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Tanzanite had set out with a mission that morning.

Their army had taken a severe hit in the battle. They had lost more than she cared to admit, and those who had survived had sustained significant injuries. However, Tanzanite had watched with joy as the senshi had been torn through, and the lunar invaders had not escaped without losses of their own. While the purple-haired General had been no exception, her injuries had been more of a draining of her energy than physical damage, and so her 'wounds' had been faster to heal than, well.. a shattered kneecap.

Like that of the Captain she had set out to check on one bright and sunny morning. She had emerged from scouting Elysion with a start, eyes wides as she was ripped from her impending fight with the always troublesome Sailor Ares before she could land a blow. Needing to pull her mind from the should-have-been battle, she set out to check upon their wounded soldiers.

She had given heavy thought to skipping Captain Scheelite entirely, but the man was a Negaverse Captain, and a loyal one at that. And so she appeared in his room with a silent teleportation, cold and formal as she looked down at the injured man.

“Captain,” she greeted formally.

“Ha.”

Tanzanite's single syllable of amusement came out harsher than she had meant it, but the faintest hint of a smile curved the corners of her lips. Like Serandite, Scheelite had often kept a smile on his face and a bounce in his step as he walked through the darkness. It had been only his moment of weakness, his attempts to run away, that had made Tanzanite feel some level of sympathy for the man. She knew as well as anyone the toll the Negaverse could take on a person.

Unlike her, some people had things in their human lives worth protecting.

“Keeping yourself amused, I see,” she began, taking a knee to begin scooping up the crayons. A task which was made significantly easier by having a clawed hand the size of her own head to help. She didn't even notice as the Macaroni Orange disappeared into her palm, looking down only as the youma coughed out smaller chunks of bright orange wax. She rolled her eyes; while the promotion to Captain had merged the woman and the youma into one mind, it still did smaller things without her notice.

Like eating a ******** crayon.

It was only then that the bag in her hand became visible, as she lifted both the crayons and a plastic bag to the table. She had gone to half a dozen gas stations to find the particular drink, but the bag hit the wood with a soft metallic clink. The plastic stuck to the condensation on the cans, and the Rockstar energy drink label was clearly visible beneath the bold red 'Thank You' letters printed on the bag.

“I brought you a present.”

She did not mention being called 'Tanzy'.

Tanzanite listened as the boy rambled, her expression unchanging. Her brows were slightly raised, her lips somewhere between a faint smile and an apathetic line. She listened to his worries and his fears, and her face did not change even as he started crying. Tanzanite might have been a rock for all the emotion she showed, at least until he asked her a direct question.

Her brows rose, and for a moment Tanzanite thought about the inquiry.

“I think you're hyper, you talk too much, and you sometimes make me wants to drop kick a kitten,” she began flatly, “But no, you are not useless. You spend too much time worrying about who is or isn't proud of you. Who does or doesn't like you. Who gives a s**t what Hel thinks?”

Tanzanite did not know the corrupted senshi particularly well, but the woman had yet to earn her respect. For Tanzanite, it was something she did not hand out with ease, especially not to former enemies. Out of all of the corrupted, Alkaid and Vivianite were the only ones she trusted much.

“Captain, you're a competent individual. You may sometimes remind me of a Tickle Me Elmo on crack, but you are a competent officer. More of our officers will die in this war and you won't be able to do a damn thing about it, you'd do well to accept that now.” Tanzanite busied herself with inspecting his wounds, not bothering to ask permission as she manhandled him to check on any other bruises or cuts he might have, “Doctors say you might not walk again, Captain. Human doctors. The Negaverse takes care of it's own. You'll be out of here and annoying me again soon enough.”

Of that, she was certain. Once she was satisfied that there was nothing she could tend to that the doctors hadn't already, the General pulled up a chair beside the bed and dropped herself into it.

“Stop crying, Scheelite,” she dropped the formality as she took a tissue from the box on the table and held it out for him.

“A good soldier,” she echoed him, and punctuated her words with a laugh. His apology wiped away her faint, mirthless smile, and the General fixed her grey eyes upon him. For a moment she regarded him, contemplative, before she spoke.

“You didn't mean to,” she agreed at last, “You didn't know what happened, Captain. I can't fault you for calling things as you've seen them.”

Hurtful though it was to hear, the truth was that Tanzanite wasn't particularly human anymore. Sometimes a reminder of that was not such a terrible thing.

Tanzanite watched with a strange sort of fascination and Scheelite explained what was, honestly, a rather brilliant scheme. Her brows climbed her forehead until she wore a look of blatant surprise. She caught herself and shook it off, returning to the sane flat stare she usually wore. By the time he was down, Tanzanite was nodding as he spoke and feeding crayons into the seemingly endless pit in the center of her palm.

Goodbye, Robin's Egg Blue.

“You see, Captain,” she smiled, pride evident in the expression, “We all have our role. I could not have come up with such a thing.”

It was the truth. Tanzanite, while an excellent strategist and aggressive as they came, was not a planner. She did not come up with clever schemes and intriguing plots. No, Tanzanite hit things. She ate things. She killed things. Drawing arrows on paper like some exuberant football coach was not in her skillset, but it seemed to be at the very top of Scheelite's. He was different from her in almost every way, but he would serve the Negaverse in a niche of his own in time.

Of that, she was quite certain.

“Ah-” she said, rather surprised as he asked how the arm that was now inhaling Screamin' Green had come to be. A long moment passed, in which the General was strangely silent. She had not had to tell that story in what felt like years. It seemed forever ago. Since her promotion to General and the subsequent elimination of most of her human life, she could barely remember a time before the youma had been a part of her. She could remember struggling with it as a Captain, in a time when it had been a distinctly foreign presence. Now, she could barely tell where her own consciousness ended and the youma's began.

They were, for all intents and purposes, a single individual now.

Which meant that it was Tanzanite who was devouring Scheelite's crayons intentionally.

Brick Red vanished into her palm before she spoke again, her expression grim.

“Castor happened.”

“I was going to kill him,” she said after a while, curling those black fingers in to close the mouth that seemed so intent on devouring Demetri's crayons, “For Linarite, I wanted to kill him. For...” her voice trailed off, and a pained look flashed in those grey eyes, “For Nealite, before she showed herself to be a traitor. I wasn't even a Lieutenant, then, and he was a Super.” Her laugh was strangely genuine, as she remembered the day Charonite had demoted her. The only officer to ever hold the disgraced position of sub-Lieutenant.

“He would have killed me if Nealite hadn't arrived, but he wasn't alone. Kunzite, the cavalier... formerly one of Beryl's most trusted General-King's. She knew that Nealite was Beryl's host, before Beryl had a body of her own, and she would have killed her. She almost did, and the Negaverse itself would have died at the hands of that damnable woman.”

Tanzanite remembered it with such vivid accuracy. The sword swinging down in a wide arc, the way her muscles burned with desperation to get Nealite – Beryl – out of it's way. She remembered the feeling of cold steel as it carved through her body, the sickening crunch as it sheared her arm from her body at the shoulder.

“I think Castor pitied me when he saw it happen, but I would not flatter him enough to say that a senshi is capable of understanding why. When I awoke...”

Tanzanite's brow furrowed, her lips pressed into a thin line. How did one explain what it felt like to have a youma integrated into their body? To have that cracked, blackened starseed pressed to a raw wound and the power of a General-King searing it into her system? It was like corruption, but it was also different. It had been the beginning of a descent into madness that had lasted throughout her Captaincy, that had taken her to the brink of insanity as she warred with the consciousness of that creature.

“I was not given much of a choice when I joined the Negaverse, and I was not given a choice when I was rewarded for saving Queen Beryl's life. I would not take back those actions, but please understand me, Demetri.” Her gaze lifted, and there was a sadness in Tanzanite's eyes that few would ever see, “I did not choose to become what I am. We all pay a heavy price to defend our planet. Humanity was mine.”