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Every step hurt. Cybele's arm might have been in a sling, but that only mattered so much. She wasn't supposed to be moving while everything healed up, let alone lightly jogging through the city, peeking into any suspicious buildings she could find.

Unfortunately, watching musicals on Netflix for a week or so would not do anything to bring Ganymede home, and so Cybele was out scouting every moment that she was not asleep.

It was most likely all for nothing. She knew that. Of course she knew that. She was half expecting half expecting to find Ganymede's corpse when she turned some corner, left as an example with a bloody message pinned to her chest on the tip of Aquamarine's dagger.

She thought she saw it laying there once, then twice. The third time, it did not go away when she blinked.

Only, the colors were all wrong, and when Cybele got closer, she found that it was not Ganymede on the pavement, but someone else who she was just as close to. It was Albireo.

She screamed. Cybele was in no place to repress her emotions right now, and she howled as she knelt over the body of her friend. She was still breathing, but too perfect, too still, the way that Empyrean had been after the battle. Cybele knew what that meant.

A moment later, she was charging at the nearby Chaos aura and ignoring the way that her arm complained about it. "Give it back," she hissed, even as the tears began to flow down her cheeks. "Give her back, or I'll-"

That was when Cybele actually looked up at the rooftop, and saw who it was who was standing there.

Oh.

When she threw the starseed, Cybele's heart froze in her chest. When she caught it, her heart beat again.

Cybele remembered doing something similar when she'd been fighting Ganymede. She'd tossed the starseed down an alleyway to try to get a reaction out of her. She remembered watching it shatter.

Now, Cybele took a few steps and leapt up onto the rooftop before she could stop herself. Her shoulder screamed at the movement and her mind screamed at the height of it, even if she was careful to angle herself so she could not see the drop.

She bit down on her tongue against it, with slight success. She could not let this ridiculous phobia stop her when Albireo's life was on the line.Probably over, she knew. She'd never seen a starseed go back into its chest.

After everything that had happened, though, she had to try.

"I was corrupted, yes. It was all against my will. Miserable, like Albireo, yes."

A moment paused, and then she asked, "And you?"

Sweat beaded on her forehead from the height alone. She was in no place to say something that might rile up an Eternal, but she thought that she saw a familiar blank look in the woman's eyes.

There were articulate things that Cybele could have said if she was arguing for Albireo's life. She could have pointed out the holes in the corrupt's story, how if she'd been in the Negaverse a long time ago and changed sides twice, been corrupted twice, it was very unlikely that she'd still be an Eternal.

Alternatively, she could have kept going for the ethos, pressed more about how the Negaverse was treating her.

Instead, she watched Albireo's starseed, her soul, vanish into nothingness. On top of that, she mentioned something about the Princess, who apparently had been brought in, and Jet rewarded for it.

She didn't feel how hard she was biting her tongue now, but she tasted the blood. It didn't help.

Her thoughts were replaced by a blank screen of static. The tears came quickly, her breath quicker. Cybele dropped to her knees.

"If you're going to take hers, take mine too," she said, her voice shaking and desperate, although the words sounded distant, as if someone else was saying them.

With Empyrean dead, she'd tried to stay strong. With Ganymede taken, she'd tried to hold on to hope. The physical pain from her own injuries, she could push through. This, though? Her first Order friend, on top of all of that? She couldn't do this anymore.

She couldn't do this anymore. She couldn't-

It was the corrupt's soft hand on her face that broke her out of her thought spiral.

It didn't bring her back all the way. Cybele was still sobbing to the point where she could barely breathe, but at least her mind could form words again.

"She's my friend," she choked out between gasps, although that wasn't quite enough to explain the way that they always giggled over shoes, or the way that Siegfried thought of the two of them as married, even back when they'd first met, or the way that they'd curled up against each other, sharing milkshakes, while they worried about the future of things.

"I loved her."

She sucked in a breath.

"The Negaverse keeps taking people I love. My father, dead. My sister, gone. Now this."

Cybele wiped at her tears and swallowed the blood from her mouth, although the other senshi's next comment had her freeze again.

"Kill me! Do. Not. Take me back. I'll be useless. I'll be miserable. I was empty. I was lonely. I didn't want to be alive the first time, it won't change. I won't survive."

She squeezed her eyes shut, shook. In her desperation, she couldn't go into any more detail than that.

She didn't want to leave the rest of the family behind, but she didn't want them fighting a shell of her, either.

"No," said Cybele, and though her cheeks were still wet, her voice came steadier than before. "There's no fixing Chaos. It consumes. It destroys everything good in the world."

She looked up at the corrupt, and for all of the sorrow and resignation in her face, in all the trembling from the height and the situation in her body, there was no fear there at the concept of facing her own death. She rolled her shoulders back, showed her chest.

"If Ganymede still lives, tell her that I- that Cybele- was sorry I couldn't protect her," she said, and two fresh tears slipped down her cheeks.

"That is my request."