She didn’t know how to ask for help.

Well, that was a lie. She knew perfectly well how to ask for help, she knew the steps to take. Walk up to a Zodiac. Hold out her hands. Say the words, ask them, beg them (please help me, I can’t do this). She could imagine each confrontation with each Zodiac: Grayson’s quiet words, his attempts to back her up, gentle hugs, banana pancakes but ultimately nothing. Hero’s assertion that she was the heart of the Zodiac, that everyone relied on her; but ultimately, nothing. Andeon and Mackenzie, fiercely protective--but she would still, ultimately, have nothing. She didn’t need help with a physical problem, she didn’t need help with the youma. She needed help with something... deeper, and all she had were words. And words... Words were just words and more and more words weren’t enough to keep up her spirits.

It’s all right, Sailor Virgo thought. It’s fine.

It’s fine, echoed something inside, but there was doubt. These were sentiments she couldn’t show anyone, didn’t dare show. Thoughts she didn’t know how to say, words she couldn’t really figure out how to share. Even if she could she wouldn’t, Virgo thought. Why would she? She was the heart of the Zodiac, not an indulged baby, not something to be protected. No one’s responsibility but her own. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, hamstring her friends--her family--by hinting that she was anything but a pillar. Virgo could be leaned on. She could be trusted to fulfill her place as a Zodiac, to back up her family, to reach out to the lunar senshi, to protect the Princess.

Memory and planning were similar, being the recall of the past and the prediction of the future. What she saw right in front of her was different. It was best compared to taking a photo and sharpening each piece of it into a razor’s edge--if the razor was made of diamond--but even then, it wasn’t quite right. Things moved too quickly, they darted out of view. You had to count on instinct and training and you didn’t always have that. Virgo did.

There was a man in a strange uniform, with a dark aura, standing over an unmoving civilian. What she saw was this: A man, older than Virgo by at least a decade, laying on the concrete like his legs had given out beneath him. She could imagine the brown-haired man falling to his knees, his torso twisting as he slumped to the side. His breathing had likely stuttered, his body would have made a soft thump, like an explosion from far away. She stared at his shoulder, at the limp arm, at the boneless fingers, and watched it shakily rise once. The Negaverse officer spat on the civilian.

And Virgo hurled herself at him. The umph of his breath leaving his body when her shoulder impacted the solar plexus was satisfactory--a dark, sick satisfaction, but all the same it was what she had. In moments, her knee was buried in his gut. Her eyes were tightly closed, but all the same she could smell the blood and hear the crunch as his nose broke under her fist. Her power was greater; this was a Lieutenant, not a Captain and certainly not a General. There was glass on the ground beneath them but a quick glance through narrowed eyes revealed his weapon, a baseball bat, at the back of the alley. A broken bottle’s shards littered the alleyway.

He was cursing as she drew back her hand and slammed her knuckles into a cheekbone. She could overpower him, but he was bigger than she was, he was big as Sue, and he threw her off. The bluenette squealed when she hit the wall and staggered, hugging herself for a moment as she bowed, doubling over to protect her torso. She could hear, as if from far away, the man’s boots scuffing around the ground, his ******** b***h, stupid c**t, my face--he was leaving, she realized through the television static, he was leaving and he still had the starseed. Virgo forced herself straight, the blood on her knuckles unsettling her stomach, and ran after him, snatched his arm and then, because she had to, she pried his fingers away from the little gem.

“Get away,” she panted, planting her heel in his side. He stumbled away, fell on his back. He made to get back up but she stepped forward, the tip of her shoe over his groin. She leaned, her green eyes chips of emerald behind her lashes. The Negaverse officer whined--not a scream, for which she was grateful, but a whine. Like a puppy. “I’ll kill you if you don’t leave now.” She lifted her shoe, and he scrambled away--once he was out of sight, her powerful facade shattered and she almost collapsed. So tired. So very tired, so frightened. Being a member of the Guard meant always being scared. Constantly being terrified, always wanting to go home and hide, but all that saved all of the people she loved from being as scared as she was. Virgo could do this as long as Maman and Papa never had to know the fear she felt when she went out to patrol anymore.

She shuddered as she rolled the man onto his back; the wet slap of fabric confused her for a bit. Her faculties were clouded by the sharp copper scent of blood, but she pulled herself together and pressed the starseed against his very deep red shirt. The color bled into her gloves as she pushed, desperation increasing as the little gem very obstinately stayed atop the man’s sternum. Something cracked beneath her hand and she jerked backwards, an abortive and muffled scream half-escaping into her bloodied glove. The starseed rolled down the man’s side, clattering to the ground. Its glow was muted red from the gore.

Virgo knelt there, her breaths coming fast and hard, tiny pants as she lowered her hand. He was dead?... he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be dead, she’d saved him, it was a fluke, it was wine, there were pieces of a broken bottle digging into her knees, she was bleeding, but he was just covered in wine. Please God, let it only be wine. She leaned back in again, shook the man’s shoulder. His head lolled from one shoulder to the other, exposing the bloody gash in his throat. Virgo stared at it, her hands shaking too hard to pick up the starseed, too hard for her to turn the man’s head again so she wouldn’t have to stare at that gaping hole. It reminded her of a mouth--obscenely placed, yawning wide, exposing viscera. The man’s skin wasn’t cold, but with that amount of blood--

The urge to vomit could no longer be ignored. She scrabbled away, but any attempts to vomit brought up bile and then nothing, nothing at all. Virgo had forgotten to eat dinner, for which she was glad, and she knelt there with her head balanced on a raised forearm and shook, crying. It hurt so much to cry, like she was trying to eat gravel. The sobs ripped out of her throat.

Not beautiful, graceful tears like she read about in her books--this wasn’t grief pain, not respectable pain, it was caught-in-a-trap pain. It was I can’t handle this any more pain, because the words she had been trying for so long to articulate had finally floated up into the forefront of her consciousness. This shouldn’t be happening, she thought, and then she whispered it. “This shouldn’t be happening.” Saying those words made it real. She could feel it sliding over her skin, slick like blood, slug trails down her uniform. No one deserved what this man had endured. To be faced with a Negaverser, to be murdered coldly... She supposed there was mercy if you died, if you didn’t come back. At least this man had peace now, he couldn’t suffer any more, there was no fear where he was. “This shouldn’t be--this shouldn’t be happening to me!--”

(Once, ‘crazy’ meant ‘to shatter viciously,’ from the Norse krasa. In the fifteen hundreds, it spread to use in institutions, where it meant ‘mentally unstable’. With a situation such as this, both definitions are appropriate.)

It was too much. The Princess had no crystal, Tony and Aquarius and Scylla and Fallon and--and Ally and Jude were still dead, and everyone was depending on her, and she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t take it all, she just wanted to go home to France and cling to Maman and cry, cry for days, until the world crumbled to pieces around her.

She didn’t understand. What had the man done? What had she done? “This shouldn’t be happening to me,” she whimpered. The coppery scent of blood was strong enough to inspire another set of dry heaves, but eventually she just knelt there, her head in her hands, gasping for breath. This was wrong. No one deserved this--it wasn’t fair--

As she picked herself up off the ground: “This shouldn’t be happening to me.” As she walked out of the alleyway: “This shouldn’t be happening to me.” And when she climbed into her window, into the shower, slumping under the spray of water as it pounded the space between her shoulder blades: “This shouldn’t be happening to me.”