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Some of us are still human, Tanzanite.

The words had brought out a side of the fanatic General that few among their ranks would ever see. They had struck a chord in Tanzanite that she could not have kept silent no matter how hard she tried. In a moment of weakness she had let out every bit of her pain and anger and sadness in front of Wolframite and Zanazziite, and had fallen asleep in the very same corner she was laying in when Wolframite returned.

And boy, did she ever look like s**t.

The energy they had given her had helped. The patches of flesh that her Arm had assimilated were a deep grey, almost matching the natural black of the rest of it. However, her eyes were still ringed with dark circles of exhaustion, the left side of her face still battered and bruised. Her pulse was slower than an average human's, a result of the thick, oily blood that ran through her corrupted veins. However, she was very much alive, and she awoke at Wolframite's touch with a sudden start. Eyes wide, lips pulled back in a snarl, she bolted upright.

Only for dizziness to wash over her and bring her right back down. From within the Crystal coffin, Charonite and Nealite watched, silent and still. Charonite would have looked at her, knelt down and placed his heavy hands upon her shoulders. He would have lifted her head up and stared her down, grey eyes on grey eyes, and told her that this was war. He would have told her to get the ******** up and walk it off.

But Charonite was gone, and it was Wolframite now who looked at her with worried eyes.

“Yes,” she spoke after a long moment, blinking in the darkness as though momentarily unsure of where she was. The memories came rushing back. The summoning. Elysion. Scheelite. Slowly, Tanzanite pushed herself up to a sitting position, “How long have I been asleep?”

“I don't have the energy to teleport,” she admitted, though reluctant to acknowledge such a weakness. There was no denying that she had overexerted herself in the battle, and now she was paying the price for her overzealousness. She had removed the armor plating that covered her legs and shoulder, and she began to gather them from the pile where they sat. Deciding better of it, she simply took a moment to close her eyes, focus, and power down.

Unlike others, it took a great deal of effort for Tanzanite to bundle up the power of the Negaverse and force it back inside of her. It was the opposite experience that most officers endured, in which they found remaining in Negaverse form tiresome after too many hours. For Tanzanite, it was more like trying to keep a spring collapsed; it was always there, the dark power trying to spring back into existence. She kept it down long enough to shift back into human form, her black arm somehow compacted into a rather normal looking replacement. Only her fingernails, matte black and slightly sharp, showed that it was anything but a normal arm.

“Fortunately, germs evolved to live in a human system. As Captain Scheelite pointed out,” Aree purposefully avoided looking at the Captain for a moment, though a flash of agitation crossed her features. She knew the blonde Captain had spoken out of frustration, but as Linarite could have told anyone, it was a sore subject for the half youma General, “I doubt my body is a suitable host. I've never seen a youma with a flu.”

Her arm, even compacted into the illusion of a human limb, eagerly sucked up the energy. Her skin looked a little healthier, the circles beneath her eyes lightening a shade or two.

“I have a mother, Captain Wolframite,” she managed through a yawn, though she accepted his assistance in standing. She did not mentioning that she had not seen said mother since shortly after her corruption, “I do not need another one.”

Still, she could not supress a faint smile at the way the Captain fussed over her like a worried mother. It reminded her of the way Nealite had once done so, and Linarite after her.

Her faint smile became a full on grin at his last sentence, “Don't let Linarite hear you say that.”

What was that? A sense of humor from Tanzanite?

Miracles happened.

Aree listened as he lectured, and the smile stayed on her lips all the while. The way Wolframite reddened, and the way she laughed in response, was a testament to his words; they were still human. No matter was atrocities they had committed in Beryl's name, no matter how many lives they had taken, they were still humans. Still part of their strange, dark family, no matter what happened to them during their tenure as officers in the Dark Kingdom.

It was a small comfort, but a comfort nevertheless.

The Negaverse faded out around her, darkness melting into utter blackness for a brief second before the brighter colors of Linarite's safehouse apartment took shape around them. Aree stumbled a bit on their arrival; even though it was not her power transporting them, being teleported by someone else in a weakened state was enough to make the woman sway under a wave of nausea. She steadied herself with a deep breath, trying to shift her weight from Wolframite and onto her own two feet.

It was not an entirely successful venture, and she was leaning on the black-haired Captain once again as he escorted her to the bedroom. She eased herself onto the bed with his assistance, hissing softly as her sore ribs ******** senshi. Who threw someone twenty feet into solid rock? Really, it was just rude.

Aree made a mental note to break Sailor Scyllas spine in half.

“How are your injuries,” she said at last, “Wolf-” Aree paused, realizing she was not aware of his human name, and provided hers as a courtesy, “Aree.”

Ow.

Ow.

Ow.

Every step caused an ache to shoot through her back, a delayed consequence of her high-speed impact with the ground. Again her vision blurred white with momentary rage; she really was going to kill that damn senshi.

Her anger was swiftly replaced with amusement the more Wolframite spoke; a sewing kit? She didn't even own a sewing kit. Then again, she also didn't own more than a few changes of clothes and a single pair of shoes. Aree Cadence had been poor as a human girl, and much of what she had owned had been cleaned out of her apartment during her time in Europe. Now, her few belongings sat in a box by the bed Wolfraite helped her onto.

One of Ursula Killingworth's throw pillows was visible, just beneath a faded old t-shirt and a small, dried out bouquet; the one she had held at the wedding that would ultimately doom the Negaverse's former leaders.

Aree was dressed now in the same black pajama pants and tank top she had been dressed in when she had last powered up. It had been days ago, and her attempts at pinpointing the exact moment in time were useless. Her days blurred together now, a constant stream of energy-gathering, fighting, and trying to ignore the constant, nagging fear that everything might fall through at any moment. She looked down at her own arms, at the patches of skin that had been scraped away by rocks and dirt. One of the cuts had a small pebble still wedged in it.

“Sewing things,” she said, shaking her head. She was... well, surprised, to say the least, “You're quite the bag of wonders, Ladon Shepard.”

Aree wasn't quite sure how to do anything at anything less than full speed. She was an all or none type of woman, and that went for off the battlefield as well as on it. It was the reason she made a good fighter, but also the reason she found herself vomiting up blood in front of the rest of the Negaverse. She was a force of destruction – hell, she hardly knew anything else those days – but like a Triple Crown contender, she had a bad habit of pushing herself further than her body could take. If the senshi were smart, they would stop trying to kill her and just goad her into killing herself on accident.

This was Aree's definition of give and take.

While Wolframite went about preparing to treat the wounds, Aree made her own preparations. Beneath the bed was a thin wooden rod, bite marks stretching from one end to the other. Aree clamped it between her teeth and pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail. If the scars and bruises weren't an indication, she had undergone a dozen such repair sessions with Audrey, Nealite, and Charonite.

She knew what was coming.

“Alright,” she sighed around the biting rod, her words muffled, “Let's get this over with.”

Briefly, she held his gaze, and gave a thankful nod. It was far from Aree's nature to trust anyone, especially with such a task as tending to her injuries. It was a duty often reserved for Linarite alone. Aree had a plethora of issues, but perhaps none so severe as her lack of trust. Pale fingers wrapped into the bedsheets, and the General nodded to indicate her readiness.

It wasn't the pain that worried Tanzanite; it was a matter of control.

Injured, physically and emotionally, the General had less control over the darker side of herself. While woman and youma now shared a single mind, there was still an instinctual side of that dark power that wanted nothing but death. It craved killing the way Tanzanite as a human never could, and the General knew well enough that her control over that was a fragile and fleeting thing. It had shown when she'd overexerted herself in combat, when she'd eaten through the chest of a dying Lieutenant to power her body past it's natural limits.

Power, especially that which came from the Negaverse, was always a double-edged sword.

Her teeth ground into the stick at the familiar sting of peroxide. It was nowhere near as painful as what any of their officers had endured in that battle, but tired and weak, Tanzanite was not taking any chances. The last thing she wanted was to wake from a blackout standing over Wolframite's corpse.

She leaned back as he finished, the rasping youma's voice muttering curses beneath her own calm, polite, “Thank y-” Tanzanite cleared her throat, and the obscenities stopped, “Thank you, Wolframite.”

And then, he brought her juice, and Tanzanite just thought that was the most adorable ******** thing she'd ever seen. Which was odd, given that Tanzanite's list of adorable things was topped by a mental image of Castor's screaming face as she gripped his starseed. So charming.

She accepted the juice in one hand, but did not sip it. It sat in her lap, her pale and black-nailed fingers Still weak, still injured, the Arm would have spit out almost anything other than energy at that point in time. She had been healed beyond and real worries, but only time would allow the youma to use the energy it had been given to fully repair itself.

“You're quite the nurse, Wolframite,” she smiled, just ignorant enough to still think of 'nurse' as a distinctly feminine term, “And shaping up to be quite the fighter, I saw.”

Aree knew immediately what Ladon was referring to. She would likely never forget the look on his face when he had seen what she'd done. The way he had stared in absolute horror as she took the life of an already dying Lieutenant for her own power gain. It had been a necessary sacrifice, a faster end than the one he would have inevitably had, but Aree had never before needed to explain those reasons. They were carved into her mind. The Negaverse acted only in the interest of the Earth, its people, and its rightful Queen. Whatever atrocities she might commit, she knew they were for a higher cause. Some greater good.

As long as she acted in the name of the Negaverse, she served Earth itself.

If it were anyone other than Ladon, she would have likely popped in a Lion King DVD and let Mufasa explain all about the circle of life. For him, however, the General slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position, and watched him carefully.

He deserved more than a dismissive answer.

“I would save anyone I could,” she said after a long moment, “but I cannot save everyone. Some people, like that man, are beyond saving. A senshi cut him open like a fish, Ladon, neck to groin. Some skirted b***h looked him in the eye and cut No amount of starseeds or stitching can fix a man who is trying – and failing - to hold in his own guts.” It was a blunt statement, harshly worded and harshly spoken. She had not doubted for a moment that the Lieutenant was doomed, and her need to kill the senshi far surpassed her considerations of last wishes and burial rites.

“We're in a war, Ladon, and the fate of seven billion people depend on us. On a few dozen soldiers who can barely hold our ground against an endless sea of senshi. We were not born with our power, as they were. We were born human, and we have been given the gift of being able to fight for this planet and every person on it who was not born...” Her face twisted with the word, spitting it out as though it were rotten, “special. But with that comes the burden of having to take human lives for that power. We must sacrifice everything, even our fellow citizens of Earth, just to hold onto our home. They sacrifice nothing, and they think this place is theirs to rule.”

By the end, enthusiasm was thick in her voice, anger apparent in her narrowed brow and downturned lips. She had slowly sat up more and more, until a wave of dizziness and a moment of blurred vision had her leaning back against the headboard.

“That Lieutenant would have died either way,” she said quietly, “ I did what I could to make sure he did not do so in vain.”