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Wind rustled through the trees. A few late leaves, golden-orange shimmering to brown, lost their tenuous hold on their branches and fluttered through the air around her. It was strange, coming here after such a long time. Strange, when logic dictated she'd never been here before.

For a while, she'd wandered through the woods, amazed by the newness of false memories it stirred; none of it had happened, not yet, but she remembered it as though someone had taken the path of the future ahead of her and folded it over onto itself, so that it was overlaid onto the past, all one in her mind. It all felt very real, like she'd experienced it: but here Laney was, tongue in her head, heart still beating in her chest, and with a familiar warmth in her left arm that said the seal of her wonder still bound her to her oath. None of it had happened, yet. The trees still stood. The sky still shone blue through the canopy. The tents had not been raised.

Are there not still fireflies, the poem came to her, swimming out of memory. Are there not still four-leaf clovers? Is not our land still beautiful, our fields not full of armed enemies, our cities never bombed to oblivion, never occupied by iron armies speaking iron tongues? She drew her hand across the trunk of a tree. In her mind's eye, it was only a stump, cut flat to the ground -- lumber cleared to make room for where the mess tent had once stood. Laney put her hand to the bark, feeling out the realness of it, the complex texture. It existed right now. It -- this -- was real. She turned and sat in the crook of its shadow, staring up into bare branches and a parched late-autumn sky.

" 'Are not our warriors still valiant, ready to defend us?' " she recited to herself, voice low and personal. Laney wondered why she'd come here -- but she'd had to come, all the same. Had to see it for herself. And she didn't wonder at all why she'd waited so long.

There were a few acorns on the ground nearby. Laney scooped them up and rolled them absently between her fingers. " 'Are not our senators still wearing fine togas? Are we not still a great people? Is this not still a free country? Are not our fields still ours, our gardens still full of flowers, our ships -- ' "

She was interrupted in her little idyll by a sudden, loud series of sounds coming through the trees in the distance. There was a heavy thudding, like a large animal running -- then an explosion of power and a voice, a voice Laney knew --

Her heart skipped a few beats, then the adrenaline kicked in --

And it was Hvergelmir Squire standing there, acorns clutched in hand, tripping over a loose tree root before catching herself and moving into a dead run toward the sound. Her dress fluttered in her wake, and she wondered what was going on, why Ida was here, why she was yelling. There were no other power signatures in the area -- what could have happened?

"Ida!" Hvergelmir called out, running toward the noise at full speed, an odd tension and nervousness in her heart. "Ida, what's wrong?"

When she arrived, she had even less idea. No one seemed to be there except for the eternal senshi herself. If there had been a Negaverse agent, they must've teleported before Laney had assumed her powered form. If it had been a youma, it must've been dead. Whatever had scared Ida into discharging her magic, Hvergelmir could find no sign of it.

"Are you alright?" she asked, nearly out of breath.

The confused way Ida was looking at her caused Hvergelmir a great deal of worry. It was as though she was focusing in from some place very far away, and then initially not quite recognizing what she saw . . . Neither of those things were very good signs. Worse still were the words that followed them, piling fear upon dread.

Concern -- and something else, some feeling in the pit of her stomach that stemmed from some other lost bit of memory (Past? Future? She didn't know.) -- welled up and was enough to propel her forward, very close into Ida's personal space as though she had a long-standing right to be there. She caught the other woman's warm-featured face between her hands and said, soothing and serious, "Shhhh, no, it's alright. You're not going insane. I won't let that happen."

She didn't know or understand what was going on with the other woman, but though it frightened her, she stayed where she was, as solid and steady as she could manage to be. If Ida was here, it had to be for the same reason Hvergelmir had come here. To see it for herself.

"Don't be afraid. That future is very far away. We don't belong to it."

It was the sort of thing Carmine was fond of saying. Those were his ways of reassuring her when she was avoiding doing something because she was too anxious about the outcome. He was good at reminding her that while anxiety was binding her, it wasn't helping her, and she had to let it go. And sometimes she even managed to.

"Shhh," Hvergelmir said again, brushing Ida's hair back with the tips of her fingers. "Just breathe for a little while. Stay here with me. No one's going anywhere."

She held the other woman patiently in her arms like that, trying to draw her closer forward into a hug, if she could settle down enough to relax into it. It must've been difficult, to be Ida, to be in the situation she'd described. Hvergelmir's memories came back to her in a progession of steps, and she'd pieced a good deal of them together by now, but she couldn't imagine how frightful it must've been to bear it all in one unnerving experience, or to have it revisited upon her in the form of a hallucination.

"It sounds like your memories are fighting you," she said in a calm, lullaby voice. "You're trying to forget them, but they don't want to be forgotten. Your heart knows they contain something important that you just haven't figured out yet -- and the harder you try to bury them, the more they'll fight for your attention. Just relax for a while. Relax and stay in this moment with me, right here. You're okay, alright? I've got you."

How much of her own advice had Hvergelmir actually listened to? Maybe not all of it -- but she wondered if that was what had brought her to this place, too -- the feeling that she hadn't been truly facing her memories. The feeling of deliberately avoiding making decisions based on them, real honest decisions, when that had to be what they'd all been given these memories in order to do.

Holding onto Ida seemed like an unearned gift -- something she felt, guilty, she hadn't actually put in the work to deserve, in this lifetime, but one of life's graces, for that. She didn't want to let go. Hvergelmir liked holding people, being held by them -- and Ida was nice to hold. She was soft and warm and she smelled good, and she leaned in rather than pulling away: all positive traits in a hug with a pretty girl. What was more, Hvergelmir could feel a familiar longing, here with Ida -- one that felt old and well-rooted even though it had never really had time to be. Their future may not have been real, may never have happened, but -- for Ida, it had. For Hvergelmir, enough of it seemed to have that she could feel it in her chest nonetheless. And if that was so, then what did it matter? Who was to say they shouldn't be here together?

Ida was settling down, which was a good thing. Then, briefly, something seemed to spook her, and they had to start over -- that was alright, though. Laney had had plenty of panic attacks in life; from an outside perspective, it was much easier to remember that there was no rush and it was no real bother. Thus, she waited -- calmly rubbing circles over Ida's lower back till she started to untense again.

"You'll laugh when I tell you," she said, smiling into Ida's shoulder.

Hvergelmir relaxed, letting out a delighted sputter of a laugh. In general, she was an easily amused person, and most jokes tended to find favor with her -- this one being no exception -- but in this case, what really prompted her particular delight at the moment was the fact that Ida was able to joke at all. It was so hard with her -- Ida had always seemed, to the Hvergelmir of the future, to be at once both stable, in control of things, and also troublingly depressed, fighting to hold it together. It was hard, when you were used to a person in that kind of state, to suss out whether they were leaning more toward the former or the latter at any given moment.

A few minutes ago, Ida had been at the end of her tether, caught in a hallucination, terrified -- now she seemed more at ease. It was a sobering reminder that this was the Ida she cared about: trapped within some dark reality in her own head, looking through a distorted lens and never able to lend any credit to the things other people tried to say to her. Capable of caring about others, but always hating herself. Hvergelmir had never had any success at getting her to change.

"Not quite," she said to the senshi with a smile. "I just thought -- I lived here, we all lived here, for years. And you could be surprised how loud it always was, so many people sharing the same space, but we were still always careful not to be too needlessly loud. And with my injury, I never..." She shrugged, letting that sentence trail off. "This place is sort of sacred in my memories. It's terrifying, I guess, like it's this sacrosanct place, where I died. It feels like I'm trespassing here even if there's nothing here yet, you know? So I just came out here thinking I'd scream my head off and break the illusion, that's all. My, um..."

She omitted the word therapist, never sure how that would go over with people. "Someone told me we all make up laws in our minds about how things are, and sometimes we're making roadblocks for ourselves that aren't really there. So when you realize you've made up a mythology about something, you have to debunk it for yourself."

She thought, briefly, of Kerberos, convinced he was some kind of lost cause. Ida was like that, Hvergelmir noted. She'd constructed a mythos about herself and interpreted the events of reality to suit it.

Hvergelmir shrugged again, not letting go. "I don't know. I just thought it might help me work through it."

Hvergelmir stepped back, sliding her arms down until she was holding onto Ida by both hands. "It was home for me because my friends were here," she affirmed. "But that was never the trees and the grass. This isn't a planet or a wonder -- it's just a place. The only magic here is what we put into it, and none of that's gone. You're all still here, now, and that's what matters. What made this place special was always you."

Ida, she realized, didn't understand. Hvergelmir didn't want to commemorate their lost lives with a song or a dance or a silly poem. She didn't want to chase away her unhappy ghosts with happy ones -- she wasn't here to brighten something dark by bringing some light to it.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to rage and rail and tear at the bark of trees. She wanted to vent her frustration -- her sorrow -- her anger for everything that the world insisted was going to happen if they stayed on this course. She didn't want to be happy . . . she wanted to be angry at something.

But that would have to wait, she supposed. Ida was here, and she clearly would've found something like that disturbing. It wasn't the sort of thing people looked for from Hvergelmir -- she could tell. And she didn't want to scare someone she cared about.

So, instead, she set it all aside. Another time, another day. What she wanted could wait. Hvergelmir lifted Ida's knuckles to her lips, then said, " 'Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop, without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake.' " She lowered her voice to a whisper, leaning in a little. "' The only other sound’s the sweep'," Hvergelmir paused to flutter her fingers through Ida's hair, then brush them featherlight over her shoulder, " 'of easy wind and downy flake.' "

She let go again, stepping away. A last leaf was clinging, deep brown, to a nearby branch. Hvergelmir plucked it down and twirled it between her fingers. " 'These woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep."

Robert Frost was easy, simple -- but it was one of those poems most people were familiar with, and one of the first ones she'd ever memorized. She assumed it would translate well for company.

What had been a quiet moment suddenly shrank down into something cold and suffocating, like icicles were pressing down around her. That was the wintry sting of rejection, an unusual form of it, and Hvergelmir could feel herself shrinking down into her own skin -- all her poise of a moment before a thin illusion that had shattered.

She dropped the little brown leaf, and it fell to the forest floor with a slight flutter, landing with a papery crackle, ever-so-faint.

"Away?" she said, her voice betraying her bewilderment and a slight echo of hurt. "Just 'away'? Where? Why?"

Ida had already explained why, in fact, but that information wasn't settling in Hvergelmir's mind yet. All she could think was that she'd done something wrong, said something wrong -- the wrong words, the wrong poem, the wrong gestures . . . whatever it was, she'd screwed something up. And now Ida was leaving.