It's later on Halloween evening. After that incident in the parker earlier, Jadeite had teleported Mamoru back home, and the rest of the group had surely followed in quick succession. The ECFH is a bit somber as a result, plans for any late-night partying having taken a backseat. Kyouko is in the kitchen, still wearing her halloween getup, the perkigoth lazy costume of a skull-decorated tanktop, black shorts and fishnets and dark makeup. She just hasn't really had the time or wherewithal to change yet.
The other guys are no doubt off doing some combination of taking care of Mamoru and themselves, but Kyouko self-medicates via food, which is why she is currently tearing into the wrapper of a fun-sized candybar that came from the big bowl on the counter. The wrapper joins a pile of several others already on the counter as she chews, staring off into the distance silently as she does, clearly thinking.
Makoto disappeared for a bit as people filtered off in their own directions. Where she went might not have been quite clear in the shuffle, until she emerges back into view of the kitchen area dressed in the change of clothes she keeps over here for just this kind of occasion.
Not that 'had a disturbing encounter with an undead horror while wearing a fancy ballgown costume' was high on the list of contingencies necessarily planned for, but... they lead eventful lives. Things happen.
Now in jeans and an oversized sweater with her hair yanked back into a careless ponytail, Makoto shuffles into the kitchen to join Kyouko at the candy bowl.
"Good idea," she says. "Mind sharing?"
"Normally," Kyouko says, her eyes shifting to Makoto as the other girl enters the room, "I'd fight somebody to the death if they tried to take away my candy." She gives a lopsided grin. "But I guess since it's you I can make an exception." She pushes the bowl a little towards her friend. "Besides, this is technically communal candy anyway."
She pops another piece into her mouth, chewing for a moment, before saying, "So.. pretty interesting night, huh?" She leans her elbow on the counter. "I mean.. I didn't really know Silenus, but I didn't expect to run into a literal undead zombie on halloween. It seems almost.." She pauses, thinking, then finishes, "inappropriate."
Makoto answers Kyouko's grin with an amiably wry one of her own. "Why do you think I asked first? I'm a hundred percent done fighting for one evening."
She fishes a candy bar out of the bowl and peels open the wrapper, occupying herself with nomming down for a short interval.
"It does seem rude," she agrees once she's finished downing the hit of chocolate. "I know this sort of thing comes with the territory, but..." Sighing, she shakes her head a little and reaches for another piece of candy.
"I didn't really know him either," she admits, fiddling with the wrapper. "I kind of recognize the name, but the past life stuff is fuzzy for me to begin with."
"Don't worry," Kyouko says, with equal wryness, "Getting my ass kicked by you once a week is more than enough for me. I don't need to ask for a second helping."
Kyouko tilts her head slightly, still leaning on the counter, as she grabs another piece of candy, idly twirling it around her fingers rather than unwrapping it herself as she gives Makoto a curious look. "I forget sometimes, that you have that whole past-life thing going on, too." She says. "I mean, I've gotten used to it with the guys but.. it's not like anyone really likes to talk about it. Still seems weird to me.. though, sometimes it feels like not being a part of it makes me a junior member of the club." She smirks at herself faintly, unwrapping the candy at last.
Mako's head dips a little in acknowledgement, her eyes drifting downwards toward the floor. "I think the others remember more than I do... but yeah. I don't think anybody really wants to talk about it too much."
She fidgets a little longer with the bandy wrapper, still not quite opening it. "Personally," she tells Kyouko, looking up again, "I don't think you're missing out on much. But I'm not sure I see the whole thing quite the same as the other senshi do."
Kyouko shrugs her shoulders. "Well, I ain't lookin' to make you think unpleasant thoughts tonight, Mako-chan, especially after what we just went through." She says, with a small smile. "It just got me thinkin', y'know. As far as I know, I don't have a past life. I mean, maybe I do.. maybe everybody does? But if so I don't remember it."
"But it does make me wonder if.. now that I'm, y'know.. an official Earth Court member and stuff.. if I died, would I come back? Like the other guys, and you Senshi did?" She twists her lips to the side in a half-grimace. "Not sure how I feel about it, honestly. And since the only way to actually find out is to die, I can't say I'm really in a hurry to resolve the question."
"I'm not sure we'd come back again if we died," Makoto points out. "I mean, I'm pretty sure niisan assumes we will, but the way things ended last time was... kind of an extreme scenario. And it's not like we had a bunch of other lives in between."
Beat. As the ramifications of what she just said start to occur to her, she makes a very wry face and tears open the mini candy bar. "At least, if I did I sure don't remember any of it."
She pops the chocolate into her mouth, takes a little time to chew and swallow before continuing. "The point is, I don't think coming back is something we should count on either way."
"I guess that's true." Kyouko allows, chewing her own candy and swallowing after a moment, adding to the pile of wrappers on the counter. "I mean, like I said. The only way to know for sure is to die, and I'm not in a hurry to do that. For a long time I thought I'd be dead before I turned sixteen, and now here I am at eighteen with question-mark-question-mark years ahead of me. I'm going to milk it for all it's worth." She grins.
"I just.. don't like to see the past coming back to hurt Mamoru, that's all." She quickly adds, "Anybody else either, but. He's more sensitive to it than most. Because he's more sensitive about everything than most." She shrugs again. "In that way, I guess I do feel kinda special, since at least I'm proof that some things do change."
At this, Mako smiles - not so wryly, this time. "That's right," she agrees. "You are. And it's a good thing. Even if it seems like that life keeps butting in on this one every time we turn around... we're not supposed to stay tied to it forever.
"At least," she adds, crushing the wrapper in her hand before she drops it among the others, "that's what I think. Like I said, I'm not sure I see it the way the others do. Or maybe it just feels that way since we don't talk about it a lot."
"Yeah well," Kyouko says dismissively, turning around to lean her hips against the counter and cross her arms, apparently having had her fill of candy for the moment, "I know what it's like to have a past that comes back to haunt you, even if mine isn't nearly as far in the past as the one you all have to deal with."
She smiles in return, though. "I think that's a good attitude. And that's not just my 'left out of the past-lives' imposter syndrome talking. While I know what it's like to have a past that comes back to haunt you, I also know that putting your past behind you is usually a healthy thing. There's too much future coming our way to turn our backs to it. That's what I think."
"And that," Makoto declares, digging into the candy bowl again, "is probably one of the reasons we get along so well. That and punching people, but, y'know."
Once again, she doesn't open the candy wrapper right away, though this time it seems less like preoccupation and more like she's decising whether or not to go for piece number three. "You and I see it the same way, I think. We worked too hard to keep the past from repeating itself to keep looking back to it all the time. What's ahead is what's important."
"Punching people definitely has something to do with it, if only because we both need someone we can punch without breaking so we can get better at punching the things that really deserve to be punched." She grins.
"Not," She then adds, "That forgetting the past is a good thing. I made a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes I don't want to repeat. Even if it is kind of painful to look back and see what a total bitch I was." She winces self-deprecatingly. "Be thankful that by the time you met me, Mamoru and Usagi and people had already started to wear away the sharp edges a little bit. You would not have liked 14-year-old Kyouko."
Makoto muses over this for a moment. "Everybody's had their fuckups," she decides shortly. "Some more dramatic than others, but it's not like I can judge you for stuff that happened before we met." She lifts her shoulders, pushing away Kyouko's description of her past self with a little shrug.
"Not that you're not right, of course. Learning from the past is an important part of not repeating it, and all."
"Sister, you don't even know the meaning of the word fuckup until you've heard about my early teenage years." Kyouko says, dryly, but grins. "And I sure hope not, or else I'd be pretty screwed. Luckily everyone around here is the forgiving type, or so it seems to me."
She goes for another piece of candy after all, the temptation of the bowl sitting there just within reach too much even though five minutes ago she had decided she had had enough. "That said, leaning from the past is all well and good, but I can do without it literally coming back as a zombie and attacking me. Or the people I care about. Should we be concerned about why that happened?"
Makoto, meanwhile, apparently decides against that third piece and is about to drop it back into the bowl - at least until Kyouko asks that question. Then she sighs and peels the wrapper open anyway.
"Probably," she answers. "But hell if I know what must've happened to cause all that. If it was just Golden Kingdom crap coming back around, you'd think it would've been acting up back when the Dark Kingdom was doing its thing."
She bites the piece of chocolate in half, chewing meditatively. "Or maybe it did and we just didn't run into it? Ugh, I hate trying to figure these things out."
"I know, right?" Kyouko says in solidarity. "This is why we have our Kunzites and Amis and various other people with big brains. They figure out what needs to get smashed and then we can go smash it and be home in time for supper." She adds her latest wrapper to the pile, shaking her head. "But I have to think about it anyway."
"It's possible that it was just a fluke, a random attack on Mamoru that just happened to be on halloween and just happened to be related to the past but. I'm getting paranoid in my old age and if we're going to end up with more 'visitors' I'd really like to be forwarned next time. Talk about putting a damper on an otherwise fun evening."
A brief, horrified pause. "My Palace used to be the Dark Kingdom. The actualy physical location anyway. I really hope nothing weird is happening there." She grunts. "I wish I could teach Benjy to use a cell phone so I could check in without actually going back."
Mako winces a little at the thought. "Maybe you could get him a communicator or something. It really seems like a design flaw if the Palace Guardians can't get in touch with you guys when they need to. Especially considering anything causing trouble in the Palaces is probably going to be big trouble."
Pulling a face, she shakes her head as though trying to shake off negativity. "It'd be nice if tonight was just one of those random things that just happened because it was Halloween night and the stars were in the wrong alignment and something got through that should've have been able to. But let's face it, we're probably not that lucky."
"Not that I really think there's anything wrong in the Palace," Kyouko says. "I feel like I'd.. probably feel it, if there were? Just talking about the Dark Kingdom kind of made me paranoid, and it'd be nice to be able to check." She smirks. "Mamoru might balk at giving a communicator to a rat though, even a talking one."
"Well, you never know. Those things do happen." She adds, with another shrug. "It's just that those things are usually dumb random monsters like that jello slime we fought in an alleyway a while back. When something pops up with legit ties to the shared past, I start getting nervous that there's something more behind it."
"Because there usually is," sighs Makoto. "I get it. Though if you think you'd feel something going weird in your Palace, at least that's something."
She's eyeing the candy bowl again, though she doesn't make another move for it yet. "Also we get the communicators literally from cats, so niisan's not allowed to complain about giving one to the talking rat. Though I guess Luna might protest."
"You should feel it," says the Slightly Less Grim Reaper from the hallway. Kunzite has the hood of his costume cast back, still, the black veils that mask his face trailing down his back beneath the tied-back tail of his hair. "We didn't have the possibility of communicators, so the design built in what we could."
He considers the prospect of Luna plus favor plus talking rat gravely. "You might consider asking Mamoru to invest in fish first. Heavily."
"Eh. It'd probably just spoil him anyway." Kyouko says, of Benjy, turning to face Kunzite as he enters the room. She tilts her head slightly. "Mamoru doing okay?" Though she has to assume that he is, or else Kunzite wouldn't be here talking to them.
"And that's reassuring. I figured as much, that I'd sort of get the gist something wasn't right if my Palace was under attack or whatever. But like I said.. paranoia kinda comes with the territory."
"Let's be real, between Minako-chan, Zoi, Neil, and Jadeite, Benjy's probably not even halfway up the list of 'people most likely to use communicators to troll people'. But, fair."
Kunzite joining them prompts Makoto to stop considering the candy bowl; she looks over, raising a hand in greeting, and waits to hear his answer regarding Mamoru before she says more than, "Hi."
"Managing," Kazuo answers, taking a spot against the wall near the hallway, rather than competing for the candy bowl's contents. "Mildly distressed, but that's his tendency to adopt guilt as if it were a kitten in a rescue shelter. More confused than anything else, I think. He's all right now, and he'll be fine by tomorrow."
Kunzite lets an eyebrow twitch upward in Makoto's direction. "Zoi wouldn't use the communicators to troll people more than once. Of that entire list, he's the only one who would be sorely affected by tactical shedding. And good evening."
"Ah yes, 'managing'. The state most of us can aspire to most days, and often fail to achieve." Kyouko says somewhat dryly. "Honestly getting buried in mud is pretty much just as horrifying as phantoms from the past to me, so I'm glad to hear that he's only mildly distressed."
Kyouko has already had an unhealthy amount of self-medication in the form of candy, so she resists temptation to go for any more. This being a communal bowl though, there's still plenty of Kazuo changes his mind. "Maybe I can just get an interdimensional intercom or something. Like a baby monitor."
Mako tips her head in acknowledgement. "Good point," she tells Kazuo, "but I'm standing by my statement. And," the humor softens out of her expression, "that's good to hear. Tonight wasn't fun for anybody, but I'm pretty sure he had it the worst. If he's coping, then I'm glad."
... from the expression on Kazuo's face, he is the one mildly distressed at the moment. At the concept of an interdimensional baby monitor.
Though not distressed enough to move for the candy.