The living room of Mamoru's apartment is growing steadily and increasingly more cluttered. The missing patch of carpet from when a Kyouko-stabbed Fiore teleported in bleeding everywhere? Still missing. The coffee table? Cluttered with medical supplies, technology, food, drinks. Some of the food is half-eaten and abandoned. The couches? Occupied at present by a couple of unconscious forms: Mamoru's familiar body on his usual one, stretched out and sleeping to escape the ongoing pain; Nephrite a more massive figure, mostly an outline under a blanket. An outline with a cast on one foot and leg.
The corner between the two has had a chair dragged into it. This lets Kunzite scan something quietly on Mamoru's tablet while staying within arm's reach of both of them. And having a view on both major approaches, the balcony door and the door from inside the building. Both, at present, are unlocked.
At first, Usagi had been so preoccupied with getting an exhausted Ami to sleep to put more than an annoyed thought toward what had happened and a recently developed disturbing trend.
At school, she was bored enough to...dwell.
And fume. And rage.
(And maybe even duck into the bathroom for a good cry.)
She would have come over straight away, but there's an injured boy to spoil.
She doesn't come flying onto the balcony. She enters through the front door.
Oddly enough, she appears calm. Perhaps the only noticeable sign that Something is Wrong is how she completely disregards Kunzite's presence.
This may seem like a cold shoulder tactic. In truth, she's just not wanting to outright throttle him. Or cry.
A fuzzy brown teddy bear is tucked into a slumbering Nephrite's arm followed by a moment of almost maternal fretting. Lifting the blanket, she pulls out a pink marker and doodles a get well message punctuated with a bunny and some hearts, because that's the ritual. It's What's Done.
Then she goes over to Mamoru, fingers ghosting over his hair and checking him over before her lips lightly, very lightly, brush against his forehead.
Only when she stands does she finally look at Kunzite. Anger and hurt have equal footing in her expression, and it's not clear which is the cause for her stinging eyes. "I am so unbelievably pissed off at you right now."
Her voice is low, of course, because slumbering cinnamon rolls, and she spins on her heels to use grabbing a drink as an excuse for trying to calm herself down.
Through the front door means that Kunzite has some forewarning, at least. He leans and sets the tablet down on the coffee table; the corner near him has space for it, and is not particularly near the pitcher of water. "Good afternoon." The words are quiet, in and of themselves. But more, they're so thoroughly swallowed up by the silence before and after that they might never have been spoken at all.
He's watching her when she looks at him. That's not a surprise, not to her.
And as she's turning, she can see him lifting a hand to run through what there is of his hair. "That's the universal opinion," he says. "Are you going to give me an itemized list of the reasons, like Mercury, or am I meant to guess?"
There were many better ways to handle that statement. Possibly all of them.
Yeah, Kunzite really could have phrased that better.
She just gapes at him when she returns from the kitchen, a can of soda pressed against her forehead.
The anger is winning the duel for dominance on her face!
"I was gonna wait until the urge to scream at you was gone, but that's pretty much shot to hell now, isn't it? So go ahead, take your best guess."
Kunzite closes his eyes for a moment. "No matter what Mercury told you," he says, "I am still not dating Naru under false pretenses. Because I am still not dating Naru at all."
Normally, Usagi would laugh at that and roll her eyes.
Normally, she'd tease him about it.
Now...
"No, you just use her getting hurt as an excuse for a stupid test."
Kunzite lowers his hand rather than risk fidgeting with it any more, and glances back to Usagi again. "Needed to happen. Jupiter talks to people about things. Mercury does. Mars doesn't. Now I know when I need to follow up, instead of trusting that you'll get news from your girls."
She just...blinks at him again. "You chose Fiore deciding to start targeting my friends as a good time for that, did you? If I hadn't felt anything that day, would you have told me about Kyouko? And what about him?!" She gestures toward the couch.
"'Oh, he's not one of Usagi's best best best friends, so obviously she'd rather weed her home than check on him. Obviously she won't give a rats ass about a stupid, stupid plan gone wrong.'"
"Something that should have been urgent, but that we had a couple of days' leeway on while Fiore gathered himself? Yes. I did. Because I could wait and still be reasonably safe, and because I expected Mars to forward that news." Let her be angry with him, though, not with Mars. That's a good sign. That means that that's just what Mars does, not an anomaly. That's fine. Kyouko she's not entirely angry about; that's a coounterfactual, he doesn't have to address that --
-- and he sits up straighter, and his blank expression shifts to the smallest of frowns.
"Wait," he says. "Jupiter didn't tell you?"
That one wasn't a test. That's an unpleasant surprise.
Urge to strangle...higher. "No, Kunzite. Not we. You. You had a few days. I was enjoying a weekend of stupid, ignorant bliss."
Usagi just...
THAT gets a visible reaction out of him?
"Of course she didn't. I figured she's been here all weekend looking after Sleeping Beauty here. And so what if she had? Is it really too much of a bother to take two seconds to send even a text? I had to find out last night from a very sleep deprived Ami-chan."
She crying by now, of course, though trying hard not to because she's angry, dammit. And it's what makes it worse than crocodile tears. "Do you really think I wouldn't want to know when any of you are hurt?"
That's what got a visible reaction out of him. That's what gets him to rise from his chair now. There's a handful of random packages of tissues on the table, duly bright with advertisements; he reaches for an open one without looking, offers it to her.
"She was here for ten or fifteen minutes the night it happened," Kunzite says quietly. "She left." And took out the power to half the ward. "She hasn't been back. Mercury said she saw her -- I expected her to be spending half the weekend with you."
And Mercury isn't sleeping. Hell.
Usagi takes the tissue and turns a little away so he can't see her cry anymore and can't see her wiping at her eyes. She even tries (and fails) not to sniffle.
She shakes her head. "I haven't seen anybody. Been too busy weeding my house..."
Grump grump.
She's pretty sure she'll have a new set of dislikes when this is done. Houseplants being one of them.
(Except for roses.)
A couple more sniffles and she turns just enough to look at Kunzite.
And she still looks grumpy at him. "Even if she'd been home cooking and baking, she'd still have visited more."
Yes, she's worried. Yes, she's pretty sure once she's not as grumpy at Kunzite, she'll fret herself into ulcers. For now.
Stinkface.
She turns away, and that's not challenged; but there are hands on her shoulders, now. Not secured at all. She wouldn't even have to step away to get rid of them, a shrug would do it. Just contact. That's all.
"Don't be angry at Jadeite," he says quietly. Being angry at Kunzite is, apparently, fine by him. "He couldn't say anything with that many flowers around. We're trying to be careful. As long as Fiore thinks Nephrite's dead, the thing in his head might not realize what we know now. The longer we can keep that secret, the better chance we have of being able to take it out at the source."
Something tightens in his expression. "Jupiter wasn't home cooking and baking. Or she'd have given Mercury something when she saw her, and Mercury would've passed some of it on to you."
She doesn't step away, because Usagi's a very tactile person. And though she's furious at him, she refuses to jerk away. (That kind of rejection hurts!)
Her shoulders tighten at 'dead' and 'Nephrite,' only to be almost hard as cement by the end.
Very true. If Makoto had baked, Usagi would have received something, even if it had been through a trickling down of resources.
Without looking at him, she finally does move away from his hands, only to turn and hug him.
Tight.
Serves him right.
"You can be...the world's biggest ass sometimes, you know that?"
Of course he does.
The smug bastard.
And then she's holding her breath to fight down a panic, because Mamoru's right there and looks like a complete mess, even in his sleep. "Where do you think she is?"
Fate has decreed that Usagi be at an excellent height for crushing Kunzite's kidneys when she hugs him like that. He is never going to say a word about it. He wraps arms around her in turn, though rather more careful of things like her breathing and important internal organs.
"The miracle," he tells her, "is that you and Mamoru have been working on me long enough that occasionally I'm not."
(She wants to know when they're hurt. Didn't he worry about that sometimes, once? He thinks he remembers sending messengers. What overruled it? The years in the Dark, when the only reason to mention that someone was hurt was to get a third party to attack them?)
(The memory that wells up, sudden, is Kazuo's; he pushes it aside fast and hard enough that the only sign is a little twitch of his head, maybe a quarter inch's worth of movement. Almost nothing.)
(All right, then. That'll be something he needs to actively work to remember. But it's something he can do.)
Usagi's talking. "I don't know," he says. "It can't be too bad, or Mercury would've mentioned how she looked. If it were one of us, you could find us in a moment, but I don't know whether Luna put the same beacons on you. And she might take it as intrusive." There's school, isn't there? There's always school.
Crushed kidneys. Pffff. It builds character.
Besides, pee in the blood is the new black!
She bites back a smile and pinches him in revenge. She's mad, dangit! (Doesn't matter that the 'you' sends a happy butterfly in her.)
Still, one important issue must be addressed.
"No. You're occasionally an ass. You're usually real nice."
This could be her bias, of course. It could also be his usual lack off assness around her. Or both.
Her grip on him loosens as she looks up at him.
Yes, fall prey to those large, wet eyes!
"I think she does. Because she always seems to know where to find me. So...as a last resort type thing?"
Pinching is accepted duly. Right alongside Usagi's delusions, from whatever source they derive. The large, wet eyes ... oh, god, she's not still crying, is she? Well. If she is, his shirt will survive. He's reasonably sure about that, anyhow.
"I don't know," he says. And then lets out a breath. "All right. In the mean time. How much of the wreckage of this weekend did Mercury tell you about?"
Usagi shrugs. Finally, she saves his shirt by pulling away and finishing wiping her eyes with tissue. "Meteor trajectories, Nephrite. And apparently." Her face turns about ten times more grumpy than she'd looked at him before. "Taka-baka is also Riventon."
"Yes," Kunzite says quietly. "I didn't tell you that one, either. But that -- Mercury was close enough to him, I thought she had the right to decide how she wanted people told. In a way, I'm almost relieved. Two obsessive researchers bent on trying to save the world by harnessing powers inimical to it? One is better."
Usagi blinks up at him. "Is...the one Ami-chan? What does inimical mean?"
A sigh and a flop of her arms. "No, that one...yeah. Best from her." Another sigh!
Her eyes settle on Nephrite and...of course, a moment later, on Mamoru. A slight crease forms between her eyebrows. "How is he?"
Because, she's certain, her boyfriend is hiding just how bad it is.
"No, not Mizuno-san." There's the slightest of hitches before the name; Usagi tends to make what she calls people into something contagious, and Kunzite is not, at present, about to start calling Ami by her personal name even in her absence. "I meant Takashi. Inimical means both hostile and harmful at once. Something that both can hurt you, and wants to. And usually does by its nature."
The question is enough to make Kunzite follow Usagi's glance without meaning to; he exhales, and retreats to his chair. Which yields the area in front of Mamoru quite nicely. "He's exhausted," he says. "Sleeping a lot. Using everything he can spare on Nephrite." Weak and in pain. Not really able to walk on his own. She knows that. "I don't think we have much longer. But we were able to get the data Mercury needed; she can figure out what we need to do about the asteroid now. If she remembers to sleep enough to think straight."
Her eyebrows raise as she clasps a hand over her mouth! "Whoops! Definitely not Ami-chan, then!" She sniffs. "I'd have beaten him up if he tried to turn her into a Sith lord."
She may have seen the new Star Wars movie...
As Kunzite tells her pretty much what she knows or has guessed, Usagi just watches Mamoru as he sleeps.
When he's done, it takes her a moment to look back at Kunzite, a fist balled at her side. "Kunzite? Can you do me a favor?"
She brings up her fist and opens it, shoulders drooping as she stares at the crystal.
It wants to help as much as she does.
"Remind me...why its a bad idea to use this? I could...well, maybe not all of them, but give you enough time to figure out..."
For a moment, her throat is tight.
"And, you know, he won't be so..." Flopping hand wave. "Hurty."
The request for a favor has his attention back to her, instead of on Mamoru. Which means that he sees the crystal.
It's not something that he's seen before, in person. Not this close.
There is no mistaking it for anything other than absolutely and utterly what it is. And he goes, for a moment, very still.
"It draws its power from you, doesn't it." The words are oddly hard to say. "The amount of power you'd need to do that -- he'd rather spend a hundred years like this than have you take that risk. Not while there's anything else we can do. You're like air to him. It hurt him to be without us; it'd kill him to lose you."
She shrugs. "I guess it's my soul?"
She rolls the faceted crystal around in her palm, watching the light from the window catch and bend and make pretty colors.
The thing is, though, Mamoru may be willing to live like this for a hundred years rather than her take the risk, but Usagi'd rather spend the next hundred years feeling as she had a few months ago rather than have him be like this.
The cracked and broken bones, being choked, the emotional evisceration, even the feeling of barbed wire and sandpaper grinding in her chest. All at once, even.
She gives a snort that probably should be tinged with amusement. "Too bad we can't do like on Pirates of the Caribbean. Get him a jar of dirt."
Her soul.
It's not something that Kunzite can dispute, given his own: inosilicate, tenebrescent, tinged by a contaminant both necessary and toxic. That hers would be both vastly more powerful and vastly more lovely is no surprise.
That she handles it that casually is purely Usagi.
(That Kunzite might feel much the same way she does is no surprise to her, either. But her. Not her. Let the rest of them burn themselves out without a blink, if it keeps her safe. ... which is undoubtedly thinking that she hates nearly as much as this.)
And then there is a blink.
"Jar of dirt?" Kunzite repeats, utterly blankly. It's not that he's not aware of the Pirates movies. There aren't many people in the developed world who don't recognize Johnny Depp's scarf and gait. It's just that the money that a different teenager might have used to go see it wound up tucked away in a hidden cache, and the time that a different teenager might have spent watching it on television was spent instead on a quest as obsessive and unending as Norrington's hunt for Jack Sparrow.
(Usagi does hate the idea of others sacrificing themselves so that she may live. After all, it implies she's more important than them, doesn't it? And yet, each of those people willing to burn are oh so important to her.)
It started as a joke, but now she's...considering it. Sure, it's very likely a stupid idea that won't work, but it's an idea.
"Yeah. Captain Jack was gonna get eaten at sea or something, but someone gave him a jar of dirt?" Hey, it's been awhile.
She sighs and shrugs. "I dunno. I know I shouldn't purify all the earth, but I guess I was thinking about purifying...some."
She looks up at Kunzite, fully expecting him to take it as she's quickly cycling back to seeing: a very dumb idea.
(It's something Mamoru hates, too. But in terms of sheer pragmatism -- as long as Usagi is alive, there's a chance that she might eventually be able to restore the rest of them. As long as Mamoru is alive with her, that chance is better. None of the rest of them can do that. Not even Mercury. So long as Usagi lives, in a sense, they all do.)
(And if she dies ... in a sense, they all do.)
It's an equation that's always present in the back of Kunzite's mind, influencing the priorities he gives things, altering what he chooses to do. It's rarely in the front of his mind. And what he's staring blankly at Usagi over, just now, has nothing to do with it.
"How did a jar of dirt ... never mind. What do you think it would do?" Mamoru is in danger from a lot of sources, right now, but he's only in danger of being drowned when he and Nephrite are both awake and talking...
(That's part of the issue too, though, isn't it? If she and Mamoru are the last of their friends, odds are slim they'd be completely happy especially if they're unable to bring their friends back. And if it were just Usagi? Well. She'd be facing the same, bleak, desolate future she had in the fall of the Silver Millennium.)
As with Kunzite, these thoughts are a near constant in the back of her mind. Nightmares, when they aren't flashbacks, consist of being alone. And perhaps its selfish, but she's really okay with that.
Still, completely off topic!
Usagi shrugs. "I dunno. I mean, the earth is sick. But if we gave him a little bit that wasn't? Oh oh! Kinda like dialysis. Except we're not...replacing his blood with dirt?"
Earth that wasn't sick.
Kunzite's eyes unfocus for a moment, for once, as he searches back through memory. Once, for a moment, Mamoru showed him something of how he sensed the Earth.
It would be better if they could risk living earth. Growing things. They can't. And even that, even if it worked, would do so very little. The cries of everything else would be no less strong, and he can sense it all.
But so very little might be something. Might at least stretch the time that the painkillers will help, or keep him able to use his hands an hour or two longer.
They've run with worse plans, lately, in their desperation.
"We'd have to be very careful," he says slowly. "But I can't see any way it would hurt. As long as it wouldn't use too much of your power. We'll be fighting soon enough, and you'll need it."
A thrill shoots through her when her idea isn't shot down! She's quick to shake her head, almost beating Kunzite up with her flying twintails. "It won't! It's just a teeny jar of dirt!"
Well, she has her mind set on a rather large planter on the balcony, but...
"Can we try now? We could stick his hand in it! Like I did to my brother when he tried to crash my sleepovers. Only it was warm water. And instead of dirtysis, he peed himself."
There will be no planters on the balcony. Otherwise there will immediately be a flock of Xenian flowers in them. The roof is bad enough. Still, that's something that can be overruled later.
"We are not planting Mamoru," Kunzite says resignedly. "Let's wait until the others get home. That way you'll have someone to carry it for you." Maybe Jadeite. Maybe himself. "I can't leave these two alone; if Fiore turned up, they wouldn't be able to keep him from walking off with Mamoru."
Usagi sulks for a moment. "Not plant him. Just...bury a part of hi--yeah, no let's not do that."
Shiver!
She does, however, try not to giggle at the idea of asking Zoisite to help her carry...dirt.
"Okay. But..." She looks over at Mamoru. She very much doesn't want to leave right now. (She's been away for days, thinking she pretty much just got in the way.)
Inspiration!
Turning, she beams at Kunzite. "Until then, we can marathon the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy!"
"I think Mercury has established that we are not to bury anyone else for a very long time," Kunzite says. He's probably trying very hard not to wonder what Usagi is giggling at.
He doesn't have to wonder what she's looking at. It's been a long time since she's been over.
And then. Well. There are things he can resign himself to --
"As long as the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy doesn't involve Tomoyo Nagase eating doorknobs."
-- and things of which he can only take so much.
Blank, clueless eyes. These are what blink at Kunzite. "Who eating what?"
She waves a hand! "Nope! Just involves cursed pirates, Johnny Depp, and...other people." She's turning on the entertainment system, adjusting volume and fiddling with bass and treble settings because she doesn't want people to wake up to their teeth rattling, after all! Besides, she knows the Preferred Mamo Settings!
...
Sorta!
Menus, menus, streaming video places.
"Oh! And a love triangle. Which, now that I think about it, has a very obvious solution every movie or book or show ever doesn't wanna touch."
Johnny Depp probably being the important one, so far as Usagi's concerned. The pretty one's likely a little blond for her tastes.
At her addition, there's a low sound from Kunzite that could, ambiguously, be something not entirely unlike laughter. He takes himself into the kitchen while she's fussing with the settings. Three months is long enough to learn certain ground rules. One of these involves Usagi, television, and the necessity for ice cream.
Also the necessity for making sure they have more ice cream, because heaven knows that any other teenaged girl who shows up in the next several hours isn't leaving, either.
Completely oblivious to the delicious treat about to befall her mouth, Usagi's gleefully setting up.
In all actuality, she's glad she came over grumpy. She's glad she yelled at Kunzite. Otherwise things would have festered. Probably into all those ulcers she keeps worrying about.
And she knows she'll probably have to beat him up on occasion, but it's very much not fun being angry at Kunzite.
Finally, she has the movie up, and she's paused AT THE VERY BEGINNING because the opening tags are part of the experience. If there were trailers before streaming movies, she'd make him watch those, too.
There is not a word spoken about said ice cream. There is merely a dish with spoon intruding quietly on Usagi's field of view.
Even if he's been trying lately -- Kunzite has always been better at apologizing with things rather than with words.
Ice cream fills her vision.
It's almost (as in a billion lightyears away, which is closer than anything else) as beautiful as that Just For Her smile!
She turns to Kunzite and beams, and if smiles could literally illuminate, she'd be able to land a plane. At night.
But, since they don't, she drags him over toward the couches. both still within easy reach.
Universal sign for 'stay here,' she piles chair cushions on the floor, and then she's dragging him down to sit next to her on the pile of cushions!
She puts her fingers to her lips, oddly just...excited for this. "Okay, okay, shh." Before she begins, she turns to look at him.
Her expression is Dead Serious.
"Are you one of those that talk and ask questions during a movie? If so, just tap me so I can pause the movie."
He has a chair. No, really, he has a -- he had a chair. Well then. With Usagi around, emergency evacuations aren't as likely to be necessary anyway. Kunzite folds himself down obediently under the pull of Tiny Blonde, and --
-- she just asked the man who fades out of normal conversations whether he talked during movies.
Her answer is an eyebrow twitched upward. Absolutely nothing more.
Usagi makes a quiet little 'eeee!' before starting the movie.
Eagerly, she leans forward in their nest of pillows and presses play.
And yes, Kunzite. When she's not busy chowing down on ice cream, or pausing for refills and-slash-or potty breaks, you definitely have Tiny Blonde snuggled against you.
And if you're not careful, you very well may have Tiny Blonde...napping on you.
Behind them, a prince cracks one eye open and pauses.
He eyes the television.
His head turns infinitesimally toward the two people within arm's reach of him, sitting on the floor leaning against the couch he's on.
Odangos. Connected to a head leaning against the arm of a much larger figure with white hair.
Watching Pirates of the Carribean.
Mamoru just closes his eyes again, because clearly the painkillers are interfering with his lucid dreaming. If he actually had control of this one the movie would be paused and Usagi would be asking Kunzite who would ever name a town 'Pontypool'.