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The only haze of battles and gruesome war wounds Khaldun - who for the rest of the conversation would be better known as Hematite - had real experience with were the ones in his history textbook, on and around which he was kind enough to pencil in various lewd anatomical and verbal add-ons for future students to get a real education from. But to be perfectly honest, he was always rather fond of having a whole five fingers on each hand which were not bent backwards and bloody. His own face was bad enough already, in his opinion, looking like someone had taken a knife to it one way and then doubled back again just for fun. He'd never been to a hospital before, or certainly didn't remember having to go to any, for anything as long as he'd been at Hillworth. This... kind of was the hospital, which was to say in retrospect Hematite should have left his finger to set at a gruesome angle and be glad he got away from that girl with such a minor injury. The gears were turning in Hematite's mind as to how to explain this one. Seeing the look on Charonite's face go from bad to worse made his excuses skip like the music on a scratched CD, one Charonite had heard all before anyway. The problem was that Hematite wasn't just a hapless student here to wheedle a band aid. He was a Negaverse Lieutenant. And Charonite was, in terms Hematite preferred to use, his boss.

At the request, Hematite kicked a foot out automatically at the and closed the door with it - his fingers were preoccupied with escaping Charonite's full gaze. He was trapped now, no turning back. This was going to be a very dangerous game just to escape not only with first aid, but less injured than when he arrived. And it was only Hematite's love of such high-stakes gambles that he had considered there to be an inkling of a notion that coming here had possibly been an ok idea. Hematite hated Charonite, and of course there were a great many things he wanted to say or do at this moment that were not in his best interests if he wanted to keep those other nine fingers whole or even attached to his hands. But he'd had some learning experiences in his time that were powerful enough to warn him just how high the stakes were here.

Hematite's dark eyes followed the sunglasses and then the first aid kit as they hit the desk, and the new request meant he was forced to make his decision of just how to cover up this latest girl-inflicted injury. Charonite probably already knew, going by the 'pathetic', but Hematite was only here because of the slim chance the General-King didn't put two and two together from the other times Hematite had ended up here for first aid. He didn't want Charonite's pity, but that was mostly because Charonite did not pity anything, so he had complete confidence that he was not about to become the exception. But, rule number one, no eye contact. Especially when Charonite wasn't wearing those sunglasses of his. He began to study the floor of Charonite's office as though it were the most fascinating thing in the world, and mumbled something.

"It's not what it looks like-" Of course it was what it looked like. It was a broken finger, purple and swollen with blood and misaligned bone. It looked very convincingly like a broken finger. And only the one broken finger at that. Hematite could have played Stairway to Heaven on the tension in the room. There was a momentary pause before he managed to spit out the missing piece of the sentence like he'd been choking on it. "-Sir."

Khaldun reached his arm over as slowly as possible, staring at it as though he were preparing to stick it into a tiger's mouth with no certainty as to how or if it would be returned to him. Still, he refused to look Charonite in the eyes when he spoke, instead making detailed observations about the woodgrain of the desk his own hand was palm-down on. Every instinct in his body told him go ahead, make a wiseass remark, get it out of his system. Hell, while you're at it just give Charonite a piece of your mind about all that 'failure'.. Only the bitter realization that the fate of his hand was up to a man that could just as soon crush it in his grip should he be, say, talked back to, was keeping him from it. Almost.

"I wish I had, too. But last month you sure didn't seem to think it was possible for me to have broken my nose on one, so I've been very careful with them since." He just barely managed to keep his tone flat on that one, and fixed his face at the last second to look deadly serious. By being very careful with starseeds, he meant not going completely out of his way to get them. That much Khaldun was aware Charonite knew - Khaldun had a reputation for not having a whole lot of motivation, though Obsidian or the boss threatening to eviscerate him usually did the trick. Ultimately, his nose had been broken last month in a so-called 'pissant fight', a step above this month's 'rejection by a finger-breaking girl', in that at least it hadn't been emasculating on top of being painful to fix. Anyway, Khaldun was already fully convinced Charonite was taking his time with the bone-setting on purpose here. This hurt a hell of a lot worse than when the finger had been broken in first place! Khaldun spent a few moments trying to get a grip but was faltering fast, knowing that he was going to bite into his tongue soon if he had any hopes of pretending not to be in excruciating pain. Was there anything he could elaborate on about his encounter with the purple-haired girl that would make a barely-believable story? Only the five-second appearance of the cat. Good enough!

"Okay, okay, see, I was chasing a cat. Because I thought it was, y'know, the cat! Funny thing about cats, they're really hard to chase in the middle of a city!" His voice spiked and fell in volume several times as he wove a broken story to match the state of his finger, keeping himself talking to avoid having to pay full attention to his fingerbone being arranged. Charonite was taking so long now as far as Khaldun thought, that he was running out of lies and only had truth left to continue on. That b*****d. "But now that I think about it more carefully, there may have been a girl involved! But only for like a minute! A completely cat-related minute!"

"Inadvertently, maybe. Not really. No. Definitely no." The worst seemed to be over, and for the pain he'd at least have a working finger somewhere down the line. Was he in the clear? There had been an unusually small amount of yelling today. It was actually pretty suspicious. After all, this was Charonite. There was never a day in Khaldun's memory he went without blowing his top at least once.

So when the boss let loose on the tirade, Khaldun was aware that it had been kind of like having a sixth sense for impending nuclear disaster. Accurate, but he was still screwed in the end. He could swear he felt the yelling in his broken, splinted finger. Wincing between the ringing in his ears and the Flecks of Spit, he managed to find enough silence in his mind to record the obvious observation. Aaand there we go.

The rest of his response was fairly Pavlovian. When those dogs heard a bell, they got hungry. When Khaldun heard Charonite bellowing, he got in the mindset of a man defusing a bomb. There was one thing and one thing only that Khaldun had to know about Flecks of Spit time - there was no ******** around now.

"I'm sorry, sir!" Khaldun did have more training than the rest of the lieutenants, military-style training, which ought to have made him a better fighter. He had never had any interest in finding out, and avoided Senshi whenever possible (except perhaps to get a phone number off them in human guise, which never worked). The most his military training amounted to in the meantime was an instinctive use of "sir" as a form of punctuation when Charonite bore down on him in a fit of rage, or a paroxysm of rage, or a partly cloudy with a chance of rage. Anything with spittle. Whatever it was Charonite wanted to hear, though, Khaldun would have to say it right now, and it sounded like he was pretty hung up on that cat, Astraea. It didn't pay to be all that curious here, and Khaldun didn't need the matching set of broken fingers. All he hoped was that Charonite wouldn't give him another one of those Sisyphean-scale star seed quotas with the short amount of time to fill it, or even worse, give him the quota and some kind of... of partner he had to go get them with that made shirking the job impossible and attracting the attention of Senshi a guarantee. Khaldun was a goddamn lone wolf. A lazy, irresponsible one, but a lone wolf first and foremost. He'd get around to getting a few more star seeds, eventually. On his own time. Then there'd be more yelling later, but then, there always was. If Charonite could suspend his disgust long enough to imagine Khaldun could maybe actually do something he was supposed to, though, this ruse ought to work. "The cat will be in your office by the end of the week, dead or alive, sir! She won't get away from me again!"

Take the bait, take the bait... Khaldun knew could just catch any old stray and let all this blow over while his finger healed. No effort, and if it turned out not to be Astraea well that'd be an honest mistake! Too easy.

That was too close. Khaldun let out an audible sigh through his nose, which turned into a grunt of pain when the medicine hit him in the bad hand. It wasn't exactly a sign of caring, but it was a sign that the adrenaline coursing through Khaldun's veins was no longer necessary. Now that the storm had passed, he finally lifted his eyes from their desk-gazing position to Charonite himself, albeit avoiding meeting his gray eyes still. And again with Khaldun's stellar lack of promotions. The teenager made a face of annoyance but didn't reply. Everything was always some sort of disappointment to Charonite. Khaldun certainly remembered not having a whole lot of choice in the matter of joining the Negaverse - that decision had apparently been made for him. So why in the hell did the guy think Khaldun would go out of his way to be useful to someone he hardly knew, for a purpose he'd never been told, for an organization that effectively went 'it's dangerous to go alone - take this', and dropped a pocketwatch into his hands as a weapon? Khaldun had to admit there was reason to be suspicious, but then again Khaldun would admit everything in life was awfully suspicious.

"Ugh, not a cat," he groaned reflexively, at the thought of being stuck with a guardian cat. Khaldun hated cats, and was not a cat person in the least, and though he didn't fear them he certainly would not want a cat following him around all the time. He hated the claws, the teeth, the caterwauling, the hissing and spitting, the sheer unpredictability of felines. In fact, he seemed to hate cats for all the same reasons as he hated Charonite right in front of him. Small wonder. The talking aspect of the guardian cats seemed to make it worse, though, since at least with a regular cat it was just a dumb animal. With his good hand, Khaldun brushed aside a dread that had fallen over his shoulder. What good was he besides being a beacon of rugged manliness to the young ladies of Destiny City? "I suppose I do give Lieutenant Obsidian someone to chase after during P.E. class."

Khaldun looked at Charonite apprehensively, knowing exactly where that particular tone went when paired with his name. It went to a place Khaldun was not at all comfortable with acknowledging the nature of. But to Khaldun's inner delight, the subject was dropped as suddenly as it had been raised.

"Yesss, sir," Khaldun purred at the request, trying hard not to betray his relief through his expression. He eyed his finger splint, and the finger inside that was now only radiating a dull, constant pain rather than the sharpness of moving bones under the skin. All he needed was a dumb cat now and he was set. Sweet, sweet victory for Khaldun. "Nothing will stand in my way this time, rest assured."