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Honestly, just to get it out there, life sucked. It just did, unequivocally. Her boyfriend was avoiding her. Her parents flipped out whenever she went somewhere. School was hard, but at least the year was almost over. Speaking of school, the school nurse was giving her the side-eye. This had never happened at Crystal, and she'd been getting injured so much worse before. The Zodiacs were disappearing, one by one by inexorable one, and she couldn't do anything to stop it, and she felt so useless--

Her longing for Hero to come save her from these responsibilities had become rarer and rarer over time, just like her wishes for Prince Eon. And she had always been great at soldiering on, keeping her chin up, all those fun things. It just got hard sometimes, and she couldn't burden the Princess with her feelings, so she just ran and ran and ran until she couldn't anymore. That was what had brought her there, to a large-sized rock in the park near her home. Every breath felt like fire, which was no less than she deserved. She couldn't get enough air, and wasn't even trying to be secretive about her panting, the jerking sobs that just about tore out of her throat. It was dusk, though, and no one was around--and Elke didn't even want the attention. Not anymore.

She was just starting to calm, scrubbing her eyes and snuffling pathetically in an attempt to clear her throat, when she heard a familiar voice. Had it been Grayson... or the Princess... or anyone else, she might have laughed and agreed, and later it would have inspired a bout of fresh tears. The words too perfectly echoed her feeling at the time. Of course she was alone! She was worthless, too stupid to lead even when trusted by Chronos, she couldn't keep the Zodiac together, not even for her own scummy life.

But she couldn't admit that in front of this stupid cat. It was Zue, so instead she looked up at him. Her fingers, gone rigid with a sudden spike of anger, blocked stripes of red-rimmed eyes. It only made the iris seem greener in comparison. "Oh," she said, in tones of barely disguised loathing. "It's you."

The things she would have done for Hero to return! For Sagittarius, for Eon, for this Zodiac before her to be her boyfriend or Mackie or--any other Zodiac, any other missing Zodiac, but not the ******** cat that was one-half Sue Gottschalk. She and Zue once had held an accord between them. She was a useless tactician, but she tried hard and she wanted to succeed, and did what the cat ordered her to do to improve. That had gone a long way with him, once.

When he merged with the young man who had once savaged her with a golf club? Not so much, not anymore. More of it rested on Elke than Sue, but all the same. "What do you want? To make fun of me? Go ahead. I don't care. I don't care where you've been, I don't care what you want to say to me, but go ahead and say it anyway so at least you'll maybe start acting like a guardian cat like you're supposed to for the others. Ce d'un chat sans honneur..."

She took a deep breath, lowered her hands to her lap and fisted her hands in her orange Meadowview skirt. What did he even want with her? Doubtless to tell her how much of a failure of a Captain she was. How she was never going to equal Aries and never going to be powerful enough to keep the Zodiac together--how could she protect them if she didn't know where they were? If they weren't interested in the Court anymore...

"If you were a proper Guardian Cat, you would know," she said. Wasn't that his job? To know what the Zodiac was doing and be helping them? Where had he even gone, she hadn't heard a thing about it--all the same, whatever, she needed to make nice with him at least a little. "They're gone," shortly, angrily. Like he should know! He had the headmap, didn't he? Not Virgo--she knew Aries had had some kind of awareness, but she had nothing, nothing at all, and it made her job almost impossible.

She took a deep breath, scrubbed at her face with her palms. "Aries died," she said. "I don't know where Taurus is, he's not answering his phone. Cancer is gone. The Gemini twins, I saw them in November but not since. Leo is at his apartment. I'm here. Libra's gone, Sagittarius is dead, Scorpio's gone, Aquarius isn't answering her phone, Capricorn went--somewhere--and Pisces checks in sometimes but not often enough... I don't have a stupid headmap! You should know more about this than me, why are you asking me?"

At this, Elke burst into loud, noisy tears. Not because it was her last resort; no, not even her only resort. Her first, best resort, she thought, was to blame herself. Obviously it was her fault, because everyone had begun disappearing after she'd become Captain. She'd last seen Pisces in... when? The blonde covered her mouth in one hand and leaned hard against her knees, which were too bony under her standard-issue Meadowview tights. She was just tired! Of everything! And now Zue was back to make things worse. If things could get worse!

"Yeah," she said through her sniffles. "They're gone. And now, since September, I'm the Captain, so it's my fault. I should've done better."

Then, morosely: "I suck." She fully expected him to agree.

See, there he went, agreeing. Just like she thought. Virgo--or rather, Elke, since she couldn't remember Zue ever being this much of a d**k--had the personality of the Guardian Cat down pat. Didn't she?

"Yeah," she said, scrubbing her face. The return to normalcy was calming, and Zue should just feel thankful that she hadn't gone on another night-long crying spree. She set her hands on her knees, and gave Zue her most unhappy look. "Because the Princess asked me to. Because Aries is dead and Taurus couldn't handle it and no one else wanted it. Why else would anyone appoint me?"

She'd been good at keeping the Zodiac together before. Good at bringing White Moon senshi into their fold. What hadn't she been willing to do for the Zodiac? Maybe that was really why... She'd rather die than watch the Zodiac fall apart as she was now. The Zodiac's infallible shield was turning out to be very, very fallible indeed.

"I want the Zodiac to not fail. We failed once and look at this," with an expansive gesture indicating at its smallest radius, the park. At the widest, it was their entire situation. She was sixteen and the captain of a fractured, but once elite guardian force of superpowered aliens reborn into human bodies, like supermen but without the infallibility. Zue was a thousand-year-old cat, but Sue was not that much older than her, and even if she hated him she knew that no one really deserved to be thrown into this kind of fight. And she might have admitted that she had been harsh on Sue, except he'd been just as harsh to her and she wasn't in the mood for pitying him.

She sighed, sat up straighter and looked over at Sue. "I guess we both do." As a conciliatory gesture--she hoped it was conciliatory--she said, "If you help me with the Captaincy, I will... I will try not to be so antagonistic." It wasn't so much Sue she wanted to ask, but Zue. The cat who had once helped train every Zodiac, who hadn't let any of them slack not even for an instant.

That would help. The facts of balancing school and jobs and life made it harder to train the Zodiac, the ages at which the Zodiacs were discovered were getting later and later--hadn't Jude been almost eighteen when he was awakened?--and everything was getting incredibly unbalanced.

She took a deep breath, and sighed. "The Zodiac has its work cut out for it," she said, examining her shoes again.

She kicked her feet out, listened to the thunk as they collided again with the rock she was sitting on. "I don't know," she said, and she tipped her head back to look up at the stars. Where was the Surrounding out there, anyway? The place was huge, encompassing the entire system; shouldn't it be visible, even a little? But maybe it was too small, width-wise. It didn't matter how long a thing was, she guessed, if it was only as wide as a highway and so far away.

"I'm going to go to the Surrounding," she decided. "I know it can be done. Themis--that's a White Moon super senshi--he showed me how I could do it. You just sort of... phone home, I guess." With a tentative plan in place, she was starting to feel a bit better about everything. She could go to the Surrounding and see how it was, and then whatever she found would influence everything else.

After all, their duty technically wasn't to hold the line on Earth. She thought the other senshi had that quite down pat.

"A little bit," she said, reaching over to pat Sue. Zue. Whoever he was. In that moment, her rancor seemed to have largely been let go. "But we're gonna be okay. I think, when all of us get back together, we're gonna be okay." She smiled at Sue, almost friendly, and she slipped off her rock. "Don't worry. I'll be real careful, Sue."

She waved as she retreated, footsteps reverberating as they pounded against the ground.