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At first, Cybele did not mind the rain. The June humidity had hung heavy over the city through the late afternoon and into the evening, and towards the end there, it was becoming oppressively sticky.

The first sweet raindrops were a relief, and Cybele smiled as she made her way down the sidewalk. The few times that she'd felt up for patrolling, she'd been retracing her old draining routes out of habit, wondering if someone else would pick them up after she'd left. That meant she did a few loops through the commercial areas of the city before moving on to finish up in the parks.

Unfortunately, the refreshing drizzle only lasted for about five minutes before it began to pour.

Pouring rain wasn't awful, but it was unpleasant, and after everything that had happened, Cybele was trying to learn how to take care of herself in the small ways. Her friends would not want her soaked, she knew, so she sprinted off looking for shelter and ended up running several blocks without thinking before ducking under the first awning she saw, one that belonged to an upscale restaurant.

She would have spent a few moments just catching her breath, but that was when she noticed the nearby Chaos aura. A General. Squinting through the rain at the hotel across the street, Cybele wondered which one it was this time.

"Who's there?" she asked, allowing her voice to carry.

"No," said Cybele, the sudden firmness in her voice catching her by surprise.

As she stepped forwards to the last dry patch of ground under the awning, she could make out the general shape of the agent, huddled in his own shelter on a higher level than she was. She knew the voice, although not well enough to pick out who it belonged to immediately.

She was only sure who it wasn't.

"Chrysocolla is somebody else," she said. The name alone was enough to bring up an odd feeling in her chest, one that was neither pure warmth or pure caution, the way her snippets of familiarity tended to be. It was a feeling that she couldn't untangle right now, even as she thought about it for a moment, and tried to pull up any extra emotions or even memories that might be lurking beneath the surface. None came.

Revealing her own identity seemed somewhat risky, given the circumstances, but she wasn't going to lie. Her colors would give her away at a glance, anyway.

"I'm Cybele," she said.

The figure resolved itself into Faustite, although he looked different, too. His fire, the signature of his powers, had dimmed considerably. Cybele noticed that his aura was as strong as ever. It was something else, then. He carried himself heavily, and his voice was steadier than she'd ever heard it. There was no snapping at people, the way there had been at the meeting. There were no dry comments about breaking wrists, or even claims that she was a traitor.

Something was off.

"Are you all right?" she asked, her lips pressing into a line as she looked him over.

There had been a time when she hadn't seen him as a person, but that was long gone and forgotten, now. They'd had a lot in common during their time in the barracks, and she still saw a bit of herself in him.

That meant that now that the Chaos was gone and her thoughts were clearer, something ached in her chest at the sight of him.

"I wasn't. All right, I mean," she said. She leaned against one of the awning's supports, her own voice calm. "Remember when we were talking about the things the Negaverse took from us? They took a lot from me. I found a way to get some of it back."

She shrugged slightly. "And I wasn't demoted. It doesn't really work like that in Order, anyway. It just turns out it weakens the starseed to have Chaos pushed into and out of it so much."

It was the Negaverse's fault that she was weak now, and nobody else's, but she held that anger deep down, away from the surface.

No empathy? Cybele raised an eyebrow at that.

"Breaking or killing you isn't off the table, if that makes you feel better," she said. There was a hint of her usual dry humor in her tone, but only a hint. The rest was dead serious. Her mouth pressed to one side.

It wasn't difficult to see why she'd been bent on it before. With the broken body, and the youma in him, she wasn't sure that there was much to be done for him short of sending his starseed to the cauldron. He was dangerous enough that time spent looking into purification options for him was time that he might end up planning more large scale attacks.

The empathy still stayed her hand for the time being, whether he wanted that or not. The smarter choice would have been to kill her, too, and yet now that she was here, she was glad no one had done it.

"I know. She's gone," said Cybele. "I accepted that a long time ago. The memories are gone, and the identity. The strength, now."

The person that she'd been while corrupted was still more present in her life than the old Order Cybele, which was an strange thought, but she could accept that, too. "But I have friends whose love for me doesn't revolve around how many starseeds I bring them. I don't have the Chaos constantly pressing on my mind. I have a life that revolves around more than war."

At the very least, she was working on building that life. It was a long road, still, but that was all right.

"Why do you ask?" She met Faustite's gaze as the rain continued to pour down around them. "Do you think I should have stayed?"

"I wouldn't have lasted."

Emotion came to Cybele's face more easily now than it had when she'd had the Chaos in her. Her lips twitched sideways into a wry smile, and violet eyes were half-lidded as she shook her head.

"I was seen as an acquisition, a tool, by many of the people in the Negaverse. Perhaps I was an old enemy." Her gaze flicked to Faustite's wrists. "Never a friend." She could have tried talking to the new recruits, she supposed, but that would have just had her ending up on the other side of the power dynamic. "But more than that, I didn't know that I was miserable because I did not have a baseline for what it meant to be okay until Order started reaching out. I didn't know that it might help to have friends, or a life."

Any hints of a smile faded as she met the General's eyes. "I just knew that I did not care if I survived."

She knew that he wasn't actually stuck here, even if the downpour threatened whatever was left of his fire. It wasn't hard for Generals to teleport. It was possible that he was scouting for information for Sylvite, or himself, or for one of the General-Kings. After a brief moment, Cybele decided she did not mind giving that information, as long as it did not paint too large of a target on Ganymede's back.

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Still, I might have tried for a while longer if everything hadn't fallen apart at the Farnsworth."

Cybele had been an actress, once. The title had been lost months ago, when Fleur Willis had died at Sylvite's hands, but the skills had remained. They'd served her during the socializing that the Negaverse had required of her, and she used them now, too.

She was careful not to let too much empathy, or any hated pity, show through on her face.

It was difficult, because she could tell from what he said, from the way that he carried himself, that they did have similar stories, in a way. Chaos had not been kind to him, either.

Still, out of respect, she stuck to giving him the facts about what had happened at his own mission.

"I took down a few of the enemy with Kamacite's help. I brought one of their starseeds to try to bait the others, as you asked," she said. Her time in the Negaverse felt distant. She still hadn't fully processed it, and her voice went flat again as she spoke about it. "Ganymede called the bluff, and yet she was still kinder to me when I had a starseed in my teeth and was trying to kill her, too, than anyone in the Negaverse had been in the months that I risked my life for their energy stores."

She watched Faustite carefully, wondering if his explosive temper would trigger from any of this.

"I hesitated, I suppose, especially after she powered up and I remembered something for the first time. It was a battle where we'd fought together, but more than that, it was a time I'd felt alive."

Even now, her eyes lit up at the thought of it.

"The General you sent for backup noticed, and he started calling me a traitor on the spot. He threatened to hurt me, even after I tried to explain what was happening. I panicked after that, and I ran."

She did not mention where she'd gone, or her time spent in the woods, mulling things over. All of that seemed too personal, and it had been outside of the scope of the mission, anyway. She moved past that, and a hint of a smile found its way onto her face.

"After that, Order found me first."

"Don't," snapped Cybele. A hint of thunder rumbled in the distance.

Faustite might have been the one with Chaos in his veins and fire in his belly, but Cybele's temper had always run hot, and now it broke almost as fast as his. Her lips twitched. Her hand curled into a fist at her side.

"Don't talk about Ganymede like that."

Her gaze was as sharp as her voice. Faustite may have been someone who she'd had a certain respect for, once. They may have walked a similar path for a time, similar enough that she clenched her fist until it was white knuckled instead of doing anything more, but Ganymede was on an entirely different level. Ganymede was her savior, her Princess, her sister.

"She's a better person than either of us," said Cybele. "She'd have offered you kindness, too, if you'd given her half a chance." She'd offered hints of it to Benitoite, even though nearly everyone in that situation seemed to have thought him a bit of a witless crapsack.

"And don't say I didn't try." That came out softer, as Cybele's gaze turned from the General to the raindrops beyond, although her tone was still dangerously low. It was strange to hear the strain and intensity in his own voice. She hadn't known that he'd cared, and it drew up a new feeling in her chest, another emotion she did not remember the word for.

None of that changed how wrong he was.

"I tried. The Negaverse destroyed my life, and I tried for eight months." She looked back to him, voice going even lower. "It's not my fault you weren't around until about when I decided to try something else."