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Kunzite hesitated, her bloodied arms still raising her sword high. She was moments away from delivering the coup de grace on Charonite. Perhaps she would have had the time, the bare moment to spare. Perhaps she could have taken the risk. Instead she eyed Beryl and the growing ball of energy between her hands a little wild-eyed. This too was memory. She remembered Queen Beryl, and this was the Queen Beryl that she remembered -- hardhearted and cruel, with no mercy for incompetence and even less for treason.

She lowered her sword as Beryl prepared to let loose the blast. She might have said something then, but she didn't: only looked away from Charonite for a long moment as she stared her death in the face. And then, as both of them looked on, she winked out of existence.

Even General Kunzite, it seemed, knew when a fight was lost.

The General-King hadn't sworn, didn't swear. He didn't even show anger, no <********>, no hitting things, had been silent and still as a tin man when Beryl had dressed him down. And now he just leant against the broken-down slab of crystal that had served them as a table all those years ago and bled, eyes closed.

Only briefly. "No." His voice was quiet now. Nealite had never seen him like this, either. He looked defeated, somehow, diminished; nothing had ever diminished the leader of the Negaverse in all the time that she had known him. He was larger than life. "No. No, no hospital."

The sudden rush of air that heralded his teleport came without any warning. She followed him too, and her guess as to where he was going was bang on the mark. Gunn Killingworth staggered forward in his apartment to the little kitchenette, already pulling off the shirt swiftly getting stained with gouts of blood -- splattered it on the tiling, though at least that could be cleaned. "No hospital," he said again, a little inanely. "s**t."

His voice was empty. He looked empty. He leant over the sink and bled into that instead. "s**t." For a moment she thought he'd throw up, but he simply hunched himself there and clapped one hand to the wound that was bleeding in time with his heart.

That wasn't good. That usually meant, artery. Was there even an artery there? Had she hit his subclavian? s**t indeed.

He was looking clammy, and he was breathing too hard. His eyes tracked too unevenly over the sink and the window in front of him, which still held a tiny lonely pot plant that Ursula had obviously forgotten to remove in the Great Furniture Swap. Blood ran down to his hips in thick rivulets. "Get me a towel," he said, voice still too quiet. Usually he yelled like a drill sergeant. Charonite's voice carried. "And there's a small box. Bottom of the fridge. Unless you tossed it."

The towel she could do. That was a quick trip to the laundry closet (which now actually contained laundry, thanks to her), after which she did a frantic search through the bottom of the fridge. He hadn't moved, just bled more, and he was shivering a little and trying not to. There was the little white box -- the towel he took, and he was wrapping it around his shoulder. His lips were pale.

"He got." The breathing was shallow, harsh. "The ******** muscle. Didn't even get... the artery. Wasn't aiming for it."

Inside the white box there was a generic needle, with another ampoule of fluid. "Mix it up," he said, and with fingers that felt all thumbs she did. When she passed it over, he laid out his other arm and said: "Get the vein."

"Gunn -- "

She was a secretary, not trauma center, why wouldn't he just go to the hospital?

"Get the vein."

Somehow, she did.

After that he staggered over to the couch and laid himself down on it -- tying the towel in some kind of ******** ghetto bandage, leaning his head up against the arm of the couch. This would probably end up in 'ruined couch'. He was still breathing badly.

"Do you know," he said, "he took me when I had ******** nothing? He was -- he was always... I was a ******** rube, I could barely read. Taught myself out of an almanac. And a page ripped from a book." He was still trying to get too much air, sucking in anxiously as though it wasn't going through his lungs enough. "That's who you're marrying. A man who. Didn't read properly. Until he was. ********. Ursula."

"I'm not maimed," he said immediately, snapping it out. "I'm not goddamn maimed. The muscle will heal. It's fine. It's fine."

He still didn't look fine. Charonite kept on forcing his eyes open as though letting them droop closed was the enemy, stared straight ahead sometimes and then looked back at her. But then he settled, and their heads were close together now. His breath rasped against her cheek. "I'm not maimed," he said, and his voice was much quieter now, as though it had taken effort to snap before. The towel was staining red. "You won't... I won't be a ******** cripple."

It was unusual to hear his voice dropped that low, pitched so quietly. His skin was a little cold, a little damp, he was sweating. "I told you I'd marry you. I will. I'll just. Have to give you. One day. Beryl." He was stumbling over his words, and looked a little irritated about it, but more than irritated he looked pale and agitated. "Endymion. I'm not a prince."

When she opened her mouth to speak again he interrupted her. He took her hand in his good one and placed it on his chest, curling his fingers around hers (so weakly? God) and pressing it to his skin, the edge of the towel. He was running on a rail today, because then he rambled on: "It was the plan... was always the plan. Kunzite's plan. The Prince, obsessed with Serenity. It hurt to watch. Kunzite couldn't bear it. Kunzite out of all of us was... measured, was... he is my... was my Captain. My General-King. I am yours. He was mine."

Just in case Ursula started to draw a worrisome parallel --

"He taught me... who I am. I never taught you bullshit... you were always. You were always goddamned strong. And you."

It was at this point, the point when he was quiet and the point when he was rambling, when she started to realise he might actually die.

He didn't even laugh. She was used to his cautiously dry chuckles, which tended to be more short barks of laughter than anything more sustained. He kept on staring into nothing, blinking rapidly at times. His fingers worried at her ring, brushing against the diamond. He said nothing about her adamant declaration that she would remain Ursula, remain his wife; that was maybe telling, too. Or not. He was probably high as a kite on the pain and on whatever he'd had her inject into his arm, his movements slow and much clumsier than she was accustomed to.

Scheelite probably did have enough glowsticks to light the path to Hell.

He was mumbling a little still: "I can't believe he's still better than me as... a teenage girl." A racking cough: he winced. "Things have... changed. ********. I told him once I'd... never get married. He was married to... the Kingdom, honestly ******** devoted... pure... the Prince, the Kingdom, if you'd seen it... Do you. Remember." His breathing was laboured again. "The day you became. Nealite. Sometimes I. Don't say you don't regret it. You don't know how to regret it."

He was urging his words on now like tired horses.

His pupils wandered over to fix on hers. His hand slowly jerked up to touch her cheek, move numb fingers back to curl in her hair, pressing her head (still unfamiliar, still clumsy) closer. "Don't cry," he said, a little more gruff now. "I don't want you to cry over me. I am not. Not going. To die. On you."

It still sounded as though he was trying to convince her of something. The General-King's voice lilted, his fingers not even able to tangle in her hair. She had to be close to hear him now. "I just want to. Tell you. The truth, the goddamned truth," he was saying. "I keep on... you don't know. Who I am. So..."

His eyes drifted closed, his skin ashen. His hand was heavy at the back of her head. His lips were a little open, and his lips had taken on a strange, bluish tinge. He was still. Disquietingly still. Silent. This close, his skin gave out little warmth, little comfort.

But then his eyes flew open again, voice slurred: "What the ******** was I talking about."

He took this in, eyes cracked wide open, considering this. "Someone in a ******** ******** of pain." That sounded more like the man she knew: a man full of utterly redundant expletives, though he'd never admitted pain before. That probably meant he was in as much as he was hinting.

"Let me guess, you... won't even let me have a cigarette."

Yes, that was the man she was going to marry.

He answered for her: "No, that would be... easy." Movement. With what was probably a heroic effort, he swung his legs around even as she found herself hovering like some panicked nurse, stumbling -- she caught him, squeezed her way under his arm -- and he stumped forward, every step so slow and measured that it looked like he had to relearn how to move each time. "I'm going to go. And bleed on your ******** cushions."

Yes, that was definitely the man she was going to marry.

She looked a lot better than doing it on the Wiki how-to advised you should smoke. No coughing. Correct inhalation. Lit it from the right end. (You'd be surprised.) He took it from her, slid it between two fingers, and stuck it in his mouth even as his eyebrows shot up. The towel was encrusted with blood. He was propped up and smoking with nerveless hands.

She was so relieved.

And he'd watched her every movement from cigarette to light to taking a drag off it with no sign of vacillating pupils, narrowed and focused entirely on her, though he was greedy for the smoke first and foremost. When he removed the cylinder from his lips, he muttered, "You're lucky I'm wounded in action, Captain," and stuck it back in his mouth. And then his arm snaked, slowly, unsurely, probably temporarily but oh well what the hell, around her shoulders.

In another universe, under the right lighting, the right temperature, examined at the proper angle, squished around and squinted at:

It sounded like a come-on.

Things were definitely brightening up.