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It was the equivalent of late spring on Castor, the air was warm and flowers were in full bloom. Most importantly, the blue daisies of the remnants of the royal garden were practically glittering like gems covering the vast field. Castor had managed to rebuild half of the outer wall of the general's villa, but a good portion still remained unfinished. However, he'd gotten the villa rather secure. Windows had been replaced, doors fixed or permanently sealed. The castle, as always, was avoided. Slowly, he was rebuilding what had been lost. Today wasn't a day of rebuilding or fixing that which was broken, it was a day for them, for what they shared. A picnic on Castor, it's prince and consort-knight, (whom Castor would always call his princess, crowned or not), in the garden of flowers planted for her well over 2000 year ago.

Castor was more than content, wings stretched out in the sun's warm rays, the smell of cinnamon in the air, and the sound of his planet's wardrums in the back of his mind, a soothing sound that brought him more comfort than any melody he'd ever heard on earth. "Lina." His hand reached out, seeking her blue curls. "Lay down with me and relax for bit. The cinnamon rolls aren't going anywhere and the ice won't melt, I've told you that a dozen times. The salad and the drinks will be cold."

He chuckled. "I think the roll can wait for one cuddle."

"Hey, it was cuddles or I tickling. And from experience, we knock s**t over when we start tickle wars." He chuckled. Often Castor, or when he was earth, Elzo, would find that he often touched Lina with a soft brush of his fingers. Just to let him know that he was still in the real world, that the dream he'd had wasn't just that-a dream- it was as real as anything else, and she was indeed, his wife. Something a year ago he'd have laughed at, thinking that he'd be insane to move so fast. But what use was sanity in the face of destiny? What purpose did sanity have when confronted with a love that had transcended all odds and come out from what should have been a vast nothingness? Sanity was take out back and shot, that was what. Besides, Castor never much like the idea of rationality when it came to how he ran things.

"I've been thinking..." The sky was a light, pale, pale white. the senshi assumed like the earth reflected the oceans, Castor reflected the ice and snow. Castor undid his cape, letting it act like barrier between him and the soft grass. "How about we stay here for a while this summer? We have the formal wedding, and go to the beach, and then spend a bit of the honeymoon up here; no senshi, no knights, no negaverse or crazy a** general queens with hate boners for us. Just you and me. The fruits should be in season and if I remember right, it's also when the beetles are in the south. Er, or is that the north? Either way they aren't here and-" A wing brushed along her bare arms, teasing. "we can work on those two dozen children we want to have."

He was grinning, over exaggerating a fact they both knew wouldn't be happening for a while. That was the plan at least.

Some peopled like to say they knew just what their significant other was feeling all the time, not matter how great the distance. Castor was one of those people. He liked to think that Lina and he were connected in a way most people were not. Their bond was special, that what they had was special, (because transcending 2000 years to be with the one you had loved, fought for and died holding in you arms wasn't special enough). No, Castor thought he could read Lina like a book.

Her sigh was the trigger that got him alert, but the moment the name of the general Queen left her lips, Castor's own wore a frown. "I knew her before she became a monster Lina. I watched Kunzite deliver what should have been a killing blow. Was she beautiful? Yes Lina, she was." His hand ran to the back of her head, massaging her scalp and he drew her close. "I had a boner more to see her stay human, to be saved I suppose. The one I had for you? That was love. A desire for friendship, and the other was a desire for love if I can best describe it."

He was avoiding her question. It made him look back to the sky, avoiding her eyes. "....It wasn't hate." Hands kept running in her hair. It soothed him, kept his mind focused much like another person might have found tapping their foot or chewing gum. "It was sadness. When I thought of you I wanted nothing more than to be with you, to hold you in my arms, and to tell you I loved you until the world burned and ended all around us. I loved you, but watching you suffer because they knew I loved you-" His hand had stopped brushing her hair. "It was agony to think I was making you suffer because they saw my love for you and wanted to exploit it. So I lied. I lied to them, I lied to you, and the worst part was I had to lie to myself. I had to tell myself that the love I felt was a lie, even when deep down I knew that wasn't true." Arms pulled her to him, wings wrapped around them. "When I saw you change I was so happy. It was you, it had always been you. Never anyone else. Yet...it was gone so fast. They would know and- I couldn't loose you. Not when I found you again."

"I never want that empty existence. That's what every so called relationship was before I found you, it was just...emptiness."

Castor said what he wanted to be true because he would do anything to make them come true. He said things he believed so much in because he just believed. Belief had gotten him through so much, without it he would have drowned in that empty existence. She gave him more purpose than she knew, and if she knew just how much she meant to him, she had protected it well. He believed in her, and he'd done all he could to help her. Then she had made the impossible. She'd returned from that darkness. Yet how many remained behind? Trapped in that darkness? Castor didn't know them like he knew Lina. He couldn't believe in what he didn't know. It was his wall. It was her hope, he belief that he saw for them. "Maybe they need to find that something, they need to find that something, that someone." He enjoyed the closeness, the touch of her skin, the smell of her hair, the sound of her voice.

"They cannot be forced to abandon Chaos. That's what Cosmos said wasn't it? They...can't enjoy what they are, what they've become..what they will become." That is what ate at him. The finality of that. That once they reached a point they lost hope. They couldn't be helped. They couldn't be saved. He wanted so badly to reject those words, but that was just the way the world was. Magic could only do so much. Choices drove them. Castor had always wanted a choice, a chance to change the world. He had his chance and he took it. He'd taken his place in the vast universe as a senshi, and now, as Prince. He'd chosen. He chose to fight, to love, and now he had what he'd been fighting and searching for his whole life. "They have a choice in the end, and some one them..some like Tanz...they've made that choice. There is no return for them."

He gave her a tight squeeze. "They'll never be purified, they will fight for the darkness, and it will consume them." He hated it, but even he was powerless in the face of such a painful truth. Of such an absolute. "Those..those are the ones beyond hope. Beyond saving Lina." He hated it. He always would. "They will live an empty existence, and it hurts to know that they'll never get to enjoy that which we have." He looked into her eyes. His own were sad. "What we had and what we always will have."

He didn't realize what he was saying was so upsetting to her, but more than that Castor didn't understand why she getting so worked up. The negaverse was evil. That fact was simple to him. They were good. For the longest time he didn't think there was a gray area for them, a way to move from one side to the next, short of corruption and killing them. Her struggles mad his grip tighten out of habit. Panic of the past, of her running, only made his vice like grip dig into her more. But her words fuels an anger in him, did she really think- "It's the truth Lina!"

He sat upright, and his grip had begun to loosen. "Some of them aren't human!" Blue eyes flicked into her brown with anger on their own. He didn't like being accused of things, he didn't like being wrong. "How many of them are like that a*****e Obsidian? Like Tanzanite? Sick ******** who torture and main for fun? How many of them get their jollies from killing and causing pain? Some of them stopped being human the second they stepped into shadows- ******** Lina, some of them were probably never human to start with!" He was angry and for no damn good reason. "Some have humanity still in them, why else would they cry, why else would they be so will to die for each other? But most are nothing like that, most are nothing more than rabid dogs." It was cruel. He knew it was cruel but his own blind anger he couldn't see it that way.

The second she told him of starseeds, of what she did- A look of horror crossed his face. He knew they used them for power but- The mental image of his Daphne, his Lina, the woman he loved eating the life of another? He didn't want to think she could do such a thing. But she had, and he- "No." He pushed her off him to stand. "Those are human lives Lina, you heard Cosmos. They can't enjoy it, you-" She'd enjoyed it. Parts of the darkness she enjoyed and it was something he didn't want to imagine, to think about, to face. "If its an addiction to power, a craving, then it can be broken. But it's those sick ******** who thrive on it, on what else they can do in the darkness that can't be saved, its those ones who we can never save. Not like I did with you, like like how Cosmos did with us."
Castor was just torn. He loved her, he wanted to support her but on this he truly didn't understand. He didn't know what it was like. He didn't know and part of him never wanted to.

He wasn't even looking at her. Castor wasn't looking at her anymore. He couldn't in that moment. The image of her...enjoying death, enjoying killing- that wasn't his Lina. That wasn't the woman he loved and married. "Stop." He whispered the words yet they vanish on cold winds. The summer sky seemed darker, clouds of gray rolling in from the ocean. "Stop." He was sure she could hear him, even as the summer breeze was being replaced by that of a storm brewing in the distance. he didn't want to hear this. He was trying to stop his imagination for creating the scene of her killing his fellow senshi. "I SAID STOP LINA." His voice was jagged and rough, filled with a rage and sent towards the one person he never wanted to direct it. It hurt him to know, to face what the truth.

He loved a murderer. Castor loved a woman who in her time in the darkness had lived off of killing. "I don't want to hear that." It ate at him, to know these things. "It's too late for her Lina, you saw her that day, you saw what she has become. She made the choice. You made your own. Just as I made the choice." He was just barely holding tears back in his own eyes. To hear her voice crackle, the signs of her deep sorrow he pulled her back, clinging to her, refusing to let her go. "Everyone of us make a choice, and we must live by them. Good...and bad."

He held her and he felt sick to his stomach as the one thing he adored more than anything; more than the senshi, more than earth, more than anything in the cosmos, wept in his arms. Words had long failed him, his anger and rage boiling down in sadness and disgust. Sadness at the fact his beloved hurt so deeply, disgust at to that which he placed the blame. Not only did he blame the negaverse, but he blamed himself. If he'd gotten to her sooner, perhaps it might not have come to this. If he's had the power he did not, maybe she'd had never have had to take human lives.

So many ifs, so many uncertainties.

"I will kill them Lina." His hands ran into her hair and wings wrapped around them, covering her from the harsh storm wind that was now around them. The summer storm had arrived. "Beryl, Tanzanite, I have to kill them. We can't save them. You can't force them to the light, you know that, and I can't purify them. I-...that isn't in my power." It never would be. Cosmos had warned him but even without the warning he didn't think he could do it. There was only one person he knew he could save, and now she was brokenly sobbing in his arms he felt powerless to stop it.

The rain started to fall warm despite the cold turbulent winds. "I won't leave you. I can't, you're my star, my beloved gem, my nymph, my eternity, mio amore." He was still so blind to what she saw, so bullheaded to see her ideals. Stuck in his view, but he stilled loved her. He could never not love her. But-" I just have to know." He brought her hand to his chest, to where his starseed was just under his skin. "Do you still crave it? Do you still-" He had to know the truth. Even if he might hate it, he had to know.

He let her go.

It was oddly easy for him to watch her walk away this time, on stumbling gait back to the villa. He felt empty when she said it, admitted to what he wished wasn't the fact. What he wished was not the blatant truth told from his lover's lips. She wanted it still. Lina still wanted the power that a human life devoured could offer her. The rain soaked his clothes to his skin, and ran down the feathers of his wings in translucent beads. Yet he felt no chill when the wind blew across his skin. The crown of crystalline laurels, laurels made of the shell of the Castorian beetle. The words of his past echoing, haunting him. The king's words as he was crowned more than a millennium ago.

"A crown of crystal. Carved from that which we fight and loath, but need to survive. They symbolize your power and skill. But they also symbolize more than that. They might be from the Beetle, but they are formed into the symbol of knowledge, of understanding." The laurels rested on his head, sliding down, almost too big for him. "You are our prince, and you are our senshi. The best of us, you have both power and knowledge. War and wisdom. Wear this crown Prince Castor, and know it for what it is. It is the spirit of Us. You carry the heart of our world, let all who see this crown know-"

The King smiled at him, full of pride. "You are our Prince."

The memory burned him and he felt warm summer rain mix with tears, the memory soured by the knowledge he would have to face. A weight in his palm and looking down, the Castorian Crystal was cool. Looking at it, the petal like shards reflected his face, torn and twisted. He let her walk away, but with slow steps he followed, finding her sniffling, eyes on the portrait of her past self. Of her past. Coming from behind her, arms embraced her and before she could protest, he pressed the crystal over her heart. It was the heart of his world, but more than that, it was the most sacred part of him. His lips kissed her neck. "I love you Daphne." His words a whisper almost hidden from the melody of the rain from outside. "I will always love you-no matter the past. I will never stop loving you."