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Hvergelmir took Sarras's hand in her own and began leading him down through the side balcony, around the raised storage wing and into the pitch-dark fly loft. It wasn't the easiest crossing to do without benefit of much light to see by, but Hvergelmir knew the two fly galleries by now, and the catwalks that joined them, and -- having laid down glow tape to mark her path on a previous occasion -- she had little trouble steering Sarras around where she knew the counterweights were waiting in the dark. Soon enough they were scaling down the far end and heading down the shallow steps to the stage area where Hvergelmir kept most of her things when she visited.

Sarras's commiseration about the theater did give her pause: she went a little bit stiff, embarrassed at her unthinking faux pas, and it was a moment before she recovered enough to give his hand a tentative little squeeze. "I'm so sorry," she said quietly -- her voice sounded louder, somehow, in the dark. "I didn't realize."

The stage was set to resemble a parlor room from an English country estate -- a large, central table with chairs set around it, a fake fireplace to one side, and at the back of the stage, just in front of the crossover, was a wall of false windows, empty lattices without the glass. She'd taken it over a bit, so now there was a plastic cooler on the floor and a lot of her supplies on the table, including a few touch lamps. She tapped them each with her fingertips to give herself and Sarras some much-needed light to see by.

Hvergelmir let go of Sarras's hand and gestured to one of the empty chairs while she opened up the cooler to start pulling out things she thought they'd need -- mainly a few water bottles and some first aid supplies. (Nothing in the cooler was actually cool, of course -- but it had been a convenient way to transport a whole bunch of stuff at once without raising too many questions.)

She looked at the packets of antiseptic wipes in one hand and then back at Sarras, considering. Hvergelmir didn't know a great wealth of information about first aid, but she could hum a few bars. Probably enough for the kinds of injuries they were sporting, unless Sarras was a lot worse off than he claimed to be. "Do you want me to help you get your shirt off so we can get that cut cleaned? I'm okay to power down, more or less, but I don't think you want to power down and bleed on your street clothes, right?"

Hvergelmir watched as Sarras attempted -- unsuccessfully, and in obvious pain -- to remove his shirt the conventional way. It looked halfway to agonizing, and she longed to help, but he'd refused her offer; instead, she stood by and tried to look like she wasn't paying too much attention, in hopes of sparing his pride. When he gave up, resorting instead to tearing his shirt off entirely, like Hulk Hogan on a bender, she blinked a few times in surprise -- then stood there for a few seconds, blushing and staring. The injury to his back really didn't do anything to diminish the fact that, from the front, it wasn't a bad sight.

Still, it was probably a little impolite to stare at a time like this. She turned a little redder and shifted her gaze down to the medical supplies in her hands. She was going to administer first aid. Yes. Totally. That.

His comment caught Hvergelmir off-guard, startling her eyes back up almost immediately -- and the look on his face, the obvious disdain for his uniform, was so profound that she couldn't help it -- she started laughing over his contemptuous face, his torn shirt, his wry comment, their whole situation. It was a few long seconds before she got her giggling under control.

"It really is unfair," she agreed, collecting herself with an amused shake of her head. "We don't exactly look intimidating in our outfits, do we? It's like, tremble in fear in the face of a couple of ex-Candyland refugees, ooh, scary."

She concentrated for a second and shifted down from her torn ex-Candyland refugee dress into her plain old civilian self. Jeans and a sweatshirt didn't qualify as intimidating or anything either, but they definitely did qualify as way more comfortable than her page dress -- and probably less smelly and garbage-stained, at the moment, and her ponytail kept her hair out of her eyes.

Laney grabbed a bucket off of the table and set it under Sarras's chair, then walked around behind him and cracked the first water bottle open. "Okay, from here on out, this is going to probably suck, sorry. Think happy thoughts, okay? Or, uh, distractions! So tell me about yourself -- you mentioned you have a brother? Any other siblings?"

As she spoke, she began pouring water down his back and over his injury, sluicing over his skin to run down the chair and into the bucket. The antiseptic was going to do the real work, and probably cause the real pain, but she had to get some of the worst of the youma gunk off first.

Laney winced as she cleaned off the worst of Sarras's wound with a good dose of Poland Spring -- not just because it was obviously causing him pain, but for the conversation, too. Laney had never had close family like that -- what must it be like to lose someone you'd grown up your whole life with, a friend by blood that you'd always have a connection to? What had Laney ever really lost that was precious at all? What could she possibly know about how Sarras was feeling?

Laney pulled up a chair behind her companion and settled herself down in it, stretching her legs out to either side. She began unfolding antiseptic wrappers and taking out the damp little swabs. "This'll sting," was all she warned this time, because she was sure he already knew how antiseptic worked, and that it'd be worse than the water. There was no pointing in ratcheting up the anticipation.

She started at the top of his injury, daubing at the wound as lightly as she could while still effectively cleaning and disinfecting it. "I don't think you look so bad in lavender, if you ask me," she joked in a low voice as she worked. "And I mean, the headpiece is like, really working for you. It has that futuristic beta edition Google Glass look I hear young singles really go for in their heartthrobs. I think you'll be on the cover of Teen Beat in no time."

She paused between swabs to give him a bit of a break, and so she could set aside the old antiseptic wipe and unwrap a new one. "I don't have much family, myself. Just my folks and me, an aunt that lives out of town, and some extended relations. I used to think about what it would be like to have a twin -- I was kind of, you know, a bored kid," Laney smiled to herself. "Anyway, I can pretty much guarantee the universe would collapse under the weight of two of me -- or at least my parents' patience, anyway. But I always thought it would be nice to have someone who'd . . . I don't know. Understand me, I guess -- the way you understand someone when you've spent your whole lives seeing the other person grow too."

She laughed quietly to herself. "I don't know, listen to me, just merrily gabbing away. You're probably thinking, 'that's not how twins are at all.' Don't mind me, though -- I just like to talk. Gives you something to get annoyed about, to get you gritting your teeth through the pain. Special skill of mine, in fact -- free of charge."

Laney took a break to wipe her hands off on a nearby towel. She was going through antiseptic wipes at a pretty good clip. "So you grew up in Texas, surrounded by cousins. What was that like for you, living there and then here? I've only ever lived in the city."

Laney sighed, contemplating the matter of Sarras and his apparently-estranged twin. It hit surprisingly close to home, actually -- she hadn't expected that. "My family's like that. They're the whole 'no one's allowed in the dining room because the carpet's white and we don't actually use the dining room' types, and I'm their weird kid. I don't mean that in a sad way, just -- it's how it is. And I don't think we've ever really understood each other," she said soberly. "And with this . . . I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm proud of it -- fighting gross armadillo things is probably a better end than anything else I was ever going to amount to, you know? But they're not really the sort of parents you can tell about something like this. Some people, you tell them because you need to, because you share your burdens with them anyway, even if the other person doesn't know what they're sharing, so it's easier for them, knowing -- but some people want to stop you, maybe because they love you, or maybe because they think you're not good enough to handle it."

She frowned, unrolling gauze between her hands. "My best friend's a sailor senshi. She didn't tell me that for three years. Well, two years, I guess." Laney didn't think the year she'd been in a coma really counted. "It was hard, not knowing why she was on edge all the time. Why she never seemed to be able to relax, or be really happy. I wish she'd told me, but . . . I understand why she didn't tell her family."

Laney covered the wound with long strips of gauze, tamping them down at the edges with medical tape. It wasn't much more than a giant makeshift bandaid, but it would hold, for now.

"Okay, you can turn around," she decided. "All done. In fact, you probably should turn around, if only to see my eyebrows-raised face from the part where you described Texas as being 'too claustrophobic.' Here, this is the face." She pointed at her own face with both hands, putting on her most dramatically skeptical expression. "I mean, we're talking about Texas the state, right? Not like, 'the small town of Texas, Alabama'?"

Laney promptly waved that off with a smile, though, to indicate she was joking and he did not actually have to justify the claustrophobicness of his home state to her. "I've never been more than a state away," Laney admitted. "I'd like that a lot. A Cosmos knight field trip. No youma and no costumes and no worries for a couple of days."

It was a nice thought. It was the kind of nice thought she sort of assumed Sarras had just put forward to be nice, because they both knew they wouldn't necessarily live long enough to take silly vacations, and it was better to talk about these things like you could do them than like you knew you couldn't -- but it was nice. Laney didn't care if it was just a pipe dream they were bandying about to keep their spirits up. It was nice.

Laney tilted her head skeptically, with a game smile and a cheerful dismissal, which was generally how she responded to compliments she'd already decided the other person didn't really mean. "Seriously, you have to take that back right now if you know what's good for you," she said affably. "I'm one of those people who has a story about a time they set pasta on fire, except I have two incinerated pasta stories." Her smile was much less hostile: it closed off the comment with an implied, but thanks.

"We'll definitely see each other again -- and you can always come here if you need a place to hole up and clean an injury. Use whatever you need, the gate's always open." She took out another water bottle and started pouring it over her hands to clean them, decanting it into the bucket with the rest of their drippings. "Are you okay to see yourself out? I want to stick around here and fiddle around a little while before I head out."

In actuality, she wanted to clean up a bit, since they'd made a mess dealing with Sarras's injury -- but if she said that, she was too worried he'd offer to stay and help out. In his condition, he didn't need that. She could handle throwing out a little bit of trash on her own, and would rather see him on his way to a warm bed and a long night's sleep.