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The healing wound over her side was too unclean. A straight strip could have gotten it described as an accident, falling into a fence -- a desk -- something -- but what had made it had been teeth, and so instead of a gash it was a criss-cross collection of gouges and puncture marks. It looked as though Hero Barrett had been bitten by a dog. And the taekwondo team would not turn their faces away as she got out of her whites and changed into her uniform, not at Crystal Academy.

On the third floor of the dormitory building there was a bathroom that nobody liked. One of the toilets had never flushed properly, and it was the first one to be refurbished ten years ago. Now it was dated and the soap dispenser never gave you enough soap and the showers didn't have enough pressure, so it was a ghost bathroom that had been abandoned by all and sundry. She thought it would be a good place to change.

Serendipity was an odd object --

Hero clattered into the bathroom and drew the bolt behind her before her ears could catch up with her brain. The noise from the shower benches was that of restrained, angry sobs, the kind of crying you did when you were at the end of your tether and hated life. It was also the kind of crying you did when, even alone, you didn't want anyone to hear you, not even yourself, an irritated nasal string of gulpings and clearing one's throat. It was too late to go back. It was too late to excuse herself.

It was also much too late because Hero Barrett was looking at the hunched, blueclad back of Miriam Jacobs, huddled in on herself, stiff as a board and all her dignity gone. She'd often thought about how she looked with all her dignity gone, as though her skin had been stripped off, but Miriam with her dignity gone was something else entirely. It was much too late. Her whole being cringed.

For long moments she just stood there with her bag, in her taekwondo dobak, back against the door. Miriam did not move or say a word. In the sliver of a mirror facing south, she caught sight of her roommate's red swollen cheeks and long dark hair stuck to them. And Hero was -- sorry, she was sorry. She was suddenly very sorry.

She put the bag down and went to wash her hands, and Miriam didn't move. The soap dispenser didn't give enough soap. Hero dried her hands on a paper towel and went to sit on the other side of the bench, more lost than she'd ever been, less to say than she'd ever had to say.

Silence reigned.

Eventually she got up again, and went to her bag. When she came back she dropped a folded white square next to Miriam's hand: it was a dampened handkerchief with the uninspiring initials H.A.B embroidered in a corner. It had actually been a first-year sewing project. She had not liked soft materials tech. But this time she sat down next to her rather than breadths away, and both of them stared straight ahead as though they were standing in an elevator together.

"It's clean," she said inanely, "I never use it for sneezing."

Miriam took it. Her head was bent now and she was folding the handkerchief into halves. She could obviously say nothing, nothing in her defense and nothing prickly or nothing neutral, and that was even worse. When somebody was crying at Crystal Academy you would go and get one of their friends and deal with it in the least humiliating way possible. If, say, Hero was caught crying (God), there would have been plenty of people to get -- Aurelia or Giselle, or Karin from the taekwondo team, or June from her home class. There were plenty of people who could be retrieved and who would not be a blow to her ego, who could be trusted to be kind. People who knew Hero Barrett. Or people who knew Captain Aries.

It struck her that there was nobody she could go and get for Miriam or Captain Kunzite, either way.

"Jacobs," she said lowly, and corrected herself -- "Miriam."

Hero held her gaze for a long time, but was the first to break it. She looked away. She looked around at the linoleum floor and the tiles that crept halfway up the walls before she could meet Miriam's in the mirror again. Ever since they'd met Miriam Jacobs had been plagued with some kind of injury, some lingering wound, a chilling reminder that without senshi healing they all would have been the same.

Worse. Miriam never walked like she was wounded, said the quiet slippery voice in the back of her head.

She still sounded stiff and awkward: "I want to know what's wrong. I've got a -- " She had been about to say, I've got a right, but she had no right. She really had no right at all. " -- vested interest." Which made her sound like a shareholder. Hero tried again. There was only one appropriate word to say and that was, "Please."

For long moments she hadn't understood. The image of Andeon pulling open Miriam's underwear drawer floated in her subconscious like an unwelcome piece of scum. She was flushing red as paint, she was angry, the shame was growing exponentially now -- at the time it had just been one of Andeon's pranks. It was Andeon Boskovic. It was an underwear drawer. Just like Castor on her bed.

Except it wasn't like Castor on her bed, she'd been completely lukewarm in her response to Andeon doing it, and she just generally hadn't cared. Hero hadn't cared. She hadn't cared in a vicious, small way, racking up points lost and gained against Miriam Jacobs like she'd done all term. As though there would be a golden trophy in the end with You Were Right And She Was Wrong engraved on it in big serif letters.

She was ashamed, exhaustively ashamed, and that didn't matter either.

"Miriam," she said. Her roommate didn't lift her head. It took a while before she herself could get out: "I've been unkind. I've been incredibly unkind, and hateful as well." There was another strangled, slightly hysterical sob, filled to the brim with self-loathing. "I've been a bully and it's, it was beneath me, it is beneath me -- I've just, I've treated you -- abominably."

Another sob. In that sob was: yes, you ******** have, and?

Hero couldn't look at the mirror any more. She put one elbow on her knee and half her head in her hand, masking one eye as she stared at Miriam's shoe. "I'm sorry. Jacobs, I was wrong. I was wrong, I was always wrong." Each word was a body blow to herself and her voice was leaden. "I'm sorry. I don't pity you, you know, I -- I'm just sorry."

That added texture to the bruise.

Hero knew the scholarship girls because they were a little nervous and out of place and tended to act a bit humbled at the amazing chance that had landed in their laps. They stuck out. She'd assumed Miriam Jacobs was a rich girl with the dignity and pride of someone who had gotten in on a hereditary Old Boy's placement, even, someone who had never known an option not Crystal Academy.

Miriam on a scholarship meant --

She pushed herself up off the bench, not knowing what to do with her hands or her feet. Miriam was staring at her own wet, tear-swollen cheeks, not at Hero flushed red as paint with embarrassment behind her. Miriam was a scholarship girl. She said, feebly, "I didn't..." and trailed off there.

Her roommate was dabbing at her cheeks now, methodically wiping them even as another violent sniffling storm saw teardrops rolling down her cheeks. For a terrible, horrible moment, Hero wanted to touch her in impotent reassurance. That would have been dreadful for them both.

"Give me another chance." Her voice sounded odd, thin. "I know I don't -- deserve one, Jacobs. I'll patrol with you. I'll never touch your things again." Good God, she sounded pathetic. "Try me. Miriam, please. I never knew you were on schol."

Hero was leaning back against the sink. It was making the back of her taekwondo uniform damp. She didn't care. "Andeon will make a full apology." All her roomie did was keep on painstakingly lacing up her shoes, putting even lengths into the bow as she squeezed the eyelets, doubled them around. "He'll -- "

"I don't give a s**t."

The laces were getting tied on the other shoe now. She really sounded as though she didn't. Her voice was empty and devoid of any pride, anything that might have shored her up, like Jacobs' reserves had boiled away and nothing was left. "I really don't," she repeated, like a mantra. Loop through loop. Double bow.

When she turned around Hero was in front of her.

Miriam's eyebrows shot up and her mouth was sour, eyes blank, and Hero could anticipate what was going to come next: spare me your melodrama. "I don't pity you," she said. She didn't know what to do with her hands. "I've never pitied you. None of my -- friends pity you."

There was silence. She said, "I'm not going to tell anyone about this."

"Thanks." It was bitter, hoarse, scratchy.

"Jacobs." To her roomie's credit her eyes didn't dart for the nearest exit away. She just held her gaze with those pale blue, red-rimmed eyes, looking like a mess, looking like a girl who'd been sobbing her heart out for twenty minutes straight. "Miss dinner. I'll bring you something, I'll cover for you with Matron." Nothing.

There wasn't even much of a pause as Hero sat down on the bench as well. This time she sat on the other side -- back to back but far enough away that they weren't touching. They stared at each other from opposite mirrors in a funhouse of reflections before Miriam turned back to her knees and Hero stared away somewhere at the wall. Miriam's bristling hate was palpable, but worse than that was the despair. Go, can't you go, said her shoulders.

It was obvious that she wasn't leaving. There was silence now. They were just sitting together in forced companionship, Miriam Jacobs' modesty upheld by Hero not looking at her face or her eyes or the fight beaten out of her shoulders. She wondered a bit at her decision. She really could go, which would probably fill Jacobs with a bitter relief that would nonetheless be relief.

There was nobody she could go and get. There was nobody.

Her anger wasn't even there, replaced by a gaping emptiness that in the end she had been the catalyst for this, she had been a cause. A large determining factor. There were others. She couldn't be arrogant about how much she contributed to Miriam's misery now, but in the pie chart she was damned with a large slice.

"Understood," Hero said, surprised at how strange her voice sounded. Jude had been dead a little while now. He would have understood the need to rearrange someone else's face. She wanted to go so badly; she wanted to leave and pretend Miriam was intangible so that her pride could survive.

She wished Miriam had never known about him. She wished Andeon did not go through underwear drawers. She wished a lot of things, suddenly: wished that the Zodiacs didn't all turn away from each other, wished that the day she'd met Miriam Jacobs she hadn't unnecessarily lost it, wished the Opal Crystal hadn't been stolen, wished that Serenade would stop wringing her hands. Wished that Eon and Sagittarius were alive. Wished a lot of things. At this point Andeon would say, I wish the ring had never come to me!, but she'd never regretted that.

With a creak of the bench she got up again, took her bag and started to awkwardly change out of her whites -- moved behind a partition wall and buttoned herself back into her unflattering Crystal dress, sitting back down on the bench again to roll up her stockings.

"No, I never thought you were weak," Hero said lowly. "No, I never thought you had feelings, actually. You seemed impenetrable. I never knew you were on scholarship. I never bothered to think that you were a human being." She was straightening out the wrinkles. "I don't know anything about you. And for that I'm -- "

Silence again. For a moment the natural termination was probably going to be, sorry, but surprisingly ended in -- "a real b***h," she finished, stiffly. "You can rearrange my face all you like, Jude's beyond -- caring, now."

Hero hadn't known that either: that Miriam could possess any distaste for the work, or nausea or fear or hate over it. She had imagined each slice of Heaven's Mandate done smoothly without the flinch of looking back. She imagined Miriam never wiping blood from her face with any sign of disgust. It's kind of a crunch. There was heat from Miriam's back -- misery made you exhausted, crying made you sweat.

She swung her legs around. She was sitting catty-corner from her roomie because it seemed like the best possible position. Miriam looked hollowed out: if you tapped her, you imagined she might sound empty.

"Blood," said Hero.

Her roomie's silence seemed a little bemused. She continued: "It's blood I don't do -- the smell, it nauseates me." She just sounded inane now. Inane could be damned, she sounded like a dope. "I can't eat rare steak. I hate dried blood, it makes my fingers itch. It's something about the way it flakes."

All right, now she just sounded inane and obsessive-compulsive. "I throw up if I bleed too much. In bushes. On patrol." She could stop any time she liked. She could have stopped twenty seconds ago.

"It doesn't matter whether you think it's group therapy or not," said Hero, her voice awkward and off still. It rang strangely in her ears. "It's true. I'm not playing Show And Tell. It's hardly something to bond over, it's just -- me."

That made her roommate deflate like a pricked balloon, though it happened in stages. It was just as though the light had been sucked out of her along with the anger, and though she pursed her lips together she did not cry. The loud sniffles still broke through her silence. Miriam looked wrung-out, dehydrated. Presently she said: "I don't want your admiration, you know, I don't want group therapy or your pound of flesh, I just want -- "

What did she want? What did Hero Barrett even want?

"Rapprochement," she said.