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If the unlucky sailor soldier had chosen the wrong night to play hero, then perhaps Hvergelmir, too, had chosen the wrong night to go on patrol. It was a habit of hers, on nights when she'd been at her bench and was heading home -- one late-night sweep of the streets along her way to clear out any unwelcome youma -- but generally, she kept to herself.

Hvergelmir tried to remind herself that it was best for her to avoid the energy signatures of Negaverse agents entangled with Order's soldiers. There was nothing she could do, after all, that was likely to please anyone involved. Few agents enjoyed a spectator; fewer knights and sailor soldiers appreciated being abandoned. She always tried to tell herself it was best to stay away.

She always wondered why she sometimes didn't listen.

This time, though, she regretted it particularly. What she saw was Labyrinthite, vicious and terrifying -- and with his scythe held poised at his victim's cheek, like he was going to open up their smile for good. Hvergelmir stood at the mouth of the alley, framed in moonlight, for a long second -- then had to catch herself against the wall as she barely managed not to throw up.

She was unsteady when she looked back. Her hands were trembling. She didn't really see any point in trying to hide it -- not from him.

"When you do that," she spoke, her voice sounding loud against the sharp, harsh breathing of a Negaverse General and his prey, "do you think of me?"

It was all she could think of, seeing Labyrinthite again in circumstances like this: the way they were always improbably bound up in each other's fates somehow, each other's lives. Their strange gravity on each other.

Do you dream of me, he'd once asked -- and it was what she'd wondered too. Was she his ghost, like he was hers? Did he, too, understand what it was like to feel haunted?

Hvergelmir wasn't looking at Labyrinthite -- not at first. Her eyes were caught on the figure slumped on the ground, a scythe jutting upwards from its back. A pool of blood was starting on the alleyway, viscous and dark as it glittered in the night. It felt like it was spreading to fill her vision, stretching end to end, all she could see. Here was another failure. Another people she hadn't helped, still couldn't help. Here was a betrayal of her own side, yet again.

The person on the ground would not forgive her her vows. Were they even still alive?

She didn't look back, even as Labyrinthite approached. "Yes," Hvergelmir admitted quietly. "But not like this. I don't . . . "

Something shook loose in her perception, breaking through the veil of shock and pooling blood, and she looked up, blinking rapidly. Labyrinthite had called her by her name, but not by her name -- it was -- . . . how had he known that?

"What did you call me?" she said, pale. "How do you know that name?"

Hvergelmir shrank backwards by a step or two, clasping her hands over her chest. It was scant enough protection if Labyrinthite should decide to be that sort of a danger to her -- but it put her hands together, fingers poised over her summons ring if she needed to make a quick escape.

Would it come to that? Had Labyrinthite lost any sense of goodwill he might have once held towards her?

She didn't want to think that. Hvergelmir knew there was never much chance of Labyrinthite shaking loose Metallia's shackles, but even so, she'd always held onto the hope that he could learn to believe in her -- not to see her as an enemy. Even something as small as that could be a start toward someday brokering a peace.

She wasn't sure how much room was left in his heart anymore for her.

And now, it seemed, what he wanted from her wasn't her friendship -- just answers to whatever questions he might have. After he'd learned what he wanted to know, would he kill her, or let her go?

There was only one way to find out.

She looked at the pocket watch he was holding out towards her. The insignia.

Some stupid dream.

Her voice came out in a whisper. "It belonged to a friend."

He did. Crims had looked almost exactly like that: Labyrinthite's sneering face was layered over the kinder, more playful smile in Nephthys's memory to an almost perfect match. Reincarnation had reinvented his body and Metallia had twisted his soul, but her heart told her to be certain of it: this was Crims of Saturn, reborn to the modern world.

He was even less free now than the unlucky life of unwanted duty that had haunted him and killed him before.

Hvergelmir didn't bother to answer yes or no -- but the tear tracks rolling down her face, unbidden, were answer enough. They both knew what she would've said.

"What trials?" she asked instead, her voice frayed, damp and hoarse. "Did someone hurt you? Are you alright?"

Hvergelmir had, to some extent, an awareness of her movements and expressions. She'd practiced stillness in the face of threats, she'd put great effort into projecting a slowness and deliberacy of movement -- but a lack of affect was rarely what she needed, in a situation. She had no intention of appearing unaffected by the horrors of war: war was horrific, and it served no one to pretend otherwise. But this -- this was personal, and Hvergelmir couldn't have stemmed her tears if she'd wanted to.

Labyrinthite looked briefly surprised by her reaction, taken aback: but whether it was because he was surprised to learn more about his past self or harbored any lingering sympathy for Hvergelmir herself, she couldn't have said. He was a hard man to read, even at his most stable, because he invested so much of himself into the reaper he strove to be.

You were close to him, weren't you?

"You could say that," she answered, the grief in her voice heavy and palpable. She looked away. "You knew me better than almost anyone else, back then."

She didn't say Tarren. She didn't say Crims. The words felt like curses on her lips, if she let herself utter them now: she was as stingy with his lost names as he was liberal with hers. Nephthys had been a cowardly creature, fearful of being pinned down by anyone, and Hvergelmir found it painful, sometimes, to acknowledge her -- but that didn't change the fact that Nephthys had always been a part of her, a face she couldn't get rid of. She didn't enjoy the reminders of the imperfect person she'd been in another lifetime -- but that did nothing to diminish her attachment to the memories of the people she'd once loved.

Crims had been a safe port in a stormy lifetime. He'd never asked her to settle down or stop running. He was a runner, too.

And now Metallia had leashed him. Now, apparently, she whipped him whenever he needed to be brought back to heel. Hvergelmir was glad that whatever suffering had been visited upon him hadn't been at the hands of her own kin -- but it was suffering, nonetheless. It made her angry, as Metallia's methods always did -- and angrier, too, to think of it visited upon Crims.

"Your keepers are clumsy and impatient, if this is the best way they can think of to improve you," she said, with the bite of conviction in her voice.

Her eyes finally found Labyrinthite's again, gold to gold. "Of course I would've noticed," she answered his question. "Out of anyone, I would've. Wouldn't you have noticed me gone?"

If Labyrinthite looked, for all the world, like Crims of Saturn at this moment, still his aura radiated clear as day the stench of Chaos all around him as he approached. Hvergelmir's senses warred subconsciously with each other: her eyes triggering memories of long-ago safety and welcome, fondness and affection; while her soul blared a reminder that this man was anything but safe.

It wasn't quite the same sense of emotional conflict that she felt when she stood near Titanlavenite and could feel his blackened veneer of Chaos over his gentle demeanor -- but it broke her heart in a very similar way.

Metallia had taken something she had no right to. Her foul hands had besmirched something good and beloved and free, binding it with tar and with vile deeds.

Hvergelmir did not step back this time, when Labyrinthite approached. She let him close. He had a right to that particular question, after all.

"It served me better," she said. "I can't say whether you would've thought so. I wasn't enough help to save you, in the end."

And now, too: Hvergelmir hadn't been enough to save Crims in their last lifetime together, and she hadn't been enough to save him in this one, either. She was still a coward. Still a failure. She still lacked the strength to drive people out of the darkest of shadows unless they were already doing most of the work themselves.

Labyrinthite was not on a path to redemption. He was on a path to monstrosity.

"Metallia will always trade power for free will," Hvergelmir pointed out. "She has no banner she can rally her troops under -- her cause is false and unworthy, and too easy to see through. She bolsters strength in exchange for freedom, because a mutiny is the thing she fears most. Why else are most of her troops youma and foolish children?" Hvergelmir followed Labyrinthite's line of sight. He'd cast out his scythe without a second thought, his aim unerring. It was ingrained in his muscle and bone now, killing. "Metallia will take and take everything you are, until one day you're powerful enough to rip people in half with a snap of your jaw, but you can't leave the Rift at all unless some agent calls for you. You were always strong," she said. "Always brave, always proud. But it was never because of what other people demanded of you, or tried to force you to be. It was because of you."

She wanted to reach out and touch him -- to feel her hands on warm skin, to grab at lapels she knew weren't really there, to make a connection as though it would somehow stir some memory loose for him -- but that, she assumed, would be too much. Labyrinthite had often gone to great lengths to remind her she was unsafe in his presence. He wasn't likely to be happy if she acted like she didn't take that seriously.

"I lost a year of my life once, a long time ago," she replied. "But nothing like that. Nothing cruel. I can't imagine what she must have done to you."

Hvergelmir wondered if what Labyrinthite said was true. Would she look very much like Nephthys, to other people who looked at her? She'd always imagined them different, and taken comfort in the idea. Nephthys moved through the world comfortable in her own skin, luxuriating in it, showing it off like it was a statement: that she belonged to herself and no one else. When she gave herself away, it was as much for the pleasure of giving herself away as it was for the joy of later taking herself back. Nephthys was more confident than Laney had ever been, but also more driven by her past, by the invisible broken chains she could never seem to make peace with or shed. Nephthys moved through the world with graceful swagger and fearful bravado, a challenge to the world that it should dare to try and prevent her from being happy.

Laney had always pictured herself different than that. Less than that. But perhaps that was only an idea she clung to, to tell herself she was different than the former self that she envied but held in such low esteem. Perhaps it was another excuse to hide from the flaws in herself that she didn't want to acknowledge. Maybe Labyrinthite was right, and she really wasn't much different.

But Crims was.

"No," she said vehemently, with a certainty that was as much Nephthys as it was Laney. "No one was meant for this. Nobody, anywhere, deserves to be a slave. And there was a time when no one believed that more than you."

Hvergelmir let herself close her eyes for a moment as the general brushed his knuckles over her cheek, imagining him a friend and not an enemy -- a lover who might have once kissed her for laughing at a stupid joke, and not the reaper who might someday come to cut out her tongue.

There would be few enough moments left to imagine things like that, if Metallia had her way. Hvergelmir supposed she ought to savor this small moment of gentle contact -- in case it was their last. If he truly was Metallia's knight now, proven in some kind of sick youma gauntlet of endless bloody combat, the queen would hardly share him.

If Labyrinthite had had a dramatic return from his mysterious trials, Hvergelmir knew precious little of it. She supposed she could ask around -- Aegir might know, or Thraen. Or Castor, if she was desperate and in the mood for aggravating conversation with someone even more stubborn than Thraen. But she could guess. She imagined it was something bloody and awful.

Shame all I do is disappoint you.

Hvergelmir shook her head in silent disagreement, her own somber expression conveying her mood. Labyrinthite had never been an easy case, of all the people she'd met -- but even he had reached out to her when he'd been at his lowest point. He'd knelt, miserable and lost, at her feet, in need of help.

And again, in yet another lifetime, still she'd failed to save him.

"You were never the one I was disappointed in," she replied.

Like a good slave, he played the role Metallia had given him -- and like a good mistress, Metallia had shackled him in coldest iron. It was only the liberator who'd failed her role. It was only Hvergelmir, forever unequal to the enormous task she'd taken up.

"I couldn't suffer the way you do. I'm not that strong -- the cage alone would kill me. But you . . . " She sighed. How to explain human worth to someone who believed they were well past the category? "I believe in you because I'm free, and I can choose to. Because there's no point in having free will if I turn around and deny it to other people just to make it easier to condemn them for their sins. Because Metallia wants you to stop believing in yourself -- and I'll fight against that as hard as I can, for as long as I can. And because something in you -- " She swallowed hard. "Something in you -- in spite of everything -- still lets me. Because -- at least for now -- you want something different from me than to cut out my tongue."