A faint pulse and shallow breath seemed to be at least small assurances Zia was still alive, although she was unmoving for a concerning amount of time.

Sunlight hit her eyes during the afternoon, and she managed to make a small whine of discomfort and roll over, grabbing a pillow and smashing it into her face. And then all at once she seemed to be aware of where she was and her eyes snapped opening. Park. She had been in the park. It all started to come back to her. She had asked Pascal to meet her there. She was finally going to try it.

She couldn’t remember anything after that. She remembered making contact with the parasite, drawing it out of him.

And then nothing.

She sat upright hard enough she felt dizzy and immediately regretted it, hugging the blankets close to her chest in worry.

These were not her blankets. Or Chester’s. But they were still familiar.

And half a second later she realized there was a looming figure at the side of the bed. Her brain made the connection it must be Pascal just as it made the connection this was his bedroom, but when she glanced over to see a stranger’s face, she screamed and fell off the opposite end of the bed, taking all of the blankets with her.

Appeal
It was the noises she made prior to waking up that had drawn him back to her side. He hadn’t slept much, unable to bring himself to rest when Zia’s fate was still uncertain. The bat had worried him, putting strange notions into his mind. The only thing he knew for certain was where he could bring her to recover. He had taken her home, and laid her in his own bed. It was familiar, and a little weird. Definitely extremely eerie. How long had it been since she had been in his bed? Too long. Such a notion would have been disregarded the other week but here she was.

Unconscious.

His amber eyes fell over her sleeping face, and he found himself sighing heavily. This felt like his fault. He felt guilty, and that’s not how he wanted to feel when he finally had his freedom. Why couldn’t she just wake up? All she had to do was open her eyes!

Why hadn’t she woken up yet? Would she wake up soon? He didn’t know. She hadn’t woken up yet, and there was no reason to believe she’d wake up anytime soon but she had also spent a concerning about of time without any motion at all so something as simple as a breath was a very positive sign after a night of panic.

“Zee!” He said as his torso moved toward her only for her to jolt away and fall off of his bed.

“Zee! Are you okay?”

She was okay! She was finally awake, and he could finally breath too.


“Who the ******** are you?!” She screeched. Logic seemed to be put on the backburner by sheer panic. “Where’s Pascal? What happened?”

All were shouted as she tried to scramble backwards away from him, holding her hands in front of her defensively.. “Oh, no, nope, no, no no nononononono, no, crap,” She held one hand to her head, feeling dizzy and nauseous. She probably should still be resting instead of going zero to thirty in just a few short seconds. But that nausea was accented by panic. Had she killed Pascal? That was her first thought. He was dead and she was just brought back to her last permanent address. Except that didn’t make any sense either, because a perfect stranger would have just taken her to the hospital.

She got to her feet, wobbly, but holding out one hand as if to warn him to keep his distance, at least for the time being. “W-who are you?”

Appeal
Before he could even answer her first question, he was horrified by her second. At first he had briefly considered the possibility whole ordeal had given her short term memory loss but when her name fell across her tongue, he had a new concern. She didn’t recognize. No. Why didn’t she recognize him?! Split between confusion and her sudden movements, he wasn’t sure which to worry about first.

“Zee! Calm down, stop moving so much! You need to rest!” He yelled, reaching out for her in an attempt to stop her from moving around so much, before finding himself drawing back with hesitation as she motioned for him to stay away.

“Zee. It’s me. Pascal. Why don’t you recognize me?” He asked. his hand sliding across his face in exasperation before flipping his hair to the other side as it pulled away.


She seemed frozen, trying to stay upright and looking at him with an expression that couldn’t seem to decide if she wanted to look scrutinizing or terrified. It took a second for her brainfog to clear. She knew how purification worked. Glamour. She didn’t see him after he’d purified. And after a moment, she did accept that the sum of his parts were very Pascal-like.

There had just been something stopping her from making the connection.

After a long silence, she ran to close the distance and grab him in a hug. “It worked,” She breathed. He was free. He could start fresh.

“Can I see it? She whispered, feeling the excited lurch in her stomach. Or maybe the nausea was just lingering well past its welcome. “The new… uniform, I mean. I just… Can I see?”

Appeal
The silence was deafening.

He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered what she was going to do. He didn’t know what to expect but the words ‘Can I see it?’ hadn’t been on the list. There were too many jokes. Too many puns. There was too much to be said that instead all he had was silence, followed by a snicker, and then finally when he could no longer control himself a cocky turn of the tongue, “Oh, you only want to see it?”

He pondered her request with all seriousness, though. She wanted to see it, and he hadn’t really had the chance to properly look at it either. Without the taint of the Dark Mirror Court, would he still dislike it? Maybe but it would never be as terrible as it was. Nothing could be as bad as it was.

“It’d be only fair to show you your good work,” he teased, shuffling around for a henshin pen that was somewhere under the bed at this point. He’d been in such a rush when he’d come in that it dropped faster than his pants usually do in the same circumstances.

It didn’t take long after he dug it out that he gave her a small show, pulling the hood over his head with embarrassment as he stood in front of her. He couldn’t stay like this for long but a small show wouldn’t hurt anyone. How many drunken nights had he come in and not powered down as soon as he should have? Not to mention that time he walked right through her bathroom’s mirror.

“How does it look? Charming, perhaps?”


Zia’s brow raised, and then lowered and furrowed as she pouted and gave his shoulder a sharp punch. Or, sort of. It just kind of pathetically bounced off of him thanks to her still unsettling weakness.

But he powered up. Into a senshi with a white fuku with gorgeous blue and gold accents and accessories. He wasn’t one of theirs anymore, he was who he was meant to be.

She finally gave in to her wooziness and sat on the edge of the bed, staring as tears welled up, and all too soon she was red faced with waterworks flowing freely. “I’m… really happy for you,” She managed to get out. And she was. She was glad one of them was free. She wasn’t expecting to be so selfishly upset, though. The gut wrenching feeling of distance felt like it came out of nowhere.

He belonged to the White Moon.

They didn’t share mirrors anymore. He was where he belonged, but where he belonged felt just a little further away. One more broken connection.

“Really,” She said, and tried not to sob as she reached out to brush her fingers on his sleeve.

Appeal
She said she was happy for him but her body sent him an entirely different message. He felt nauseous in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t that his sparklesash was simply tied too tightly. She was crying, and it just felt wrong.

“Please don’t cry. Zee, tell me what’s wrong.” He said, settling down on the bed and patting the spot beside him, motioning for her to join him.


“Nothing,” She croaked out. She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t say she missed having someone who understood what it was like to be tied to the mirror, even if he had been on the Chaos side. It was wrong, to want someone to share in suffering, especially when their suffering came with more loss and more Chaos than one should ever wish on another person.

He wasn’t hers to have, and she’d have to make her peace with that.

She sniffled and rubbed her puffy eyes on the back of her sleeve. “You’re going to have to start over again. Where will you go?”

Appeal
He didn’t believe her. Not for one moment. He knew her too well, and had seen all those lies before. He slinked back into his civilian without a name, and fell back against the bed. He wondered how long it would take him to get the truth out of her, and how much pain it would cause them. Would it be worth it? Was not knowing worth the price it cost currently? How many more tears was he going to cause? How much more sadness would he bring her?

“Again,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t know. Where will you go? I’d like to take you to a place that’s not paved with your tears, Zee.”


“My dad died. Two months ago,” Zia answered out of nowhere. She seemed to be repressing the outburst down to just the few occasional sniffles. “The house I grew up in is where I’ve been staying, most days. It’s big and dusty and the floors creak. Sometimes I can’t stand it, and I’ll go weeks without going back, though.” Chester’s office was much more cramped, but full of company and better memories that didn’t leave a dull ache in her chest. “And sometimes I miss it like I can’t stop going back. This whole city is just poison.”

She inhaled her last few, deep and shaky sobs and stared at her hands that had fallen in her lap. “Let’s leave.”

It seemed so simple, as she said it. Finn was in the back of her mind reminding her it was okay to escape, if you needed to. Chester wasn’t going to object, he never did when she disappeared on him. Usually the only things that kept her from hiding away from the world was the fact he usually occupied the places she liked to hide, and that she would feel guilty for taking advantage of how easily he didn’t judge the way she couldn’t stay still in one place.

“The beach. California. Brazil. Somewhere. I don’t know. Not here. We can get you a new identity. Laws don’t matter when you have money.”

She stood up. She meant for it to be a dramatic moment of taking a stand, but she was still wobbly and had to grab the bed frame. It was baffling how much that process had taken out of her.

“Let’s just leave it behind.”

Appeal
He didn’t know what to say when she told him that her father died. Daddy issues made the world go ‘round but it didn’t make it any better when they were permanently out of the picture, permanently dead. He didn’t apologize to her but he simply brushed his hand against her in a gentle caress. He didn’t know if his father was alive or dead, and it was unsettling. He didn’t seek the answer to the question but if he knew, how would he react? He definitely had nothing to say to argue her.

The city was poison.

He knew what it did to them.

He seen what it did their lives, and even their very souls.

He had no doubt that their lives would be better somewhere else. Anywhere else.

He pushed himself up off the bed, and soon found his feet touching the ground again. Standing beside Zia and the bed frame, he offered his hand out to her.

“You’re my best friend, Zee. I’ll follow you anywhere you go.”


It took a second to get her bearings, but she stood on her own two feet, staring at his hand. She grabbed it. And there was something different in her body language that wouldn’t have been present all that time ago when he was just the boy she was hooking up with. There was a camaraderie there that was a special sort of thing that forged after two people had dragged each other through hell.

There wasn’t much to do to leave, but Zia found herself looking back out at the trashed, old dump of an apartment before she shut the door for the last time. Every day and every week that had been spent here seemed to be twisting and pulling memories and images around in her brain. This place seemed powerful, in a moment. Intensity, passion, and hatred had all been so strong here, and in a lot of ways for the first time.

But up ahead was a whole world.

It wasn’t a sin to go see it. Finn taught her that. And Finn, Chester, and all of her other friends here were the only home she knew, in a lot of ways. The place didn’t matter. And if she needed to leave, the ones that mattered would forgive her.

She slammed the door shut with a sweeping flair of her arm and she shoved her hands in her pockets, arrogantly striding alongside Pascal…. or whoever he was now. They’d figure it ******** this place,” She said with a crooked grin in his direction and a cocky gait of confidence that had been lost to her this last year. Spending so much time frightened and unsure and doomed, she suddenly seemed to have it in spades all of the sudden.

They could save their own souls.