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Hvergelmir was having trouble concentrating on her book. She should've brought string or something to make string figures with, or maybe a hackey sack. She could learn to juggle, maybe.

What did it matter, though? Tara was missing. At the end of the night, she'd still be missing, and Laney wasn't out finding her.

Tara's brother was already looking, of course. She hadn't heard from him in a few days. And Laney had looked, too, in her downtime -- but she had a lot of appointments to keep. She couldn't spend all her time looking for Sailor Aquarius, much as she might want to.

Still, these particular appointments were some of the most difficult to keep. She'd made a decision to keep a regular schedule of visits to North End Park so she could start trying to meet people in her powered form on more peaceful terms than youma-hunting -- and so that, once she met them, she could tell them where and when to find her if they ever wanted to talk. The problem was, this meant three nights a week sitting in the park with a book, reading, not necessarily encountering anyone. That kind of idleness was maddening when her best friend was missing.

She set down her latest undertaking -- a nostalgic reread of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator -- and rubbed the bridge of her nose tiredly. Some days, Hvergelmir just wanted to stay in bed.

Hvergelmir blinked suddenly, immediately aware of the crushingly powerful aura of a corrupted senshi in her vicinity. She started, drawing herself up, fearful that it would be Sailor Ate again -- but a glance at the senshi in question laid that fear to rest, at least. She shivered nonetheless.

This corrupted senshi, at least, had the outward appearance of being friendly. That was rare, it seemed -- but even though she had a worried suspicion that it might be a ruse, or part of some complicated personality issue, Hvergelmir couldn't exactly look a gift horse in the mouth.

A Negaverser was being nice to her. It was more than she usually hoped for.

Hvergelmir smiled, hopeful. "Oh, this? It's not all its cracked up to be, I promise you. Besides, I mean, look who's talking! Have you seen your hair? You'd be the envy of every Disney princess; it's, like, exquisite."

"Oh, I'm normally all about the running and screaming, trust me. Grace under fire, thy name is definitely not Hvergelmir Page of the Cosmos. It's just that in this case, that would've defeated the purpose of hanging out here," Hvergelmir said, immediately dismissing the notion that she'd done something worth positive affirmation. Compliments about her dress were something she'd heard before, and they were a little easier to take, since she hadn't had anything to do with choosing it, and that made it not really a compliment. Positive commentary about something she'd done, however -- she didn't really know what to do with it. Dismissing it out of hand was almost an automatic response.

"I don't fight Negaversers," she explained. "It's against my oath. I'd rather talk. Do you . . . do you have a few minutes?"

She offered a hopeful smile -- but she was still ready to make with the running and screaming if things went south. The last corrupted senshi she'd met had left her with bad memories and a wariness of dark alleyways.

"Oh," Hvergelmir answered Persephone with a smile that said why, I'm so glad you asked. "Okay, do you see this mark on my arm?"

It was hard to miss -- her oath was seared into her shoulder in white and gold glitter, and was approximately the size of a tea saucer. It marked out her compact with her Wonder in the shape of its traditional crest: a star of Cosmos rising out of a well, ringed in gold trim.

"That's the seal of my Wonder, and it means I've sworn a vow to it. If the Negaverse is fighting to protect the Earth, you're no enemy of mine -- so I won't fight you unless my own life's at stake. With my life forfeit if I break my oath."

She shrugged. "I'm not saying that was, like, my first choice, mind. But things got to a point where either I had to give up and join a war I don't believe in, or let someone kill me, or find a way to prove I wasn't going to hurt anyone. And this," Hvergelmir indicated her arm again, "this is what I came up with."

She waited for the usual reaction, which so far had been variations on the theme of her life expectancy and how this had drastically shortened it. Hvergelmir was used to it by now. Some days, she even privately agreed.

"Mm," she said tonelessly, uneasy with the praise once again. "Thank you, but I don't know about standing up for what I believe, I'm not really that much of a brave or selfless person. I just -- couldn't see myself joining an army. Following orders, killing people, forcing other people to join the same army -- without knowing why. I couldn't do it."

Hvergelmir smiled, twisting in her seat to face Persephone more fully. "I've had some bad luck with Negaversers who don't care about my vow a few times now, but a lot of people have been willing to answer at least a few questions -- and I'd rather hear more about you. How long have you been with the Negaverse?"

Hvergelmir shook her head sadly, listening to Persephone's confirmation that the Negaverse was as blindly face-foward of an organization as she'd been led to believe. No one ever seemed to say otherwise; no one told her the Negaverse was an open community where information was shared freely. They were all just dancing along to their pied pipers' tunes as blankly as sleeping children.

Persephone said little about her corruption, initially, but of what she said, something was already confusing Hvergelmir's expectations. This was why it was useful to talk to people. "You corrupted by choice, I take it? Are you saying you can't remember . . . anything from your civilian life?"

She felt her stomach drop a little. Her own life might not've been very full at the moment, but it had Tara in it -- and looking for fairies with strangers in clover patches -- and her memories went all the way back to her childhood, everything she'd ever experienced. There were holes in what she could recall already: a year in a coma that had simply not occured for her; and the time before that, whatever had happened at Barren Pines, that should've been etched in her memory but was somehow, frustratingly, always blocked to her. Those little losses grieved her enough: she couldn't imagine truly forgetting everything.

Hvergelmir listened patiently, affected by the quiet emotion in Persephone's voice. There was a lot of heart still in the corrupted senshi, a lot that she hadn't expected, in the face of Chaos. She wondered, idly, how versatile Chaos was, what corners it could tuck itself into in a person's heart to grow root. It seemed to need so little soil.

Chaos wasn't holding her with anger or hatred, it didn't seem. Was it grief? Was that what kept her tethered to her place in the Negaverse, convinced enough to say she felt glad not to remember the shadows of the life she'd lost? Did Chaos feed her grief, keep it alive like a wound inside her that never healed, nurturing her pain so it could go on being the balm she needed?

Could Chaos do that to a person? And could it have taken all her best, strongest memories on purpose?

"Something terrible happened," she translated Persephone's explanation with as much gentleness as she could. "Something too unbearable to go on carrying with you."

She reached out a hand to lay it on one of Persephone's. "Would it hurt too much to talk about? I'm sorry to ask about something so personal, but -- if it's okay with you, I'd like to know. Sometimes . . . sometimes your side's not the only one I don't know enough about."

Hvergelmir sighed. There was no moral to Persephone's story, no silver lining she could point to and say, here, here's the glimmer of hope you missed. Here's what I can offer you. She'd always believed in magic, and wonder, and that the universe was a fundamentally growing, blooming place, a well that never ran completely dry for anyone. But not every story was a love story. Not every bitter pill came with a spoonful of sugar. Tragedy, sometimes, stood alone.

Just as Chaos would have it, no doubt.

"This is a hard life," she said, "and we're thrown into it so fast. I feel terrified all the time, and I can't imagine having to do that alone. I can't imagine feeling so incredibly responsible for so much." She dreamed of it, as it was, when she slept long enough for dreams to come. She dreamed of people following where she led, and suffering, and dying. "The Negaverse has a structure, don't they -- a military order. They tell you what's right and what's not right; what you have to do. You don't have to bear the weight of those choices on your own anymore. Am I right?"