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It was true. She wished at times that she could have left Hematite and spared him the trouble of his fate but in reality, she would not have been able to leave him behind when he so desperately needed her. Nor would he have let himself be left behind, even with how unnerved he was by her condition.

The last thought struck her like a blow, something she had nearly forgotten in all the time that he had been gone, in all the time she'd spent staring at his frozen face. He truly had been hurt by what she had become.

The hands that had been cupped over her starseed shifted to wrap around her torso instead, as if she had a sudden chill, or she was trying to hold what remained of her together. The moments when she remembered what it was like to be human - to hurt, to love, to feel - were the ones she disliked most. This exposure to someone who had those feelings wrapped up in her was bringing them to the surface for the both of them.

For the first time in a long while, she felt the pitfalls of her humanity.

"Someone told me recently that remembering the things she cared about, that she might have to give up, gave her strength." The bird overhead had drawn her attention now, with its incessant squawking. The noise was as unnecessary as the eavesdropping. "I'm beginning to think that I've already lost too much for that to be true, for me. All it does is make hateful and angry." She laughed and shut her eyes for a moment, then let them reopen to stare at the General she had once loved when they were simply teenagers.

"They'll rue the day I was ever awakened to fight this war for them."

"I am a weapon."

The answer was immediate, spoken with no anger toward the question, or resentment towards the fact. She knew what she was and she had known it for a very long time. In reality, she had known from the moment of her consent that this was her path, even if some of the development surprised her along the way.

"I'm fighting because the Senshi don't belong here, because as long as they exist, so must this war. They've all lost their planets to their own reckless nature and their Princess decided, as she always has, that anything is within her domain to take." The expression on her face was stony as she spoke the words that few so seldom asked to her. They always questioned how she became the way she was, what it was like, but never once, until now, had a single soul asked her why she had done this to herself.

"They've already eradicated every other known civilization in the Universe with the power they've been given and now they're all here, in one place, in the last place. If they destroy this too, there will be nothing left for the people of Earth, just as there is nothing left for the unfortunate citizens of Mars, or Jupiter," a pause, and then, "or Alkaid."

She drew out a long sigh as she came back to the inescapable knowledge that she too, despite her relinquished rights to the title, had been born and reborn a Senshi. For the second time, her hand slipped up to the charred chasm that held her starseed, flattening over it.

"I was a senshi," she corrected, immediately, and the flare of heat in her words was impossible to miss. The hand over her chest curled into a fist and fell back to her side. The flash of eyes in his direction, sharp and cutting, was the closest thing to anger she had truly felt - and likely would truly feel. "And even if one were to lump me back in with that parasitic presence, at least I've ended my own cycle."

His words weren't missed and though it didn't propel her forward into a rage, the implication at least kept the fire in her heart burning. If she were really being honest, the decimation of her planet before she found it in this life was likely her fault anyway, even if those sins belonged to another lifetime. It was hard to know that things she didn't even remember were her sins to bare, even still, after all the hard work she'd done to earn herself a place that would ensure the ultimate eradication of her kind.


"There's nothing," she said crossly, "there was nothing, except the sound of their bleached bones as they crunched under my feet." When his hand reached out toward the hole in her chest, she did one better for him, and plunged her own within it. Even with it lying visible just beneath the chasm of her chest, it gave way like the subspace in any other being, and she pulled out the battered starseed. It looked as if it were barely being held together, cracked and broken as it was like the rest of her, though there was a purple tint to the vessel that spoke of its true composition.

"Do you see?" Her eyes were studying the gem of her own soul with a look that wasn't truly discernible. It wasn't angry, or proud, or awed. There was a curiosity that lingered there but buried beneath something else, like purpose, but not quite. "It's the end for me. I won't come back." Metallia couldn't follow her into the cauldron - and without her, she would crumble.

A small ghost of a smile slipped across her face at his joke, remembering a time when he'd whispered such things into her ear. Yet his words echoed true and her memories paled in the wake of his words.

Everything dies, every cycle ends.

She slid her starseed gently back through the cracks that held it in place. She stepped closer to him, into his space, so that she could lay one hand gently against his chest - over his starseed where it pulsed beneath his flesh. She had once taken comfort in knowing Labyrinthite lurked beneath Chase's flesh, knowing she was safe from her own kind and the perils of being a corrupt among ruthless leaders. Now she knew that he had taken that boy's life as surely as she had stolen Kaia's.

"I don't think that it is either, Labyrinth. So let's just greet the end together, hm? We've come this far already."