Welcome to Gaia! ::

Rea Marshall was the captain of Team Seven. Team Alpha. Team Did Not Have Any ******** Idea As To What They Were Doing, Team Not Winning The Amazing Race. She put that in as her cell message: o Captain my Captain, I've got a dark alley and a bad idea.

For Rea, this could have meant anything (a date, another date, a not-date, Charys dying of leukaemia) but further texts explicated it; and then there was Charys bundled up and waiting outside of Destiny Memorial Hospital for her, a scarf and a muffler rather than the usual resistance to the elements that the girl displayed -- reached out to ruffle Rea's snow-powdery strawberry hair when she reached the entrance. Charys looked a little... off. The tie scraping her hair off her head was a dust-flecked black, her coat looked like it belonged to her dad, her skinny jeans were beat-up cargoes. She looked as though she had just thrown together the first outfit that struck her fancy, and not in the usual 'I want to look like I just threw together the first outfit' that she usually favoured. And her brown eyes were glassy, as though she wasn't even... there.

"Reality Marshall," she said. "I got someone who you're going to make a visitor of."

And she started steering her inside the hospital. "This is your first work as team captain, oh gosh," she said. "You're going to have a second work afterwards, just because I'm the work fairy. But first you're going to go visiting. You look cute, that's great. Sorry for being a last-minute douchebag."

This was all a little surreal.

"Two to visit Miriam Jacobs," said Charys when they got up to the third floor. Destiny Memorial smelled like it always did; of failure, desperation and disinfectant, reminding them of when Eve had been wounded, reminding them of the last stay that Charys had been in here at all. Neither of them liked the hospital, which meant that Rea getting dragged there in the first place was a big deal.

The nurse said, "Are you family," as a kind of rote interrogation --

"I'm her third cousin's niece's janitor's charwoman," said Charys.

They let them in anyway.

The girl in the bed was lying with her eyes closed, and Rea recognized her immediately as a girl from her school: a tall, unfriendly Jewish fencer who spurned the company of fools, a category which encompassed everyone else at the school, as far as anyone could tell. Miriam Jacobs was a semi-familiar sight, and here she was -- or a sallow, sickly version of her, at any rate. She wore a white hospital gown patterned with pale blue diamonds. Unsurprisingly, there was an IV strapped to one of her arms, in between bloodied white bandages that covered her arms from wrists to shoulders. There was an adhesive bandage on her forehead. At the foot of her bed, one of her feet was swathed entirely in bandages and some kind of cast. She looked like she'd been hit by a truck.

When Charys came in the girl didn't respond, and for all the world it looked like she was sleeping. But when Rea entered the room fully Miriam's eyes snapped open and she sat bolt upright in the next moment, trailing blood-filled IV tube and all. All in all it had something of a creepy horror movie effect. A jarring minor soundtrack chord would not have been out of place.

She was pale. She looked ghoulish. She looked like something out of The Grudge. And she didn't add anything reassuring, either -- she just stared head-on at Charys and Rea like they were apparitions in her hospital room. Rea, in fact, slightly more. For some reason.

Rea did indeed recognize the girl in the bed, surprisingly. Even more surprisingly, it was one of the few girls at Crystal she didn't find to be painful to her existence. While they had never met, her reputation preceded her, in this case in a good way. Anyone who spurned the company of fools got points in her book.

"Seems a little counterproductive to walks on the beach," She replied with a tone that lacked the touch of humor it was clearly suppose to have. That sometimes happened with Rea Marshall -- . Especially when the tone of the room didn't exactly warrant joking. And looking at Miriam, it clearly didn't. Miriam Jacobs looked like someone who had been standing at Death's door, one foot in, her hand still on the doorframe and had somehow had the sense to run away screaming at the last minute. Or... run her through with a sword, whatever worked.

In fact, her eyes had never left since she had walked into the room. And not just because she looked like a seizure patient. She moved to follow Charys as far as the first chair, but Rea's eyes were clearly set on Miriam's cool grey-blue ones, her expression trying (and failing) to do its best impression of a statue.

"Have we... met?"

"Well, hey," said Charys, leaning back in her plastic chair, tucking her legs up so that her feet were just sticking out. "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into yours. You two have fun with that."

And much to Miriam's -- well, Miriam wasn't even caring -- and Rea's dismay, she popped in her iPod earbuds, leant her head back, and bowed out of the conversation. She was, instead, vaguely humming along to some mash-up, doing vague thumb-dances and leaving the wounded brunette and the pretty leader of Team Seven to it. You could not accuse Charys of ever helping with anything, ever. Rea was left to stare at the bruised, blank-eyed Crystal girl in front of her, the one that she'd once admired.

The one that she'd --

-- her dream --

A man, with short dark hair. Blue eyes, like the depths of the ocean. And a golden crystal. And the dead pegasus in the cage. But the man, standing in front of her, the wind whipping up leaves and stray blossom all around him in the fields of Elysion.

Miriam -- Kunzite -- stared. She'd been doing this along, but in response to being named her big pale eyes got even bigger. Then they abruptly narrowed, and her brow furrowed, with an expression that was easy to name: she was trying to remember something. She was trying to remember -- she looked disoriented, unhealthy-disoriented, like a gravely wounded person in a hospital bed might. Perhaps for that reason it took her a moment or two longer. Then she gripped the edges of her bed, white-knuckled, and looked at Rea again with her eyes big.

"Helios," she said. "Helios."

Then she did the inadvisable. She tried to get up. She swung her feet off the bed, including the one in the cast, and struggled to her feet -- supporting herself with a grimace on the nightstand. The IV jerked and stretched and threatened to pull itself straight out of her wrist, but she paid it no heed. Her legs were trembling a little and she rested her weight heavier on her hands: "Helios," she said, breathless. "Helios, where is he? Do you know where he is?"

As Rea pressed on her shoulders Miriam struggled to get back up, weakly; she tried to raise her arms to push Rea away but at this point the IV did catch and she glanced at it, as if aware of it for the first time -- she settled on putting her hands on Rea's arms as she was pushed back into bed and fisting her fingers in her sleeves tightly. She stared at Rea. She was deathly white now, possibly from the exertion, possibly from stress, or perhaps she just looked paler and veinier up close: but it was no matter. It was no matter if she was pale, or sick, or seventeen or a girl from Crystal. She was the Captain of the Guard and after all this time she was here.

At you don't have him she had thinned her mouth grimly. Now she was gripping the sleeves of Rea's shirt like a person in rigor mortis. "I don't have him," she said, shortly. "I was a traitor. You remember. Your Holiness," and there it was, the formality, the respect, the deference that Kunzite had never lost even when he was at his most frustrated, "With all due respect, I am charged with your protection as well as that of the royal family and -- I -- things are not well here. Helios, I am afraid I cannot let you go anywhere on your own. Much less searching out the Prince, not in times like this."

That was one more thing Helios remembered about Kunzite. He was stubborn, immovable as a rock when he set his mind to it. You and whose army? was the obvious question, but Miriam answered it by turning a disdainful look to the blood bag. "I don't need to rest," she said, against all apparent evidence. "I need to be discharged. The best thing you can do for him is to do something about that." She was serious.

"Sir," it was not the sir offered to a commanding officer, of which Captain Kunzite had none, but rather the respectful sir given to a high-ranking stranger, "with all due respect," they both loved this phrase, "you are not one of my soldiers. It is your duty to serve the Prince. It is your duty to serve the Prince in a spiritual and advisory capacity. I cannot abide anything happening to you. I could not tolerate that failure. I cannot --"

Miriam Jacobs broke off. It occurred to Rea that she looked desperate. Desperate was a strange state in which to find Captain Kunzite, and not a familiar one at all, and yet there he was, staring wild-eyed at Helios, pasty from blood loss and injury, doing the only thing he still had the strength to do: cling to Helios's sleeves. With determination. It was a strange state indeed in which to find Captain Kunzite. It was a slightly pitiable state. The Kunzite Helios knew would've rather gouged out his own eyes than be pitied by the Priest of Elysion.

A moment later she had collected herself. She hadn't let go of Rea, though. "In either case," she said stiffly, awkwardly, possibly what passed for diplomatically, "it is a relief to find you alive and well."

She did not sound relieved, but perhaps it was that interminable pride that Kunzite had always clutched to his chest like it would protect him.

"You have to understand, Helios."

Miriam's fingers quivered a little, with the exertion of gripping. She ignored them.

"There is no one else. It's only you and me."

Miriam's shoulders sagged. This too was an unheard-of gesture from Kunzite. Kunzite, Helios remembered, had been the sort to stand sharp at attention through blizzards, in the boiling heat, and would have kept on standing there through cannonade and archers if Endymion had so demanded. He did not slouch. Miriam Jacobs was most definitely slouching. Then again, Miriam Jacobs had discolored further -- Rea pressed an instinctive hand to her forehead, and she glared -- and ah yes, she was either developing or coming down from a fever.

"I've been awake less than a week in total," said Miriam lowly. "If the others are here, I don't know where they are. If you have some method of finding them, something from Elysion -- if you have some other way at all I would greatly appreciate it if you used it. Anything at all. All I can do is -- I don't know what I can do, Helios. I don't know what I can do."

She slumped a little further with this admission of impotence, and she looked dizzy -- dizzy, and sleepy, and worn-out, and injured. It was definitely more than her pride could take. The fact that she was still doing it was good enough evidence that her body was not really keeping pace with her pride at the moment.

"I killed a corrupted senshi," she said, wearily. "Nova. She nearly took me down with her. That's why I'm here."

More silence.

She grated out a hoarse laugh. "So." She held out her hand. "I'm Miriam Jacobs. What about you, Holiness?"