Welcome to Gaia! ::

For a second or two he began to choke from the lack of atmosphere and his free hand rose to his throat where Virgo's claw marks were still fresh. Without thinking the glamour fell from him, and everything returned to some semblance of normal, at least for his lungs. His eyes finally darted around to take in where she'd pulled him. Vaguely he recognized the alien landscape. After Ares had dragged him through a mirror to Requiem, he'd learned to keep his eyes fixed to the ground any time he came out of a mirror, which was thankfully not very often. He'd broken that rule once, but he'd also lost a lot of blood before then and his recollection was all kind of vague and blurry and missing some of the key details. Such as the sun that was so swollen its light seemed to render the black sky around it empty and dark.

He was still staring up at it with an expression more horrified than curious when Alkaid noticed what he'd briefly forgotten - his demotion. That brought his attention quickly back down. It was pretty clear her judgment was affecting him, as he quickly began to wither under her gaze.

"Can it wait?" he asked quietly, as if it really required her permission to be tabled. Then again, Alkaid had never been the one outranking him before. His eyes were taking in the charred and cracked ground at his feet with extreme interest. It was embarrassing enough that he could almost forget where they were. Almost. Any other time he would have withdrawn, but there was nowhere to go here. He had to stay close to her.

He showed his thanks with a small sigh and continued to avoid a look of what he was sure was disgust. Maybe all of this was for nothing. She wasn't going to waste her time with a lieutenant. All the while his feelings just remained as overpowering as ever. She was the only person he'd ever felt so strongly about, and it was maddening.

Slowly he lifted his gaze when she asked, and followed the direction she pointed right back down to the ground. Her explanations made about as much sense as anything else in the Negaverse lately. If he panicked over anything, it was over. That was the deal. For once, Hematite had been preparing himself for weirdness. Maybe not this much weirdness, but at least he got fair warning this time. It really made all the difference with him. He couldn't hide his surprise, but he could get a grip on himself within a reasonable amount of time.

"Ah," he began uncertainly. His eyes finally tore away from the strange spectacle of her mere presence siphoning energy right out of the ground. It was an unavoidable reminder of what she had become. Her expression and words were ominous, but he couldn't begin to guess what she was getting at. He tried anyway, tentatively, with an expression of uncertainty. "So you... need more energy?"

"But you told me it was just a promotion," His eyes fell to the hole in her chest, but his thoughts were elsewhere. The heat of the sun and wind here hid the way her skin burned to the touch. He let himself be pulled along with her as he retreated into his thoughts and the more familiar concepts she was bringing up. "I thought this was just what happened when you got promoted like we are."

Not that protesting it was going to change what she just said. She'd traded her star to Metallia for her rank. When her star changed, she changed too. He knew too little about the nature of senshi to understand how it worked with them.

"But that makes no sense," he responded, meeting her eyes. "We still collect energy from people as if this-" He waved a hand at the empty landscape ahead of them-- "never happened. If a whole star's energy barely helps us, then-"

He remembered Kaia matter-of-factly pointing out the sun was a star, months ago, at a museum. Uneducated as he was, even Hematite had at least heard in passing the wild theories that the sun was going to eventually blow up or burn out or something in a million billion years. Even if senshi didn't seem to die, stars eventually could.

"What happens when it's all used up?"

He didn't have much to say on the subject of Metallia that wouldn't land him in at least as much trouble as his feelings about Ares had. She was the source of all their power but something he truly couldn't understand, and therefore feared for her unpredictability in his eyes. There was nothing human about her, or Tanzanite, and at one point he had feared Alkaid had gone the same route. He could hardly believe the other eight soldiers were alive after he'd seen them dragged into Metallia's doorway. They had all been swept up in the rush of the battle in space, and he didn't get a chance to ask them what had happened, how they had survived. The nine of them had gone against an order, Tanzanite's, Metallia's. But Alkaid had followed hers. Where the nine of them had somehow been spared an execution...

Alkaid really was as human as she could have hoped to be.

They walked in silence for some time after the last words Alkaid spoke, communicating instead with the way they intertwined their fingers. His eyes remained downcast, watching each footstep sink into the black sand, stepping carefully over deep fissures.

Just when the quiet was starting to become unbearable, Hematite spoke. His words were simple but they were spoken with complete conviction. "No. I won't let that happen."

For someone who had spent all their memorable life in a war of magic, he couldn't imagine anything that was truly impossible.

"You don't understand," he explained, meeting her gaze with a particularly distraught one. "When you came back like this, I started noticing you were... different. I tried to look past it but all I saw was a stranger who looked just like you. It was like you had already died, somehow, and I believed there was nothing I could do to bring you back. I couldn't take it."

His free hand founds its way to hers, and closed around it before pulling both between them. It was probably lucky Kaia no longer had a circulation to cut off. The way Hematite clenched her fingers in his grip he probably would have. He was starting to look a little worked up - normal, for him, just abnormal that it had taken so long.

"I shouldn't have left you. I should have tried to do something about this, when I still could've. God, I was such a ********> idiot."

But the real outburst never came. There was only silence again. When his grip on her hands finally relaxed some, he had dropped his head again and was back to staring at the sand.

In a voice much quieter, but much heavier: "Kaia, I can't - I'm not going to watch you die all over again."

"It's- it's alright... I wouldn't last long without you anyway.." He'd shut his eyes too, as soon as her forehead touched his. It was hard to raise his voice; it was impossible to control it. He felt like he was just choking on everything he didn't know how to say to her. There was no way to concisely begin to explain what he'd done, and what had been done to him in turn. "If there's a way to... just slow this down, even, we'll find it. I swear."

He felt every crack and crevice even along her fingers just from the way his own pressed against them. There really was no way to change what she'd become. It had been his stupidity that had driven her out of the apartment months ago, to this wasteland of a planet. That... that could be fixed. At long last he forced himself to tear away from the intimate closeness.

"I think we should go home," he suggested, taking a step backward so that their arms were stretched out loosely between them. "Together."