Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was an odd feeling, to lay with his head in the lap of what amounted to a stranger, apart from her frequent visits in his nightmares. The sound of her voice was more calming than he remembered, gentler than he had recalled again and again surrounded by a river of blood, listening to words that weren't really hers speak of betrayal and failure. He was relieved to hear that she didn't sound at all like the pale woman that haunted him, even if she had the same face, and he began to relax when her attention shifted to wiping away the worst of the grime with gentle fingers.

"You haven't caused me any more trouble than I cause myself, doll." The distance in her eyes was troubling and he tried his best to put humor in his voice, though it was weak from the exhaustion and waning pain that still lingered. A smile tugged at his lips once she was done with her work, but it too seemed sad. He didn't want her to shoulder whatever this blame he'd realized, suddenly, that she felt. "It's my magic, not yours."

A hand shifted out from beneath the blanket of her cape, one not terribly injured, and reached up to touch the curve of her cheek with blunt fingertips so that she would stop focusing on the spot Cinnabar had nearly destroyed him through.

"It's Gehenna, but just call me Ghen."

The only thing that lessened the weight of failure that Gehenna, that Kam, carried on his shoulders was the sight of another soul trying to carry some part of the burden that belonged to him. It brought a different kind of guilt over him that wormed its way as easily into his soul as the filth of Cinnabar's hand.

"Hvergelmir," his lips formed the syllables awkwardly, but it felt important that he try to use her full name as their eyes met and she pushed his hand away from where their fingers had entwined for that brief moment. "You can't judge my worth for yourself. You don't know me well enough to know what sins are written in my skin."

Yet now he had a name for the woman that had, for so long, been the embodiment of both innocence and judgement. Staring at her now, he realized, she had walked hand in hand with his visions of Mars. When the bright star called out to him and he ignored it, he remembered the look on Hver's face. He had always imagined it was betrayal that stared back at him and even now he could feel his magic trying to pull him as he lay with his head in her lap, watching the expression on her face that he felt wholly responsible for. It wasn't betrayal he saw, but something else.

Guilt? Exhaustion? There was so much in her eyes, eyes more human and less damning than he remembered.

"You're welcome," he answered, soft and low, as if he had trouble letting her thank him for a debt he felt he owed, "but I'd do it again, you know. No matter what you think."

The touch was as calming as the gentle warmth of the cape she had draped over him. It felt odd not only to let someone he barely knew touch him, someone too that he had spent so long conceptualizing as the representation of all his fears and doubts, but even stranger to find that the tension in his bones had begun to wane. There was more to Hver than a simple Cosmos Knight in the wrong place at the wrong time, he knew. She had been there, always, with purpose.

The thought seemed painful in comparison to his own nature - the Mars Knight that was constantly running from his heritage.

"Yes." He answered simply at first, letting his eyes shut so that he didn't have to look at her as the memories of his magic came unbidden. Even with closed eyes, his brows drew down and his mouth tugged at the corners. Yet he felt like he owed her more than one word. After all, his magic was what had been between them when..

"I used to think it was fun, before I started hurting people I didn't mean to. It took too long to realize I wasn't in control of it at all." The Negaverse agent he had surely beaten to an unrecognizable pulp hadn't bothered him, but turning on Hver so quickly had. Just like when he'd hit Nemesis. "I keep trying to avoid it, but somehow I find myself in these situations.."

There was a pause, and then,

"That's not the first time I've had to pull her off of someone. I can't fight her without it - I almost couldn't anyway, this time."

There was no need for Hver to mention that his magic would only get stronger, he'd already guessed at what his fate might bring him if he were to rank up. There was also the knowledge, and deeply rooted fear, that knights didn't ask to rank up - there was no Mauvian that gave them that gift. It would just happen. He would just be.

With every dire situation that he encountered, he risked it. Tonight could have been the night, or the next time he face the youma general. It didn't even have to be that dire, he knew that too. He'd watched Cimmerian rank up over a drunken bar fight.

There was a guilty hope in his heart, one that made him hate himself over the mere thought, that he was enough of a failure that Mars would never want him to have Knight magic.

"Tanais?" The sound of Hver's voice pulled him from his silent pondering and his eyes opened to look back up at her again. He knew the gist of the Negaverse - enough to know they had some weird hard-on for mineral names. The skepticism in his words only thickened as he jumped to the conclusion that she knew more about the General than he'd realized, and he made a guess at why he'd found them entangled in the first place.

This is between me and the Glow Bug. A little discussion about philosophies.

"Were you trying to reason with that maniac?"

Tanais of Mars.

Some small part of Gehenna mourned immediately at the thought of a Mars knight taken to the Negaverse, though he could not have said specifically why. There was a part of him, he knew, that was an echo of a man that had lived thousands of years ago. He had stood before the statue of Princess Mars and felt his loyalty, had looked at remnants of his comrades and felt their loss. He supposed he might have known her once and that loyalty in his veins, no matter his own failings as a knight, caused sorrow at the thought of his kind in the hands of Chaos.

"You can't reason with a wild fire, no matter what oath you took," he said gently, staring up at her eyes as surely as she stared away from his. His head rocked in her lap, signaling that he too had turned it to look out at what he could see of the horizon from her position. Mars hung low that night, gleaming red, as it always was. He knew how to find it now, without an app or internet search. It was always there, watching, waiting, judging. "You can barely fight one, after all."

But there was something curious that tickled at him, immediately.

"How do you know she was meant to be Tanais?" There was a shift of his head again, his eyes looking back at her pale, troubled face.

It was a noble thing, he realized suddenly, that Hvergelmir did. She put her life at risk over and over again and, while the thought of her bloodied and broken was all too easy for him to conjure up to his mind, he had to admire that type of dedication. Yet his eyes dropped away from her smile as he remembered another face, another monster, someone he would never bring himself to offer safe harbor to.

Hver was a better soldier than he, in that moment.

Instead of letting that train of thought continue and have to deal with the consequences of his own guilty conscience, he latched onto her talk of dreams - and wondered, for the first time, over a few that had broken the trend of his own nightmares. They had been brief and clouded, but true. Beneath the blanket, his right arm flexed of its own accord, reminding him that it was still attached.

"I don't assume anything is a coincidence in this world anymore," he mumbled into the night, sighing as the last word died on his lips. "I had dreams of being a Negaverse General. Not many, but enough." He opened his eyes to look back up at her, all seriousness in a way that set the bones in his face to hard lines. "Do you think you can really bring her to become Tanais? And if you could, what would that mean for everyone else? I don't know that it's a future we want, Hver."

Gehenna fell silent for a minute or so as he considered what that meant. The future where everything happened, where his magic had been silenced forever, had also held a purified Cinnabar - Tanais. If she could no longer become Tanais, then there was a chance that the future where they were all persecuted, where he had helped persecute his own kind out of some twisted loyalty, would never come to pass.

"Would it really be so bad to lose a few from that future, like Cinnabar, if it meant the majority of us remained as we are? So far as I have ever seen, it doesn't look like anyone is making much headway in this war, Hver." It was hard to look up at her as he spoke, at the gentle woman whose heart was in the right place, who cradled his head even now. "Every time we save someone, they find another, they doom another person to fight."

An exhausted sigh escaped him on his breath then, as he knit his eyebrows and looked past her to the stars gleaming just overhead. Any time he had to talk about the war, about his goals, or the moon kingdom's goals, it simply gave him a headache. When he was younger, he had thought it all great fun, and now it felt like little more than a heavy burden he could never escape. He was Sisyphus with his boulder, never quite reaching his goal.

"Though I guess we do the same, don't we?"

He fell back to silence as he realized he was talking himself in circles, speaking out loud the labyrinth of thoughts that always drove him to drink and avoid his duty to Mars. They all had their burdens.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, dismissing himself and his thoughts. How much longer was this cloak magic going to take? He felt a sudden need to leave - with his demons in tow.

We can't spend all our time just trying to avoid that future.

The words she spoke made the deeply rooted guilt in his gut rise and blossom, causing him to swallow against the feeling of bile at the back of his throat. Even without meaning to, she made him feel ashamed of himself. There were so many other, better men and women fighting this war, doing their duties and trying so desperately to help their cause.

And then there was Kam, the unwilling Squire of Gehenna. Not for the first time, he wondered how Mars could have made such a poor choice in her vessel.

"I think I'll do that," he answered, sitting up carefully and watching as the shimmering fabric fell to crumple in his lap. The back of his neck was still warm from the cradle of her thighs, though the air, by contrast, felt chilled. A shiver ran down the length of his spine and made him tense until it passed, not just caused by the cold air alone. Very slowly, he pushed himself up to his feet, more cautious than he normally would have been over his own injuries - he didn't want to undo whatever effort Hver had made.

"Thank you, for the.." a hand waved at the expanse of colorful fabric, "magic. Try not to get too close to her without someone else nearby." He turned to head for the roof access door with one last word of caution, though he felt as if it were falling on deaf ears with Hver. She would do what she felt was right, no matter what. His opposite, he reminded himself, and much too noble for him to keep wasting her time.