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The Dark Kingdom was as he'd left it.

There was the throne where Endymion had lolled, blank-eyed and unreal, a mockery of a prince. Or else Beryl had sat there, her crimson fingernails tapping the arm of the iron throne in distaste, mouth curling as she looked at her Generals -- it had been the four of them, and sometimes he still wondered why. That was painful. It was as ugly as it was painful.

Ghosts walked the halls: there was Zoisite, kneeling on the dusty floor, hiding what was probably a smirk as he ducked his curly head down -- never listened, never did. Couldn't help himself. There was Jadeite waiting quietly at the back, fixated on Beryl. Out of all of them, Beryl had been Jadeite's queen, had been his declared obsessive love. He would have crawled for her smile: he always had loved women a little too much, and Beryl hadn't been the first. Nephrite, unsmiling, probably trying to figure a way out of the entire thing. But the ghost that remained was the Prince, always the Prince, his blue eyes black as Beryl sat next to him and coaxed curls out of his hair like he was some kind of pet.

His ghost walked these halls too.

They were broken now, run-down, thick with dust and disuse. The long table where they'd discussed their plans was broken. Fragments of crystal and rock decorated the floor, though the front of the throneroom showed recent signs of scrubbing -- nothing more mystical than PineSol. A room to the east lead away, a skeleton crumbled inbetween large chunks of what had been a crystal coffin. If Charonite kept the Negaverse, he was being unusually dirty.

Kunzite couldn't sense the stones. Maybe Charonite had been unable to retrieve them. Maybe Endymion, with his last dreams, had tucked them away -- the world was too full of maybes.

It was a terrible stroke of destiny -- maybe Destiny had always planned it out that way -- that, sauntering without fear into this graveyard, was the General-King himself. He was saying something to the (girl? The Negaverse had obviously gotten a lot more liberal) next to him, a pretty twentysomething with long vermillion hair. And Luna had been right: for someone who had known the Queen, had served in front of her and bent knee, the soul of Beryl shone darkly within her like a beacon.

" -- no, I'm not ******** planning on -- "

Charonite stopped.

The General-King -- now a man well into his thirties -- stopped dead, one arm flung out to stop Beryl next to him as well. He was older. Much older. His other hand went to the weapon at his side, which was, bafflingly, a whip: the sword had gone. He stared through dark glasses. And he looked at Kunzite with first, bafflement: then, relief.

"Captain," he said. His voice had never been the type to fill with excitement, but something in the gruff monotony was thick with thanksgiving. The defensive arm in front of Beryl lowered, and he took a step forward instead, taking off his sunglasses so that he could peer at Kunzite better with pale grey eyes. "Wait. A teenage girl? Were there no other bodies at the time? A teenage girl?"

Miscommunication: or maybe the General-King just really, really, really wanted to believe.

Nealite stood there frozen, confusion evident on her face.

Discussions of cushions and redecorating the Negaverse subspace had quickly fallen to the wayside as the stranger made herself known. Or rather, when Charonite had made her presence known.

The Negaverse Captain knew the headquarters was a safe place. Hell, it was the safest place, so as she laid eyes on the solemn beauty standing before them and recognized the odd change in Charonite's tone, she felt herself bristling. And, just as she'd opened her mouth to tell this little tramp just how she felt about her stealing away her fiancé's attention, she found her jaw clamping shut as Charonite addressed the newcomer.

Captain? But.. wasn't she the only Captain?

Answers would not come, only further confusion as the strange girl in even stranger attire returned the acknowledgment with a foreign word. Was it a name? Or some kind of bizarre greeting from the Bizarro world she obviously hailed from?

Eyes glanced to the side, ensuring indeed there was not another one of these loony characters lurking in the shadows, when she heard another name being addressed. A name that immediately sent an icy chill down her spine.

She straightened herself up immediately, her gaze returning on the one Charonite had addressed as Captain, who apparently was slightly disgruntled over the fact they were now a woman. Tough titties, join the ******** club.

One step sideways and she drew closer to the General-King. This was crazy. This was just ******** crazy.

"Uh, chickie? Do you even know who the hell you're talking to?"

She was unnerved by the name she'd been addressed as, but one hand rose to grip on to her hip in attempts to appear unaffected. After all, what kind of opposition was this? Fighting this chick would be like taking on ******** Serandite. And how the hell did she even get down here? And Captain?

Her other hand moved up and rested on her hip as well, and Nealite let out a long, exasperated sigh, narrowed eyes never leaving Lady Bizarro.

"Charonite, do you mind telling me what the <********> is going on?"

"Charonite --" There was a falter in Kunzite's nearly unflappable voice, just barely, but a falter nevertheless. She had turned half-sideways in what appeared to be a swordsman's position to present a smaller target: a battle stance, though she made no move forward, only held her sword aloft and edged slightly to the side, so that she was centered in front of Charonite. Either she didn't consider Nealite a threat or she had no interest in fighting her. Her stare was definitely fixed on Charonite, all through his outburst, through the shouting, the slam of his fist onto the broken table -- at the final screaming she twisted her mouth in a peculiar way.

"Charonite," she said again, "I am sorry. I am deeply sorry. You have no idea how incredibly sorry I am for what I did by leading you here. I'm not saying I haven't done terrible things, Charonite -- I'm not saying that I'm not responsible. I am. You wouldn't be here," Kunzite gestured with her free hand, at the Dark Kingdom, the cave, perhaps the world as it was, "if not for me. You have no way of knowing how much I regret that."

Her voice hardened: and with it, her face, and with it, her posture, until she stood combat-ready. "It was a mistake. All of it. None of this has served the Prince -- it has only been treason against him. Lay down your arms, Charonite. Tell Beryl that it's over. It is. It has nothing to do with the Lunars. This was always dishonor to the Cavaliers."

There was only one response she could give to him, only one thing that she could say after standing there, listening to the two men (???) converse with one another as if she hadn't been standing within feet of either of them. Only one thing that could be said to clearly summarize her feelings for the situation, one answer to his insistent ********>. You. ******** you and your little cockbite buddy over there!"


Her fists were clenched, having fallen to her sides by this point. Clenched and turning white, her face wiped clean of the confusion, replaced by a mask of pure anger.

She didn't understand this Cavalier s**t. She didn't understand who this woman was, or how it was that she was able to stir such a reaction out of Charonite. Not even Nealite herself could have created such a response, and it both alarmed and frightened her to the point that she'd backed away from the duo.

But then he'd said it. He'd ******** said it, suggesting that he would just toss her the ******** aside to that goddamn Prince he kept going on and on about with this Kunzite bimbo, as if Nealite had never existed. What happened to her, the woman he'd just told her he wanted? Was she really worth nothing to him, in the end, but the vessel to hold Beryl in?

Did Nealite even matter anymore?


"I'm not going ******** anywhere, Charonite."

And she was there, just like that. The gateway from Nealite's anger proving an easy outlet for her arrival, and elegant violet fabric brushed over the floor as the Queen of the Negaverse stepped forward, moving to stand alongside her General-King.

Eyes moved from the lilac-haired man over to the teenager, the glare disapproving. Knowing.

Soon enough a smirk followed, pale slender fingers moving out to run across the top of the broken table.

"Kunzite. Kunzite. You, of all of them, should know that there is nothing capable of matching my power, of matching the Negaverse. And you come in here and choose to mock me? You dare threaten your Queen?"

Her hand raked against the smooth surface, her nails dragging softly along the hard stone. "If your Prince is mine, then you are mine as well. Disobeying me, Kunzite, is the true act of treason."

A pause, and then her hand left the table, her body turning to face her directly, cold heartless eyes narrowing.

"Are you committing treason against me, Captain?"

A lot of things had happened at once, some of them involving the word cockbite. There was the Queen by his side, her long skirts whispering on the stone floor of the Negaverse cavern; and there was Kunzite with his sword, unfaltering, as unmoving and as ready as he had always been. It was a little bit of a three-way ******** now. Queen Beryl had already revealed herself at not full power, he thought, in the old days she would have just tried to strangle the Captain then and there.

He wanted to say something to her, to tell her to leave, but couldn't, what the ******** --

"Yes," he said. "I did."

Charonite took Deathcord and flicked it. Normally that would have changed it to razorwire, but it did something different -- as Beryl glanced, it turned into a long length of intestine, studded with suckers here and there, a limp streamer of pink-purple innards attached to a handle. "And I'll kill the Moon court," he said, "and I'll kill any others. And I'll do what you can't. And God don't make me kill the Shitennou because I ******** will. I will do whatever it ******** takes. Do you know who taught me that? You."

He exhalted through his mouth. "You've committed goddamned treason. Against the Queen. So now -- "

And then both of them moved at once.

Kunzite was faster now. The lead Shitennou of old had been tall and lanky but muscled, a pillar of muscle, and now he was a much shorter, slimmer girl. More speed. Less power. Charonite snapped the whip forward to her wrist -- she snatched it back but the whip still grazed over her hand, the suckers clamping down even through the fabric of her glove. It burnt; when it brushed, it left terrible welts; rosettes of blood blossomed on the cloth. There was no turning back at this point.

The difficulty with Deathcord's third form was that it was organic. The sword cut deeply into the whipflesh, squirmed horrifically and spouted blood, dark violet blood which splattered onto the floor in steaming droplets. As Beryl watched -- and she had seen him fight before, as Ursula, as Nealite -- and there was something... lacking. There was lacking the killer instinct, the singleminded A to Z that Charonite usually demonstrated. It was only visible if you knew him. Otherwise they acted as though the other one was their only aim to kill in all of the world.

And then the General-King made a stupid ******** mistake -- he lashed out again with Deathcord and wrapped the majority of it around Kunzite's arm. She blanched rather than screamed, her pristine white coat immediately tinging a growing shade of crimson, the welts probably already forming on her skin. But then he drew her in, tugged her forward much too close. The whip was a distance weapon. The sword was not. Deathcord lashed over her arm, her shoulder --

And then Kunzite coolly stabbed the General-King through the shoulder, bunching her muscles and then sliding her sword forward. It sunk in, not quite making it out the other end (the angle wasn't right for her to be able to shove it home) but he stumbled back as he leant against the broken table, next to Beryl, Deathcord shivering back to normal rawhide as he clutched the wound and stayed, amazingly, standing. The whip was still in his good hand, but that shoulder was a wreck. He was standing, readying again for the offensive, bleeding like a stuck pig and mouth buttoned tight, his breathing shallow. The General-King was in obvious trouble, more trouble than any of the senshi had ever managed, and bloodied Kunzite still had her sword --

She'd watched the duel in silence, her expression unwavering as both fighters took hits, as both of them tore into one another, blood from both adversaries painting the freezing ground they stood on. It had been years since the floors had been tainted with the remains of anything besides incompetent Lieutenants at the mercy of an angry General-King. Years since the blood of their enemies had mingled with the dust on the floor, the dark crimson slowly drying, staining the neglected ground.

And there wasn't enough.

It was true, her powers had not fully returned to her after her fuse, but there was no concern evident on Beryl's face as she watched. The only sign of emotion she did finally reveal was a disgusted look as her General-King faltered back, his weight being forced onto the desk beside her.

"Pity."

To whom or what she was referring to went unsaid, her voice replaced by a low crackle emitting itself from her direction. The sound quickly grew louder and caught the attention of both duelers. Beryl's hands were in front of her now, moving as if they were stroking a crystal ball. Instead of crystal, however, a dark orb of energy floated between her hands, dark black and sparking, as if electrified. As her hands moved, the ball grew larger, slowly but surely.

Perhaps both Shitennou had underestimated the Queen and her current abilities, after all.

"There will be no surrendering," the cold voice told the young woman, Beryl taking it upon herself to answer for her minion, "Just as there has never been any surrendering in the past. There is allegiance and then there is death."

Her hands rose, the ball of energy now growing at an alarming rate. Both individuals in front of her knew of Beryl's power, of what she was capable of. This ball was no minor threat; it held the potential within it to cause both of their deaths within moments, the energy from her hands having already proven their ability on many unfortunate souls in the past, including the General-King Zoisite. It was clear that her powers had not returned at full force, judging by the time it was taking to create the energy, but the threat was still there in front of them now, strong, clear, and terrifying.

"And you, Kunzite, are going to die."