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Laney had been on her feet for about the last eighteen hours, which she hadn't expected. Guard duty always ran long, like it was planned to -- but afterwards, they'd been short handed on an emergency at the field hospital, some kind of mission gone sour, and she'd had to scrub in to help out, even with her minimal qualifications for work like that. They might've mentioned what the mission was that'd gone foul, she realized -- but she was too tired to remember it at the moment.

Right now, all she wanted was to brush the knots out of her hair and curl up in bed until someone came to wake her for her next shift of... whatever it was she was supposed to be doing in the next few hours.

Laney ran tired fingers through her hair as she walked, trying to detangle it, her fingers getting caught on her surgical mask -- good lord, she was still wearing it. Distracted as she was, fingers caught in a snarl of hair, she didn't notice herself walking into another person along the little dirt footpath.

Post-collision, she blinked, looking up with her hands already waving in apology -- but it was --

Azzo?

How long had it been since she'd seen Azzo Crowley? Years? It had to have been years -- and she'd worried, in that time, thinking of him on occasion, wondering if he was alive or doing alright.

But he hadn't been here when they'd brought her in bleeding and unconscious, slack-jawed -- when Sailor Oenone had had to sew her face together. He didn't -- he didn't know.

Laney could feel the blood drain from her face, still half-hidden by the surgical mask, as he hugged her. She stood there stiffly. Normally, she would've had an enthusiastic hug for a friend she hadn't seen in so long -- but it had been a long time since she'd had to deal with this bit. To tell someone who didn't know, as he obviously didn't, what had happened.

The dog that was licking her hand distracted her momentarily -- she looked downward, reflexively petting it on its head to try and soothe its excitement.

Her eyes stung a little. She was tired, she supposed.

With resignation, she reached into her back pocket to pull out the little paper notepad she kept on her person in her non-powered form.

Laney flipped open to the first page and held it up for Azzo to see, looking away in embarrassment.

I am mute, but I can hear, the little piece of paper read in worn black marker.

I can write things down to speak to you.

Laney blinked several times, trying unsuccessfully to wish away tears that were threatening to spill over her face. The cat's question made all the blood return to her face in an embarrassed red flush.

She turned to a fresh page, pulling the little golf pencil out of her pocket to write, A General-King named Labyrinthite has it.

She held up this new message for them to read. While they did, Laney used her free hand to tug the surgical mask down from her face to show the horridly wrought, parodied grin of a Glasgow smile that was scarred there.

The idea of anyone she cared about squaring off against Labyrinthite made Laney's skin crawl. She shook her head emphatically, trying to picture a knight with a blunt weapon squaring off against a scythe-baring General-King.

She didn't want to think about Labyrinthite ever. Let him be relegated to nightmares, where he belonged, and stay out of her life otherwise. Let him die without her ever even hearing about it. That'd be better.

He's dangerous, she wrote. I don't need avenging.

Let him use his energies elsewhere. She knelt to pet the guardian cat who'd put all his feet in his mouth, offering forgiveness via a gentle hand. What had Azzo been up to, actually? Where had he been directing his energies?

How long have you been in camp? she scribbled down. Then, underlined and with a trail of needless punctuation, Where have you been all this time??????????

Laney frowned, watching Azzo closely as he answered her questions. He was covering a span of years in very vague terms, and she wondered what there was not to be said. Had Princess Polaris been corrupted, rather than killed like he was implying? Would Azzo hold something like that back?

She didn't know. But Azzo was a good person, a friend, and she'd known him since the beginning of things. Since the empty hole in her head where Barren Pines had been carved away. She'd go on trusting him as long as she needed to.

I'm sorry about Aurora, she wrote down. People here will be glad to have you, though. Never enough hands on deck. How long can you stay? Permanently?

Laney shared the Mauvian's concern as Azzo fiddled with the henshin pen -- if nothing else, a knight carelessly fiddling with a senshi's henshin pen was a memento mori -- a reminder that someone had died and didn't need their pen anymore; a reminder that any one of them could die, too. She was grateful when Snowball said something -- it meant she didn't have to.

Good you're staying, she wrote tersely. Always work to do here.

She held that up while he asked his next question, then appended her note with:

Sometimes on Guard. Sometimes helping @ field hospital. Came from there, on way to bed.

Then, with slightly less clipped sentences to make sure it came out clearly enough, Do you know where the group barracks tent is? Extra beds there for new arrivals. I can take you there.

Laney was exhausted after such a long day, but Snowball's words were alarming: alarming enough that she bit back her powerful sense of revulsion about having someone unfamiliar so close to her face without permission, letting it show only as a hideous, twitchy grimace.

She waited until Snowball had settled down, then pulled the medical mask up over her mouth to make herself unconsciously feel a little safer. She shook her head in disapproval at the news about what Finn had said about the Shadows.

It's a difficult job, she wrote down. Not something people would pressure someone into doing if they weren't OK with it. That's a recipe for problems.

Laney looked at Azzo, though, for a long moment, trying to read his face. 'Something's made him go a little squirrelly.' When she took up writing again, it was clear she was asking about whatever she saw there and didn't understand.

Do you want to talk about it?