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Either it was some ******** up dream, or... Gunn Killingworth was sitting, yet again, at the chair he'd been occupying when he'd first -- in her dream? -- saw her. This time there were four ashtrays, all overoccupied, and he was tersely smoking out a cigarette outside the cracked-open window. That was what was letting in the chill; it was cracking up to be a bitterly cold Destiny City winter, and it was probably even snowing a little.

He looked at her -- his sunglasses were pushed up high on his forehead, and he was looking at her with those absurdly pale grey eyes. Complete with the same bruises underneath that she'd seen in -- had it been a dream?

Because all he did was look at her neutrally and say: "You're awake now" -- not as a question, but as a statement of fact. It would have been stupid to make it a question, obviously she was awake.

"Nearly. Five o'clock. Early evening." He killed the cigarette by mashing it into an already-occupied ashtray, and thankfully closed the window -- apparently the first dream had had it right with his spartan apartment; there wasn't apparently a hell of a lot of heating either. Maybe when you were General-King you fuelled your own body heat with annoyance alone.

The leader of the Negaverse looked at her. There was already -- something different -- between them; either that had been one hell of a dream or she was still in one. Eventually, he said: "You're not required to call me Sir any more, Captain. General-King and -- Charonite are appropriate."

Charonite deferential?

"This is the point when I ask you if you're -- goddamn all right."

He leant back in his chair, looking at her for a moment before oddly enough, his gaze was torn away; he was looking out the window to the grim, unattractive Hillworth campus, where there were a few students outside. Late afternoon. Probably he'd be going to one of the late-night basketball teams? Or what? It had been a while since she had been at Hillworth and known its familiar routines -- it was Barren Pines now, which was anything but familiar.

"Our queen, Beryl," he said eventually -- in the tones of somebody who didn't want to tell a story, but was about to, and was about to do it in as few words as possible -- "was the leader of the Negaverse. Couple thousand years ago. Political situation between the Earth and the Moon was all-out war." This was not something she had ever been told. None of them had been told this. Thousand years ago, what? "Moon finally seized on a badly-planned ceasefire seducing the Earth's stupid ******** god damned prince who could not ******** resist a pretty ******** face -- planned on undermining the military and taking him into their god damned matriarchal bullshit monarchy, so the Earth would be under Serenity's power.

"Beryl lead the knights still loyal to the Earth monarchy to war. We were ambushed, but managed to do enough ******** damage to kill the court. Got reborn in 1983 due to a ********. Did it again. All died, again. Now we're here and we're Earth loyalists, trying to get the rightful ruler -- Beryl -- you -- into place."

He was fiddling with the ashtray again before he looked at her. "Our Queen died in the 1980s. The last gift she left us was her crystallized soul -- and my forebears' corpses, much ******** use those dipshits were apart from Lord Kunzite, didn't realise they stacked s**t that high. Thought it would only go into the body of a corrupted senshi. Turns out it didn't want Nova, didn't want Tisiphone."

Charonite narrowed his eyes. "She wanted you."

He looked at her. God, things had changed. There was none of the irritation nor the anger that his personal space had been invaded, though he did inch his arm away minutely from her -- he wasn't nervous. Charonite was never nervous. But he was as tense as a taut bowstring, and he took his sunglasses down from his forehead and clenched them shut with slightly wan knuckles. He wasn't nervous. But he was -- something.

"I don't pretend to know what the hell is going on in the Queen's head," he said tersely. "She picked you. If you want the answer to that question, ask yourself."

He flicked the sunglasses with his fingers -- open, shut. Open.

"Ursula."

He'd said her name, that also had to mean something --

"Captain, I am..." Exhalation. "A bad ******** idea."

"Nealite, goddamnit."

He stood up, grabbing both of her wrists in his hold, back to the usual old precision Charonite glare; he shook them free immediately as though he'd been burnt -- or as though he'd burnt her. "May I remind you that you are the Queen," he spat out. "Queens don't do secretary work. Queens don't go ******** chasing after Castor, you can have the last blow when we bring him in -- Queens don't go running around without back-up. You think the moment Astraea doesn't learn we've gotten the soul in you she'll aim every ******** senshi in Destiny City your way? She can't control hers either, but you can't control yours, your Majesty. You are too important to ******** lose."

The General-King hauled her up to stand -- and then suddenly his fingers were cupping and stroking along her jaw, behind her ear, his thumb briefly flirting with the side of her mouth. "Queens," he said, "can't -- fraternize."

"Queens have to ******** rule," he said, but he was unravelling now. He'd actually paused. That had been a weighty pause. It was the pause of somebody who had had a train of thought that had been pretty derailed, and he was staring at her like a dying man who had suffered years without water and was now faced with a pretty large oasis: somebody who had forgotten the purpose of water and what it looked like. A dim memory pretty hurriedly making its return. "Queens have rules. You are now the heir to Earth's throne. When we get you your queendom, you'll be god damn marrying the best they can ******** offer, even Endymion if we have to drag his a** across your ******** floor; though frankly I'd rather see his head on a ******** pike."

She was still pouting. He seemed pretty fixated on the fact that she was pouting. He said, "Nova makes shitty coffee," distantly, without actually realising he was saying it.

When Charonite came back to himself, he shifted his hand away from her mouth (away from the mouth) to sift through her hair, cradling the back of her skull again. She'd made a good point about the safety of Hillworth compared to the rest of Destiny City. So why wasn't he addressing it? Charonite usually attacked everything with case-by-case yellbacks. "Ursula," he said, urgently. "You are a god damned queen. I am your guard. And you're -- nobody's whore."

He did not choke. General-Kings did not choke. General-Kings did, however, apparently stare down at the visage of their former secretary with their sunglasses firmly ensconced at their forehead, and did not stare down a little like a man who has been placed before him a terrible puzzle and knows a way to solve it. Nealite had been waiting far too long. He was apparently pretending that he was a brick wall at this point, an unkissable brick wall, though then he realised that as a brick wall Ursula had him on defense pinned underneath her offensive and that it was probably time to either start a retreat or a counterattack.

General-Kings did not retreat.

He walked her forward into the wall, pressing her shoulders back against it, preventing her from making any more inroads into the territory of his mouth or throat. She was at his jugular. Nobody had ever had him by the throat, goddamnit. "Move into the Hillworth dorms," he said, "if you're in the same housing as Nova and Tisiphone you'll be ******** guarded well enough." This was not a sexy solution. But he'd pinned her, and he ripped the sunglasses off her head to drop them without preamble on the floor, and his mouth was at her ear. For somebody who was talking an awful lot about 'not fraternizing' his body was awfully up close and personal.

"What do you goddamn want from me, Ursula?"

Beat. His lips were brushing her ear now. And the pretty lame: "Do you even know how much older I am than you?"