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It was a nightmare that Audrey'd had many times while her parents were asleep in Destiny City's premier hospital, draining the funds of the HMO while she could barely keep food in the house on the money allotted by the life insurance plan. The nightmare was a pounding on the door in the middle of the night, the police coming to regretfully inform her that Jason and Shelley Collins were unfortunately deceased. So when the banging started Audrey shot out of bed and ran with dread down the stairs..but the voice on the other side was familiar. Too familiar, in fact. But months ago she had made a promise, and the promise would not let her keep the door shut.

'I won't let you get hurt again.'

The door was pulled open and almost immediately the bluenette regretted her delay. There, looking like death warmed over and washed down the drain a few times was Captain Tanzanite. "Tanz? Good God what happened. Come inside!" Light hands pulled the Amazonian Negaverser in through the front door, shutting it behind her and then standing in the silence. One was covered in blood and Lord only knew what else, the other simply dressed in a white tank top and brightly colored shorts who went into the nearby room to flick on a low lamp. "What happened? Where have you been? How..." Stunned and bewildered the questions trailed off as Audrey simply stood and stared at the woman she'd leaned on for so long, until she'd vanished without a word one day. What happened?!

Ursula. Fingers combed through curls and clenched there for a moment in frustration with that whole situation and the news that she was about to deal to a very unstable individual. So the teenager immediately went into damage control mode, nodding silently and lightly touching Tanzanite on the arm very lightly. "Hi there." It was absurd, and she knew it. "I'm going to go grab a sheet for you okay? Just wait right here, I'll be back in a blink." Bare feet were pounding up the steps like a fury, reaching into the closet and yanking out the darkest thing that she could find. It hadn't taken more than Audrey's first month in the Negaverse to learn which colors hid blood the best, every idiot knew that white and powder blue were not even candidates.

It possibly was not even the thirty seconds to get up the stairs and back down again before the girl was back downstairs again and guiding her friend towards the couch. "You can sit here, catch your breath, tell me what the hell you've been doing while...while you were gone." Call it cowardly, but she just wasn't ready to handle the awful truth about what had happened to Aree's closest friend, Tanzanite's real queen. The fact that Audrey hadn't immediately reassured Tanzanite that she was there, that she was going to make everything alright was also fairly damning. Nonetheless her hands and voice were gentle, reassuring, understanding, almost motherly.

"My parents are still in their comas, so you don't have to worry about waking anybody up or anything. It's just me here for now, you got lucky." A halfhearted smile, a try at levity she didn't feel. "My cousin Victoria's been staying with me a lot." A firmer hand stroked the monster arm as it flexed in the darkness. "Are you back for good now?" It was a fairly simple question, a good starting place. Audrey was willing to give her time, but not without answers. She herself hurt too openly for that.

Amber eyes were wide in bewildered terror at what was happening in front of her. It was absolutely the worst time for any of this to be happening...whatever the hell it was that was happening. It was putting Tanzanite through what seemed to be intense pain, and it was rippling her arm; the youma? Going down to her knees in front of her friend, hands touched her knees and looked up into those almost pathetic gray eyes. "Tanz, you've been gone for almost three months. You don't remember any of that?" It was a stupid question, but the two of them had already been through the fact that she was an idiot for falling off a building trying to...well. Be an idiot.

It was so hard to stay angry when the shattered remains of a strong person were sitting on her couch screaming silently through the pain of negative power. It was a dark reminder to the newly-made general of what happened when power went wrong, what happened when you gave too much to something. Tanzanite, no Aree had given up everything into the Negaverse and now the people that she had respected most were gone. Possibly forever, as Beryl hadn't quite promised to not kill them when they came back.

Life was too complicated for her to handle alone! Who had decided that it was Audrey's job, that it was Linarite's job? Fingers ran again through her air as Audrey tried again, grasping hands both monster and human in her own. "So if you don't remember the last three months, why don't you tell me what you do know? Then I can help you, and can tell you what happened here." The tone was slow and measured, but still the warmth that normally sprung from the girl was still absent. Apparently anger could settle, but hurt took a little longer.

Not even Elzo Xanis could banish her feelings for this odd young woman who had shown up again on her doorstep, badly needing her help. With any luck, this would end up much better than the last time Tanzanite had come to her with no one else to turn to.

She might have been a warning and a sign, no longer any beacon of success, but she would always be a pillar of strength in Audrey's mind. The bluenette would always remember the battle on her birthday after she had gone from mocking Ursula in her apartment to skipping home with a milkshake, battling Sailor Alcyone to frustration. Then going through the turmoil of betraying Castor, the grief of losing her, finding her again, then the person who was there when Linarite thought she was going to die the next day - calling her an idiot like there was nothing wrong more than a broken leg. It shattered Audrey to see her pillar of strength crumbling, and refused to let it happen.

"It has been three months. That's probably why they locked up the apartment, rented it to someone else by now. Charonite is asleep, remember?" It wasn't a lie, not precisely. Charonite was very much asleep and would very much be that way for a good long time, if there was any luck. "Whatever you did must have pushed the youma to the front so you lost some time." It was all she could think of, there was no way an otherwise intelligent individual would lose such chunks of time and memory that way, it had to be that goddamn youma. Whatever had possessed Ursula to push it into her in the first place....no. There was no use for any of that. Curls fell over Audrey's face for a moment before she looked up again, trying so hard to keep composure.

It wasn't working well. Worry and desperation to make some sense of what was going on showed in her face easily in the dim light of the living room. "You can stay here for now, you know that. There is the daybed in my room that nobody uses and even if mom and dad wake up tomorrow they would not throw you out." A light smile touched around the edge of her mouth. Somewhere to stay was easy. What to do about the fear. "I can try and help with the rest. Okay?" She hoped that was okay.

There wasn't anyone else to help.

The sound of a motorcycle was a sound Audrey might have come to expect at such hours. It was just after the hospital visiting hours ended and her newly acquired boyfriend would arrive to make sure his girlfriend wasn't alone. He'd been living at his dad's hotel for the last few days, hunting for apartments for himself and his brother once the younger Xanis sibling woke from his coma. He had been planning to get an apartment for months. In his mind, his brother would wake, and so, he needed to plan for it. Until then, Elzo Xanis was the occasional resident of the Collins house, sleeping alongside his girlfriend while their families remained in their unnatural sleep.
As the sound of the engine was killed in front of the house, Elzo's voice could be heard from outside, already calling out Audrey's name, expecting her to open the door, welcoming.

Elzo's voice changed quickly however, from happy and expectant, to frantic worry and the young man looked down to the sight of blood on cement, leading up the walkway of his beloved's house. "Audrey! Audrey!" Worry and fear flooded Elzo's mind. Blood was never a good sign. The fact it was going right up to Audrey's house was even worse. Hundreds of terrible fates that could have happened to his girlfriend were in his head, screaming at him to find her, save her, help her. Frantic hands grabbed at the door handle, jerking it before relixing it was locked.

A man driven to utter fear fumbled with the spare key she'd given him. A key for 'emergencies'. Elzo felt blood on the door. He considered blood an emergency. "Audrey hold on! s**t! s**t! s**t!" Keys fumbled into the socket, but once the lock clicked open, the door was flung wide open, leaving a rather nasty mark on the wall. The mark was unnoticed. All Elzo could think of was to find Audrey and make sure she was safe.

By the time Audrey was up and blocking Elzo's entrance, Tanzanite was already undergoing the struggle to push the power of the Negaverse out of her. There had been a time when staying in her Negaverse form for more than a few hours was an exhausting effort, and now it seemed to be quite the opposite. Her eyes were closed, and beads of sweat had already appeared on her forehead as she struggled to find that glimmer of Aree Cadence that still existed inside of her. The naïve human girl had died long ago, at Beryl's feet, but her visage was still accessible. Tanzanite grabbed hold of the memory in desperation, and pulled it to the front of her thoughts. The chaos of Tanzanite's memory was pushed aside, giving way to an Aree who, without the power of the Negaverse, was beyond the youma's influence.

The girl who took Tanzanite's place looked little like the one that would have come to mind had her former friends been asked to imagine Aree in her days at Crystal. Her frame was thinner, almost skeletal, and her eyes were underlined with deep, blue-purple crescents that marked days without sleep. Still, she could have passed for an overzealous college student in the midst of finals week. The arm that had been contained in human skin looked normal enough, save for fingertips that had turned black well beyond the nails. The skin was blackened and cracked, as though burnt. As Aree pushed her skinny frame to a standing position, slowed by the half-healed wound in her side, she stuffed the blackened hand into the pocket of her hoodie and moved into view.

“Stop yelling,” she said flatly, in the authoritative tone that she couldn't quite shake after spending so long in her Captain's form. For a long moment she simply stared at Elzo, looking him up and down in a clearly appraising manner. Judging by the way her jaw tightened and her brows drew down, he hadn't scored particularly high.

“Who the ******** are you?”

There was an almost Animal Planet nature show voice playing in Audrey's head as (thank God) Aree emerged somewhat shakily from the living room to glare at Elzo's sudden appearance and grabby hands. The voice was doing some boring speech about the sleek panther that had been too long between meals, eying a rather plump and docile bird as it fluttered about her head. The bird thought it was out of harm for being so high up, but would never be. The predator was too close, and not at all stable. The hands didn't really perturb her, Audrey was used to being pulled around and coddled by her overgrown puppy of a boyfriend, and she rather preferred it in all truth. But in front of Aree it felt almost...wrong was not the proper word yet the situation was too far from comfortable for the bluenette to relax.

Hands fisted in her hair yet again to show her frustration at the whole debacle, waiting until poor Elzo had lumped back down the stairs to let her voice loose from her throat in a burst. "Yes, Elzo, this is my friend Aree. She's been evicted from her place due to a misunderstanding about tenancy and they have all her stuff stored somewhere; won't tell her until she pays up on rent but money's rough." A reproving look was sent towards the irate Aree. "She was dumb enough to try and rough it out instead of coming here. Like a dummy." Alright, it was immature, but the meager points she was able to score towards the ravaged woman were all she'd ever get.

Hands reached out to pull the medkit away from Elzo and all but march back into the living room, snagging Aree's arm and dragging her with. "Sit back down. You shouldn't be standing, I can't pick you up if you faint from dehydration." A look from amber to gray eyes apologized, but the teen wasn't about to let poor Elzo anywhere near the arm that even she could see was straining against the restraints of a human form. Youma were so impatient. "Never a quiet night at the Collins household." If she wasn't rescuing Victoria from one of her many over-eager suitors, Elzo was here, or she was out filling her collection of star seeds. Now two of the most unlikely people were in her living room, and Audrey wasn't entirely sure that Tanz wouldn't simply try to kill Elzo.

That would be bad.