He hadn't left the Negaverse to set out on some grand quest to go to space and discover who he really was. He'd left because it was untenable to continue to serve in a way he did not agree with. Mostly, he had not been able to stay and watch Guinevere actively make herself worse, and drag that poor girlfriend of hers down with her. And probably look to grab a few more hands on the way down. Guinevere was not a woman of minor appetites, that was for sure. He wondered how much of that had been true before Chaos. A question he would never have the answer to.
He wondered if she even noticed he was gone, honestly. He bore his own guilt like a flag, a black ribbon on his arm that marked his shame, but she had never seemed to think much of his efforts to care about her.
It sucked to acknowledge that. To know that he'd put himself out there for someone and it had resulted in nothing but misery. And the thing was, deep down, he knew it wasn't even his fault.
Lionel sighed, and pulled out his phone. He spent far too much time dwelling on the past, he thought, but maybe it was normal to be all tied up emotionally. He'd walked a complex, tangled path to get to where he was, and if he was honest, he hadn't really given himself much time to...lay with it. Really think over all he'd given up and all he'd let go of in his years with Chaos. More years than he liked to think about, given everything. He'd known for a long time how much he hated it, and yet he'd felt...trapped. Hopeless.
There had seemed to be no way out for so long. How was he supposed to find a Princess? Why would one give a s**t about someone like him? And he'd seen a demonstration of Chaos's power, that night on the hill when he watched Guinevere change in front of him; yes, the White Moon had escaped, but only after a miracle. And they hadn't left whole. Guinevere had not been the only one whose fuku turned black, that awful night.
He'd bet those hadn't been the only losses, either. People had undoubtedly died; that was what happened when you crashed into enemies with bladed weapons and all you had was hope and magic. The exact position Lionel was in now, of course, but at least he knew what he was getting into. Most of the time. Got into it anyway sometimes, but that was the way of things, one way or the other. A little personal risk was worth it when the other option was leaving people to get eaten up by Chaos.
So maybe he was doing something with this new life. Maybe it wasn't all pointless. Certainly he wasn't shying away from tangling with Chaos; that wasn't hard, though, when it presented itself so regularly to receive an asskicking.
He couldn't help but be pleased by what he'd done not a few nights before, sending that Corrupt and Captain fighting each other so he could get the hell out of Dodge. He hoped it was awkward afterwards. He'd bet money it was funny, at absolute bare minimum, and frankly, he'd gladly take funny.
But that didn't exactly fix the situation he'd made for himself, really. Not on emotional terms. Maybe it was even more of the same thing he'd been doing--shutting down, running away, pretending he could just...forget it all if he tried hard enough.
He'd jumped into new things, run away from who he was before. And that wasn't to say there weren't good things in his life; he wouldn't trade Leandro for anything, and he wouldn't have that at all if he hadn't taken the emotional leap to follow Murikabushi. And if he'd wallowed, like Muri's cute blue-haired boyfriend, he'd still be stuck where he was. Depression, But In White Now wasn't the move he wanted to make. But he'd...sort of done something similar.
He caught himself wallowing, sometimes, and he always wanted to shove it away rather than confront it. He'd go find some Chaos to punch, or call up Leandro and find something fun to do, or practice his guitar to relearn the muscle memory of it all. See if Soren needed a second set of hands on some project or other he was working on. Literally anything but sit too long with his feelings and really think about them, because that sounded like a special circle of hell.
It was like looking into a deep, dark pit, and teetering on the edge of it. The same way he'd felt by the well, that night, when Murikabushi had convinced him that he deserved to try for something more than just miserably existing in the Negaverse for the rest of forever. Like there was a long, long drop, and darkness waiting, and if he fell, it would just...swallow him up.
And then he would have nothing to worry about at all.
Sort of a nice thought, in its way. Except for the parts where everything would be over, and he would never get a chance to figure out something better, more balanced, less....shitty and miserable.
So maybe the idea of finally checking out his planet had some merit on that front. He'd go there, look around, take some time somewhere far away, and be somewhere where he and his thoughts were all alone. Maybe a semi-ridiculous idea. Maybe exactly what he needed to sort his s**t out.
He'd thought about asking Leandro to come with him, but this first visit....it needed to be for him. He needed to see what this place was like, and take it in, by himself. Find out what sort of world produced the Senshi of Betrayal, and stuck him in a mecha pilot bodysuit and sort of left him to figure his s**t out. Then again, he'd gathered, from his long conversations with Soren over mechanical projects, that this wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Soren hadn't known his world well, but he'd said that Senshi weren't supposed to be born so far from...home. If it could be called that, given that he'd never even set foot on the land whose name he bore and who, according to Soren, he was tied to by his very soul.
He'd pulled his own starseed once or twice, when he'd still been corrupt, to admire the shining facets of it. To wonder at its size and simplicity when it contained everything he was and ever would be. To admire the way it caught the light, the way it had color even though part of him felt like it ought to be rotten by now. He didn't remember any of it anymore, but the way he'd thought about his life before made him think it probably hadn't been easy; he suspected he had probably...well, struggled, to put it mildly. He remembered gratitude, when the Negaverse had first brought him in. Gratitude, and a desire for more power.
He'd wanted all of that so badly, wanted to finally take ownership from a world that had refused him, and it had been...heady, once.
The shine had worn off, of course. But it had been there, as little as he liked to admit to it. Pretending otherwise wasn't going to get him anywhere.
Neither was standing around in Henley Park in the middle of the night, a sitting duck for some Negaverse a*****e who wanted to pick a fight with Lionel for existing, or some other clown who paid enoguh attention to other officers to recognize him. Both extremely yikes scenarios, and he was not eager to get tied up in either.
So, he finally pressed the button that would whisk him off to space.
What he saw made his heart stop for a moment.
He was in another park, of that he was sure. And like the one he'd left behind, its green spaces were no longer so green, though this looked less like seasonal change and more like long term rot. A thousand years of neglect, if he had to guess--he could see how it had once been, the lines of old paths still traced out in stone that had probably once been polished and elegant but now showed signs of overgrowth and then, after the overgrowth, decay. Cracks and breaks and stones pushed up. Once, this place had been tamed and beautiful, and even in ruins, it still had a sort of elegance about it.
In the distance, he could see great buildings--skyscrapers, almost, though they too bore the marks of decay. It looked as if plants had grown all over them, once, and Lionel could even see places that almost looked marked out for them to grow, but they had clearly spilled beyond those borders, shattering glass and
And then, at some point or another, they'd begun to die, and he could only see the corpses left behind. Dead vines. Dirt tracks where something had rotted away completely. A fallen tree hanging out a window that held his eyes for a long moment, like a monument to the deunification of nature and man that had clearly occurred after the Lionelian people had begun to die off.
As surely they had, like every other planet in the galaxy. Even those that still had their Senshi were otherwise empty, lifeless husks, and Lionel couldn't help but feel a sense of deep, profound sorrow, seeing this place and the way it marked thousands of lives once lived and now snuffed out.
He wondered what kind of plants had grown here. Their carefully separated rows were so neatly organized, and it looked to have been delineated into sections, once--and as his eyes passed over, he could see the tools of agriculture. Particularly, though they were falling apart, what looked like vertical planters, back to back, made with an alien material that he was sure had once shone but was now dirty and decayed.
Lionel walked up to it and lifted up his arm, rubbing off some of the dirt--
and in an instant, he saw the park not as it was but as what it had been.
Everything was so beautiful. Clean and elegant, every piece of human-made architecture carefully built to fold into the environment around it. And he could see other people--families, children--hard at work pruning and tending a rainbow of exotic plants. Their clothes seemed both humble and futuristic--sleek, yes, but decorated with plants embroidered and live.
The people were mostly human, except that he noticed lionlike ears and tails, in a rainbow of colors to match the vibrant hairs everyone seemed to sport.
And after a moment of looking around, he noticed that people seemed to be avoiding his gaze.
"Don't want to be caught in the crossfire if someone takes a shot at you," a voice said, and he turned to look up. Nest to him, with a hand on his shoulder, was a gruff older man with graying violet hair and silvery lion ears. He squeezed Lionels's shoulder and sighed, and Lionel realized abruptly that the man next to him was not absurdly tall, to loom over him so; he himself was in fact much shorter (and perhaps much younger) than he was used to. "If the Great Houses could stop their nonsense..."
"But they never will," Lionel said, and his voice confirmed that he was in fact young. "They haven't for centuries. Gambling that the next me will be born in their family, so they can use him as a tool for however long he's around for."
There was an undeniable bitterness in his tone. Clearly he had accepted this, and just as clearly, he was not at all happy about it.
"And they forget that losing our Senshi and having to restart the search so frequently leaves us weak. We've got it too good here. Not enough external conflict, so the Houses have to invent things to fight about."
"It could be better," Lionel said, "if they stopped fighting each other and focused on moving forward."
"It could be," the older man said. "But we aren't there yet, little lion. We may find our way one day. Until then, eyes up."
It was half a vision, a strange tangle of understandings, all at once, and something so thoroughly contradictory.
The city was beautiful. The garden was thriving, and he'd seen the great towers in the distance, sleek and white and grown over with so much green it made him want to cry. A world that had to be incredibly beautiful at first sight.
A world that was apparently at war with itself.
He wondered if he'd come to understand more, if he came back here. If he'd learn more about that young man, about who he grew up to be--if he even got to grow up.
Don't want to be caught in the crossfire. Which meant that there was a chance that someone trying to assassinate their own ******** Senshi might strike in public and put the lives of everyone in this gorgeous community garden--a community garden! the type of society that had community ******** gardens and buildings built to harmonize with nature also had people trying to assassinate the Senshi for stupid power plays--at risk for...whatever it was they wanted.
It sounded incalculably stupid, to him. Surely there had to be better things to do. Surely there were ways they could have been working to improve their world further instead of....whatever the ******** they were doing instead. How absolutely miserable.
He huffed, dropping down on a bench that looked sturdy enoguh to support him--sleek and elegant, if a bit dirty--and fiddled a little with the ribbon on his arm.
Was he doing the same thing? Simultaneously wallowing in and running from who he used to be? Wasting the good life he had by letting the shadow of his past loom so large, he wanted to run from it as far as he could?
It seemed like a ridiculous contradiction. But so did "solarpunk utopia whose Senshi had to worry about assassins in broad daylight in a ******** community garden." And just like that particular shitty situation, nothing but misery could possibly result from it.
Laeradr had asked about the ribbon, once. Only once, because Lionel had thoroughly dodged the question--just said that it was connected to who he used to be and that he didn't want to talk about it. And for all the ways Laer could be a s**t, he wasn't the pushy kind, and so he'd backed off and left Lionel to shove it down and down and away, into a dark, deep well of his own making where the only monster at the bottom was the one created whole cloth from his own memories.
He'd kept his past similarly locked up tight, talked little of his time in the Negaverse, tried to pretend he was focusing on building something new. But how could he build something new, when he let the shadow of the old loom so heavy that it marked the very magical uniform he wore every time he powered up?
It wasn't like he had any illusions about whose fault what happened to Guinevere was. It wasn't his, certainly. He hadn't set up those generators. If he was real, it probably didn't really fall in the lap of the Velencyans, either, but even if it dud, surely they'd paid enough when she killed one of their own, shattering his starseed so he would never rise again. But truly and fully, the responsibility sat with the Negaverse, with Laurelite and her General-Sovereigns, who had let that happen. Who had kettled Order so they were trapped with those awful machines, and who had simply watched as lives were destroyed and people were unalterably changed.
And they'd called it a victory. Celebrated. Given out medals. Honored their brave soldiers as if they hadn't just done something so horrible, it had turned the hearts of some of their own.
He hadn't done that. Hadn't made a single decision that day, except the one to try and protect Guinevere after Chaos took her. And even that hadn't worked out particularly well, because she didn't want to be protected, hated the idea of being saved.
People had to want to change, had to want to accept help, and she had wanted neither of those things.
And maybe he could let himself stop carrying this weight. Maybe he didn't have to keep on suffering. Maybe he could let it go.
It was ego, after all, wasn't it? Hanging onto this like he was so big and strong for carrying it?
So maybe he could go back to Earth and share the burden a little with someone who cared about him.
Maybe it didn't have to be misery all the time forever.
He untied the ribbon, and let it fall to the ground. He would leave this piece of his past here, on this beautiful alien world, and let it lay. He was free of the Negaverse now, and the only way he needed to look was forward.
He had made his own choices. He had a life to live.
He took a deep breath and pressed the button that would take him back to Earth. And once he got there, he powered down, finding a nice bench to sit on so he could text Leandro.
Hey, he began, come meet me in Henley Park? I'm on one of the benches halfway up the walking trail. There's something really important I'd like to talk to you about.
[wc: 3027 words]
