He had avoided it, since arriving on Earth. There was simply so much there that he did not wish to return to--so many centuries of loneliness and emptiness that Helene had come to represent to him. But that did not mean that he could neglect his world forever. Its continued corruption hurt him--made his magic react strangely or not work, and he feared that one day, that magic would fail him in a critical moment and result in him getting hurt.
Worse, it would fail him in a critical moment and result in Kaifeng getting hurt.
He hated the idea of putting his beloved in danger. Not now that he finally had everything he had considered only a hazy dream for so long. He had loved Xingyi deeply, and lost him--and still, the weight of his failure sat in his heart. Perhaps if he had been able to get to Saturn, if he had been able to put himself between the mob and his Knight, he might have changed things.
(Perhaps he would have died, too, and left Kaifeng's soul to carry that burden. He knew there was only so much space for what-ifs, because for every "what if I could have changed it," there was an equal "what if I changed it for the worse." But, still. He could not help but wonder if he might have done something to....fix things. Somehow.)
Perhaps those things weren't worth pondering. Xingyi was long gone, and Lianli was here, and alive, and loved him, and had--somehow--loved him even before they met. And for all that Lianli was not Xingyi--Helene loved him, too. He was different. Vibrant. Alive, in a way that Xingyi had sometimes seemed....more faded, more lost.
And he loved his Wonder as fiercely as Xingyi had, took his duties to the dead there just as seriously, worked so hard to make it into everything it could be....it was admirable, and it warmed Helene's heart every time they visited his Wonder and found something new.
How could Helene give his world any less than his Knight gave his Wonder? It was his duty to protect Helene as much as it was Lianli's to protect Kaifeng, and he had...perhaps....let fear rule him for too long.
Still, he was not eager to take Lianli with him. Yes, he was immune to the plague that had ravished his world, but that didn't mean that others were. And he would not allow the disease that had stolen everyone else he loved to take Lianli, too. He would have to be careful--another reason he had avoided returning; fear of carrying the plague back on himself--but he hoped that as powering down cleaned clothes and fixed damaged uniforms, it might also sanitize any clinging...bacteria or viruses, those were the words the modern world used for vectors of disease. Pathogens. Pathogens that might not survive Earth's environment anyway, and that Helene was almost certain were tied to Chaos and thus unusual in their spread and behavior.
Probably, it would not return with him. It hadn't come with him when he arrived. But that did not make him hesitate less about bringing Lianli to his world, and so....he would return alone.
(And this first time back, it....felt like it needed to be his and his alone, regardless. He needed to do this, to walk his world again, to remind himself that it was there and it needed saving. Perhaps he was a worse Senshi for having taken so long to do this; perhaps he didn't care. He had been the perfect Sailor Helene for so long, and it had gotten him nothing but loneliness. Being a little imperfect, enjoying the life he had now....Helene was okay with that making him a "worse" Senshi than one that was more dedicated to their world. He would live with disappointing the dead.)
He'd slipped away from the house, had not told anyone where he intended to go. This was too private, too personal to discuss. He trusted that Lianli would understand; if he needed to explain, he would when he arrived home. But for now, he sat on a rooftop, several blocks away from that home, legs crossed in a meditative position.
The roof was dirty; he ignored it. The city hummed below him; he let it pass throguh him until it became meditative static in the back of his mind. Took one breath. Then two.
Pulled his delightful Senshi phone from subspace, glad once again for its straightforward interface that made this so much easier. Far less fuss in space travel nowadays, at least to ones' own world.
Pressed the button that would carry him away.
And when he found himself on his world, it was a familiar sight.
For a thousand years and some, this had been his sanctuary. More recently, he had seen it as rendered by Xingyi--a place of love, of safety, where he could lay down his burdens and simply be.
His home had deteriorated some, over the years and despite his best efforts to maintain it. There were cracks in the plaster, and the roof tiles were losing pieces. But it was still his home, and Helene felt....
Peace. More peace than he had expected, returning to this place. There was little sign that this was a house on a ravaged world; the gardens that had once blossomed were dead, of course, and there were no animal sounds to fill the air, but ultimately, it looked...
Well, Helene couldn't say it looked like "home." "Home" was a house on Earth filled with people, suffused with warmth and camaraderie, and most importantly, where Lianli waited for him. "Home" had become something else, ever since he returned to Earth, and this empty place lacked the essential vitality that could have made it feel like a place where Helene belonged.
But it had been home, once. And it felt like returning after too long away.
He stepped through the door, and sighed. The neglect showed more inside; he'd let it....go to s**t, he suspected was the phrasing Pyrrhus would use. Deteriorate, was what he personally preferred. Either way, things were much messier than he cared to keep them, and as he took in the crumbling furniture, the discarded papers, the abandoned notes and guesses about what might be plaguing his world, his eyes drifted to a corner of the room.
To something abandoned long before the fall of his world.
He could see the shape under tossed aside blankets, and Helene's heart twisted in his chest. Carefully, he moved the detritus aside, revealing what was underneath.
A long, lacquered piece of wood, decorated with white jade and mother-of-pearl, engraved with symbols of Helene and of Huanxi himself. Twenty-one strings, sliced neatly in half, lay across it, and the whole surface was battered, with a long crack running down the center.
His zheng.
Just seeing it made Helene's chest hurt.
He had inflicted the damage himself, a thousand years ago. In his grief over Xingyi's death, he had sworn to himself never to play again, because what was the point, whent he person who best understood his songs, the person for whom he wrote his finest compositions, was gone? He'd slashed the strings, cast it aside, caused that awful crack running down it when it hit the wall. And he'd left it there, for centuries, abandoned and broken. There had been no reason to touch it, to play. It had hurt too much to even think of doing it, when music was something he had so intimately shared with Xingyi.
It had become a piece of his grief.
And he had found music again, since returning to Earth--had learned to play guitar with Lianli, to sing again, to find peace in music the way he had before. But it wasn't the same. He'd missed his zheng, deep down, and regretted destroying it. Thought it lost; perhaps cleaned up by his brother in one of his few visits while Huanxi was deep in mourning for Xingyi's loss. Taking it to repair it seemed like something Zhiguang would have done in an effort to offer some mending to his little brother's shattered heart.
But here it was, right in front of him.
He picked it up, carefully turning it over. It was not so terribly damaged--cut strings could be replaced, scratches could be cleaned, the crack could be carefully repaired and re-lacquered. It didn't seem to go too deep into the wood itself, perhaps only damaging the finish.
He could take it back with him. Fix it. Perhaps introduce Lianli to it, let him hear some of Huanxi's old compositions as they had originally been written. This was...this was a blessing he had not expected. A second chance he had not thought existed for him.
And as he carefully picked up the zheng, as he prepared to return home to Lianli so that he might go about finding space in the house to work on it, he felt something inside him shift. A warmth, that filled him from the tips of his fingers on through the rest of his body, and the feeling of something settling in his chest.
New magic. A new gift, from his world.
Helene smiled. It was time to return home, but perhaps this place was not as lost to him as he had feared.
[wc: 1567 words]
