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If Delphine was feeling bad for trusting Sailor Ares as a friend and leader, it was nothing compared to the bitter loathing and self-disgust that Eilian was feeling. She and the enigmatic leader of the Blood Moon Court had been quite a bit more than friends for a brief period of time; it had led her to make fallacious jumps in logic that made her think for a moment that the burgundy-haired young woman gave a damn about her. No, she was just weak. The word 'weakness' had been pounding through her head for over twenty-four hours now in a merciless headache.

Trying to find some way to regain her confidence, her footing, Eilian Halpan returned to the scene of the crime, as it were. Her hair was sleeked back into an immaculate ponytail, the colors of her jogging suit matched perfectly to both her shoes and the tie in her hair. It was all the basic facade of a rich girl runner and she had indeed tried to jog. It had been halfhearted at best though really. Sliding into the doors she saw the slumped figure and figured it for one of the poor homeless who had nowhere to go.

That was until, indignant to throw them out, she got closer and recognized the two-tone hairstyle. Nemesis. No..."Delphine. What are you doing here?"

"Talk about making someone want to vomit. I've never seen someone sling a sales pitch better than the devout." Religious skepticism was something that had been a frustration to Eilian's incredibly Catholic parents for quite some time. Thankfully they had learned, somewhere around her thirteenth year, to keep their incredibly vocal child away from the priests. Confessions had been filled with harrying questions that had the local priesthood convinced that the middle Halpan child was indeed possessed by some form of sinister devil.

Suffice to say that she did not attend church services at all after that. Really, this was the most amount of time she had spent in any religious institution since she was pre-pubescent. Oddly fitting that Ares would have chosen to stage her dramatic revelations here in the place for them.

"I feel something alright but I think it's lingering bullshit." It was always best to be direct with Delphine. Sure Eilian could have danced around the fact that neither of them were particularly happy, she could have been chummish, even cordial. It would have been a general waste of breath. "I'm just trying to make sense of it all. I never would have thought..." Staring off into space, Eilian sat her perfectly matched bottom down on the old pew a foot away from her comrade.

"It was personal. For me anyway."

There was just something about Nemesis that always made Eilian grin. It was hard to separate the two in her mind. Delphine was the civlian sitting next to her, but as far as the deep violet-haired woman was concerned, she was Sailor Nemesis. The lack of bullshit involved was so utterly refreshing that it was like springtime. Somehow, she didn't think that her fellow BMC-er would appreciate hearing that. At all.

"She just never seemed the kind to abandon someone. That's all." The whole thing was quickly turning into a pity party of one with Albali singing the Woe Is Me serenade. Delph did have a point though, there was no sense involved. "Maybe that's why it's called Chaos. Holy s**t breakthrough moment I know." Her mouth lifted in self-deprecation. "But it's just not something you can understand or plan against. You just have to destroy it." Hands gripped the edge of the pew next to her thighs with tension. Just thinking of trying to hurt Fallon -- Ares -- was not something Eilian was equipped for just yet.

"Birhan isn't so bad. She stands up for herself at least and I think she'll be more inclined to listen now. She didn't listen before and look what happened. Now she has to or the whole thing is going to fall apart." Fingers touched her hipbone where the burn of her initiation had been healed slowly over time. It was shiny scar tissue now, dead skin in an unmistakable burn of a crescent moon. "I don't think leaving will help anything. At least this way it's like giving her the giant finger." Certainly that's what Are was doing to them!

Anger was never the problem in a situation like this. Channeling the anger so that it could be used constructively was the problem and Eilian was scrambling around her own misery to try and do that with Delphine. Suffice to say that she didn't feel particularly close to any of the remaining members of the Blood Moon Court but she and the Senshi of Decay had always run rather parallel (the word in her thoughts alone made her wince). There was something that she knew decidedly marked Ares as different from Nemesis, the information wielded like a stick poked right into the other woman's side.

"She wasn't dark like you. You forget that the soul of the senshi wasn't even from this world. She's...other. Apparently whatever that other was finally won. Sweet Neuton. I sound like those Negaverse idiots." Her voice took on a false falsetto, hand on her chest in a mimicry of an obviously self-righteous Negaverse a*****e. "Oh those senshi aliens. You don't belong here. Augh." The ponytail was flipped back over her shoulder as another thought sunk in. "That pink princess. She was right. That burns. I never especially wanted to admit that pink thing could be even halfway right. She's so...pink." And another thing that was totally alien to them all.

Eilian's forehead fell into her hands as so many things were being absorbed, processed, and dumped out the other end of her orderly mind. This lack of knowledge, the way things had changed, they just hadn't caught up with her yet so that her mind reeled restlessly. "That's why you can't leave though. Ares just made us look like total fools and we have to save face. We have to make something out of this so that....that nobody can say that we're weak. That we intentionally harbored whatever this was and cultivated it. It's not our fault. Then, one day, you can give Ares a glowing finger right where it hurts." If anyone said to Albali that she was weak within the next month, she was going to ask Nemesis to touch her. And then someone was going to get a very unpleasant surprise.

Those awfully final yet unquestionably true words coming from Nemesis' mouth broke Eilian's composure. Broke it long enough for the girl to bring her hands up, fingers pressing into her eyes until she saw white dots behind them, banishing the fact that just listening to this went against all of her instincts. Sailor Albali had promised to serve in whatever way possible. She had spent a sleepless night wondering if perhaps there was some way to still serve from this side of the divided line, coming up with a blank.

There was little way to act a saboteur unless truly coating her hands with the blood of her comrades that simply wanted to make the world better. Some wanted only to end this magical bullshit war so that they could go back to their normal lives. Could she kill someone like Nemesis? No. Eilian and her magical persona were many things but never had she been a true killer for anything less than the most dire of circumstances.

"Don't you ever go to those crazy magical girl club meetings?" Fingers were still pressed to her face, sliding down her cheeks as Eilian's head tipped back to contemplate the ruined ceiling. "She's not really one of the power princesses but she claims her mom is the Moon Princess that is dead and gone. And isn't Castor the one who is always trying to take pictures up our skirts?" She remembered that from their time in space. It had been brief, thank Einstein, but hadn't he been floating around with his senshi phone?

She didn't want to contemplate it.

"I've got your back. Whenever it all comes down to it. I guess that's all there is to it these days. Who has your back and who doesn't."

Eilian's answering grin was rather wide and a touch wicked. "As long as your hands are not glowing and north of my a**, I think you'll be just fine." It was something she'd considered several times, the idea that Sailor Nemesis could pull all sorts of nasty little pranks with her powers and glowing hands. Really, Sailor Albali was somewhat terrified of ever having to use her own powers to take one of Nemesis' abilities. No doubt the pain involved would be worse than the burns she'd taken once to achieve Sailor Gunn's powers for a short period of time.

She had seen what had become of Tanzanite, after all.

"I wonder if his little woman understands what a pervert he is. Perhaps she has no idea he's got a sideline business? That would give him time to..entertain himself on the side. As it were." Gossip was perhaps the best activity Eilian could think of when she wasn't organizing some poor lost soul's activities down to minutiae. Someday she would make a brilliant wedding planner that would make brides weep with joy.

For now, it was pretty much annoying as hell.

"It's up to us now to be strong, useful, in charge. All those lovely leadership qualities that I'm not entirely sure I possess. How well do you fake it?" Apparently they had moved on to the more ribald parts of the conversation.

Eyes rolled back into Eilian's head at the mention of the 'super special member of the ISS', the fact that she herself was one, and that it didn't matter any longer about all of that. "Do you really think that truly matters anymore? Personally I think it would be a sight ridiculous to cling to those things. The capes, the brandings, all of it. We don't have even enough people remaining to hold to those ideals any longer and personally..." The ponytail brushed Delphine in a negative.

"Personally I don't give a s**t. We just have to, as a group, figure out what we want to do and do it. That was the only real point Ares ever had. We had to work together, we had to stop sitting around waiting for some mythical moon b***h to come along and make everything better." Passion and irritation were thickening her Welsh accent until she was almost unintelligible, growling with conviction. "Capes and secret councils and all that s**t is just what it sounds like. Total s**t. It didn't work then and it won't work in the future." There was a pause. "The branding was good though. You can tell who gives a damn by who carries the mark."

Taking a deep breath to focus herself and get a goddamn grip on everything, Eilian smoothed her immaculate ponytail back into place, shooting her a look from teal eyes. "In other words, ******** leading. Just stand up for what you want to do, what you think is best for the group, and that's all you need. In other words," there was a laugh in her voice now, "You're set."

It was a bit sobering to look around and remember the night before. Remember what had happened, who had transgressed, and what had been lost forever. "We all lost our innocent belief that Ares would lead us where we needed to go last night. Now we have to just...believe in each other. Which is why I have your back. You, at least, won't get me killed." It was the highest compliment she could give.