Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hematite appeared without warning in the living room and didn't seem to miss a beat as the sound of boots gave way to sneakers, and one by one those were kicked off into a nearby corner. Kaia was probably asleep by now, and with the whole place empty, all the GUARD volunteers must have cleared out hours ago. Khal wondered if there were any leftovers in the fridge that he could steal; all that supervising and teleporting people around was hard work. He'd just grab something to eat and go crash on the couch till Kaia needed him up. It was all pretty routine. He liked routine.

He ran his hands through his hair to ease the ponytail out, letting it fall everywhere. He mumbled to himself as he walked to the kitchen. "Ugh I think the smell of that place got in my hair, ******** gross. Can't believe people live there."

Then he noticed he wasn't alone.

"Jeez, you're up early," he observed, changing course for the island and reaching out to brush her shoulder. His hand stopped halfway as he finally noticed the slump of her posture, and retracted it as he tried to puzzle it out. How long had she been out here instead of in bed? Khal hooked one of the barstools with his foot and dragged it over the linoleum so he could sit down next to her, speaking quietly. "I hope you weren't waiting up for me this whole time. I did tell you I was gonna be gone till morning, right?"

Sure enough, her story wasn't getting more than a blank stare and a slight tilt of the head. Maybe a slight flaring of the nostrils at the mention of another man. He had no idea what she was getting at. He had ideas, but then, a lot of them jumped to some really bad conclusions. Was the man Chase? Did Chase do something to her? Were they getting back together? Even if she tried to convince him Chase wasn't involved, he'd punch that son of a b***h into the next millennium anyway. Just in case. He could never be too careful. She could probably already see that the hand he had rested on the countertop had curled into a fist.

If it was this hard for her to tell him, it couldn't be anything good. He didn't like any of this. Something was wrong. Anyone could see that, even just in the nervousness of her actions. But why, he didn't have the capacity to imagine. Her story went nowhere he could follow, so his mind just paced the edge of the unknown and generated its own feeble explanations while she collected herself.

There wasn't a lot he could say to her proposition. He straightened up a little, as if posture was going to do him any good. His arms slid over his legs when he leaned back and fixed his gaze on her. His expression was nervous. The waiting was killing them both. "Alright."

His eyes followed her as she walked across the kitchen. It was the Negaverse. Dealing with the unexpected on a daily basis was practically the entire job description. He'd seen a lot of weird s**t already: a school of zombies, an alien tree attack, a monster made out of snowglobes, the goddamn Rift, the list went on and on. None of it bothered him much, and new things were usually met by little more than sarcasm or annoyance, his handy coping mechanisms. He only had one supernaturally based problem to deal with, which was a miracle in and of itself. But then, for the longest time, he'd only ever had himself to worry about.

He was sure for a moment his heart stopped as a spiderweb of cracks formed all along Alkaid's body. There was no hiding the horror that crossed his face at the unexpected reveal. He was always an open book. When he stumbled to his feet, the barstool clattered to the floor behind him. But he'd never had any intention of leaving.

A formality was pointless. Slow, careful steps brought him in front of her, looking down and the changes she'd gone through in a single night. Wordlessly he reached out and brushed a couple of fingers along the side of her face, and he could feel the space between the cracks. No blood, just darkness, the same darkness that he knew filled her the way it did every other corrupt. Alkaid's beautiful, human appearance was shattered, radiating out from the punctures in her chest and head.

The fingers fell away at the end of their slow arc around her jaw. His eyes swept slowly across the changes, back up to the gaping hole in her head, and finally down to her golden eyes. There was a frantic confusion in his own, and his mouth seemed to stay just parted, as if at any moment the right question would come to mind.

It hurt to look at her. It hurt to see how fragile she was. A lot of horrible things happened in the Negaverse, but until now they never happened to anyone he cared about. And he did care. He obsessed. And... this... was what happened when he wasn't at her side. He tried to find his voice, but his expression couldn't feign calm for longer than half a second. "Does it hurt?"

He let out a long sigh to release the breath he'd held. When she had mostly put him at ease about the most obvious of her changes, his mind was finally free to realize the rest on a second glance. That she was surrounded by a shimmering cape, that two pairs of wings spread out behind her, that she'd lost most of the little black dress. His eyes, in fact, were traveling dangerously low as the last observation occurred to him.

He looked away suddenly as if he'd been caught staring at something forbidden. In a way, it was. No wonder she was fidgeting uncomfortably under his gaze. His misogynistic mind was quite sure the other scantily clad female soldiers wanted to let as much show as possible, enjoyed the opportunity their uniform provided them to show off. Alkaid... clearly didn't. And didn't he know that? They'd lived together for months, they talked, they were friends for a long time before they'd become more. He knew her in a day-to-day way that he didn't know anyone else, right down to the fact that Alkaid was a bit of a prude when it came to the way she dressed. Whatever had happened hadn't just tried to destroy her beauty but her dignity as well. Right now, pressing her for information would just stress her out further. He'd know soon enough who to blame for this, and when he did...

Without thinking about it, he threw his shoulders back and slid his sweatshirt off his arms with a quick series of fidgets. He swept it around the back of her, and it rested on top of her cape, the empty sleeves dangling down and the hood spilling over the front instead of the back. It wasn't much, but he couldn't think of anything else. Maybe it would ease her discomfort a little right now.

As he drew his hands away they accidentally brushed against her shoulders, and he could feel the heat radiating off of them like a fever across her entire body.

"You're probably just cold," he lied, finally looking at her again and not the linoleum. He tried to force a small smile but it didn't make it to his eyes.

"Yeah..." he echoed weakly. He remembered. He didn't want to frighten her with how upset and angry he was about this, though. Sometimes he forgot that Kaia didn't just know his thoughts in the way she always knew everything else. He never had a lot of resolve where she was concerned, though. Whatever Kaia didn't already know, she could always take by force. And she certainly was trying, pressing close as Alkaid to remind him of the way they had embraced so many times before. Of course he knew Kaia was the center of his universe. He closed his eyes for a moment to loosely organize his thoughts. Shallow vanity wasn't what brought them together, and it wouldn't be what tore him away from her tonight. He met her gaze with some concern over how she'd react, but his heart had already made the decision for him the moment she'd asked. He'd talk.

"You... got promoted, didn't you?" Or whatever the equivalent was for senshi, they never even surpassed lieutenants in rank even at their most powerful. One hand loosely swung out toward the dark wings jutting out from behind Alkaid and flicked one of them. He'd seen eternal senshi before, with their white feathered wings. He'd seen Ammolite from a distance, with her matching set to Alkaid's. "But the others don't look like this. Like... broken."

His eyes swung back from the wing to the winding cracks along her face and neck. While his words picked up a little in pace and pitch, his expression was growing helpless and frustrated. "I'd be a ******** liar if I said I knew what you were going through or that 'I understand.' I don't."

"So I don't know what to think about this either, Kaia. You've got scars everywhere, you feel like you're on fire. Is this normal, for senshi? I'm scared of what could happen to you next. What if you don't get better? What if this just gets worse?"

Just as he was really going to fly off the handle, he instead hung his head and glanced away from her again, and away from the shattered hole in her head. It was deadly quiet in the kitchen. The loose dreadlocks hid his face from view. He took a deep breath, let it out. His voice had returned to being low and quiet. "I should have been there tonight. I should have been with you." Too little, too late. Another pause, then he looked back up at her once again from between the curtain of dreadlocks. His gaze was unusually piercing. Very few things could motivate Khaldun to give 110%, but Kaia was about to discover a new one. "Whoever's responsible for hurting you, I'll kill them."

Khaldun hung back by the island where Alkaid left him, glaring at her back and staring sullenly at her front as she finally deigned to to fill him in on the rest of the details ever so slowly. Stupid spiderweb of a trap Kaia was throwing him into. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't, damned if he took too long to decide, damned if she just told him she wanted to know but really it was some weird sphinx riddle. He was tired. He was irritable. While he was slogging around the damned Rift, trying to produce a group of lieutenants that could actually hold their own, Tanzanite apparently broke his girlfriend. It was too much to process too late.

"General, huh?" Maybe he shouldn't have been too surprised a General-Queen was involved. He wanted to try joking but she was just infuriating him, and the irritation was showing in his voice. It came out more like some kind of angry suicidal declaration than anything else. "Treason, hah. I bet I can still land a punch before she guts me with that horrible ******** arm. But whatever."

"s**t, that's not - you're overreacting - Kaia -" He was pretty focused on her face, her whole, unbroken face, before she turned it away. He trailed off at the sight of her pain. It was futile to argue with her. Leave it to him to find the exact wrong things to say and do. Okay, he hadn't reacted that well to her appearance, but who the hell wouldn't at least do a double take at the sight of what had happened to her? There were no rules for consoling a girlfriend whose whole appearance had been shattered like a ceramic pot. He was just trying to be careful! The last time Kaia had been like this he'd had some girl around while she was still dating someone. What, did she think he was just going to leave her and find a new... oh for ******** sake.

"Come on. We're not going through this again," he growled. "So is that what this is about? You want to know what I think of how you look now, Kaia?" He walked right up to her with his arms crossed tightly and raised his voice over the running water. It was a ******** cup of tea, it didn't take that much cleaning, but she was still at it, with her back turned to him. She had to be in one of her moods again, that obsessive cleaning was a sure sign. "Drop the glamour."

This wasn't exactly a grand plan he had going, just a spur-of-the-moment dare to prove he wasn't disgusted by her. With her pseudo-permission, one hand reached out to hold the side of her face with fingers splayed while the other gripped her shoulder. Khal leaned in and kissed her roughly, nearly bending her backward over the sink. It was obvious he was going out of his way to manhandle her a bit as they went, a physical objection to her earlier comment. He didn't like the idea of it, hell, he was inwardly terrified she would shatter from all this, but she wasn't going to listen to a word he said if he didn't do something first to get her back to normal somehow. Not a moment after he pulled back to get his breath back, he dipped his head forward again. He was brushing his face against the side of hers, ignoring the feverish heat from her cheek.

He breathed the words into her ear: "I don't care."

"If this was about looks, you'd never have chosen an ugly carved-up b*****d like me in the first place."

He waited a moment before he leaned back and straightened up again, glancing down at Kaia with a stoic expression, dark circles cutting under his eyes. With a slow downward winding, he traced the crack that cut through the center of her face with a finger. He'd show her he wasn't afraid.

"Remember when you had to borrow my clothes for a week because someone stole your laundry, and you decided to listen to music from all the bands from my t-shirts? When we started synchronizing our energy runs so we never had to stop talking even when we left the apartment? Remember how you saved my life and didn't ask for anything in return?"

"A few new scars won't change what we've already been through together." It was his turn to cast his gaze downward. He had his own insecurities about the relationship. "I'm lost without you, Kaia."