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Hvergelmir fell backwards, knocked further off-balance by the sudden movement of being thrown across the universe. A moment ago, she'd been standing near her bench in the park, trying to pry three bodies apart so she could get to a dying man, reaching for a knife --

Now she was somewhere quiet, the only sounds the sobs of the woman who'd brought her here. It smelled alive and verdant. It looked even moreso.

In the pale, tinted lights of flowers -- glowing at her as though in greeting -- it was difficult to make out colors properly. The foliage around her, around the circle of stones they'd landed in, grew upwards in tall, exponential tiers: the delicate, glowing flowers; the waist-high grass; the pale, budding whorls of tall trees, elegantly curved; and far above them all, the towering silhouettes of trees beyond human recognition, aspiring high up toward the stars.

A moon glowed down from the sky, but not any Earth moon. Hvergelmir had felt the shift -- the senshi in violet had brought them to her homeworld.

It was too late, now, even if they went back. Bischofite's lover -- she assumed, from their interactions -- would've finished the job, if it even needed any more finishing. There was only Iris's last remaining soldier, and *********, to stand against them, if they chose to -- and Bischofite had wanted to die, he made that much clear. He was still strong enough to fight. He'd fought them.

No -- he fought her. You hung back, safe and untouched and useless, having your little freakout. What did your magic even accomplish?

They'd failed. By now, worlds away, Bischofite was as good as dead.

And here, Hvergelmir was left on a strange planet with a senshi she didn't know. What now?

Her first priority, she reasoned, was the senshi's obvious injuries. She'd seen Bischofite drag tar across the senshi's face and down her arm, had seen her recoil in agony. It was still on her, and probably doing no good. Whatever grief-stricken fugue the senshi was in, she needed care.

And they shared a common cause. She'd tried to save Bischofite, after all. She was no enemy.

Hvergelmir came over and crouched by her, laying a hand on her shoulder. "Sweetheart," she soothed, not having a name to call her by, "you're hurt. Please let me help you. It's not good to stay like this."

Something had gone terribly wrong for this woman. Something, in what had happened tonight, had had far more significance for her than it had for Hvergelmir -- and Hvergelmir didn't exactly consider herself to be in a happy place, at the moment. What had this all meant to the senshi on the ground? What kind of pain was worse than the tar burning through her skin, that she could just ignore it?

"Shhhhh. Shh, it's alright. That's alright; it's all over now." Hvergelmir smoothed her hood back, started pushing her hair away from the tarred side of her face so it wouldn't get stuck. "Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it. Stay here with me, sweetheart, help me help you. This is your homeworld, right? Is there water somewhere? Or ice? If not, we'll have to dig down to mud."

It wasn't an ideal solution, but under the circumstances, Hvergelmir was aware of very few options. If there wasn't any visible water, this much vegetation could only be sustained by a high saturation of groundwater. That meant digging with her hands. Joy. Well, there was nothing for it but to see it through. No one else was stepping up to help the woman in front of her.

If there had ever been any fight in Sailor Ida, Hvergelmir couldn't see it now. She'd been reserved, or maybe preoccupied, during their brief encounter at the BlackWatch meeting -- and nervous, Hvergelmir supposed, in the park. She'd been like a rope that was fraying -- and now it had broken entirely, leaving only loose strands and a look on the pretty young woman's face that said she was in freefall.

"Hvergelmir of the Cosmos, or any nickname you like," she introduced herself. "I don't mind a bit of a walk, it's fine. I can't imagine any tour guide I'd want more than Sailor Ida herself, to show me her fine homeworld . . . or maybe to tell me what's wrong? Forgive me, you look . . . you look like you could stand to talk."

Hvergelmir frowned deeply, trying to school her face from making an even more pitying expression. Ida obviously hadn't just known Bischofite in his human guise, she'd known him well -- cared for him. He must have been different as a human being than as the half-monstrous creature Hvergelmir had always known. What had he been like, as a human, for Ida? Soft-spoken? Unassuming? Or irritable and sharp? Or half-mad, with a fire in his lost eyes, demanding constant questions of the world as he did now? What part of Alois had Ida loved and lost, and only been left with Bischofite as poor consolation, in the end? Was it the same part of him that Bischofite's other lover had seen, and still drawn the knife on him, in the end?

Hvergelmir didn't know how Ida must feel, carrying all of that on her shoulders. She'd never experienced any of that -- never loved, and never lost, the way that Ida had. She had friends and acquaintances, and they had lives and heartaches -- never anything closer to home than that. Her world was so much less personal.

The city opened up around them, its features only dimly visible in the soft, natural flowerlight. It turned out not to be beyond the trees, but around them and in them -- manmade structures woven into the texture of the asteroid's growth, rather than replacing it. The Temple of Hvergelmir was all rock and stone, beautiful and calmly featured and remote -- but this place had life worked into its very bones, enhanced by cultivation, rather than risk being despoiled in any way. It was a marvel.

"I'm sorry," she said honestly, following along in Ida's wake. "I've only met Bischofite a few times, and Alois not at all. I arranged his purification for him."

Here her frown deepened. "Though not very well, I'm afraid. I should've been more mindful of the man he brought with him. The truth is, it's my fault things went south. I should've arranged some security."

"No," Hvergelmir clarified, shaking her head. "There was more than enough security there to protect us from him. There wasn't enough security there to protect him from us."

"Another senshi - Thraen - seeks to kill me instead. 'Murder them all so we may live in peace.' He intends to build his utopia atop a pile of corpses. I wonder... Ida, who finds me repulsive and abhorrent in any form, and Thraen, who prefers me dead over purified... Are they heralds for common schools of sought that I will encounter as a knight?"

Hvergelmir had met Sailor Thraen, if you could call him that -- or at least seen him -- at the founding meeting of the BlackWatch. She'd liked him well enough, at the time, thought of him as deeply principled and largely astruggle for words to suit the various needs of such a broad audience. It had been a large and difficult undertaking, and it had demanded personal initiative to see it through. For Hvergelmir, who saw those things as barriers to entry that stopped her from doing anything brave or difficult at any time -- and who invariably preferred to hang back and let other people do brave things instead -- those were sources of esteem: she had a lot of admiration for someone who was truly motivated by their own inner moral engine without needing a mob effect to push them along. She'd wondered, at the time, over Bischofite's impression of him.

What Hvergelmir had pictured initially, of Sailor Thraen, was a man of cold judgment and implacable ignorance, willing to condemn others to the same. She'd hated him in sheer concept -- this figment of her imagination who had neither time nor care to purify or to educate one's enemy away. What she'd met had been so terribly different. She'd wondered what drove a person so aware of privation and want, of ignorance and struggle, to adopt such an extreme stance. Perhaps the going had been hard for him. Perhaps his approach was all he felt their resources could support: killing the enemy quickly and in great numbers, like some great, hideous triage. After all, why else would he have such cause to dwell on the things he'd proposed the BlackWatch to deal with? If that wasn't his experience of the war, why craft such a solution?

Now she had a third image to superimpose over the first two. A young man named Quenton, holding a half-youma General of the Negaverse in his arms. Waiting, vulnerable in his human skin, to see if there was any chance for his miserable lover to live as a man again. Raising the knife in failure to strike him down.

Ready to abandon his hard line stance in the face of hope. Ready to abandon his finer points of judgment in the face of hopelessness. Or maybe, instead, never really able to abandon either, no matter how it might appeal. What kind of a man was Sailor Thraen, in the end? What did he believe? Why had he swung the knife there, of all places?

There was so much Hvergelmir hadn't known. She'd been as ignorant of Thraen and Ida as Bischofite had.

Yet they'd still been on his mind.

"He spoke of you once, you know," she said, kneeling to help Ida begin to douse water on her face, her arm. The coolness would hopefully help to keep the tar from integrating further with her skin; the moisture might start to help it loose its hold altogether. Water wasn't the best cure for many things, but it would still help.

"You -- as Ida -- and Thraen. He mentioned you each to me by name. He thinks Thraen would've killed him in a heartbeat, and that you'd have found him repugnant even as a knight. What do you make of his assessment, though?"

Hvergelmir shifted away from sluicing water down Ida's arm for a few moments. Instead, she settled back on her haunches, and -- as she had once before -- tore a long furl of fabric off the bottom of her dress. She let it soak in the little well until it was fairly saturated, then set to trying to wrap the wet cloth around Ida's upper arm.

"We've all said things we didn't mean, one time or another. Emotion takes the wheel, sometimes, when things are hard," she conceded. "For me, that's pretty often, being honest -- I'm not what you'd call a stiff upper lip kind of person, and I panic, like, at the drop of a hat. Tonight, you could've run, though -- anywhere you liked. Why come here?"

It was an unusual impulse. Maybe, Hvergelmir thought, thinking about it would help Ida feel better. Or, at the very least, it might help convince her to come home and get proper medical treatment.

"It doesn't seem childish at all," Hvergelmir contended with sincerity, trying to keep water running consistently over the tar on Ida's arm. "If you're looking for peace, I can see why you'd find peace here. It's such a gentle, soothing place."

"Its so... big, that feels like nothing I could do could really affect it." And if you're looking for something you can love that you can't possibly hurt, she thought, little wonder you'd choose it. It won't reject you. It never deems you unworthy. It's safe from whatever you maybe think is wrong with you?

Hvergelmir found herself starting to do that instinctively -- like it was a habit. Like she was talking to a Negaverse officer and taking everything they said and trying to suss out where it was that Chaos had crept into their hearts.

Do you not love yourself, Sailor Ida? Are you afraid of failing? Is that what drives you to hide the world safely away from you, and pretend it's the other way around? And if so, how do I save you from that? What can I say?

"My Wonder is something like an oasis." Hvergelmir looked around, considering the beautiful architecture (geotecture?) once more. "Very much smaller than this. It's like a quiet backyard in the middle of nowhere, way out among the stars. I like it there, but.... the memories are strange. I can only remember things in little pieces, and it's like I'm remembering someone else's life, someone else's feelings. Like I'm starting to remember I'm someone that I don't understand. It scares me a little, I guess. The person I was -- she's such a mystery to me.

"Do you remember much of your life before? Were you happy here, then?"