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2:30am was one of those times of day when everything seemed to exist inside of a bubble. Towards the hotspot center of town where there was a concentration of people you could almost always find someone but when all the clubs were closed, the bars had been shut down for half an hour at least, the streets were deserted in this stretch of town. It was also one of those times, if you'd been one of those people at the clubs, that you couldn't quite see going home when your energy was still sky-high. Usually Daph ended up somewhere like the IHOP or Denny's or something like that to get a snack and burn off the edge talking to the drunk guys from the local university but today that just seemed a bit too...boring.

So instead Daph had wanted to go for a walk and Kess had obliged, the pair of them wandering around what was probably not the best part of town but that wasn't quite something that was registering in the mind of the bluenette. It was three years too late to care about that and it was a habit that she couldn't relearn, that fear of seedy places. Besides she wasn't exactly alone in the dark places of Destiny City! Kess was with her! Kess who, when faced with three thugs kicking her a** and a savior in the form of a knight, had walked off without saying a word.

They'd be fine.

High on life for a change and perhaps a little tipsy after those two shots she'd been encouraged to do the bluenette wrapped both of her arms around one of Kess', batting eyes up at her. "So you have to make sure nothing bad happens. I hear Destiny City is a bad place to be at night. Things that go bump and all that. I'm confident you could save me though, Lance."

Daphne opened her mouth about to make a joke in what was probably incredibly poor taste about what it was exactly Kess could snack on this late at night, which actually was probably not at all a joke, but decided against it. Especially when Jennifer's Body was tossed out as an alternative to going home and doing what was on the itinerary for most nights. You could always go home and not watch a movie but how often could you go to a nearly-deserted theater full of people who'd had way too much to drink and partially not watch a movie?

Not often, that was for damn sure!

Snagging a finger in the collar of Kess' shirt the bluenette pulled her companion down for another, much longer kiss that spoke more than a little of how good she was feeling before she pulled back to laugh just a bit sheepishly. "Sorry, shouldn't do that if we're going to go to go ogle Megan Fox for a few hours. You know how her horrible acting just gets me all...bothered." Eyes and laughter rolled as Daphne turned on one of her heels to look around. She didn't quite recognize where they were but that was probably the Jagermeister fogging her head up.

"What's the quickest way to get transpo from here? I didn't think we'd walked so far!"

Since nether of them were powered, they wouldn’t have felt him when he appeared. Kess however would likely be the first person to realize that he was there, because his hand closed around her throat, yanking her backwards and down, loosing her footing as his hand squeezed dangerously tight around her throat, constricting breath.

What better chance could there have been to do this than to catch Howlite making out with DAPHNE. So publicly too, scandalous, shameful! And she knew full well that the girl was of the side of order. It would have been so much better if she hadn’t been so damned –tall, but yanking backwards worked rather well in the end. It let Daphne, always so happy in the candy store to help, so personable, see that he was reaching for her blond lovers star seed.

“Has no one ever scolded you young lovers about such blatant displays of public affection?”

"F-" Kess stiffened just before the hand found her neck, a sense of intuition not enough to stop her from being jerked off her feet and flung hard to the pavement. "-uck!" Her jaw clenched as she forced herself into silence, black eyes cold as she looked up at the General-King, lying there as he taunted Daphne.

It hadn't been a planned attack, but there was nothing inside her that allowed for panic, especially when she knew who, exactly, was threatening her life. Her hand reached up to her neck, though her human strength would do nothing to loosen his grip.

Kess couldn't feel the flush of power, but she could see it, stilling as she watched Daphne become someone else. It hurt, the way her chest tightened at the visual confirmation of what she had already suspected. It was strange, startling, the sense of loss she felt over something she didn't even know she had.

Why couldn't she look away from those bright eyes? They were the same. Those were Daphne's eyes, even if she'd never seen them so hard. No. It was Lina Kight, and that meant that Zinkenite couldn't be trusted to do what had to be done.

Powering up wasn't a choice.

Chaos rippled over her, crawled along her skin and hardening into armor until her fingers held the strength necessary to pry the distracted Zinkenite's hand free, fling it from her body and roll away to regain her footing and access the situation.

Howlite did what Kess had always done: adapt. She'd already known she was going to lose Daphne, so why was it so hard to swallow? It helped, then, to think of her as Linarite, again, to see Zinkenite's reaction.

She said nothing.

Zinkenite wasn't the only one whose world could crumble at the edges, the only one who looked like they'd taken a knee straight to the gut in a phantom pain reminiscent of the first time they'd met. It was that unnamed general who had sworn boldly that because the General King could not, she would kill the traitor knight for her crimes and did not hesitate. Would she hesitate now that it was Daphne? Now that it was Kess? From everything she had seen of this general that question was up in the air and the uncertainty of it haunted her features as eyes flicked quickly between the two.

Kess and...who? Zinkenite's identity was still nothing but a mystery to her, mind scraping desperately through all the men she knew to try and pick out a male friend. Someone Kess also knew.

Her mind could only grasp at one, reaching out at random to try and peg it. If any of her friends could be Zinkenite who would it be? "Zac?" The two that she'd been closest to the whole time since casting off Elzo were the two people that were now about to try and kill her, how perfectly, beautifully ironic. Shaking her head as if it didn't matter because certainly it really didn't matter who it was the bluenette couldn't help her habit of correcting his twisted information, as always. "He didn't abandon me, I abandoned him. I wasn't going to keep sleeping with, pretending to love someone who couldn't even understand the basic idea that you're not kill-on-sight. That you're people." Oh ******** Elzo.

Closing her mouth on a further rant that would do nothing more than draw attention to her doomed relationship Lina again shook her head into the negative, hesitating. "Wait, my most recent scars? What...oh are you ******** kidding me? You knew?! It's been weeks since that damned failure of a meeting and all this time you've been what? Biding your time until you could privately ambush me and see if I'd betray myself?" Her tone was furious, scathing even as she delivered her fury unto the General King. "Oh I bet you just were waiting to see if I'd invite all my senshi friends over for a big senshi bash where we talked about our least-favorite officers!" Eyelashes batted before a disgusted noises echoed in her throat.

"Guess the joke's on you if all of my friends are your damn officers. Been sleeping with one for months now and it took you that long to figure it out so I guess I'm not as bad at this as I thought." It hurt, God it hurt, to think that perhaps Kess' entire interest in her was faked. Daphne had cared, really cared about the blonde when she'd sworn up and down that she wouldn't get emotionally involved with anyone she couldn't be a hundred percent sure of again. The lure of the forbidden was, apparently, hard-wired deep into her being to the point that it happened unconsciously for the third time.

Fingers pressed to her eyes and unlike the proud knight that he'd seen so many times before, Lina could only refuse him with exhaustion in her voice. "I told you, I'm not going to do it. You know my reasons and I'm not going to trot them out for Kess to laugh at me. I think you've both had enough chuckles to last you awhile." It didn't matter that no one was laughing, that the air was so tense you could have swum through it. There was no way to run and nowhere to hide when you were trying to outrun a general who wanted you dead and a General King who was looking at you like he had no idea which way was up.

Lina Knight's fate, as horrible as she'd always thought it, was sealed.

Too much. How much could you expect one person to handle before they just couldn't handle anymore? Daphne had thought that running away, technically, with Castor had been the lowest point she could have been in. After all how low did you have to get that you begged someone to kill you because you just couldn't figure out what else to do? Then you turned around to grasp again at life with desperate hands because you hadn't been ready to die, the ultimate weakling. But then months later she'd lost Castor, she'd lost her entire family and would never again see her mother's absent smile. Would never, ever again feel a ribbon being tied in her hair with careful hands as a quiet voice told her how pretty she looked today.

No one in the forces of Order wanted her, not one cared what happened to her past some kind of misunderstood symbol of what could be. Zac and Kess were Negaverse officers! Whether it was done on purpose as a cruel mockery or simply the most convenient surface the knight couldn't help but realize they were back where they'd started before Zinkenite had interfered but with such different context that a little sob sounded. Lina wasn't fighting it this time, she was going to take what came and just accept it.

"Sorry Kess. I forgot. I really wanted..." You. To not be alone. "To protect you but I guess you figured that one out." The reassurance couldn't do much to leaven that dead, empty look from the young woman's eyes as she spoke louder this time, calling out to the General King. "I wanted to protect all of you. I failed and I'm sorry." As far as last words went they weren't much but in the end what could you say?

Fingertips reached out to so very lightly graze against Howlite's own. "It was fun."

It’s amazing how many thoughts can pass through a persons mind in a matter of seconds, perhaps less than that depending on the person. It took seconds to remove a star seed, perhaps as little as one if the person were quick. Add a few moments as Kess and Daphne, sorry… Howlite, and Lina gazed into each other’s eyes and said soft words that didn’t quite amount to ‘love’ and it left more than enough time to turn his own thoughts into a storm.

He knew he should let this happen, he knew he should let that second fly by without a moments pause, let it slip by past the point of doubts, beyond the point where it could be anything but a fleeting regret.

He would have liked to say he moved without thought, but that was not entirely true. Something drove him forward; something pushed him to latch onto Howlite’s wrist with what must have been a painful intensity. Dangerously close to overdoing what was needed to stay her hand, to draw out that split second into two. To change a sure death into chance, a coin toss between ruin and something not unlike ‘salvation’.

He channeled chaos, through himself, into Howlite, and through her, into the well abused, battle worn star seed of Knight Lina.