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The youma had gone down easy, with a couple of quick jabs and a whack with a trash can lid that she'd found lying around. Teide hadn't been surprised by that - if there was one thing she'd learned in more than a year as an officer of the Negaverse, it was how to fight. But just a few short weeks ago, she would have called that poor creature friend.

She would have cooed at it and offered it energy from her pockets and it would have obeyed her. She'd seen how they lived in the rift. Avalon had told her what went into making a youma, how you could break a soul so badly that it wasn't even human anymore-

And they'd respected her once, looked to her captaincy for orders-

Teide bit her lip, her head spinning. This was... this was a little too much, she thought, and she was blocks and blocks and blocks from home. Patrol was supposed to be easy. She was supposed to avoid conflict. She was supposed to meet people and practice with her powers. Not - not this.

(But it had lunged at her so quickly, she thought, knees shaking. It had lunged so quickly and it had been foaming at the mouth...)

Teide stumbled, her breath coming faster, and she found a wall and clung to it as she sank slowly into a crouch. "I want to go home," she whispered to herself. "I want to go home. I want to go home."

Teide felt the senshi approach, because of course she did. She felt everyone when they moved, from youma right on up to general kings and queens and everyone clinging to the power rungs in between. White moon, she thought dizzily, Base rank. Not a threat.

She curled her fingers against the wall and hoped that maybe she'd disappear. Maybe she'd teleport - but she'd lost that power, hadn't she, and she'd never been very good at it in the first place. So no dice - he was talking to her. Teide went wide-eyed and looked up at him.

"I - I don't know what you're talking about," she said nervously. She wasn't good at pop culture references, not since forgetting her whole civilian life. If she'd ever known that one, it was dust in the wind now. She tried to focus on his uniform - seventeen kinds of galaxy print. His aura was cool twilight and night air and shooting stars and dew.

"I didn't want to fight it. I didn't want to dust it," she said, looking back to where the youma had been only moments before, her voice wavering. It would be reforming in the rift by now, a little bit sadder and a little bit sicker for the experience. "I just - I want to be home." They're sweet and misunderstood and lost. I know. I used to feed them.

"Oh," said Teide, and shook her head again. "I'm sorry. I've never seen that." Should I have? she wondered. Was it just one of those things that everyone knew and if she didn't, she was a total weirdo? "Or - I might have?" she added hesitantly. "But I forgot a lot of stuff recently. I'm still trying to get things back."

She wasn't sure where she knew the smell of that smoke from. She wasn't sure she liked it. "Youma don't deserve to fight and die over and over like they have to," she said. "Someone very bad made them that way and they can't ever go back to the cauldron or even rest. It's very sad. I'm very sad about it."

She was maybe even the saddest.

Teide looked over at the joint, still uncertain, but she reached out and took it between her gloved fingers. "So I just - I just breathe in?" she asked. "I think I've done this before. Before I lost my memories. I'm not sure."

She took a suck from the joint and fought against the urge to cough - that would probably disappoint him, wouldn't it? When she couldn't hold her breath any longer, she exhaled. "What should I be feeling right now?" she asked, looking over at him. "Do I need to smoke more?"

Teide, at the very least, knew what Netflix was, so she nodded. She felt a little bit overwhelmed and decided to focus on the joint in her hands. Why - why did he have to tell her he didn't know how to make Youma? Because she knew. She'd never made one, but she knew - Avalon had told her all about Shay, how she'd taken a teenaged girl and made her into something beautiful and perfect that could serve the Negaverse and now all Teide felt was sick about it.

She took another puff.

She did not feel better - not yet.

"You make a youma by pouring chaos into someone's starseed until it overflows, until the only thing left is chaos, until they're so warped and twisted by it that they can never go back to being human. They're - it's done to them," she said, starting to get weepy. "They don't choose it. They're all suffering. And all they do when they get dusted is go back to the rift and then they get hungry or someone summons them and they get dusted again. Forever."

She sank down into a crouch - the saddest crouch - and offered the joint back to Alphard. "My name's Teide," she said, mostly to her knees. "Teide of Cosmos."

Teide nodded, drawing the connection between the subject at hand and... other things. It wasn't like she hadn't gotten the sex talk. Nick had made sure she knew everything she needed to keep herself safe. "Yeah," she said in agreement. "I- I was corrupt," she whispered after a moment, knuckles going white from how hard she was gripping her knees. "They asked me and I said yes and I wanted to be powerful and magical but - I didn't know better. I didn't really have a choice. If I'd said no, they would have killed me."

She tugged on her skirt, watching how it shimmered. "I'm better now," she said, "But it was... it was bad. And I said yes, so... so everyone keeps treating me like I was a victim, and I'm not sure I can say I was."

"I think my dress is sparkly because I'm a knight of Cosmos," she added, reaching for the joint. "Not the other way around."

She bit her lip.

"Would you get down here?" she asked. "On my level?"

Teide nodded, taking the last drag off the blunt and then stubbing it out on the pavement between her toes. "Yeah," she said after a moment, exhaling slowly. "I feel... a little bit grounded." She didn't feel as hideously sad as before, at least. Trying to answer his question just made her feel... tired. He'd already told her she couldn't change the past, so what was the point in trying to reason her way through it?

She should just let it go, like dust in the wind.

Teide began to rip what remained of the joint into tiny, worried fragments, ashes turning the tips of her gloved fingers black. "I feel like I should have done more," she said. "Like me now has a responsibility to who I was when I was fifteen. Like I should be able to reach backwards through time and make her go another way... or something. I did bad things and I'm still responsible for those things, aren't I?"

Purification couldn't cleanse a guilty conscience, after all.

She leaned against him. "I pulled someone's starseed right out of his chest. It was self-defense, but I still did it, and the youma - they don't deserve to be dusted. They can be sweet, really. If you treat them right, they'll eat right out of the palm of your hand."

Or, they had when she was a captain. It didn't work that way anymore.

"When do I get to the part when I get to be a good person and know I'm a good person and stop worrying about going bad again?" she asked, voice shaking a little. She hadn't meant to get all worked up again - it had just... happened.

Teide frowned and hugged herself a little tighter, trying to form herself into a little ball. She really didn't like the idea that people didn't get to be good - that was the whole reason she'd purified! Because she wanted to be good! If that was impossible, then what was she doing here?

She didn't think she could argue about it with Alphard, though. He seemed like he was pretty set on his philosophy. And he'd done his best to say a lot of other nice stuff, so he probably thought he was still being helpful.

Furrowing her brow, she asked, "Munchies? What kind?"

And then, "Can we go to the all-night calamari place near the university?"