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Nick had to get away. He had to. There was a fourteen-year-old girl with a suppurating chest wound and he had done everything he could, but there was nothing more--nothing more--it was all down to luck, and health, and healing, and he had confidence in none of those things in a small girl versus a Captain with a ******** knife.

He shuddered, and retched, but nothing came up. Nothing ever came up. He was stuck, like this, here, and the Negaverse ruled everything now, and it was only a matter of time before they got him and got Tallulah and Finn's little daughter and he couldn't. Nick had to do something--anything. Just had to make something happen, to get out--

He heard something, and on reflex, he reached for his henshin pen and slid into the too-awful, too-familiar skin of Oenone. "Sure," he said, recognizing Chariklo. She was a… good assist. "Hello. Nothing to do back in the city, I suppose."

"Not really," he said, sitting back down on his stump. He didn't particularly care if she wanted to kill him, or if she wanted to do… anything, really, anything at all, he really didn't. Once he'd been scared of the DMC, too, but that time was long gone. He'd never actually met any of the cruel ones that he'd heard existed. "Nothing anyone tells me."

He looked at her and tried to think of some way to respond politely to being a hot mess. "When you're right, you're right," he said. He wanted to be dead, or gone, or… somewhere else. Far away. He took a deep breath through his teeth. Oenone. He wanted to go home to Oenone. "There's a fourteen year old girl dying and I've done everything I can do," he said. "I feel pretty useless right now."

"Her parents are coming," said Oenone. "The mother's a knight, you know. So. Probably going to have a few cases of exhaustion to deal with later, they intend to bury her at her Wonder."

In the meantime, there was an old grandmother of a civilian with her. The woman had looked familiar to Oenone from the half-hidden memories of Spinel, and he tried not to think about it now. "Any news from the city? Are the ones left behind caught yet?" Yet. It was an inevitability, it was coming, he knew it--the Negaverse was too strong to be defeated. Wasn't it proven by the sheer number of places they'd held even five years before?

He tried to take a breath but only managed a broken sob. "I can't do this," he said. "I really can't."

"No," he said, "it's really not." Five years and here they were. Five years and here they still were. What was the point of power if it accomplished nothing in the long run? The Negaverse had won. It had been winning before Spinel was awakened. There was nothing left to do except hide, and wait. "We're not going to win," he said. "We were never going to win. Maybe way back when, in the Silver Millennium, when there were enough senshi spread far enough apart that they couldn't get to us. And hundreds of knights for every planet. But there aren't. Not anymore. Chaos is so prevalent knights who should be awakening now aren't."

What could they do in the face of such overwhelming power except die? "Now they're not even letting people leave the city? They're not pretending anymore. It's obvious. No one cares except us! What are we meant to do to make this stop?"

Oenone sat through it, not terrified, not upset, not any more than he already was--so much these days hit that point of horrific anxiety that he was almost used to spending his every moment mired in terror. "There are tried and tested treatment methods I would recommend," he said. "And perhaps you have noticed that I am a trauma surgeon, not an oncologist." He had made a deliberate choice to avoid such thankless, bloodless fights. Oenone was not, never had been, made for leadership or drawn-out conflict.

He looked up at her, wearily unintimidated. "Is there a time-proven, peer-reviewed method to excise Chaos from those who don't want it excised? As long as there isn't, this is a losing fight. And you know it."