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The moment Aree passed the threshold into Audrey's room, the door slammed behind her. Were it Tanzanite slamming it, the additional strength would likely have splintered the frame. The daybed creaked as Aree threw herself onto it, careless of the fact that she was probably going to get blood on the coverlet. She buried her face into one of several pillows and screamed. She screamed and she screamed and she screamed. She screamed until Tanzanite was yelling in her head, throwing out words like weak and pathetic and demanding that she stop all of that nonsense. She screamed until her throat felt raw and she had to bite down on the fabric to choke back her anger.

But why?

Why did she care? Why was she so angry, so upset that Audrey's boyfriend had been so kind? It made little sense to a woman so hellbent on not giving a damn about anything. Someone who survived by disconnecting. She should have brushed it off, kept her calm, and did what she always did: vanished into the dark, cold comfort of the Negaverse subspace. Still, there was something cathartic about screeching into that pillow until her voice cracked and her lungs burnt and the room seemed to swim around her. It was months worth of anger and frustration and rage pouring out of her, absorbed by something as amazingly, perfectly normal as a lace-fringed throw pillow in a teenage girl's bedroom.

It was a sad mirage of a moment that she should have had, crying into a pillow on her best friend's daybed. It should have been over a boy. Over a test grade. Over a pregnancy scare or an unrequited love. It should not have been months of fear and rage and sadness, and an overwhelming guilt that had slipped through the thick black scales and into the pit of her stomach.

Audrey meant well, and a rational Aree would have understood that. However, Aree had never been particularly rational. One might even go so far as to say that she was incredibly irrational, and a brave soul might even venture into the territory of calling her kind of a ******** nutter butter. Several deep breaths and a short while after Audrey had entered the room, the young woman pulled her face from a now tear-stained pillow and stared up at Audrey. Her features seemed permanently cast in that angry expression, lips pursed and brows drawn down.

“What the hell are you thinking?” She snapped, never minding the fact that she was in Audrey's home crying into Audrey's pillow while Audrey worried about whether or not she was going to bleed out all over her parent's carpey. “You're a God-damned Negaverse agent, not Molly ******** Ringwald. A boyfriend, Audrey?” Aree stood, jabbing an accusing finger in Audrey's direction, “What happens when he finds out who you are? What you are?”

Aree corrected that last part, as though she considered them all equally monsters.

“Don't you dare,” Aree was on her feet, speaking through teeth clenched so hard that they felt like they might crack. The mention of Ursula's name sent the girl into a practical frenzy, both fists clenched at her sides. She swayed in place, powering through the light-headedness, fueled by pure outrage, “<********> Ursula's not having a <********> baby because <********> Ursula is <********> GONE!” She screamed the last word, tears brimming her eyes as she stepped across the open space between them and jabbed a finger into Audrey's shoulder, “So don't you dare use her to excuse your.. your...” Aree fumbled over the word, “Your stupidity.”

She threw up her hands, as though giving up, “You think this is a game? You think what, Audrey? He finds out and he tells you he loves you anyways and you live happily ever after while you kill people as your day job? You think he's going to understand that? This isn't a twenty-hour a week job at a coffee shop, Audrey! This is your life, now. This is our life and I'm not going to go through this alone while you go ride off into the sunset with your ******** boyfriend!”

And there it was. The truth, slipping out of her mouth in a moment of anger and weakness. Aree was not angry, she was jealous. Ursula was gone – by the looks of it, forever – and now Audrey had a boyfriend. Someone to hold onto. Someone to anchor her to real life and keep her from getting pulled under by the riptide that was the Negaverse. Meanwhile, Aree was frantically clinging to scraps of emotion and struggling not to drown.

“You wand to know what I think you are, Audrey? You're a ******** murderer. Just like me.”

“You corrupted your cousin because you were too weak to do your ******** job alone!” Aree screamed, shoving Lina back in return. The black skin at her fingertips was growing, crawling up her fingers as she lost her careful control. She barked a laugh that sounded nothing at all like Aree, and all too much like the murderous Negaverse Captain inside of her, “Don't like to yourself. You corrupted your cousin because you care more about you than her. You're dating that boy – that poor ******** guy – because you care more about your loneliness than his life. You said it yourself, Audrey. Beryl trapped her two best people. The people who brought her back to life. What makes you think she would hesitate for a second to kill that boy? She would do it to punish you. ********, Audrey, she would do it because she was bored!”

Aree was screaming each word by then, and the pain in her voice was not even thinly disguised. It was there, clear as day, a seething jealousy that somehow Audrey had managed to do what she had not. She had manged to have a normal life. To balance her life in the Negaverse with the one outside of it, sacrificing neither in full.

She had manged to be happy.

“If you die, then you die for the Negaverse, you pathetic little-” Aree stopped short as Audrey's hands shoved her back. It took nothing more than that touch to shatter Aree's fragile control. What was left of the broken, emotional teenager was swallowed up in hate as Tanzanite ripped through her human disguise like claws through tissue paper. Even as she was swallowed up in purple leather and black scales, her screams rang out. The voice was not entirely her own, echoed by the dark, sinister presence of the youma that seemed to gain more and more control each day.

“Tomorrow, Audrey? Oh, no. No, no, no. I'm going to let you find out what happens today.”

That shaking, shivering body had gone, replaced by Tanzanite's confident and towering frame. Her face was a mask of anger, not even the slightest hint of rationality to be found in those narrowed gray eyes. The arm that had previously been so fond of Audrey went for the bluenette's throat, and her intent was clear.

She wasn't going to stop until she saw the light leave Audrey's eyes.

Understanding came over Tanzanite in a wave, but it did little to quell her anger. If there was one thing, anything, Tanzanite believe in, it was the power of the Negaverse. It was the one thing that had always answered her desperate prayers, always been there in her most dire moments. It gave her a second chance at life when Kunzite had nearly stolen it away. The power of the Negaverse was absolute in Tanzanite's mind, and it was that complete faith which made her know that she was already fighting a losing battle.

Still, it wasn't going to keep her from seeing it through to the end. Her knees nearly buckled from the force of the blow, and a long moment passed before the Captain could recover her breath and force her lungs to work.

“Do that to you? To YOU?!,” she rasped, “You have everything. Ursula was all I had and she was all that stood in your way. You hated her- " Tanzanite's free fist was pummeling uselessly into the wall behins Linarite's head, "you hated her! I loved her and I needed her and she's gone and you don't even care!!"

It indeed took a great deal of strength to wrench the monstrous hand from Linarite's throat, but it was strength which the General had in excess. Strength which the Captain could not compare to. While she had been on the other side of the world, it seemed that Linarite had done something awfully right in Beryl's eyes. For a brief moment, Tanzanite's eyes widened in what could only have been fear. It was a fleeting expression, quickly masked by anger and jealousy. How could this have happened? How could she have earned nothing but a quick dismissal while Linarite – Linarite with a family and a life and a boyfriend – had been promoted to General?

Rage came over Tanzanite like a tidal wave, crashing into whatever small bit of logic might have been left and sweeping it away. Her voice was little more than a guttural scream as she threw herself at her former friend, the sharp teeth in the center of her youma hand's palm gnashing violently, desperate to take a chunk out of the blue-haired General.

There was nothing that could be done, no defense to be thought of. She was powerless against the force of a General, and no amount of fury or outrage or combat experience was going to change that fact that Linarite was faster, stronger, and more powerful than she was. Her head snapped sideways with the force of that slap, and before her vision cleared the world was breaking apart around her, reflected in shards of falling glass. Cold wrapped her body as she flew through the chill night air, surrounded by the combined darkness of midnight and blurred vision. There was a sharp snap, snap, snap as her body broke through the tree branches, but they did little to cushion the hard impact with the frozen ground below.

Tanzanite's body hit the ground hard, bouncing like a ragdoll on impact. It was only the power of the Negaverse that save her from a broken neck, but that dark and mysterious force did nothing to keep her ribs from snapping like twigs. Every breath came with a sharp stab of pain, and it was only Linarite's words that drug her to her feet. It was a slow, pitiful process, the youma arm clawing at the bark of the tree to pull her body up. It was as though no matter how broken, no matter how battered the rest of her body, the arm itself had no intention of giving up. The scales had crawled up along her neck, the spine on the shoulder twisting in agony. Her eyes seemed darker, her features wild, and her voice was unmistakably deeper as she spoke. Tanzanite could have given herself over entirely, and it would have made no difference.

“I don't see,” she was laughing as she spoke. Tanzanite sucked in one ragged, painful breath and spit out a mouthful of blood, “You're so afraid,” she rasped, “Of facing the truth.” Tanzanite finally managed to get on her feet, and the black hand snapped off the thickest branch in reach, “You're going to lose everything. Then, you won't have anyone else. You won't have any other choice.”

“Then, you can't leave me.” Her smile was unsettling, as much because of the malice it contained as from the blood that stained her teeth, “You'll be Just. Like. Me. ”

The words were punctuated with a grunt as she lunged forward, dredging up any last bits of energy she could muster as she swung for Linarite's head.

The cracking noise was sickly satisfying, but the uplift it caused in Tanzanite's mood was shortlived. She heard Linarite's voice, but it was distant. An afterthought that trailed behind her brutal, single-minded desire to rip the General limb from limb. She was all anger and violence, without a nook or cranny for Linarite's pain to take hold and pull from her some kind of sympathy. She would have thrown herself at the General again and again, had that latest attack not landed with a gut-wrenching crack.

Tanzanite collapse to the glass-covered ground as her leg snapped, unable to support herself. Her human arm extended, trying to break her fall, but was rewarded with only a shard of glass that sliced through her palm. She tried to get up, and though it seemed like a mighty effort in her mind, her body barely moved. Only the black arm still fought, clawing at the grounds with teeth gnashing and snarling, as thought it would drag the dead weight of Tanzanite's body into battle behind it.

The Captain sucked in a rasping, wheezing breath, and blood gurgled in her throat with the exhale. A bruise was already starting to show along her cheekbone, the pale skin around her eye puffed and swollen in the early stages of a black eye. Her entire body shook with the low, weak laughter, a defeated Tanzanite still fighting, if only with words.

“She'll take anything she wants from you,” she spat out the words along with the blood that continued to fill her mouth, “Everything. Including him.”

Tanzanite spoke with such conviction that there was no doubt that she believed every word. They were servants of the Queen now, indebted and enslaved, and there was no way out.

There was no way back.

It was a warning, she knew. An incredibly painful warning that sunk the point straight into the marrow of her bones, causing her entire body to writhe. Tanzanite was no stranger to pain. Kunzite's sword and Beryl's “gift” had brought her a familiarity with it that few would ever know. This, however, was different. This was a pain that extended far beyond physical, that cut into her core and hooked into every single cell until her jaw was open as wide as it could go but no scream could escape to relieve her.

Worst of all, when Linarie grasped her starseed, it brought the dirty, broken thing to Tanzanite's attention. She could feel it there, a hollow and blackened remnant of what a starseed should have been. It was a youma's starseed that had created the arm that now lay uselessly pinned beneath the General's knee, and Tanzanite's was barely in better shape than the twisted, coal-like lump of stone that Charonite had merged with hers that day.

“I killed them, Lina.” Her voice was little more than a whisper, but there it was. The haunting secret of what she had done thousands of miles across the ocean. Why she had been sent away for those many months. Why she had come back with her memory broken, never wanting to face what she had done. It was a terrible deed, one which she had accepted with doglike eagerness to please their Queen. One which had slowly tested her loyalty and proven a nearly fatal weakness.

“They were... they were barely even more than children. Somehow she knew they would be awakened... and I killed them. I wanted to kill them. For her. For the Negaverse. Oh God, Lina. I killed them, I killed them, I killed them.” She repeated, over and over and over as though admitting it would somehow absolve her of that terrible sin. She repeated it until her words merged into an indiscernible and frantic mumbling.

Her breathing was ragged and heavy, and there was no hiding the fact that broken ribs and a busted up face made every breath a labored task. Her lungs shook, and though no tears would come to comfort her swollen eyes, it became quickly obvious that the battered Captain was nearly sobbing. The hand she was able to move grasped the fabric of Linarite's uniform, her head turned sideways to press her cheek against the gray-clad arm. Into it, she unleashed a low, desperate cry. It was something halfway between a scream and a sob, and it grew until it became an indistinguishable mix of fear and loathing and sadness.

And even though the sound was almost monstrous in it's self-loathing, it was perhaps the most human thing Tanzanite had done in her short, miserable life.