Wednesday evening, well after sunset; it's still stiflingly warm outside, but the apartment is sharply cool against that. For some reason.
Kunzite has not, since his arrival, dropped out of henshin. It's also possible he hasn't sat down. He's leaned himself back against a wall in the living room, his power wrapping his left arm in darkness and his left side in shadows beneath the white of his cape. Frowning down toward the typically cluttered table without focusing on it. Waiting.
Just waiting.
There's a 'thump' from outside on the balcony, and a moment later, Kyouko pulls the door open and steps inside. She's in henshin, obviously, because she can't exactly leap up to a penthouse balcony if she isn't. She also, noticably, has some large and inexpertly-applied bandages wrapped around her upper left arm and her right thigh, visibly peeking out from under her pink skirt.
She's wearing a bit of a pained scowl- the sort of expression you wear when you're hurt, but it's more of an inconvinience than anything really life-threatening. She also walks with a faint limp as she enters the room, glancing around.. eyes settling on Kunzite a moment later. It only takes her another moment to realize not all is well with him.
Her pace quickening somewhat, she crosses the room. "Nii-chan. Are you okay?" She asks, by way of greeting, her eyes glancing at the wrapped shadows, but unable to penetrate them to ascertain the cause, or perhaps, the reason.
Her arrival on the balcony is met by a lifting of Kunzite's head even before the door opens, a nod of greeting as she comes in, and a lift of his right hand. He keeps his left arm where it is, crossed over his body, and he does not otherwise move. "Kyouko. I'll be fine. A little frostbite." In the middle of July. "Mamoru should be back eventually; he's out with Jadeite. I haven't bothered to interrupt them. Is your sister all right?"
As if there were no other possible reason that Kyouko would have slowed down enough to let someone score a hit on her.
Kyouko tsks softly under her breath at Kunzite's dismissal of her concern, though she expects littl else at this point, hovering just a bit over his hidden left arm, although there's really nothing she can do about it, in any case- she's not a healer of any description. After a moment, she glances up, then away. "She wasn't there."
She gestures with her injured arm, then winces. "These are actually from last night.. but they ain't healin' right. I was hopin' somebody here could give me a hand.." Either Mamoru or Daisuke, most likely, although it doesn't seem either of them are around. Still, wounds on a Puella that haven't healed in a full day are something potentially concerning.
Naru didn't come straight over. There was a car ride, and a curse removing, and possibly some energy bars and a coffee between then and now. Perhaps a little private moment or three that didn't need to have witnesses, at least not until she'd collected herself again. That coffee, or its identical twin, is in Naru's hand as she comes up to the apartment the boring way. Front door, elevator, hallway.
Naru no longer needs to knock, she's a cool enough kid now to have her own key. She lets herself in, closing the door behind her and nudging off her shoes to pad barefoot.
"Hello?" Naru calls quietly, loud enough to alert those awake and paying attention, not loud enough to startle any who are likely sleeping. Right at the moment, startling people doesn't seem like a feature as she moves towards the living room to where two wounded warriors are.
"What happened to you, Kyouko?" The fact that Naru doesn't ask Kunzite first is probably telling, although her attention settles on him, concerned before moving to the puella, sharing the concern.
Not healing right. On a Puella. Kunzite's frown, which lessened at Kyouko's entry but did not disappear, reasserts itself. He glances aside to Naru, scanning her right side for awkwardness or skin discoloration -- then looks back to Kyouko without saying anything about what he saw or didn't see. "It's a good question," he says.
Kyouko hears the door open and turns, perhaps expecting or anticipating Mamoru or one of the other Shitennou, and instead finding Naru crossing the room towards her. If she looks a bit disappointed it's nothing personal- merely that she came here with specific needs that Naru is unlikely to be able to address.
Even so, she doesn't want to not-answer the girl's obvious concern, and the question distracts here from wondering why Naru is here in the middle of the night. When Kunzite follows up with a reinforcement of the query, she sighs.
She meets neither's eyes as she mutters, "I went to Takashi Agera's lab last night to see if I could figure out what he knows about Witches, and findin' 'em. Didn't learn anything useful, but I did end up makin' him mighty mad. He shot me with some kinda.. energy orbs. Dark Energy. It burned me, and the burns don't seem to want to heal on their own."
She pauses, then looks up. "Although, nii-chan, I could ask you the same question. Of the two of us, you look the worse for wear, here."
"It's probably better to break in when he's not there." Naru comments mildly as she lets her bag thump to the floor and sips from her coffee. She isn't generally a lefty, but she's got her coffee cup in that hand, a few irritated spots down her right arm and hand, although nothing that seems to give her undue pause, or at least not that she's sharing with the class.
Naru finds herself a spot to curl up into a comfy chair, where she can still see both of them, and close enough for conversation, but the desire to stand just isn't in her. She lets Kunzite field the question about how he got broken.
"Those." Kunzite taps the forefinger of his right hand against his thigh. "May I see one of the burns? Whichever you're comfortable with that's easiest to rebandage, since neither of us is likely to be much help. I want to make sure whether it's dark energy blocking the healing, or whether he used a variant of that spell that can carry physical toxins along with it."
Kunzite needs to have fewer good ideas. Especially where Takashi can find out about them.
That leaves him with a question to answer, and he glances toward the ceiling for a moment. "Someone calling herself Shadow Witch Shiniko attacked Naru. One of her attacks is an antiflame that drops the temperature a couple of hundred degrees locally." It would be nice if he were talking about Fahrenheit. "I was insulating us both already, but that one manifested partly inside my shields. On my side, fortunately, not the young lady's. I had enough heat in reserve to counter it before it did too much damage."
"Well, obviously I thought he wasn't there!" Kyouko snaps at Naru, her red eyes flashing momentarily. Her temper is short, though her anger isn't rightfully directed at the girl but merely reflected from her true sources of frustration. "Turns out he has some kind of alarm system or something probably, I dunno. It's too late to worry about now."
She glances back up at Kunzite, her red eyes still sharp, but after a moment she relents, turning to the side and unwinding the bandage from around her upper arm. Bandage is probably too strong a word anyway- she had just wrapped some pharmacy gauze, probably garnered from her conbenie, around it. The wound sure looks like a burn, and not even a terribly serious one, although it pulses with residual Dark Energy. She glances at it a moment, then back at Kunzite.
"Shadow Witch Shiniko, huh." She mutters, her only comment, although the subtext is clearly 'I am adding her name to the 'to be stabbed' list.'
"Who'd he bring with him?" Naru asks, not startling, or even apparently getting unduly concerned at being snarled at. "If anyone." Her voice is quiet as she asks, curling up on the couch as she watches the unveiling of the burn.
"Apparently I'm getting a reputation." Naru comments with a slow breath. She is watching more than anything. "I got just the edge of the cold, it barely grazed me when it landed solidly on Kunzite. Unsurprising, she was actively trying to separate me from you."
Kunzite detaches from the wall to come and examine the burn more closely. "No threat," he says, before reaching to lay his right hand on the skin just above the burn and let the shadows flow up and over it. Their touch is cool, but not sharply cold. Testing the temperature of her skin; testing whether that dark energy is working its way further into her system, as it would if it were encapsulating a poison to be unleashed on purification, or whether it's remaining at the surface, mere residue from the original spell.
"It kept her attention off the others, at least," he comments absently. "Always useful to have them watching the wrong target."
Kyouko glances back over at Naru, and her voice has an almost sullen tone to it when she replies, as if she's feeling a little bad for snapping at the other girl, but isn't willing to actually apologize because that would mean admitting she spoke out of turn. "I dunno. Some chick in a bat-dress or something. I didn't catch her name. She threw up a wall of Dark Energy-infused fog to try and trap me. Don't worry, I didn't breathe much of it." She was smart enough to hold her breath.
She glances down as Kunzite lays his hand on her skin. She doesn't seem to be feverish, and there's no indication that the Dark Energy is doing anything else than preventing the wound from healing. "I don't think it's anything serious," She says.. "Just.. won't heal, and I can't cleanse it on my own." Dark Energy getting into her system would be bad. She rightly doesn't like to mess with it much.
"There is a whole lot more fog going on than I ever expected." Naru muses thoughtfully. "No, it's just been a recent thing. Hunh. Interesting." She sips from her coffee, watching the examination. There is one person in the room with almost no dark energy experience, and that person is not offering unhelpful opinions.
At least on /that/.
"I often try and keep them focused on me, its where they want to focus anyhow, and it lets others attack more easily. I dont often get to explain that, however, so it doesn't usually work out as I might hope." Naru comments thoughtfully and then gestures a touch, vaguely.
"Bat dress sounds like Lacrima. Fog sounds like Shiniko." Kunzite takes his hand back, and the shadows with it. "It doesn't seem to be trying to infect you particularly," he says to Kyouko. "Clearing the residual energy should take care of the problem. Not something we can handle in-house, though. Osaka-san, do you happen to have a contact method for Mars? I have one, but it's likelier to alarm her. She's likelier than Moon to have some free time at the moment."
"It just seemed like he was trying to blast me, that's all.." Kyouko mutters, glancing down at the burn again as Kunzite removes his hand, shrugging her shoulders faintly. As if trying to be blasted into oblivion by a raging Takashi was nothing to be particularly concerned about. She shrugs her shoulders at the contemplation regarding Takashi's accomplice. "Like I said.. names weren't mentioned. I dunno."
She glances over at Naru at the mention of contacting Mars, quirking her lips slightly. She doesn't know Mars that well, though she won't turn down the help if it's offered. She makes no comment, other than adding, "Just make sure you don't get in the way by doin' that, Naru-chan. Somebody might hurt you while tryin' to protect you."
"I am getting /really/ good at getting out of the way. That is like.. my current number one useful skill in a fight. Right ahead of giving them a piece of my mind. Which is /super/ effective." Naru's voice is dry, and the sarcasm tag is in heavy use as she goes digging for her phone and considering her options there.
"I'll text Mars." Naru confirms with a little nod as she does so, her voice thoughtful. "I was just chatting with Lacrima a few days ago, and was in a fight with her last week. No fog. Plenty of dark energy blasts though." The fact that the two things do not strike Naru as an odd mix just doesn't isn't even a thing.
TXT to Rei: Are you busy, or could you stop by the boys' apt?
Rei TXT to Naru: I'm not busy. I'll be there in a bit.
Working hand is free again. That's a bonus. Kunzite retrieves his own phone, still blinking forlornly with the text of Naru's that he did not bother to actually look at, and manipulates it one-handed. Comm would technically be easier, but that was on his left wrist. And involves metal. It's abandoned in a different room for the time being, for some reason.
He doesn't say anything for the time being, because communication in one medium at a time is difficult enough right now.
TXT to Mamoru: 3 injured at apt. None bleeding.
That's when the door to the current apartment-in-use opens to admit a seriously irritated prince. "I had," he calls without preamble, "to track you with the damn communicator because you didn't CALL ME for help and give me a REASON to be able to break away from Jadeite's Juuban Instinct guild and take the rooftops and you TELEPORTED and I didn't want to risk barfing on you if you weren't bleeding out, you JA--"
Mamoru's phone buzzes in his pocket as he's stopped in the doorway to the hall, staring. "You're all jerks," he says flatly. "I was playing POKEMON. Not conducting matters of goddamn state. Who's hurt worst? Kunzite doesn't get to answer."
Kyouko just huffs softly, shaking her head, causing her long ponytail to sway behind her as she turns away from Kunzite as he texts and instead makes her way over to the couch, her gait still marked by a slight limp.. and flops down, which then causes her to wince. "Ah.. dammit." She 's not used to being injured for longer than a few minutes.
Then Mamoru is coming into the apartment, and sounding seriously peeved. Despite this, or perhaps because she's actually not responsible and therefore feels safe, she grins slightly. "Mamoru!" She feels like she hasn't really seen her friend in far too long, and even under these circumstances she's happy to.. although she immidiately follows this up with, "Kunzite."
"Mars is coming over." Naru comments as her phone bings and then she looks over to Mamoru's arrival and his declaration of them all being jerks. Not wrong, exactly.
Naru points, with the hand holding her coffee cup in echo with Kyouko's assessment of who is most broken. "Kunzite. Sorry, Mamo." What, exactly, Naru is apologizing for is unclear precisely, but she apologizes anyhow.
Traitors. No, wait, that would be if they didn't answer. Kunzite says, "In fairness, the girls just got here." Because defending them against the accusation of being jerks is clearly the most important matter at hand.
As promised, Sailor Mars lands upon the balcony not long after her text. She dehenshins into something casual, with a purse hanging off of her shoulders, and kicks off her shoes before entering. She looks at... both Kunzite and Kyouko and cringes. Then she looks in Mamoru's direction and flashes him a guilty look. Afterwards she turns to Naru and asks, "Hey, what's up?"
There doesn't seem to be any youma here, but from the state various people are in she wouldn't be surprised if they just finished fighting one. "So... anyone catch the number of the truck that hit you all, or...?"
"Then I'll get you two in a second. And thank you," sighs Mamoru, padding barefoot from the hall to where Kunzite's deposited himself. "And I don't care. You turned your air conditioning up and you're hiding shit, which is why you didn't get to answer," he tells his white-haired guardian, and crouches down in front of him, blue eyes glaring up. One hand comes up to cover Kunzite's uninjured hand so he can continue the tirade where no one else is listening, and the other slips up under Kunzite's cape to where he's hiding his injury.
At the latter, his eyes widen, then narrow again. As the glow commences, the tirade basically consists of a silent yes good defend. sure get seriously injured. it's part of the job description. but don't downplay it, don't hide it. and you are a higher goddamn priority than pokemon go any second of any day SO DON'T YOU DARE NOT INTERRUPT ME even if i am drunk or exhausted or god forbid i stubbed my toe or whatever! and keeps going even as he glances up to finally acknowledge Rei showing up-- and blinks at her guilty look.
"Yo," he says conversationally. "Thanks for asking. I didn't get to it yet."
Kyouko remains where she is on the couch, her injured arm resting on the back, showing the nasty but not-too-gruesome burn on its upper portion. A bandage on her left thigh covers a second, similar wound, hiding it from sight for the moment. She watches Mamoru as he goes over to tend to Kunzite, looking satisfied with this arrangement, before turning her attention to Rei as she appears.
"Hi." She greets, casually enough. She doesn't seem to be in any great pain, her injuries more an inconvinience, albeit one that needs seeing to. "Not a big deal. I was.. doing some reconaissance and I got blasted, but it won't heal like normal. Kunzite says it's because there's Dark Energy clinging to the burns, which I guess makes sense. I can't get rid of it on my own but they should heal up easily enough once it's gone.."
"Separate trucks," Kunzite notes, if there's a little more of gritted-teeth about it than there was before. It actually hurts considerably less now than it did when Kyouko came in, but his attention's divide in more directions, and the one no-one else is hearing has priority. "Someone named Shiniko decided that the proper thing to do about a girl being frequently targeted was target her herself as a punishment. Shadow and cold magics, mostly fueled by dark energy. She did something else to Naru, but I couldn't catch what." Just 'Naru.' First name and lack of honorific, which probably in itself says a good deal about how much attention he's not paying.
The reaction that that tirade is getting approximates to: of course I preferred not to interrupt you; I could keep the damage from compounding, and you have had one week this year so far without either a major ongoing crisis or a near=equal crisis of schoolwork, mingled with a somewhat grudging understood. He does not particularly expect this to slow the silent yelling down.
Rei bites her lower lip at Mamoru, and looks almost like she wants to say something, but she decides not to. Not right now, in any case.
Instead she stands near the balcony door, arms crossed and weight shifted to her right leg, listening to Kunzite's explanation of things. "Huh. Okay. She's being targeted so clearly she's guilty of something. That's the logic, right?" Why yes, that is her annoyed face, why do you ask?
Then, to Kyouko, Rei tilts her head. "I thought I felt something a little off in here." She walks towards Kyouko, walking around people and things to reach her. "I can help. Is it all in one place or all over?"
She reaches into her purse for an ofuda, looking over Kyouko to see, or sense, exactly where the dark energy is.
"I haven't really figured out what yet /either/, to be honest. I felt ... something.. but I only got drained a smidge, no voices in my head, I still have all the same emotional accessibility as I did before this." Naru tucks her legs under her, settling cross-legged on the couch as she leans over to set her empty coffee cup on the table.
'A smidge' is technically enough to have made other mundanes in the area weak at the knees, but Naru is currently hopped up on sufficient sugar and caffeine that energy drain is /nothing/, she's hitting hummingbird territory.
"Apparently being a target is reason to make me a target because clearly I'm not doing anything to defend myself, so I deserve it. I think that's how the logic went, but 'logic' is fairly generous. She also called herself a paragon of justice, and was pronouncing her sentance down upon me. I got irritated, but yelling at people only seems to help against Wraiths." Naru comments.
Possibly remarkable, the 'understood' actually shuts up the yelling in Kunzite's head, but with the understanding that Mamoru will want to talk about it rationally later. This is partially underlined by Mamoru's hand squeezing Kunzite's healthy one lightly and a big burst of relieved love that he's here to be grumpy. "Could she pronounce 'paragon of justice' correctly, at least?" Mamoru asks Naru interestedly, then glances back over his shoulder at Kyouko. "You're okay healing yourself whenever again because of the wraiths, too, right?"
Under cover of cape, Mamoru's thumb brushes lightly over Kunzite's arm, now more or less healed-- still sore, not good as new, but no longer in danger of permanent nerve damage or necrosis or anything wretched like that. Then the black-haired boy stands up, half-turning to glance at Naru and Kyouko, then Rei. "You want to ofuda them first?"
Kyouko glances up at Rei again as the dark-haired girl approaches the couch, gesturing to the exposed burn on her arm, and the bandage on her leg, visible white wrapping peeking out from under the hem of her pink skirt. "Just these two places. Dude was shooting dark energy orbs at me.. managed to dodge 'em for the most part but a couple of 'em grazed me. Just the two spots, I think."
Her gaze shifts to Mamoru as he addresses her, and she nods her head. "Yeah.. that ain't a problem. I mean it ain't ideal but it's workable. Problem is this," She gestures to the wounds, "Ain't goin' away with my normal healing. I guess cause of the residual Dark Energy." Or possibly because of her specific reaction to Dark Energy, but either way the solution is the ame. "It should heal up once that gets gone.. I hope."
Then she glances at Naru, processing what she said. "That's a crock of crap if I ever heard one." She snorts. "Justice is about punishing people who hurt others. You ain't never hurt anybody, Naru-chan, so far as I know."
"I think she used the term 'arbiter,' actually. She didn't seem open to jurisdictional disputes." Kunzite returns the light pressure Mamoru exerted, then -- as Mamoru's turning to the others -- lets himself drop back down to jeans and rolled-up sleeves. Of course he tries stretching his left hand. Of course he winces slightly, because that was a terrible idea.
"I didn't see any sign of anything worse in waiting," he adds toward Rei. Nothing like, say, what happened to Ami some months ago. "But you'd be better able to make sure of that." They each have their specialties. He'd like to stay well out of hers.
"Sure, yeah," says Rei to Mamoru. "It'll be easier if I do, I think. Once the dark energy is out of the way the wound should be healable." Then, as Kyouko points to her wounds, Rei kneels to place the first ofuda on Kyouko's arm, then produces another to put on her leg. There's no shouting or yelling, though the dark energy is still being... pushed aside. As if a gentle yet firm hand was shoving it out of the wound, letting it rise into the air like a vapor and dissipate into nothing.
Then she stands up, turning towards Naru and walking over to her with a third ofuda. "I don't know what specific thing is afflicting you, but just to be safe..." She places the ofuda on her forehead. "This should help."
"Oh it was crock enough that she should have been dispensing it with a shovel." Naru nods with agreement of Kyouko's assessment of Shiniko's declarations and then there's a soft snicker. "Paragon isn't quite right.. oh! Right! Artibter of justice! That was it. And I'd negligently supported enemies of justic by getting chewed on. A lot. which, she's not precisely wrong, but she's not exactly /right/ either, and the energy drain and whatever else she did to me is not precisely the most logical of next steps."
Naru nearly crosses her eyes as she watches Rei put an ofuda on her forehead and she mms softly, closing her eyes as she just takes an internal tally. "I can feel the change, but I still dont' know what it was /doing/." She pauses a moment and then opens her eyes. "Like malware in my head, I suppose."
"Besides, if she's using dark energy, or anything that can get splatted away by an ofuda, really, I'm pretty sure her idea of 'justice' is immensely skewed anyway," opines Mamoru incredibly judgementally, flashing Rei a thumbs-up for judicious use of extremely gentle akuryo taisan with one hand and insistently pushing Kunzite's left hand down with the other. Then he pads across to the other couch to see to Naru first and Kyouko second, because a) Kyouko can start healing herself anyway, and b) Naru can't quick-heal at all. She's well familiar with the sensation.
"I'm glad she didn't screw with your emotions. How are they, by the way? Any improvement?"
Kyouko watches, holding still as Rei applies the ofudas to the two wounds. There's no visible difference, but after a moment she nods her head. "Yeah, that's working. I can feel it." She shifts slightly, and offers a slight, lopsided smile to Rei. "Thanks. They should get better on their own now, I think." She's not Sayaka, so her wounds don't close in front of the watching eyes or anything, but they should be gone within a few hours now that the taint had been cleansed away.
Kyouko sits up a bit straighter, shaking her head towards Naru. "Justice is only as strong as the person backin' it up. If her Justice entails you getting hurt, we just gotta show her that our Justice is stronger. Lemme know if you need any help with that."
She glances up as Mamoru comes towards her after Naru, waving him off. "I'm fine dude, don't worry about it."
Mamoru, literally capable of pushing Kunzite around. He stops trying to do much of anything with the hand in question, and instead follows at a little distance, getting a better look at both the injured while staying out of Rei's and Mamoru's ways. "Naru was also our unintentional first report on what precisely the Wraiths do to people," he says aside to Kyouko. "Apparently they feed on emotional capacity. At least when promptly interrupted, courtesy Madoka, it appears to recover over time."
As the ofudas finish their work, they fall off. They cling to darkness as if there was a static charge. Rei catches them, crushes them into little balls and tosses them into her purse. They're used up now, and quite useless, kindof like a gauze that's already soaked with blood.
Her eyes catch the thumbs up, and Rei flashes Mamoru a smile. Once Kyouko and Naru have been cleansed, she stands up and says, "Okay, looks like that's it."
She takes a seat in a nearby chair, tilting her head at Mamoru as if considering something. Suddenly, there's a subtle change in the way she looks, as if she felt something and immediately decided to bury it under a poker face. Rei pulls out a smartphone, her real one and not a burner, and texts Mamoru.
Yes, he's right there. No that doesn't stop her.
TXT to Mamo: Usagi-chan and I went on a date.
"I can't say that I was keen on her perception of justice, no. Nor on getting chewed on /again/, whatever it was she did to me." Naru looks just a touch rueful to Kyouko. "I dont play in the same league of butt kicking as the rest of you. I mostly aim to stay out of the way and behind someone's shields. I'm getting better at that, generally."
"Thank you Rei. That was /so/ SO much better than when Usagi had to escalate to get my brain back." Naru gives a little shiver, clearly not a fan.
As Mamoru provides the entirely too familiar sense of healing there's a little sigh of lingering discomfort having been soothed. "Thank you. Emotions are basically back on line normal. One little hitch that doesnt want to heal, but it's starting to be entirely long enough that I don't think I get to blame the Wraiths anymore, I think the timing is just coincidental. I dunno, we'll see."
Naru takes a slow breath. "The wraiths didnt' just lock emotions away,t hey /removed/ them. I dont want to think about if they actually finished what they started on someone. I got away from one by myself, but yeah, I'd of been screwed if Madoka hadn't shown up to take out the whole pack of them."
Naru adds after a moment. "As a note, if you can't find me after Saturday, I wasn't kidnapped, just on vacation with my mother."
Mamoru lifts his hands, conceding to Kyouko. Then he reaches to take Kunzite's left hand in his, moving so he's alongside him instead of being flanked at a distance. And since Kyouko doesn't want healing, there's that dim gold glow, healing Kunzite's arm the rest of the way. "Good. I really wish dark energy would just GO AWAY, but..." he shrugs a little uncomfortably and lopsidedly to Rei, then glances back to Naru.
He blinks. "Oh, man. You had to get escalated? Listen, if that happens again, call me if there's time. I can make it hurt way less." Then he hears the rest of it, and his brow furrows-- but he gets another text and automatically lets go Kunzite's hand to fish his phone from his pocket and unlock it.
Mamoru blinks again, then thumbs in a reply.
TXT to Rei: it better not have been platonic
Then he looks back to Naru, lips a little pursed. "Thanks for the warning. But if that lingering hitch is going to ruin your vacation, seriously..."
Kyouko watches Rei recover the tags, nodding her head a little bit. "Feels better." She says again, shifting slightly, glancing over at Naru. She actually has a similar reaction to Mamoru when the girl mentions she had been escalated, brows raising. "Man, I had to go through that once. If you can take that, you're tougher'n you look, whatever league you play in."
Her eyes shift to Mamoru again, and she quirks her lips. "You an' me both, bro. Especially considering who I've had problems with lately. I have a.. lingering sensitivity, as ya'll know, and it's becoming damn inconvinient." She sighs softly.
On the topic of Wraiths, she nods thoughtfully. "I haven't actually had to fight that many of 'em yet, but that's.. interesting. I'll file that away."
Difficult things: not automatically glancing over at the phone of the person standing next to you. Kunzite works his hand again silently, this time minus the wince, and keeps his attention firmly on Kyouko and Naru. He does not explain the nature of the lingering hitch. Or anything else.
Rei winces sympathetically at the mention of Naru being Escalated. "Yeeeah. What Usagi does is pretty overwhelming. I don't blame you for not wanting to do that more than once."
Not that Rei's ever had to experience it first hand, but she remembers the reactions of the various Shitennou pretty clearly.
"Even what I just did is gentle compared to how I usually handle it." Apparently she didn't think that slamming a slip of paper against Kyouko's unhealed wounds was a good thing to do.
Rei's watching Mamoru's reaction to the text, only slightly distracted by other conversation. Well, it's not a bad reaction. She glances to her phone, and at the new text, and starts thumbing a response in return.
TXT to Mamo: That's your response, huh?
TXT to Mamo: Oh yeah the deep passionate kiss I gave her was totally platonic. We platonically got our romantic horoscope read, too. The flirting was also totally platonic.
TXT to Mamo: Seriously what do you think a date means? I'm not talking about a playdate here. I already loved her. The way I feel and express that love is changing a bit, that's all.
TXT to Mamo: Anyways I enjoyed it and she seemed like she did, too. So I'm going to keep doing that. Also I don't know for sure but I suspect that Ami-chan might have pictures.
To Naru, Rei nods, seeming distracted but actually paying more attention than might be apparent. "Right. Vacation soon, not a kidnapping. Got it."
"The escalation was after Mou Fubuki's attack." Naru explains with a little gesture of her hands and then she can't help but laugh softly. "Keeping track of which attacks were which basically needs a spreadsheet at the moment, and they're starting to have a lot of similarities.. or I've just had enough of them that I'm noticing patterns, which doesn't help distinguish them. If something happens again that needs an escalation, I will happily wait as long as it takes for you to come make it hurt less." There's a sympathetic look over to Kyouko. "It kinda sucked, yeah?"
Naru was not a fan, but she didn't cry!
"I don't think it'll ruin my vacation. I'll just take more pictures." Naru doesn't add 'instead of drawing, or painting', but it's rather implied by the notion of her taking photos. "And visiting galleries. That's on my list too."
"Well, okay," Mamoru tells Naru dubiously, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. Then he grins at Kyouko. "I know, right? Jeez. She's tough as nails."
Then he nods emphatically to Naru, a little belatedly, as his phone starts binging again. "Yes good. I'll come as fast as I can."
Finally, he glances down at his phone again and makes a face for a second, then looks intrigued before he thumbs out another text.
TXT to Rei: Good. Also I'm afraid of talking to Ami right now, so can you send me the pics? I love seeing her happy and I'm not about to spy on you. And I'm glad you're happy, too, you deserve it.
TXT to Rei: oh sry rite: pix or it didnt happen
TXT to Rei: ofc i am teasing you in case it wasn't clear, didnt she tell you i was fine with it? i mean god knows shes fine with me and kunzite, id have to be a complete asshole to not back you and her
Then he decisively sticks his phone in his pocket and clears his throat. "I'm going to go make coffee and tea."
And then he glides majestically out of the room toward the kitchen.
Kyouko sighs a little bit, standing up after a moment and stretching, linking her hands over her head. "I guess I should get going.. problem's solved, and I got shit to do. Always got shit to do." There's a little sigh. It's hard, working a job, taking care of a little sister, and fighting evil! But she flashes her lopsided grin to encompass all in the room.
"Thanks Rei. Thanks Mamoru.. for me and nii-chan." She walks over to give both Mamoru and Kunzite hugs, adding a little, "Next time you call for help before we show up and make you." to the latter before turning back and giving a wave, saying to Naru, "Remember, you can call me if you're in trouble, too. Have fun on your vacation." Vacation? What's that? Kyouko's hardly even sure.
She crosses back over to the balcony, opens the door, and leaps out in a flutter of white and red.