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Broken ribs courtesy of Jet meant that Cybele had been laid up for weeks now. Two weeks, to be precise, and she knew that she perhaps should have been grateful for that, because without the tender care of her loved ones and the accelerated healing from the senshi magic in her veins, it would have been six. She should have been even more grateful, she supposed, that she hadn't ended up dead, or as a prisoner in Laurelite's dungeons.

Instead she was just grumpy and restless about it all.

It was getting bad enough that she couldn't just sit on the couch anymore, watching movies and doing what work she could do from home. Even though her side still felt a bit tender and it would probably be best practice to wait another week, she slipped away.

Usually, Cybele didn't love the winter weather, but just this once, the cold air on her skin felt like freedom.

The smell of ash that hit her five minutes in to her walk, combined with a General's aura, felt like annoyance, because she had been intending to take it easy, but of course she wasn't going to let Faustite run around pulling starseeds and planning to ambush local businesses and torturing people. With a sigh and a slight change of direction, she was on the trail.

She wasn't expecting to hear pained grunts and the clanging of metal as she approached, without finding some battle to go along with it at the end of the search. She wasn't expecting Faustite to be slumped over on the corner of a roof, or for the hollows of his face to be so gaunt that she could see them by his firelight even from ground level.

That was what she found, all the same.

She raised an eyebrow, looked up. "What's this?" she asked.

The more Cybele watched, the more interesting the situation seemed. Which was to say, the more vulnerable Faustite looked. There had been times when they'd spoken before he'd tortured her where he'd lurked under balconies or around parapets, but even when lurking, he'd seemed sure of himself in a sly sort of way. He'd been intentional. Pacing, usually.

He'd never seemed unable to move, or dissolved into a sputter of awful, hacking coughs every five seconds.

It would have been a good time to pick him off, thought Cybele, if he hadn't decided to hover annoyingly out of reach. Even weakened, he might be able to turn the advantage if she tried to jump up there only to panic because of the height, and she didn't feel like losing any more of herself to him on this particular night.

Instead, she stood tall, despite her own aching body.

"Not at the moment, no," she told him. It wasn't like there were other auras around, and Faustite was one of the higher profile targets, anyway.

She raised an eyebrow. "What, you made me sit in my own waste and rotting flesh for weeks while you watched, but I'm not supposed to look at you if you're anything less than your best?"

If she didn't get bodily dignity, then he didn't either. She stared, even as she shrugged.

"You didn't treat me as a friend," she pointed out. "You kept going on about the past, about how I'd hurt you. Either that or it was missions, it was how I could be useful as the Negaverse's hunting dog, but with the way you always looked at me?"

Her lips pressed thin. "I thought I was only ever going to be an enemy to you. So, here I am, living up to that."

She watched the way he struggled to stand, and the way he tried it anyway. She watched the way it worked even if it seemed to take something out of him. Even now, he was snapping orders at her.

It was too bad for him that all the loyal dog was gone from her, now. There was only enemy left.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest. She did not leave.

"Make me," she said, voice low.

If she'd been mistaken, if she'd misinterpreted things, the way that Jet had decided to go on about before smashing her bones, it didn't really matter now. She'd been treated the way she'd been treated.

She'd had her life ruined and only left to live as a shell of herself so that she could be useful. She knew that there was no way she was mistaken about that. People were hardly going to be able to explain things away, or to charm her back.

A smile flickered across her face as she saw the way that Faustite shifted before the leap.

It was true that she could be a bit unsteady, still, but that was more when she'd been pushing herself too hard, when the aches in the parts that Lysithea hadn't quite been able to heal started to add up, after she'd been running for long distances, or taken flights and flights of stairs. Right now, she'd just spent two weeks on the couch. She had her prosthetic on to help with balance. She was fine.

She held onto her magic for the time being, but sped forwards, swinging a fist towards whatever human part of him she could find while he adjusted to his landing.

He did not dissolve into fire under her knuckles. Nothing erupted out of him, either. He was still hot, too hot, hot enough that it made Cybele's stomach turn, considering their past. In between short breaths, she reminded herself that in the same way that you could wave a fingertip through a candle flame and be fine, a punch here and there on a flaming General was not going to burn her hands all the way to bone and ash.

Still, this was an improvement over what he could have been doing. He swayed under her punch, and a grin started to spread across her cheeks.

Perhaps she was being reckless again, but after her last battle and then being laid up for weeks, she needed this.

She needed it.

She should have seen the kick to her feet coming. She did not. His metal boots found raw nerves and tender, scar-tissue skin. Cybele hiss-whimpered as pain raced through her whole body. Stars danced across her vision. She reeled, but did not back away.

He wanted to trade pain? Fine.

"Prey's agony," she whispered. She did not have move her feet to shoot, point blank, at him

When he grabbed her, Cybele's first instinct after what felt like a thousand fights with Albite was to let him. He wanted to be close? Fine. Just because she had all the trappings of an archer didn't mean she couldn't be dangerous at point blank range.

She watched her ethereal arrow enter his chest. There was no way she would miss, this close. She watched the way his eyes went wide with pain, and after everything he'd done to her, she smiled to see it. His hand was hot, but he would fall back from it, wouldn't he?

For some reason she was not expecting the strength with which he pulled her back with him.

Then she was falling. She was falling into the fire. She ended landing, hard, with her face on his chest, with his fire licking at her ribbons, at her skin, at her already delicate ribs. Even that first split second of contact, that first split second of burning, was enough to make her body jerk and her eyes go blank as she was, for a moment, back in that pitch back basement, back in the manacle-

Instincts took over, and Cybele's instincts were, as always, to fight. Blindly, but with a wild strength, she punched at his wrist that was holding her, and she kneed at his metal ribs, flame-filled or not, because that was where the pain was coming from.

Reiki’s birthday was in a few days, and he still hadn’t gotten the hang of Mirrorspace. Or anyway, he hadn’t figured out how to traverse its endless halls that all looked basically identical, or how to stop around his heroin-colored baseball field in the void, or how to just exist in that space without feeling……stifled. Pent-up. “You have to understand the way I am, mein Herr. A tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, mein Herr.” On some level that seemed to go perpetually deeper, the more he thought about it.

Stumbling out of a mirror stashed on someone’s roof, Reiki itched to do something. Not that he’d exactly done nothing in Mirrorspace this evening, but……well, it wasn’t exactly real in that place, was it? Not in the same way that taking a deep breath of the cold, crisp air of Destiny City was real. Not in the same way that jumping off the roof and landing daintily between a pair of unoccupied parking meters was real. And definitely not in the same way that the feeling of a powerful Negaverse aura nearby was real—even if it didn’t end up being the General whom Reiki wanted to check in on, then they were still better than the hazy, perpetual half-dreaming way that Mirrorspace felt.

It wasn’t until he’d started toward the General’s aura that Reiki felt another one: White Moon, and probably Eternal. That…could have posed a problem. They weren’t even in the vicinity of North End Park, much less a certain bench, so he doubted that it would be Kerberos, who at least only tended to fight people in defense of others.… Thoughts racing about what he might find, Reiki ran the rest of the way there. When the auras got too strong to be anywhere else, he jumped onto someone’s fire-escape, pumps clanging on the metal as he hopped from platform to platform, until he hit the roof.

On one hand, the smoke said he’d gotten lucky about guessing the General.

On the other hand, Reiki couldn’t even get any ridiculous, kind of pink, “He’s raised on the edge of the devil’s backbone, oh I just want to take him home” feelings that he didn’t really want to interrogate. He could barely even process what the White Moon Eternal looked like. The tramp-stamp wings were there, the tiara looked like antlers from the back, and whoever they were, they were on Faustite like a hell-cat.

Rushing over, Reiki tried to grab at the back of the other senshi’s fuku. Whoever they were, they and Faustite would both get wrecked if they stayed on him like this. “Hey, what the ********! Who do you think you are!”