Welcome to Gaia! ::

Gunn had, for the first five minutes of the walk, narrated with the Star Trek introduction. Spinel had no idea if he should be impressed with the senshi’s memorization skills and familiarity with pop culture or vaguely unnerved by the world she’d taken him to. Alkaid had been barren, white sand with chunks of crystal that resonated the pure light of Chaos; Babylon had been a city under a dome, a snowstorm raging outside it in a bizarre re-imagining of a snowglobe. Gunn, though… it was charred, ashes drifting between the burned-out shells of houses. The place looked like it had been firebombed. And yet…

In the ashes of the houses, green things were sprouting. There were saplings that looked to be two or three years old growing within what walls were still standing, vines beginning to poke out from between shattered brickwork. The air smelled like spring, like fresh rain had just fallen.

They passed two minutes in silence, and then approached the foot of a tall tower. “Yeah, so, really, getting wiped out saved my comet,” she said. “There’s evidence that there was this really ******** up pollution going on. I don’t think it would’ve made another hundred years. Once I stopped the wildfires, it all pretty much… well, you saw it.” Fire purified. That was sort of its job.

She pushed open the tower’s great doors, which swung open silently on oiled hinges. Spinel looked, unnerved, at the utilitarian staircase circling the wall, up into the roof… “C’mon,” she said, and he had no choice but to ascend the stairs behind Gunn. Up and up and up and up.

Eventually, they stopped. “Yeah, so, these were guard quarters,” she said. “Senshi quarters were upstairs. I don’t like it in here, so, sorry for the bloodstains everywhere, I… yeah.” She dropped her backpack and pushed down a door into what looked like a bunk room; most of the bedframes were shattered, clawed to pieces, but there were four left standing. The door continuing upward was barred, with a lock on their side.

Spinel knew what picture this painted for him. A world that hated and feared its senshi, that had locked it away for that crime. And this was the sort of thing Gunn wanted to preserve? “Generator’s here, fridge is there if you need it. Um, beds are in there, clearly.”

She stopped. “Any questions?” Spinel didn’t have any--he looked to Babylon, just in case.

Spinel started going through the backpacks, and after a moment, sighed and let his henshin lapse. It didn’t matter now; he was going to purify, he was going to be someone other than Paul Wyndham soon, and he didn’t think that he could hold henshin for a week. Especially not while sleeping. “I would like the last forty eight hours to have never happened,” he said, pulling out men’s underwear (still in the package, thank god) and--god, had she bought them clothes, that was weird and unsettling for reasons he didn’t want to consider.

At least it was mostly loose, comfortable clothing. It probably hadn’t been expensive.

He sorted through the things in the other two backpacks--food and dry shampoo. “Are you dating her or something?” Or was Europa? Because this was a lot of stuff to buy for someone that she didn’t like and hardly knew. It represented a major investment and that was enough to drive him up the wall.

Paul took a deep breath once he’d stocked everything away neatly enough to satisfy him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to turn her attention on you like that. Avalon, I mean.”

Unlike Finn, Paul was surprised at the person who was sharing the comet with him. “She seems to like you,” said Paul, shifting over near the wall. At least the weather was pleasant. The third bag had proven to hold light blankets, perhaps pointing towards Gunn’s familiarity with weather patterns on her world. He wondered if other senshi were as familiar with their homeworlds as she was. Would he be the same way? He frowned at his hands, and then sighed.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Avalon in the past seventy-two hours,” he said, pulling his knees up to his chest. “I don’t think she’s someone who ever forgets a slight. Ever.” He sighed, and tried not to think too hard about it--about the things he’d done in order to avoid her wrath, and the things he’d done to gain it.

He smiled, awkwardly, and was not going to say anything about what he knew about Avalon. If Finn didn’t know, it was safer to keep him in the dark; he knew for a fact that Vanya suspected nothing of Finn, and giving the man any reason to be on edge… “Yeah,” he said, “at Vanya’s party, right? You’re her roomie.”

Paul shrugged. “Uh, well, I’ve known Vanya for a while, like, since high school, and…” What could he say to get Babylon away from Avalon in their civilian lives? “She’s a bit strange. I’m not saying she’s going to axe murder you, but she’s definitely not… a stable person.” He shrugged, and returned to his contemplation of the slice in his palm, and then sighed again.

“From what I know about her corruption, she’d been considering it for a year, and she was put on the spot--corrupt or die,” said Paul. He’d heard the story through the grapevine, didn’t know how much of it was true. He did know that if he’d been cornered by Howlite, with relatively little chance of escaping on any permanent basis, alone and considering himself without a chance of meaningful backup… He’d choose to live. It was human nature, beast hindbrain stuff: survival instinct. “It’s the same choice we’re all given. Choose to corrupt, or choose to die. Because once they pull back the curtain, you know about the masquerade. They’re Edward Cullen and you’re Bella Swan and you don’t have a choice.”

He barely remembered his corruption, except for the General-King who was now dead, and the choice he was offered. Corrupt or die. They hadn’t known he was a senshi until he had awakened in the fullness of his Chaos-granted powers. Sure, he’d been chained to an officer, a keeper, but he’d had purpose then, and he missed that. Things were so different now. “I liked it, for a really long time,” he said. “I still do, mostly, because--I--I’m sounding like a monster now, aren’t I? but I felt powerful for the first time in my life. Like I could handle anything and everything.”

The conversation with Finn wasn’t going to go anywhere, maybe ever. Tate--Avalon’s old civilian self was dead, by all accounts. Avalon spoke brightly of her past as Avalon, demonstrating her ability to drink the kool-aid with alacrity, but when asked about civilian life, she went quiet and stormy. He sighed through his nose. Unless Tate herself could say it wasn’t Finn’s fault--and all that was left of her, her ‘vengeful ghost’ it could be said, was saying it was his fault--the man would blame himself. And was he wrong? Probably not. Probably if Finn Derouen had remained behind, a support and guide for Avalon, she wouldn’t have felt so alone. Maybe she would’ve clung to the side of good. No one could know. No one would ever know.

So he dropped it. “No, I meant I liked killing,” he said, because none of this mattered. Either he’d forget killing, forget he liked it, or he’d forget this confession. And either way, Finn’s opinion likely wouldn’t change. “My whole life, someone’s been telling me what to do, when to do it, how to do it. Parents and teachers and tutors and friends--and then Charonite said, here, you get to make the most powerful decision of all. You can be the one who decides if people live or die. You can choose who to target. All we ask is that you’re loyal.”

He got up, all at once, and put his face in his hands. “And I was! I was loyal! I killed fourteen-year-olds and was proud of it. I hungered for their praise and admiration. I wanted them to tell me that I was redeeming myself for what I did in my past life, but--that wasn’t what they wanted. They never wanted any of the senshi to redeem ourselves. They just wanted us to want to die for them without ever asking why. So it was just more of the same.” He could remember the day he’d realized that, and he didn’t want to think of that day any further. “As if my past life wasn’t corrupt, too,” he said. “But that’s the worst part. The only ones I feel guilty for killing are the ones since Shay. And I should feel guilty. I hate that I don’t.”

Much like the conversation about Finn’s guilt in the matter of Avalon’s corruption, this wasn’t going to go anywhere. But if Finn wanted to have it--really, all Finn would have to do to get Gunn to kill him would be to pretend Paul had attacked him, or been otherwise hostile, and Gunn would probably kill him. He didn’t want to die, not when there was Tallulah, and Raleigh, and the chance to revenge what had happened to Shay.

His fault.

He sighed, and crossed the room to haul himself onto the cot over Finn’s. It put him in a place where he couldn’t easily move around without Finn hearing and noticing, and hopefully made the knight feel safer. “And if I forget being Spinel, that’s great,” he said, “but if I forget being Paul, then what happens?” Seemed clear enough to him. Stop what he was doing and let himself get killed.

“Did you say that to Avalon,” asked Paul, closing his eyes and folding his hands over his stomach. The guardroom felt temperate, or close enough, so he decided that he wasn’t going to get down to get blankets; he was just going to go to sleep right here, like this. He knew that he was being an a**, but the thought of losing everything he was doing this for was… terrifying. “‘You won’t be alone’?”

Paul couldn’t think of anything to say to that. On the one hand, had Finn Derouen thought to tell Tate Konstantin that she wasn’t alone, and that he would come if she called, there would be no General Avalon now. Shay wouldn’t be alive, but those two senshi would be. And he wouldn’t be hiding on some godforsaken comet. On the other hand… he might have dragged his feet on the topic of purification forever. He sort of looked forward to having all this s**t over and done with.

Instead of answering Finn, he rolled onto his side and went to sleep. It took a long, long time to get there.