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It was winter, now, and even an unusually balmy season didn't mean a reprieve from the cold. Hvergelmir supposed she was probably imagining it -- finding justifications for her own confirmation bias -- but it had often seemed to her that Chaos's mark was easier to feel in summer, an icy prickling down her spine; and that Order's glow was what stood out in winter, like a rush of warmth that flooded out of a storefront when someone opened the door to go in or out.

That warmth was at the edge of her senses now, somewhere nearby. Someone on patrol, no doubt, wandering past North End Park because it was an easy beat and quickly covered in winter. She assumed they'd sense her quickly enough, and if they were hoping to be done with their duties as quickly as possible, the telltale power signature would move on just as it had come.

It didn't. It drew closer, and as it came on, she had a clearer awareness of its strength and tone. A sailor soldier, and an eternal: Hvergelmir's instincts suggested Ida as the obvious solution. But Ida was a transcendent, and there was a sharpness to the way that felt, something bright and crisp and clarion, something soprano. That layer of presence was absent.

Someone else.

She looked up from a well-dogeared and mostly completed Best of Merl Reagle compilation in her lap only when it became clear that the sailor soldier was intentionally heading her way, closing distance enough to be visible.

She hadn't been expecting Thraen.

'Can I ask you for help?'

Hvergelmir was on her feet in an instant, treasured book tossed carelessly to the bench.

Thraen -- brilliant, absurd, polite Thraen -- well, at least he'd asked. At least he trusted her enough to give her the benefit of the doubt that she might help. Had he ever asked her for anything before?

It was hard to discern much of him, standing just outside the penumbra of the overhead lamplight. He was alone -- was he hurt?

"The crocus that braves the winter can have all the time it likes," she said, dismissing the request as much as the self-consciousness she thought might sit behind the asking of it. "My free time is never in short supply."

She took a step closer. "How can I help?"

Hvergelmir stared at Thraen for a long moment, waiting as he said his piece. Her eyes widened in slight alarm as he explained that he was bleeding badly enough to leave a trail, and she glanced down by reflex, eyes scouring for telltale red liquid tracks down his legs, somewhere in among his flora and brambles.

He was hurt. Badly hurt. And all the same, ready to merrily trot along to try his luck elsewhere if it presented her with some kind of marginal inconvenience. Even by Laney's standards, it felt like an unreasonable line of thought.

Where had he learned to value himself so cheaply, or to trust in others so little? Who had taught him that?

Poor, trampled crocus -- what kind of life have you lived?

"Shhhh," was her answer, stepping two paces to the side so that she could gesture the soldier of Gardens toward the bench. "I'm happy I can help you. Please -- sit or lie down, whatever's comfortable for you, so I can take a look. Let me handle the rest -- everything's alright."

Many people were many things -- and one lesson Hvergelmir had tried to internalize for herself was that she couldn't first try to change people and then make a connection with them. It rarely worked in that direction. You had to meet someone where they were, if you could. Most of forming any kind of bond with someone was the long work of listening to the things they said and paying attention to the things they didn't say; most of it was learning to understand them. Compassion that came from caring and understanding had greater value and power than compassion for compassion's sake.

Thraen, then, was not a simple challenge to understand and to talk to. He never had been. Thraen was a stoic. Even in faded memories of their lost future, he existed mostly in the background: going his own course, hard to reach.

He was not in the background now. He was here, with her personally, willing to share as much small vulnerability as he had ever dared with her: his health.

She shook her head, watching him strip himself down and listening to him offering her counsel on the exact nature of his proposed triage and makeshift tourniquet. Super glue, really?

Hvergelmir clucked her tongue. "I think I can do a little better than super glue," she said with a faint smile. "When I said 'let me handle the rest,' I did mean it."

Hvergelmir shook her cloak out into her hands, starting the flow of its magic, then slowly and lightly settled it over Thraen's shoulders. Standing -- even slightly leaned over the bench -- he presented a fairly tall target in the shoes that he wore.

"You should feel a bit of energy starting to flow through you. Just let the cloak do its work -- it's not a quick process, but I think you'll be pleased with the results."

Hvergelmir stepped away and took a seat on the bench, near Thraen's foot. "How often do you patrol alone?" she asked.

Hvergelmir shook her head, letting the apologie lie unretrieved. She didn't need it. "It's alright," she said. "I'm not offended. It's only . . . " The knight paused for a moment, thinking it over. What was it only? "It's only that . . . well, that I'd like you to think of me as someone who's invested in your well-being. Someone who cares about you and wonders about you even when you're not in front of my face. I . . . sort of get the impression that you don't assume that of most people. And we've known each other for a long time without ever really getting to know each other, so -- I want you to know that I do. Wonder about you, I mean."

She watched his foot as he withdrew it, a little sorry for making him uncomfortable by dint of politeness. He hadn't needed to do that on her account.

Unfortunately, answering Thraen's question undermined her own point. She'd wanted to keep the focus on him, on his bad habits -- but from the wrong perspective, Hvergelmir's own behaviors could (she supposed) be perceived as unsafe and irresponsible. Of course, her situation was completely different -- but would Thraen see it that way?

"Most of the time," she allowed. "Though I can't patrol much -- just for youma. And I have an out if things go badly -- the creature I can summon is a teleporter. It's more that I just -- I don't understand why you of all people would go it alone."

Despite the fact that Hvergelmir had gone into this line of conversation meaning to take Thraen to task for patrolling alone, it was hard to ignore when one was being called out for one's own willful duplicity.

Thraen wasn't wrong. Hvergelmir was in the persistent habit of deliberately blowing people off when they asked after her welfare. She'd always considered it necessary.

"You're right," she said, looking down at her hands. "I do things like that. I'm sorry. I've always thought that if people had the idea I was anything other than perfectly safe out here, they'd try to stop me from doing my work. Sometimes it feels hard to explain to people that this is the only way to get Negaverse agents to trust me. I make myself unsafe for a specific reason -- and I didn't want anyone's good intentions getting in the way of that. I'm sorry I came across as ungrateful for your concern."

Hvergelmir frowned. It was hard not to look away, because there was an intensity to Thraen: in his eyes, she felt aware of a certain constant scrutiny, of words and actions all being processed in greater detail than the way some people's minds might elide things. It was a delicate thing, communicating with him, and she wondered if she'd made any progress at it at all, over their acquaintance.

"Other senshi attack you?" she repeated back, rhetorical, and then guessed: "Because of your zealousness in fighting Chaos?"

That was all she could really imagine. Thraen cut the figure of someone overly dedicated to his cause, not someone lacking in motivation. He fairly thrummed with exactitude and purpose: an engine that saw no point in falling idle. That sort of thing didn't set well with some people.

"These people were never raised for war," she said. "I don't think some of them can reconcile with it. They fight to stop the people they think are bad, or to avert the immediate bad thing in front of them, and they believe that's good enough. And for them it has to be good enough, because I think it's the limit of what they can bear -- emotionally, I mean. But I think that makes it hard for them to look at people standing at the extremes like you or me, or," she added grudgingly, "Castor. Because accepting what we do as valid or justifiable means questioning what lengths they're willing to go to to truly advocate for this world." She shrugged, looking down at her hands. "It's easier for some of them to reject us as invalid or unjust than to put themselves into an emotional crisis. I don't approve of that, but -- " She sighed and looked back up. "But God, we need every soldier we can get."

Most days -- for her own mental well-being, because she too had to get through the day -- Hvergelmir avoided thinking about how many people on Order's side still believed they were just without questioning why. It was rare that she felt the weight of that avoidance -- she'd learned to shrug off the way some people found it deeply important to tell her how misguided her methods were.

Today it was harder. Today she had to take into account that Thraen patrolled by himself because he felt safer alone.

"Some of them don't want to know." she agreed. "Some of them want to believe in a magic trick because they want things to be certain. They want the world to turn out to be just after all. But that woman in the art piece -- there were any number of people in the crowd that day, and they weren't all evil, but they let plenty of things happen to her. So I imagine people have any number of reasons -- some of them less admirable than the others. Who can say."

Hvergelmir flustered slightly -- not for Thraen's enthusiasm, which was welcome, but for the reminder of how often the knowledge of others outpaced her own. Still, she smiled: it wasn't so bad to open up to others, or have them open up to her, and a rare opportunity with Thraen. His questions were nothing particularly intrusive.

"I don't mind you asking," she explained. "I don't have anything like a formal education in the arts -- I mean, I don't have a formal education in philosophy either, for that matter, but that's where I came across Ms. Abramović's piece. Philosophy and ethics are hobby interests of mine. I find that, with the lives we lead and the choices we're presented, it comforts me to feel like I'm at least trying to make informed decisions and not just following my instincts. I don't think gut feelings always represent the, ah, the better angels of our nature, as it were. So I try to spend time on ethics, philosophy, and sociocultural anthropology, when I can. I read whatever I can find -- wherever the next click trail or bibliography sends me. And then I just do my best to make sense of it all. To put it in the context of warfare and what I can learn about that. And I try to proceed from there."

It hadn't always been that way, of course. When she'd started out, she too had had little in mind beyond survival -- beyond the simple fact that people were trying to kill her and she didn't understand why. She'd been so new to all this, once.

That felt like a long time ago, now.

"I hadn't known quite as much, back when I swore my oath. I'd thought about the problem of this war and how to do what seemed right -- how to contribute in the best way -- but I didn't know much then. And for all that -- honestly, I'd still stand by my decision. I've gambled everything that I have, as a knight, just to disprove a single lie that Metallia once told: that knights and sailor soldiers are seeking to conquer the Earth and have to be stopped. But I truly believe that disproving that one lie could be the key to turning the tide in this war -- so I try to get better at understanding people whenever I can. People as groups, people as individuals. Notions of identity and why we attach to them so fiercely. When I first swore my oath, I took up that work because no one else was doing it and I thought it needed to be done -- but even if I didn't start out qualified for the work I wanted to do, I try to learn how to do better every day."

It was, perhaps, not a satisfying answer. Thraen was, as far as she could tell, an intellectual. He'd given her availability at the university when she'd asked to read the sailor soldiers' primer on his phone. The notion of learning via breadcrumb trail probably struck him as infantile. But if he was disappointed with her answer about her studies in ethics, she suspected he'd be no less disappointed by her answer to his other question.

Why had she interfered after Alois' purification attempt?

"I don't disagree with euthanasia for the terminally afflicted," she said. "Though I'm familiar enough with depression and its kin to say that not all suicidal impulses are created equal, or should be equally abetted. And though I can't say I relished the notion of you and Ida coming to blows, none of that had much to do with my decision to try and stop you from stabbing Alois." She smiled ruefully, not proud that her answer lacked any particular nobility, but not trying to disguise it. "Whatever understanding you and Alois had between you, I wasn't willing to let it interfere with my work. If he'd wanted you to kill him, I wouldn't have stood in your way . . . but not at my bench, and not at a purification I'd had some part in arranging. Negaverse agents who speak to me need to know that their safety is my primary concern. That I'd never place them in needless danger. A rumor that a Negaverse agent had been murdered at a purification I'd arranged when he failed to successfully convert -- something like that could've ruined everything I'm trying to do."