In her hospital bed, Miriam Jacobs dreamed.

She dreamed she was in the Palace again, in the Golden Imperium, back before everything went wrong -- she knew because all the tapestries were in place, the vases were intact, there was no blood on the floor -- and she was sitting at a table with the Prince. A small table, with settings laid out for two. He was smiling, laughing, telling her about something, and she tried to reply: but the voice that came out was a girl's, not his Captain's, and when she looked down she was wearing a white dress, like a bride. But the Prince called her "Kunzite" and "Captain" and went on talking.

He was wearing white too, and had in his hand a goblet of red wine which he spun this way and that by the stem between two fingers, so that it refracted the light. "I feel like I haven't seen you in a long time, Captain. Where have you been?"

"You were dead," she said; then, pragmatically: "You are dead."

"Am I?" The Prince smiled. "But you see me here, and here I am." And with his other hand he touched her hand with the tips of his fingers -- but the fingernails came away, falling bloody on the table and her hand, and she recoiled in disgust. When she looked up the Prince was still smiling, but his eyes fell out of their sockets, and then his tongue out of its mouth -- and she was seized by a terrible horror and picked his eyes up and tried put them in again, but it was to no avail and the Prince fell apart in her hands into a pile of rotted, red meat even as she tried to put him back together again.

When she looked up the Dream Priest had his hands on the back of Endymion's -- what had used to be Endymion's -- chair and was shaking his head, faint sadness in his eyes. Not sadness. Disappointment.

"What has been corrupted can never be made whole, Captain," said Helios, meeting her eyes.

Only it wasn't her eyes -- it was his. Kunzite was in his uniform again, with his sword at his side. "This was never his fault," he said.

"What has been corrupted can never be made whole," said Helios -- and when he looked up again, Helios was Rea Marshall in a dress, and when he looked up once more Rea Marshall had gone, Venus in her place.

There was blood running from Venus's eyes. Kunzite was on his feet again and he stepped up to wipe it away with the edge of his white sleeve: but the blood just stained his sleeve and traveled all the way down to his elbow, and then up his arm, spreading a bloom of red across his uniform. Venus smiled at him, though she looked like she was crying: then again, with the blood it was difficult to tell. "I can't do this again, Captain," she said.

"You're bleeding," he tried to say, "hush, you're bleeding --"

"I have to trust in you," she said. "I can't do this again."

But they were both wearing blood-red now, and it was when she stumbled and he caught her that Miriam blinked her eyes open in her Destiny City Memorial bed.