riventon.
What the hell does that do to the deal?
Does it do anything?
"I didn't come hunting you. The only thing I've been looking for you over has been to pass information over a matter of mutual concern -- and you likely know nearly as much as we do about the flowers as we do by now."
Saying that's safe enough. Even to Riventon. He works with energy. They're not going to keep him from noticing the things, from dissecting them.
-- the same boy who died with Mamoru was the one who tried to take Kunzite for a research subject.
He can't think about that now. If he starts losing his own stability, it'll just accelerate the decay of Riventon's -- of Takashi's. Hell.
Riventon's eyes narrow. He knows about the flowers, and fiore, and more, but he can't really explain how. "I'd be willing to help, you know. If it wasn't for all of this unpleasantness. When you tried to kill this city I was there. When you tried to kill AMI I was there. But I guess that's not good enough." Riventon says, without mentioning the obvious and clear other things that are not 'good enough' he's now made himself clearly as responsible for.
"I'm not sure what more I could've done. But it's on my radar. I don't know how much time we have, but I've got some very delicate experiments that having a giant flower-filled asteroid crashing into the planet would disrupt. But you're dealing with it, aren't you?" he almost sneers. "You and the Sailors - you have it handled, right? Like you did Beryl?" he says, his hands balling into fists and then slowly unclenching. "Hell, maybe this time you'll be able to fix it without me dying in the process."
There's a logical way for him to know about the flowers. They are, after all, everywhere. Kunzite's still working on that simplest explanation. "You were," he acknowledges. "There. The Walpurgisnacht meeting. I presume there were other times I didn't see. And there was an agreement. More challenging for us to live up to it when the only way I knew to find you claims you're out of the country, but we'll both live."
Maybe.
There's the slightest of unconscious echoes of Riventon's body language. No fists, on Kunzite's part. BUt his thumb runs along the side of his index finger, his hand half-curling to draw the tip into range, then opening again. Only half. No more. "We'll do what we can. Have been. Working on getting the rest of the data we need." His teeth show, briefly, in the darkness of his shadows and the Earth's. "And if we can't handle it, we'll try to make enough of a light show out of dying that you notice."
Riventon looks sternly at Kunzite. "More difficult for me to live up to the agreement when all of her friends actively worked to poison the well. I don't know that Mamoru did, but given the fact that he was the first one to show hostility to me I can't discount the chance." he snarls. "Hell, even before you, and as I recall, you were... somewhat not yourself at the time." he says.
"If I wasn't letting you handle the asteroid with the others I probably would've run you through on instinct, just like that youma." he says, as though it would've been that easy. He knows it wouldn't, but he's acting like it would be, and if there's anything Riventon projects well, it's pride and self-sureness alongside anger.
"You all went out of your way to take the decisions and give the advice that ended up turning me into your enemy even when I was trying as hard as possible to put up with several people who I found personally odious, so the least I can do is honor all your hard work to that end..." That's not how it happened at all, of course, but Dark Energy doesn't generally act condusively to rational patterns of thought.
The snarls and accusations win a blink from Kunzite. One. No more than that. Those slight movements of his hand go still.
"Mamoru was in direct contact with Ami once between the last time the two of us spoke with you -- I amend, with your public identity -- and the time in question." He does not use the word 'breakup.' Because there are snarling and fists. "I was present. Your name did come up. He suggested she talk with you about the asteroid. Asked her to tell you about the problem, since he wasn't in condition to. You made an agreement with him. He held to it."
There is a significant part of him, this week, that is snarling at him for saying these things. He's seen Fiore. He knows exactly how little good words do. Takashi is Riventon. He's wielding the blade dark enough to control White, dark enough that a tiny fragment of it rendered half-crippled the girl who could focus enough power to defeat Metallia. He's wielding it casually, against a minor youma. He's angry and proud and arrogant, and Kunzite's known for a while now that Riventon's soaked in corruption to the point at which he can't see clearly, can't hear words as they were spoken, much less as they were meant. He knows, knows, that there's no point to this, that the only things it can do are cause a fight now or cause more trouble later.
And he also knows what would have happened to him if any one of a half-dozen people had stopped trying. And he knows that once, given the chance, part of Takashi still wanted out.
Damn it.
"So far as I'm concerned, that agreement holds until proven otherwise." Which might happen in the next thirty or forty seconds. Not to mention that the agreement's between Riventon and Mamoru, technically, and Mamoru may well just have been too sick to tell Kunzite the hell with it. "Our methods differ. Sometimes violently. Some of our goals still overlap. Ami's decisions aren't relevant to that. Yours are."
"Well, that's one less problem that demands a solution, at least." Riventon says, but only relaxes the slightest bit. Still, it's a visible sort of calming, and maybe Kunzite can take something from that. He still looks like he's on edge, like he's a bomb ready to blow and take the whole city block with him in a cloud of miasma.
"I don't need any more enemies right now, I have enough on my plate. Too many projects. Too important. But I think that you're probably destined to cross paths with me on one or two of them." he says, with a surprising degree of honesty. Any fear or apprehension about fighting Kunzite again is buried very well, though.
"So if you feel the need to get that out of the way right now, we can." he says, casually. Like he was offering to play a video game with the older boy. "But it's probably not necessary yet, and the odds will probably be more in your favor when you're not alone."
"The agreement with Mamoru holds until it doesn't - until he's either sticking his nose in my business or getting in my way. But my understanding is that right now he's not in any shape to be doing that. Neither's Nephrite, actually." he says, intentionally tipping his hand a bit, sharing things he shouldn't know.
But then he stops and his eyes narrow. "Ami's decisions are relevant to mine - to my decisions, to my actions, to my..." he stops short. Some words and feelings are hard for him even when he's not letting the dark energy course though him like a numbing drug to cut them off. He doesn't finish, just letting it lie there in the dead air between them.
Only the city block? Kunzite wouldn't underestimate Riventon that far.
"No particular reason for either of us to waste the energy just now," Kunzite replies. (The silent burning gold he's been hosting for a week disagrees, but that's an internal problem.) "Not when we have larger concerns. Either of us might wind up being more useful to the other intact." Something sharp curves at one side of his mouth, but this time he doesn't show teeth. "Not your fault that I work for someone who can tell when your methods are a short-term gain for a larger long-term loss. Once you figure out how to automate a test for that one, we won't have much left to argue about." As if that being within Riventon's capabilities were simply a given.
And then --
Nephrite.
Nephrite was teleported directly from the asteroid into the apartment. Mamoru hasn't left the place. Kunzite has only left now. Jadeite and Zoisite know better than to talk about these things at Infinity, and there are a wide variety of reasons that people make medical-excuse lies; that's not a giveaway. Jupiter would talk with neither Takashi nor Riventon if she could help it. They check the apartment regularly for anything that could spy on them, inside the place, arcane energies, line-of-sight outside. Who else could Riventon have learned it from?
Fiore?
Naru?
-- and then Riventon's eyes narrow and Kunzite's attention is called back to him, sharp. "Yes," he says. There's no attempt to finish the sentence, no attempt to fill in any word, to guess what Riventon might have meant in that. "Relevant. But not determinant. Not of either of ours. I don't intend to close any doors because of someone else's actions. You earned better."
Riventon's own actions -- might be another story. Might already be.
Riventon actually seems nonplussed by the idea of larger concerns, or of Kunzite's insinuation he can't plan for the longer term. "Oh, but what you see as short term gains, I see as a steady buildup of that leads to a desired end. A series of little engagements in a much larger campaign in a much larger war. Just because it's ambitious doesn't mean it's sacrificing the long goal." he says, with a smile.
"Japan wasn't united in one decisive battle that Nobunaga prepared for - but through a long series of battles and conflicts that didn't end for years. Though I expect eventually there will be a Sekigahara, that will still require a foundation to be laid first. And of course, I do not expect to leave the resolution of my plans to my successors."
"Every action, every result, has a thousand little things that determine how it plays out. Some large, some small. Sometimes a change made in the course an experiment can seem minimal, but changes the entire outcome. Lacking a control group, I can only make unverified conjecture - but I can assure you, those recent events have changed the course of this little experiment. They've shown me what I was doing wasn't working, was without value, was only going to lead to my own misery."
"Maybe without other people's influence that wouldn't have happened. But it did. This is the path I am lain on now - the truth of it all. I tried to be someone I'm not - I wasn't someone else ENOUGH. I tried hard, for her, for us. But that turned out to be a deadend, didn't it?"
"It may be my own bias, but I'd prefer to see you not end like the CUries. Brilliant, ambitious, with well-thought-out and correct plans -- and felled through no fault of their own, by aspects of their success that held dangers they weren't yet equipped to perceive. Not your fault we see a different angle on the problem." Drawing back from the military to the scientific, again. Trying to find a way to convey a warning that might find its way around that blinding pride -- if not today, then at some time in future. It's more likely to push Riventon back toward anger for now, Kunzite knows. But maybe, someday.
Because misery was always there. Just unnoticed until there was a lessening of it to compare it against.
"I'd disagree, obviously, with the notion that what you were doing was without value, and with the notion that it proved to be a deadend. But we've already established that our methods differ. Or I wouldn't have been willing to accept that loss of personal power." He hasn't echoed that smile of Riventon's. Not till now. "It's worked out for me so far. But your choices are your own."
Riventon looks particularly dull-eyed at the note about the Curies. "The Curies didn't die in vain, either. The research they did gave us amazing advances. The only way someone like that dies in vain is if you don't make use of the work they did. I won't let her die in vain, either." he says. Fists clenched again, but this is less hostile, and more a twisted sort of determination.
"You need to understand that the power I have is already the result of someone else's sacrifice. I was born with it, unlike you. It's not something forced upon me - it's something that's a part of me. Like the body you had when we first met. I don't want to be purified or fixed, because I don't want to DIE."
"And you know, I helped with that too - through Ami. Because of what I am. Because of what I know. So before you judge my methods or my energy, realize what it's done for both of you. And everyone wants to give that up?"
Someone else's sacrifice. Her. He was born with it.
Oh, hell.
"I seem to recall saying that your choices were your own." That he doesn't have a particular interest in Takashi's dying, he doesn't bother to say aloud -- it's self-evident, or at least he considers it so, from his not attacking Riventon on their last encounter. "Let me be plainer, then. When you have a vested interest in the long-term stability of the planet, but some of your experiments risk damaging it, I'm inclined to believe that it's not intentional self-sabotage on your part. You're too bright for that. Only that you don't have an accurate method for measuring that stability. We do. You might find that useful one day."
Kunzite falls silent for a moment more, studying Riventon. Letting the unconscious woman and her child register only in his peripheral vision. Someone else, here, might tell him that all those people want him to give up that dark energy because they care about what happens to him. That someone else hadn't spent years under Beryl. Hadn't watched Zoisite pursue power, or seen how near Nephrite had had to come to breaking before even the people who loved him best could draw him back. Hadn't seen Kunzite himself deceive himself, over and over again, about how much of his will was his own, about what corrupt strength he could use or retain safely.
"You're right about what you did for Ami," he says finally. "I do know. I owe you for that. As well as for him. As well as what they accomplished because he made it through. I don't intend to forget either. You've kept your head above water this long. Trying to save someone who isn't drowning just gets both parties in trouble."
(If he weren't drowning, would Ayana ever have fled? -- not a question Riventon can think rationally about. Maybe not ever. Maybe not even if he escapes himself.)
Riventon... Takashi... all one and the same now. "You don't understand, either. We're talking on two different wavelengths. Maybe someday I can show you, but that would've been a lot easier BEFORE you pulled your respawning act." he says, getting visibly more animated. "Maybe I don't trust your measurements because you've got a terrestrial telescope and mine's the Hubble, and I think there's something in the way of your own measurements." he says - though the idea it might be the other way around hasn't occured to him at all.
"I'm keeping my head above water partly because someone has to. Someone has to see it from this side. Someone has to be able to understand the things you're too afraid to look at. Otherwise when they show up all you have is fear and uncertainty and more people die that might've been hurt by whatever you did to figure it out." he says, with an almost cold disposition.%
The Hubble. How literal is that? Not in the sense of borrowing it from NASA -- that would be annoyingly difficult to cover one's tracks regarding -- but in the sense of off--
There's an abrupt gleam in Kunzite's eyes that hadn't been there for any of the things that looked like smiles. "You have been exploring."
Riventon looks back at Kunzite. "I've been exploring as long as I've been alive." he says, simply. "Here, there, other theres. The Dusk Zone. I guess you've seen it, right? How much looking, understanding have you done of it?" he says, simply.
"And then there's the white rat and the Puella Magi, who don't quite follow all the rules. And have rules of thier own. With dangerous consequences for all of us." he says.
"And that's only the surface. I hear there's something up on a certain celestial body that I might be very interested in. I just think she'd be upset if I went and had a look. But all of this is just the smallest bit. There's wreckage from the dimesional ship that falls from above, magical items from civilizations older than we knew humanity to be."
"You could say I've done a little bit of exploring, yes."
How much looking and understanding has he done? It's Kunzite's right hand that shifts, this time. Staying at his side, but fingers flexing as if to grasp some imagined, odd-angled and perhaps odd-dimensioned ledge. "You know that answer," he says. Riventon saw him transit through the Dusk Zone, once. Knows that he understood enough to be able to grasp and manipulate a barrier without a Device. Knows what that implies about how many of its broken worlds -- fragmented, in some case, broken in other sense -- he might have seen.
(Mamoru said, on that frozen lake where Takashi bled, that there were three of them there. Said that there was no exit. Said that he'd checked. Somehow.)
"It's hard to keep patience with them when they think of this world and time as the standard, isn't it. Instead of a rarity and a jewel."
"Of course I do." he says. Riventon has the air of a man who knows many things, and knows that he does. This is also the air of someone who often is blindslided by the few things they miss, as Kunzite likely knows. "But that means that you, better than most, know what I'm talking about. You know the things that, for lack of a better word, go bump in the night." he says, looking at him head on.
"So yes, it is frustrating. It's frustrating when people don't see what I look at. It's frustrating when they don't help. And it's very frustrating that the one person I thought might have the capacity to help me was taken away from me by her friends who judged without thinking!" he says, and there's that glower, and there's that charge of negative energy in the air, empowered by his hate and anger.
The question, then, is which of them is missing something this time. Both of them are convinced it's the other. But it's also not impossible that they both are.
Did Riventon see something, somewhere in the Dusk Zone, that he recognized as a specific threat? Or is this his reaction to the local whole of it, cumulatively, since the dark energy permits him to look so much more deeply than most, and his mind is sharp enough to see farther...
Neither helps, when he's oriented right back on Ami. Kunzite considers, then risks a move closer to the subject. "Did she break off everything, then? Down to the chess games? That hardly sounds like her."
Takashi would never really admit to being wrong even if he was. If Takashi's wrong, the instruments were wrong, or the data was wrong, or there was outside interference. If somehow what he'd seen was able to be resolved, then it would be an entirely different problem altogether, unforseen. It's certainly not that the answer is easier than it appears.
And the things he's seen do demand an answer. They demand it loudly, angrily, terrifyingly.
"No, but she told me in order for things to progress I'd have to rid myself of... the same thing that saved her. That gave me the strength to help Mamoru make it to the end of that ordeal. That gave me the experience to help save even you. To abandon it, and until then we couldn't make any more progress on us. So I wasn't willing to risk it. Not when there's so much at stake, so much more than people realize."
"I'm half surprised you didn't take the chance to prove her fears ungrounded." Kunzite's stance shifts slightly, and his hands move to add another layer to the words -- but that layer, like the motion, is too slow and too smooth to be one of his spells. "It's a better deal than Venus ever offered me."
Technically true. Most of the things that Venus has said honestly to him were never put into words.
"By what, playing chess with her?" he says, his eyes narrowing. "I wouldn't have been happy. She'd have been wary. It wouldn't have felt right. She'd have assumed I had ulterior motives and she would've been right." he says, though he's possibly opening up more than he meant to.
"It's not like I can just shed my energy anymore than I can shed my bones. The deal, as offered in totality, was crap."
"Who on your level plays chess without ulterior motives? One set, another, it's all the same."
(It is not remotely all the same, and for this particular instant, Riventon is actually the closer to being a sane human being.)
"And whatever it was -- it existed. She tried." There's a casual tilt of Kunzite's head, something cynical in the set of his mouth. "She was wrong. Not enough. Not much consolation. But at least she cared enough to try."
"You act as though she didn't have the relevant information about my circumstances. If I'd tell YOU, wouldn't you think I'd have shared that information with her long ago?" he asks. "She knew what she was asking for when she said it. She probably also knew what the results would be. She made that choice. We both have to deal with the consequences now."
"And one consequence is that I see the world for how it really is - I see the things I was trying to do that did not, in fact, lead to the world I wanted. Well, now I'm going to make sure that the world marches to my beat, instead of trying to march to the beat of people like your Prince."
That cynical thing stays for a moment, then pulls a little harder without actually coming to resemble humor. "You should know, then, while you're seeing the world, that you have the causation wrong on that last. It's the other way around." As if Mamoru danced to the world's tune, rather than it to his.
Kunzite takes a half-step back, then, and gives a small bow that never interferes with his watching Riventon. "Good luck. To the extent you leave space for luck in your plans at all."
"He might be dancing to a tune, but it's not one I wish to dance to, is all." he says. "I imagine the person who plays that music has two very long twintails." he supposes.
"A little luck never hurt anyone, even in science. I don't relish the day I see you on the opposite side of a battlefield from me, but I do expect it to be soon. On the bright side, I'll finally get that experiment done - but it would've been so much better with your other body. Maybe one day you'll tell me what you did with it." he says, turning on his heel. He'll turn his back to the man. Not out of hubris, but because his Device is always watching when he isn't.
There's no stabbing in it, no sudden attack. Consistent with the last time, when his offensive capabilities seemed smaller at first, only growing over time.
"That one?" Kunzite's tone stays as level and unconcerned as if that hypothetical battlefield were itself only another chess board. "There wasn't anything left to do something with. They purified it out of existence while you were still recovering from your witch-blast. Hurt like hell."
"Shame. I still was able to get enough out of the study and the idea itself to do something with." he says, once again, intentionally tipping his hand forward a bit. Wether that's from hubris or entrapment or something even greater is unknown.
"I think I've made great improvements on the original idea, anyways. But then, she really wasn't a scientist in that sense, was she."
"Or in any." At least there's one thing the two of them can agree on.
And that's the thing with someone like Riventon tipping his hand, isn't it. Whether it's entrapment or not, they have to do something with it.
Sooner or later.
... Sooner.
"No, really she wasn't in any. She let one goal blind her to the chance of succeeding at all of the others. I don't make those kind of mistakes." he says, before stepping away - in a way familiar to Kunzite, stepping into and through the Dusk Zone.