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As it turned out, coming home one night with mysterious broken bones in your hand (a lot of them) was not the most difficult thing to explain. It was just really hard. The most difficult thing to explain, in Laney's opinion, had been sitting in the ER trying to explain why her supposedly freshly sustained (and obviously clearly debilitating) injury appeared to be about two or three weeks healed and with bones perfectly set. 'Magical healing' was obviously not going to fly as an answer. In the end, she'd said, simply, "I'm sorry, I don't know," in the most piteous voice possible, and let the doctors interpret her x-rays however they wanted to. She'd had her parents to vouch for her, at least -- they had certainly not noticed her nursing any puddinghand injury before that day, and it would've been hard to hide. They'd bandaged her up as well as they could, fingers carefully wrapped and metal-splinted together, and sent her on her merry way.

The one downside was that they refused to prescribe her painkillers. They seemed to think she'd already been in treatment and (with the help of her family) was trying to scam more drugs out of a second prescription -- so they essentially wrote her a scrip for Tylenol Double Extra Strength and sent her on her way. The pain was manageable, but unpleasant. Her hand throbbed dully.

Even on her park vigils, she was careful not to cause her hand too much additional stress -- she soon discovered that transforming into her knight form left her without her splints, so she wound her hand securely with an ace bandage and kept it resting in her lap.

Hvergelmir was just in the process of trying to hold a book with three fingers and turn a page with the other two when she felt the wavering approach of a corrupted senshi in her vicinity. She set the book down, prepared to abandon it if she needed to run away, then watched carefully in the darkness until the approaching figure came into view.

Kerberos again.

And he was not looking great.

She got to her feet, broken hand cradled against her stomach. Hvergelmir walked out to meet him, worried he might stumble and fall over before he ever made it to the bench. "Are you alright?" she asked worriedly. "Are you... have you been drinking?"

"Oh yeah, it's super broken, a youma crushed it," she said, distracted. Hvergelmir tried, using her good hand, to usher the petite senshi over to the bench to get him off his feet. Up close, he stank like he'd been trying to pickle himself using hard liquor.

"You shouldn't be out transformed like this," she cautioned softly, more concern than criticism coming through in her tone. "Kerberos. What are you trying to do?"

Hvergelmir shushed off his apology with a shake of her head as she took a seat beside Kerberos. "It's healing," she said brightly, teasing, "though I think my career as a hand model is officially over."

His answer was, if nothing else, honest. It wasn't complete, though, it didn't answer the question . . . and Hvergelmir hated thinking about what that answer was.

Do you do it on purpose, Kerberos? Are you powering up and getting drunk because you hope someone will come along and kill you? Is that why you don't power down?

She knew Astrophyllite, and might have said so; but it had always been her policy to keep the names of her visitors confidential -- for their sakes as well as hers. It was a funny thing, treason: people who found it perfectly justifiable and safe when they did it often didn't extend the same trust to their fellows. Even two people who seemed to get on with her and with each other might not like finding out that they were both coming to speak with Hvergelmir, and maybe sharing state secrets. Hvergelmir worried for the young girl, of course -- but no amount of telling Kerberos that Hvergelmir knew about her was going to do Astrophyllite any good.

"You were scared of you too, weren't you?" she observed, trying to tuck some of Kerberos's long hair behind his ear. "Have you eaten anything today?"

Even as worried for him as she was, it was hard for Hvergelmir not to be at least a little amused by the way Kerberos sounded when he was drunk. He really was just a human, just a young man, petite and vulnerable and fallible. Had this been the man who'd drawn the life out of her skin until she'd collapsed in his arms? Was this really the broken shell from which that hateful creature had emerged?

If so, he was none of those things now. Not yet.

And he'd come back. He'd come back when almost no one ever came back, when even Titan didn't seem to want to see her anymore. Surely the fact that Kerberos was here was the most hopeful sign of all.

"If what you are confuses you," she said. "If it makes you feel uncomfortable, then it isn't really what you want to be. You can decide what kind of person you want to become -- or even what kind of person you want people to see you as. And if you decide you ever want to . . . leave," she said with careful open-endedness, "all you have to do is ask."

She stroked his forehead, knuckles brushing over his skin like she was checking him for a fever. "Do you have a good relationship with your parents?" she asked, voice still low and soothing. "Or someone you love in your everyday life?"

"Shhh," Hvergelmir answered him, lulling and slow. "Shhh, it's alright. You don't have to decide anything right now. No one's going to force you into anything you can't do, it's fine." She slipped a hand around his shoulders and under his long fall of hair, rubbing circles over his back in a low tempo like her father used to when Laney was a little girl and she got sick.

"Why don't you answer something for me," she suggested as an alternative, deciding to try a more gently sloped conversational road. "Do you know what asphodel represents in the language of the flowers?"

She did know. She'd looked it up. She'd researched anything she could about anyone who came to her bench, though she generally tried not to make it too obvious. It was always useful to be prepared, she thought -- in case any of them came back.

" 'My regrets follow you to the grave,' " she intoned softly. "So they say. For my own part, I believe -- I've always believed -- there's some meaning in the realms of influence the senshi have. Some essential thing, some reason, that governs why no two are the same. Each thing, big or small, is a crucial piece of the human experience. I think each of them means something." She let Kerberos lay his head on her shoulder like a sleepy child, leaning to rest her cheek against the crown of his skull.

"Regret, most of all, is the thing that drives people to change and grow. To improve. It's not regret that holds people back -- it's fear that does that. Regret's an affirmation of the things that we value. It's constant and faithful, and above all, deeply honest -- because it tells us truths we didn't want to hear. It digs its claws into our hearts and won't let go until we find a way to become better than whatever we were before."

Hvergelmir blinked in slight surprise. She wondered if, somehow, she'd revealed more about herself than she'd meant to. Certainly Kerberos seemed to think so.

It wasn't that Hvergelmir went out of her way to lie to people, not directly. It was just that, in general, she put a lot of effort into keeping her personal problems out of the interactions she had with the Chaos agents she met. It was hard, she thought, to convince people that they'd be okay if they left the Negaverse if, as a knight, her life was an obvious train wreck inspiring to no one. She had to at least look like she had it all together, she was sure -- or else no one would listen. (Mr. Clean was great at selling sponges and cleansers, but she doubted anyone would buy a bottle of Rogaine from him.)

Maybe he was just remembering her from the future, she told herself. Maybe he remembered a voiceless girl with the scars of a long smile that Labyrinthite had drawn on her. Maybe he'd rightly guessed that she had regrets of her own about where that future had led, and her part in beating the path.

Maybe.

It was a real flower, she noticed, reaching up to brush her fingers lightly over the velvet petals. Maybe, if it didn't disappear with his departure, Hvergelmir could take it up to her island and keep it in water from the well. She supposed the magic there might keep a cut blossom for quite some time, if she was lucky.

In case you ever forget, he'd told her.

"I'll try to remember," she promised.

Kerberos sounded sleepy, like he might nod off soon on her shoulder. She didn't mind. Hvergelmir was happier to think of him with someone to watch over him while he slept, rather than let him stumble off to run afoul of some more militant senshi somewhere. She shifted to wrap her voluminous cloak around them both, to help ward off the chill and enclose their body heat into a single, warm pod they could share.

"Breakups can be staged, you know," she whispered quietly. "Things like that . . . there are always options, when there's enough time. But maybe . . . maybe you should visit your sister first. Is there a gravestone for her?"