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The one good thing about the hours Lazarus spent confined to Stroud's apartment was that, generally, at least when he was here, people left him alone. It was a perfect arrangement for things like taking a bath, doing his basic strength exercises, sleeping off a hangover -- even for doing his daily chores. Routine, Stroud insisted, was an improving force: it allowed other parts of the brain to learn their activities to stop wasting so much of the frontal lobe's resources. Lazarus could believe it, too, not being stupid. But it didn't make dusting and vacuuming any less of a dull activity.

He'd been making the rounds with Stroud's special artisanally-made formulation of what he was basically sure was just ******** off-brand Pine-Sol in a pretentious mason jar; then, the big, wide silence of the apartment had been broken by the sudden sound of thudding footfalls and furniture crashing all around the living room.

Company, he thought, setting down the mason jar and the dust rag. It was hard not to tense with apprehension, but he forced himself to anyway: Stroud had opened her home to any of her friends who might want to come and go, and as a guest under her roof ("guest," yes, his mind mocked with unseen air-quotes, making him grit his teeth), Lazarus had to be at least moderately well-behaved. He made his way into a space that had, until a few moments ago, been a very painstakingly well laid out and well appointed living-room-c**-salon just in time to see Captain Cinnabar flopping somewhat dementedly over one piece of furniture after another, growing her mess as she went like the Cat in the goddamned Hat.

He clucked his tongue disapprovingly, taking a moment to double-check the knot that secured the floral silk kimono that made up his at-home wardrobe. "Son of a b***h," he sighed with an impenetrable shrug of his shoulders: his idea of a greeting for someone in the obvious throes of injury. "I just got done vacuuming in here."

Lazarus pushed off the side of the doorframe, leaning in to assess the immediacy of the damage versus his options for addressing it. "I'll get a tarp from Stroud's work room to throw over the couch," he decided. "Stay there and don't Jackson Pollock anything else while I'm gone -- that apothecary table's freshly waxed."

At least there wasn't blood spurting everywhere. He'd have been on his hands and knees scrubbing it out of the grout all day.

Lazarus, it could be argued, had a lot of problems with Cinnabar. Her partial nudity, however, was not one of them: it aroused in him only a feeling of blank, academic curiosity about the span of her odd, red scales stretched over powerful muscle. He'd long supposed that his former career as a dancer had been responsible for the lack of response here -- that working in that field had, ironically, had the effect of demystifying human nudity and blotting out any particular shame or discomfort about it -- but he wondered sometimes if it wasn't more than just that. Pieces inside him were missing now. He wondered if he could even still feel the full range of human emotion. Maybe Laurelite had plucked something else out when she'd reached in his chest and taken out all his memories.

Right now, at least, the lack of response was a convenience. He unfurled the plastic tarp over a couch, then began indicating his intention to pick Captain Cinnabar up and put her on it, starting by shifting over into Lieutenant Quartz's uniform. (He didn't have many apartment clothes, and didn't relish trying to wash battle funk out of floral silk.)

"Stroud's out giving money to some a*****e to fund his project to market perfume made from his compost heap or something, how the ******** should I know," he invented blithely, very evidently not caring enough to actually answer the question. "I'm going to pick you up and move you to the couch, then I'll make you a miracle pill."

He moved, slowly, to do this: she had less the look of a woman and more the look of an injured animal, ready to bite. Quartz wasn't interested in having to get a tetanus shot.

"So, what happened?" he put the question to her, curious. "Ran into a bigger, badder wolf on your way to Grandma's?"

She was a resilient creature, Cinnabar was. And stubborn. She insisted on levering herself up and aiding in moving herself to the tarp-covered couch; this, Quartz knew, had nothing to do with any sort of belief on her part that he somehow wasn't strong enough to carry her and everything to do with her desire to, quite literally, stand on her own two feet.

Quartz, who had been wrenched out of his own life and into whatever place on the floor or the foot of the bed or wherever Stroud decided he was allowed to sleep at any given point in time, had no such attachments to a sense of personal pride or dignity anymore. Such things were not conducive to the makings of a good soldier, and had been carefully excised.

He was to take pride in his work. In obedience. In cleverness and usefulness to the Negaverse. He would be a good soldier. He understood what things were rewarded, and what things were punished.

People like Cinnabar had apparently gotten more leeway. This, he decided, was how people like Cinnabar ended up like this. It was what Quartz told himself: at least with Schörl, he would survive. If he did whatever she wanted, he was certain to live.

He didn't need the things she told him he didn't need. He was better off without them. He would live. She was a harsh and unforgiving master, his General, but if he could bear her exacting standards, he could bear any. He would not end up like Cinnabar and her ilk.

Quartz studied her for a spare moment, helping the half-youma get her feet up onto the couch. She wanted his communicator crystal. An obvious request, if she really had lost hers. And although it wasn't the most immediate need, he normally would've complied without qualm . . . except.

I would have teleported her to the Citadel and delivered her to the General-Queen with a ******** bow attached...

A memory of himself, trussed up quite literally in two bows made of his own silk scarves, laying in a faceful of rooftop gravel. Schörl's boot pressed steadily into his back as she presented him by way of a gift to General-Queen Laurellite. He remembered fear. Pain. The horrible wound of all his memories carved away, an injury that never faded because none of his memories ever returned.

Cinnabar wasn't getting his ******** communicator crystal. She didn't goddamned need it anyway, and there was no guarantee she'd ever give it back. Let her learn some manners.

"Shouting out to all your peeps can wait," he refused her flatly. "I'm not bothering the General with anything I can do just as well myself. Do you think she hasn't taught me anything?"

Instead of the little purple-black crystal, he reached into a pocket and withdrew his emergency starseed. It was a pale, luminous brown, like the gentle eyes of a basset hound, and in a way, he was relieved to give it away. The prospect of eating it had always made him a little nauseous.

"Miracle pill," he reiterated, holding it toward her mouth to indicate she should open up for the proverbial choo-choo. "Chocolate coating makes it go down easier."

Did Quartz take joy in kicking people when they were down?

Not particularly. Not most people. Mostly, Lazarus spent the best part of his day feeling terrible, and his favorite people to be around were people who also felt terrible. Bars were great for this, especially early in the day: mostly the other people parked on bar stools were drinking away sorrows of their own, which was companionable in a lonely way. He didn't expect anything from them. They didn't expect anything from him. In that way, they all loved and cared about each other.

So in general, it wasn't like he saw a person crying and had the instinct to squirt lemon juice in their eyes. It was just that Cinnabar was not in general.

Cinnabar had shown him no quarter when he'd needed it. Finding him sobbing and puking his guts out in a bathroom, had she given him space? Shown a little mercy?

Or had she kicked the door in so hard that it had left him bruised for a week?

Quartz sat on the arm of the couch, golden boots stretched out to cross at the ankle. "Do you know why she likes you?" he asked idly.

Lazarus snorted. "She doesn't like me," he said. "Are you really that dense?" He folded his arms, tapping the fingers of one hand against the cuff around his bicep. "Who I am isn't glutes and wine expertise any more than who you are is tits and combat experience, and you're more ******** than I realized if you honestly think Stroud has ever liked anyone for being stupid."

With no particular anxiety in his voice, he went on, "Stroud despises everything about me. That's why I'm her project, that's why she takes so much time: there's almost nothing she wants to keep. She's carving out as much of me as she can -- and making a new person out of the viscera. She's an uncompromising person, and I have a lot of setbacks . . . but she'll be rid of me soon enough -- and I'm sure she'll like whatever shithead she makes in my place."

Feeling vaguely agitated, he slid off the cuff he'd been tapping at and started tossing it back and forth between his hands.

"She's getting rid of you too. The difference between you and me -- the thing she likes about you -- is that you want her to do it. You're begging her for it. You're arrogant and reckless because you don't want to bother changing yourself -- you've given up on it, doubling down to rush the inevitable crash and burn. You don't think there's anything left you can do. You want her to pull something new and better from the wreckage.

"No one else is proud of being stupid. No one else is proud of being reckless. Only someone who's tired of being behind the wheel of their own failure floors the gas pedal and drives the car into the wall. That's what she likes about you -- it's the only thing. You're self-destructing -- merrily killing yourself off to make her job easier. And you'll keep on doing it until you succeed, because she's your only hope now. Look at you -- who else is going to take you like this?"

In truth, Quartz knew precious little about Captain Cinnabar, or the woman Ariel she'd been before. What he knew was a sketchy picture, at best, drawn in broad strokes -- but he flattered himself that he was coming to know about Stroud, about the scalpels she dissected people with . . . if she invested this much attention as she had into cultivating Cinnabar's affection, she had a plan to improve her.

Cinnabar's high, cheery state only served to make Quartz more irritable. She was rolling around on a tarp in his nice clean room, burbling merrily in spite of his best attempts to make her feel worse. "You do realize every time you say something supposedly reassuring, it's basically the least reassuring thing you could possibly say," he said sulkily.

He sat very still and managed not to react when Cinnabar reached out to stroke her knuckles over his thigh. He was used to it by now, being touched without permission, and managed to avoid any visible flickers of distress -- but inwardly, some part of his brain that had been functioning successfully suddenly fell silent and still. He stared down at her hand like it was a strange and curious alien object he'd never seen before.

"I'm bored of you," Quartz said flatly, taking out his communicator crystal and setting it on the tarp next to her. "I'll go make up a sponge bath for you. Call whoever you want."