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One week later.

Sleeping at night had been proving difficult. Every time the raven-haired student closed her eyes to lay down and sleep all she could see was fire and the loss of control. The burn on her arm had been slowly healing since it was dealt by magical fire and was a reminder to Eilian that she was heading down that slippery slope. Days passed and fingers gingerly pressed into it to sharpen the pain and make a reminder. Do not ever lose control like this again.

Everything was made harder, of course, by the fact that Ares had not been seen since the battle. For the first day or two she'd been too wrapped up in her own things and sleeping off the pain and adrenaline to be much concerned. If Eilian had a crazed General-Queen hunting her, she would probably lie low too. But on the third day when she'd knocked on Fallon's door before using the key she'd palmed, the room hadn't been touched.

Of course Fallon often made everything so clean it looked like a showroom but there were variant differences. There were no signs of life and the air was stale. No life had been in this room for days. Worry started then. On the fourth day she'd reached out to the ISS. Ares would not have left her flock without a leader but none of those she'd talked to had any idea where Ares could be.

Panic had her reaching for Gaia and Laocoon. Certainly they would know! Or have a way to track! Blanks all around. That crazy b***h Tanzanite would certainly have gloated had Ares been dead so there was some slight relief there. Albali patrolled for two more nights, looking for clues before sitting down and admitting the real harsh truth.

Ares was not in Destiny City.

Another Friday night had Eilian sitting on her bed and paging through contacts, to-do activities, anything that she could have been doing other than sitting around worrying. But Fallon was her best friend, as well as admittedly a rather large crush that was undeniable. She'd left, wasn't dead, where could she be?

With Iva? No. Too turbulent. But...somewhere peaceful nearby? It was nagging at the back of her mind as pale hands came to block the light and help the teen think. There was one place that Fallon had spoken of over one of their business-and-fun dinners.

It was worth a shot, honestly. Hands dropped from her face as Eilian jumped from bed and rushed over towards her computer. It was probably fortunate that she'd been somewhat sparse in her expenditures for the past few months. Father wasn't going to be happy about the cost of a first-class flight to France on the red-eye at the last minute. Yet without taking anyone with her on this fool trip there was no better way.

Two months ago, Fallon had mentioned this place in one of their late-night chats in one of her rare moments of reminiscence about her civilian life before Destiny City, before the Parallel Court, before the Blood Moon. A wooden sign hung off a chipped fence post at the edge of the dirt road. There was a light pink teacup etched onto the hanging sign, and nothing else. No words, no address, just a little teacup. It was the teacup that told Eilian she was in the right place.

The building itself was a tiny cottage framed on either side by a lush green field nestled in a sleepy town in the south of France. Rose bushes lined the walkway up to the cherrywood door. Despite the quaint decorations, there were signs of disuse everywhere. The grass had overgrown, the windows were boarded up, and the roof had a gaping hole in it. This place had once been something special. Now it was just a husk of its former self.

When Eilian touched the door handle, it swung open without any resistance. Someone had already snapped the lock. Inside, a few stray pieces of furniture, broken mostly, littered the small foyer. A white sheet stained with gray and brown scuffs hung halfway off the corner of a mirror. A mirror. A mirror that was in much better condition than anything else in the small cottage.

As she stepped inside and closed the door behind her, Eilian heard a muffled sniffle coming from the next room. She glanced around the corner. Fallon was sitting in the middle of the room. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and her head buried against the legs of her freshly-starched jeans. She was crying. Eyes closed in relief at the sound; though the sound was not exactly familiar the pitch of voice was.

"Fallon?"

Relief and worry warred with a tinge of exasperation before sensibility won out with worried relief. Fallon was alright, physically if not emotionally, and that is what was sending Eilian into a tizzy. Another nagging part of her brain reminded the teen that she had a responsibility to alert everyone that no, their fearless leader wasn't dead but...was that what Fallon wanted? To let everyone know she'd run away to France to hide and cry out all of her disappointment, anger, and fear?

Not really.

Fingers rubbed at tired eyes before she walked over and sank to her knees at Fallon's side. A light hand stroked at tangled hair as comfortingly as she knew how. "Failed us how? You held them for two weeks Fallon. It was only at the end when that crazy b***h snapped and lost her mind that everything sorta fell apart. But think of what we accomplished. What we learned! They can be stopped, and broken, and nobody had thought about that before you came along." Moral support was attempted and Eilian liked to think that she was pretty good at it.

At least as good at support as she was for blunt assessment of anyone's flaws! What Eilian really wanted to do was hug her friend and just beat into her head that Ares was an excellent senshi and the best leader Albali had ever found. She was proud to say that she was in the Blood Moon Court no matter what her friends like Elegancia thought about them. The BMC was the best thing that had ever happened to Sailor Albali and Fallon needed to know that.

Sometimes Eilian hoped she already did.

If there was ever any resentment that Eilian had held towards her friend it was that Fallon assumed that just because she was of the White Moon, she belonged to some sort of elite club. She'd never really understood what the problem was between White Moon and Black Moon and why the two couldn't live in harmony. There wasn't a place or time to ask and how could she know that Nehelenia had once tried to make this world her own by force and through Chaos? Derpraline didn't know a damn thing and was as unhelpful as a guardian cat could ever be.

All of that was less important than what Fallon was moaning into her knees. "Don't let them do that to you. Doubting yourself is the worst possible thing you could do! If you think it was all wrong then those three died for nothing at all, which I refuse to believe. The others? They just don't want to believe that they could screw up. They chose to follow you and just because they don't like where the path led you're some kind of monster? That's their weakness not yours." A fist thudded against Eilian's knee for emphasis.

Umbrage spent she sighed. "It ended badly but it wasn't because of you. Nobody could have guessed that Tanzanite would chew up a hidden communicator and summon the wrath of hell down on us. She is the real monster and you can't forget that okay? Nothing you could have done would have stopped her from being the monster that she is and we...we did learn a lot." It wasn't that the teen was excusing the fact that things had ended badly and it could have gone better. Things could always go better than you wanted them to and it wasn't through fault of effort or methods that things had happened how they did.

Fingers pulled tear-damp, sticky hair back from her friend's neck and smoothed things as best as she could. It was almost a habit now, helping keep Fallon and her things in the perfect order she preferred them. "I am sorry that you lost something and can't get it back but." Lips pushed together. Feelings were so awkward for her sometimes; things never really worked like they did in her romance fairytale stories, did they? "But I'm here and I don't think there's anything wrong with you. It's not hopeless and I'm not giving up on you." Maybe that's what she expected from a 'White Mooner' but it wasn't happening.

Albali may have been of the White Moon, but she'd found far more purpose and belonging under the Blood.

It was a dual point. It was one of the few places where Eilian was willing to excuse a lack of resolve for several reasons. The main one was that it was never quite so easy to kill people as Ares wanted it to be. As any of them wanted it to be, really. Albali would have loved to not have her stomach roil at the memory of what had been done to Tanzanite, no matter how cruel and awful she was. Yet it happened and there wasn't a whole lot you could do about it. If they hardened themselves to death and destruction did it make them the same or worse than the Negaverse?

It was a horrible moral quandary that she wasn't quite ready to face. Thankfully Fallon removed her from all of that by pressing a hand to Eilian's face and stroking her skin softly, a distraction of monumental proportion. It wasn't just that it was Fallon stroking her face it was that Fallon was stroking her face. Hesitantly teal eyes met bloodshot magenta ones trying to fathom the dreamy look in her eyes and what it signified. It had to mean something didn't it?

The best way to find out was to ask.

"Who? Who do I look like?" That proper British voice that had always been somewhat clipped was the smoothest the teen could make it and soft, so that she didn't break the reverie. Whomever it was must have been someone important to Fallon..or perhaps Ares? It seemed unlikely but there had been stranger things that had happened. Last weekend was one of those things but even though they'd just been discussing it, the whole thing seemed so removed now. The fact that Eilian was blushing beneath that damp thumb was not lost on her.

Hopefully it was lost on Fallon.

The breath was backing up quickly in Eilian's throat at the dreamy, tender look on Fallon's face. Even if the look was for someone long gone and far away, it was intense enough to have the teen's heart racing, pulse beating in her neck visibly. Her crush on Fallon Novette-Naim had been born months ago when she'd been brought into the fold of the BMC and the pair had started working closely together. For one of the first times in her life Eilian had felt special.

She had always thought she was fairly special in deed but this was the kind of special you felt just by being. Her romantic heart had run away with the feeling and made it into a rainbow spectrum of confused feelings and unquestioning loyalty to the Captain of the Blood Moon Court. The girl was organzed, charming, a brilliant cook, lovely, and utterly cultured. The senshi had a strength, dedication, and knack for leadership that made you confident in the path she led you down. No matter where it led.

To Albali the question had always been who wouldn't have a thing for a girl like that?

It was both a comfort and a jab to the heart to realize that most of that special feeling had come from the fact that she resembled someone Ares had known in a previous existence. That she could provide something that her dear friend had obviously been longing for was something the Senshi of Echoes was more than happy to do, yet the idea remained; it wasn't really her Ares saw when they looked at each other.

But did that really matter? Paramount was Fallon's well-being and if she needed something to feel better, be it burning down the city or a convenient lie that was nothing more than the name of an old flame, well. Eilian was more than wiling to be the person to give her that. Better her than someone who did not care half as much for either of them than they deserved.

Heart in her throat, Eilian ran her hand gently down the arm from where the hand was in her hair to Fallon's shoulder, the other nudging her hip just a bit closer. "I am whatever you need me to be tonight." Knowing somehow in her gut that this step was hers to make the teen leaned forward so that they were suddenly entangled in a meeting of lips. It swam behind her eyes and the romantic in her swore she stopped breathing entirely.

Good things did sometimes come from the worst of circumstances.