Welcome to Gaia! ::

The last room he'd visited had a girl chained to a knife thrower's turntable. Quartz had been happy there were no knives. This chamber, though, was better and worse in a surreal way. There was something sweet and quiet and otherworldly about the huge birdcage, its only singer's-swing suspended. But the girl chained within it -- arms looped to one of the bars for extra security -- looked all the worse for her captivity. She looked like a dozen tortures had been visited on her person in the last four days.

He approached, slipping an Aquafina bottle out of the plastic bag looped over one forearm, and held it up visibly, a mild expression on his face. "I'm not here to ask questions," he explained perfunctorily. "Just to keep you hydrated. If I hold the bottle for you, can you drink it?"

Quartz finished his walk over to the cage, outwardly unperturbed by Ganymede's demands. "It's not really my business what the point is," he explained, holding up the water bottle where she could see it with her good eye. He uncapped it carefully, then reached through the bars to hold it to her mouth. "But if it's all the same, you may want to consider the answer to your own question."

He looked down at his own feet for a moment, mentally drifting a little distance. "There's always information you can give," he said. "And she has a thousand ways to get at it. You should prepare for that -- that what you don't know about yourself, she'll learn by trial and error. What you do know, though -- she'll have that too. You know your own real name, the real names of your friends -- where they patrol, what their powers are. She'll tease them out of you like you might squeeze a splinter. In the end, sometimes . . . sometimes you feel relieved when they're finally out."

He offered her a break from the water, let her catch her breath. "If she can't corrupt you, I imagine she'll kill you, sure. But you assume you'll die like throwing out an empty banana peel -- used up and discarded. Your death can serve a purpose, too. I imagine that's why the water."

Quartz's face betrayed momentary surprise at Laurelite's name: not the surprise of a secret having been found out, but at the oddity of an answer that was clearly not the expected one. Laurelite he had seen only once. Laurelite had reached into his chest and torn and torn at his soul until there were only a few bare tatters left, then filled the hollow with an empty blackness that burned like the hungry gnaw of maggots on an open wound. Laurelite was a thing that had happened -- but she was not what he feared.

"Not Laurelite," he said, swiping gently with the edge of his sleeve at the tracks of water on her chin, habitually, as a father might do with a baby that had just spit up its mashed bananas.

"Life is not a narrative," Quartz cautioned. "Fairness isn't some cosmic arbiter of your fate. It doesn't matter whether you beg or whether you deserve what happens to you. What matters is whether you give her what she wants, and how long it'll take you to stop hallucinating a light at the end of the tunnel. If faith is your only defense, someday you'll wish you prepared better. You can only hold onto human faith for as long as you still recognize yourself as a human being. That's what she'll take away."

"Sorry," he said in response to Ganymede's flinch backward, his voice still largely flat affect. He waited till she'd calmed again. At least she'd drunk the water -- that meant he'd done his job.

He waited her out while she asked her questions, while she leveled her accusations and shouted at some would-be schemer behind the door. Quartz couldn't blame her; it had been a familiar emotional release once, anger. It was a good stopgap that had held him in good stead for a few short, deluded days. It was the belief that help would somehow come, that the universe would not fail a human being so thoroughly. It was the belief that he could outlast his captor, and her patience would break first. Would break ever. It was not Ganymede's fault she still fought and struggled like a human being. It was just Schörl's fault that Quartz didn't.

"Oh," he clarified. "No -- I wasn't sent here for your benefit. The water's for your benefit. The lesson here's for me, from my General. She likes to make sure I learn."

Quartz paused, recognizing at last what Ganymede was asking. "Her name is Schörl. Would you like me to pour water over any of your injuries? I have some extra."

Her shoulders and neck didn't look to be in good shape -- something had been branded there, a symbol, like on her forehead -- and it had an angry, red color. Remembering how she'd reacted to his last touch, and not wanting to knock an entire fresh water bottle on the floor, he opted to warn her this time. "I'm moving your hair out of the way. Then you'll feel the bottle against your neck, then the water." She didn't need the pressure impact of pouring it from a height in the air -- better for it to roll down over her skin.

"I didn't know much when I first met General Schörl," he said quietly, watching liquid sluice down over her back. "I'd fought three or four youma before then, but I didn't really know what was going on or what I was -- and there was no one to tell me. I ran into her killing people in a club where I guess I was a dancer, and I tried to intercede. She made really short work of me, then brought me to General-Queen Laurelite to have me remade into this. I don't remember anything but that -- all the rest of it, all my life, it's gone. It took me weeks to earn clothes, more for silverware. The only thing I had left -- the only thing I hadn't given her, that I'd held on to, the only thing that was mine that she couldn't have -- was my name, the one I'd had as a knight. The one piece of who I was as a person that didn't belong to her.

"So she made me give that to her.

"And I eventually did."

'You let yourself be abused.'

Quartz stared at the pretty young woman for a long while. Her face was mottled and bruised, her bare neck the same -- she sported burns and lacerations that told a story of her captivity all too well. She probably believed this gave her perspective. She probably believed the things she said.

'You let yourself be abused.'

"You see," he said tiredly, with a shake of his head. "It's like I said, you believe there's this narrative. You believe all lost things can be found again -- which is a little easier for you to say, I imagine, when you have something that can't be lost." You will never lose what I lost. Your soul is protected. You'll never have to walk in my shoes.

"That gala was the first time I've been allowed outside in four months. I've never met another senshi or knight before today. Should I have just wished harder?"

'You let yourself be abused.'

He capped the bottle and moved to leave.

"Then fight back," he suggested. "I hope you land a single blow. Prove you belong to yourself. That's what makes you human, after all -- and not a pawn to the Negaverse, like me. I know exactly what I am, Sailor Ganymede."

Quartz picked up his bag of Aquafina bottles, then looked back at Ganymede, offering her a very wan smile. "I'm an empty husk of flesh walking around pretending to be human."

With that, he left. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving Ganymede alone once more.