Blackthorn Street was quiet. If any senshi, Knights, or youma were out and running around, they all had the decency to stay quiet. Amidst the alleyway shadows between an apartment building and a bodega, the wind rustled through and barely seemed to make a sound, even though it blew around a stray newspaper and other assorted litter.

If someone had paid especially close attention, they might have noticed the faintest sound of bells jingling.

Even though they hung around her own wrist, Andesine didn’t hear her bracelets. Not really. She could hardly hear anything over the feel of her blood rushing through her and her heartbeat echoing in her ears. Every breath she took felt both heavy and empty.

She’d gone out on tonight’s patrol with a clear purpose in mind.… She’d gone out intending to do something she had not yet done for the Negaverse, even though she preferred not to consider the idea and had noted in several of her reports for General Ashanite and then-Captain Arsenolite that she found the idea of starseeding people, on the whole, criminally wasteful.… Certainly, given the way that some of her fellow junior officers and basic senshi spoke about such things, they made it sound criminally wasteful.

Of course, she’d expressed the sentiment as respectfully as possible—usually referring back to the old adage about sheep and the relative costs and benefits of shearing them vs. slaughtering them. She took care to always argue her case with a mind on how it better served the Negaverse’s goals to leave as many starseeds alone as possible, how much more net energy they could rake in for Metallia with techniques like siphoning small amounts of energy from larger groups of people and not recklessly murdering people, whether by taking their starseeds or by draining them beyond the point of potential recovery.

(Honestly, it must’ve been some kind of internalized lesbophobia, how much math Andesine had been making herself do lately. A necessary evil, however. She’d taken to drawing up charts that compared how much energy she could get off her coworkers at the theater, taking bits and pieces from multiple people over the course of the day vs. how much she could get from wandering through a crowd, draining a little from one person—barely even enough to notice—then moving on vs. how much she could get—eugh—in the handful of instances when she’d drained a single person until they passed out.

Presenting such evidence required honest numbers, on-the-level bookkeeping, and most unfortunately, math. All in the interests of supporting Andesine’s major point in all this, however—namely: she could get more energy in the ways she preferred. While some murder or near-murder certainly made a dramatic point, if necessary, the fact that human energy was a perpetually renewable resource while starseeds were not? Made it infinitely more preferable, in terms of sheer numbers, to let the energy-sheep stay alive and reap the benefits they provided as often as possible, only resorting to a starseeding when any individual sheep proved themself too dangerous to be left alive.)

Certainly, exceptions existed, as they did to every rule. Stealing starseeds had undeniable benefits when they belonged to Order senshi. If their shiny, special starseeds couldn’t return to slutty, slutty Cosmos and her asinine magic Cauldron, then the senshi couldn’t be reborn (a potential loss of resources for the Negaverse, but even if an Order senshi were reborn, the Negaverse couldn’t recruit them for over a decade anyway, not until they were at least fourteen, while the White Moon lunatics could recruit literal, non-teenage children into their ranks).

Knights’ starseeds presented a far riskier gamble: who could tell if any given Knight had inherited their position from an ancestor, just as Helena had gotten all her damn money, or if they’d been reincarnated? Stealing the starseed from one Bastille of Saturn, or whoever they thought they were, didn’t guarantee that you prevented any further Bastilles of Saturn from existing. If they had siblings or children or cousins, the knighthood could have passed on to a new already living knight instead. All up, so many potential resources lost—but still a useful option to keep in the back of one’s mind in case any given knight proved particularly troublesome.

But those were exceptions for a reason. Overall, starseeding still struck Andesine as a last resort option, something to be avoided at all costs, a course of action that was wasteful, distasteful, and on a personal level, really skeeved her out.

Which was why, tonight, she needed to do it.

Needed to make good on the threat she’d thrown at the blue-haired delivery boy to make that nose-breaking b***h in white stand down: to plunge her hand into someone else’s chest, down into the very core of their being, and yank out the little crystal that kept them alive and made a home for their soul.

Would it waste potential resources? Absolutely, and whenever she shut her eyes, Andesine could perfectly picture all her color-coded, neatly ordered charts about exactly how much she stood to waste—how much she stood to deny the Negaverse and Metallia in the long run—by doing what she waited in this apartment building’s shadows to do. But resources were distinctly not the operative question tonight.

Tonight, the question was one of loyalty.

Not to the Negaverse on the whole, nor to Metallia at the center of it. No. The loyalty up for discussion had a much smaller scale, and far greater personal significance.

Tonight, Andesine meant to prove her loyalty to General Ashanite specifically.

She would take actions that she normally saw as other people’s ways of serving the Negaverse, both useful and respectable in their ways, but not her own way of serving the Negaverse (being careful in any verbal conversations to not sound as though she thought her own approach to meeting energy quotas inherently better than more violent and potentially lethal methods—definitely lethal, in the case of starseeding someone—even though Andesine did believe her own methods inherently, quantifiably, provably—beyond any shred of reasonable doubt—better than draining people to the point of death or ripping out their starseeds willy-nilly). In doing this thing that Andesine normally preferred not to, she would prove that even her own personal distaste for anything would not stop her, that she would stand by her General no matter what.

How fortunate that Jeanine, the Nice One of the two ladies who handled finances at the theater, had a significant other who sounded like he honestly didn’t deserve his starseed. From the snatches that Sable had picked up over the past year-and-a-half, Pete left so much to be desired that it wasn’t even funny. He snapped at and talked down to Jeanine so often that now, whenever he complimented her, she worried that she’d secretly done something wrong. Belittled her interests and dismissed most of her concerns. Spoke better of the women he was “friends” with than the one who cherished him romantically. Refused to meet her parents when they’d been together for almost five years, had lived together for three of them, and had had plenty of conversations about how much it would have meant to Jeanine if she could get Pete to meet her Mom and Dad. So much of his alleged free-time went to allegedly working overtime with no extra cash to show for it, or certainly not enough at any rate.

Truly, Andesine would do the world at large a favor by relieving Pete of his starseed. He didn’t need it that badly, while the Negaverse could surely put it to good use.

So much about the question at play tonight and Andesine’s plan for answering it did remain up for discussion, she realized. But one truth above all others stood out quite clearly: all of this—her presence in this alley off of Blackthorn street, what she planned to do before she left, the itch in her fingers and the pricking in her thumbs to just get it over with already, the fact that she even needed to do this in the first place when she could have otherwise continued taking charitable donations (pittances of energy really, little slices that nobody would notice, like the fractions of a cent left over from different larger-scale corporate transactions) from large groups of people, one at a time, until she’d racked up more energy than she could have gotten from draining a single person until they died—everything happening tonight was Monoceros’s fault, and no one else’s.

Andesine had found out about a week ago, give or take. She’d gone looking for Monoceros in the Dark Kingdom, had hoped to get his opinion on the Negaverse’s different branches and where she could be a good fit. True, Andesine hadn’t yet achieved a promotion to Captain, but she would keep working hard, staying faithful, and serving the Negaverse to the best of her abilities. If she maintained a steady pace—especially if she kept exceeding her quotas for draining energy—then a promotion would come to her eventually, when someone decided that her conduct and service merited such recognition. Still, it didn’t hurt to prepare ahead of time, to think about the question of how she might specialize so that she wouldn’t waste time spinning her wheels about it when she did earn her promotion.

She was thinking about going into Intelligence.

Infiltration, while important, didn’t really appeal to Andesine much. She respected the work that InfOs did, and she saw its utility to Metallia and the Negaverse, but it just……didn’t sound like what she would most enjoy doing. Dealing with civilians happened to Andesine more than enough, between her family and work at the theater. The latter had been made somewhat more tolerable since Niter had gotten the IT job. Even while he had to be Laike and she had to be Sable, there was comfort in knowing that at least one other person at work knew something about the truth of what went on in Destiny City. Made all of it feel less like Living A Lie in a way that hadn’t really bothered Sable all that much until she’d become Andesine and had to live with considerably bigger Lies than telling an acquaintance that they looked very cute in the ugliest effing skirt that Sable had ever seen, or smiling and playing nicely with people who made her want to gouge their eyes out with a spork.

Having to Live A Lie like that was part and parcel of the whole InfOs game, and Andesine respected the people who chose to do that. But she didn’t want it for herself.

SpecOps, while not what she thought she most wanted to do, undeniably had its merits, enough so that Andesine found it a tempting prospect. Certainly, it seemed more directly hands-on in its service to Metallia. Although SpecOps agents were required to do things that might make the wrong person vomit, Andesine saw a sort of glamour in the idea of belonging to such an elite group. On a personal note, General Ashanite and General Faustite both belonged to SpecOps, as did Rakovanite, whom Andesine had briefly met during the Astraya Incident. She hadn’t had any encounters with Rakovanite since then, but she’d liked what she’d seen of him on Astraya. Faustite, she’d only worked with on the mission into the Rift, but again, she liked what she’d seen; she respected Faustite’s drive, his ingenuity and the work he’d put into organizing the mission and keeping everyone more or less herded, how much he’d wanted things to turn out well for the Negaverse and for everyone involved in the mission to contribute.

But tempting though it was, Andesine had doubts about her own ability to keep up with what SpecOps asked of people. Primarily, she doubted her ability to kill so easily, especially in light of what she’d documented in her charts and graphs, and how deeply she believed that killing people ought to be a last resort only, given that it robbed the Negaverse of such useful and vital resources.

So many aspects of the specialization question required so much thought—hence why Andesine had wanted to talk to Monoceros, a good and loyal friend, the one who’d first seen potential in her to serve the Negaverse, the one who’d taken her to General Ashanite in the first place. Out of anyone in the Negaverse, she could most trust Monoceros. She knew that she could most trust him, not just to look out for her in a way that most people would never do for anybody else, but also to be honest with her, even when it could have negatively impacted their team’s sense of internal cohesion.

(The clearest example of the latter that came to mind was Monoceros telling her straight-up about Arsenolite’s history of not having particularly good opinions about queer issues, but Andesine liked to think that she’d turned that into an opportunity to build more trust among the team. She’d been honest with Arsenolite in a way that would hopefully prove constructive and beneficial. Plus, since she’d come to him for his side of the story—and heard him out with an open mind—before passing judgment or otherwise arriving at only half-informed conclusions, he could hopefully trust that Andesine meant it when she said that she liked their team, that she liked the people on it and getting to work with them, and that she had only wanted to understand, not to condemn Arsenolite for things he’d done years prior.)

Maybe Monoceros was not everyone’s vision of the Ideal Negaverse Officer, but Andesine chose to chalk that up to other people letting their own preconceived biases impair their judgment. Loyalty and belief in the other officers around oneself mattered to the Negaverse as much as a willingness to do violence unto Order senshi and their Knights. Supporting one’s teammates had to be worth a great deal, considering how few people seemed to do it genuinely, rather than only looking out for themselves. Monoceros did all of these things better than most of the other officers Andesine had met thus far, and he’d done them happily, so full of genuine enthusiasm for seeing other officers succeed. Hence, her looking up to him.

Hence, Andesine trusting—knowing with all her heart—that she could trust Monoceros and trust his advice on specializations.

High and low, she’d searched for him. Trekked all over the Dark Kingdom’s offices and the places where she’d known him to hang out before. He didn’t make himself apparent, but initially, that didn’t raise too many eyebrows. Even given that it had been a few weeks since she’d seen him, Andesine had felt concerned by his ostensible absence but not overly worried just yet. Supporting everyone else as genuinely as he did had to take its toll, and Monoceros had been so stressed after he’d first earned the bat-wings on his lower back. Eternal senshi had so many responsibilities, all of them dreadfully important. It wouldn’t have been too unheard of for him to simply feel like he needed space.

Still, though, Andesine had so badly wanted his advice. Given how close Monoceros was with their General, she’d first gone to Ashanite’s office……and then, she hadn’t been able to make herself ask the question that was really on her mind. Something about her General’s behavior had seemed so off. So deeply unlike the Ashanite she’d come to know since Monoceros had first brought her to him. Not that she’d never felt a sense of danger around him—she had, and she respected him for it—but normally, the danger Andesine felt with Ashanite tended more toward the “Do not ******** around with me, I will not tolerate it and you won’t like me when I’m disappointed” model.

Standing in the threshold to his officer, all requests as to Monoceros’s whereabouts on her tongue withering away like a romantic bouquet two weeks after Valentine’s Day, Andesine had felt like using the wrong words or tone with Ashanite could have made him snap. Worse yet, she’d felt that hurting himself was as likely to happen as—if not likelier than—Ashanite hurting someone else.

Worst of all, she had gotten the distinct impression (not that she’d asked for any confirmation) that Her General might not have particularly cared about either of those outcomes, that maybe he would regret hurting one of his underlings after the fact but that any damage he did to himself wouldn’t make any meaningful difference to him, not even if it upset the people who cared about him.

So, Andesine had feigned forgetfulness. Apologized profusely for wasting his time only to forget why she’d come because she had so much going on, between her patrols, her reports on them, trying to help Niter out with the new job as much as she could, doing her own job at the theater, and probably not making enough time to sleep properly. Whether or not he’d suspected the lie, Ashanite had dismissed her easily.

Next, she’d headed for Arsenolite’s office. His mood, admittedly, did not seem much better than Ashanite’s—one of the most notable differences came down to Arsenolite seeming like he hadn’t stopped seething in impotent rage for at least ten days. But asking him if he knew anything where Monoceros had gotten off to……it had felt so much easier than asking Ashanite. Easier and less likely to put Andesine on some kind of s**t-list with Her General, especially with Ashanite being in such a foul mood. Maybe Monoceros wasn’t as close with Arsenolite as he was with Ashanite, maybe there was a current of distrust there because of Arsenolite having bad opinions and mistreating Monoceros in the past, but Arsenolite still might have had an idea where Monoceros had gotten off to.

And, indeed, he had.

He’d told Andesine plainly: Monoceros had turned traitor.

Yes, she had observed correctly that Monoceros had not been easy to find, of late. But his absence for the past few weeks had not arisen from him feeling overwhelmed by his responsibilities to the Negaverse, or what he meant as a success story—a clear example of someone who had once struggled to find his footing in the Negaverse but had worked hard, found where he belonged, and triumphed—and needing some time and space to regroup. Rather, it had come because he’d run away to some filthy White Moon princess or slutty, slutty Cosmos and had gotten them to purge the power of Chaos from his starseed.

He’d turned traitor.

He’d betrayed the Negaverse and everyone within it.

He’d abandoned his team, his friends, his General and whatever else Ashanite was to him.

Andesine hadn’t wanted to believe it. Even now, in the alley, waiting for her target part of her still didn’t want to believe. A very big part of her, actually, wanted so badly for all of this to be a ruse, for Monoceros to only be feigning his defection as part of some long con to serve the Negaverse and dismantle the White Moon from within.… Desperately, she wished for some other truth to present itself, so that her friend—the best friend she’d had in the Negaverse, one of the best friends she’d had in her entire life and easily the most honest out of all of them—would not have thrown their team away for the empty promises of those lying, two-faced sellouts, who cared more about a bunch of no-hope, no-future, dead <******** rocks up in outer space than about the Earth, or its people, or the damage that their forever war wrought on the innocent ones whom the Negaverse fought so hard to protect.

But……Arsenolite had been so certain. And even if he hadn’t wanted so badly to do better for Monoceros, he wouldn’t have carelessly accused someone of defecting to the enemy. Arsenolite could have a harsh way about him, but he wouldn’t have said something like that if he didn’t genuinely believe it to be true.

Besides, a long con didn’t fit with General Ashanite’s current mood. Normally, he kept such a tight lid on his personal feelings about everything that crossed his desk. His upset would not, in Andesine’s estimation, have felt so genuine had Monoceros’s defection not been legitimate—and surely, Ashanite would have known if it weren’t. Arsenolite, yes, Andesine could understand Monoceros not telling him. But Ashanite would have had to sign off on a plan like that, wouldn’t he? Moreover, Monoceros had so much affection for him; she couldn’t see him taking on such a fundamentally dangerous undercover mission without letting Ashanite know.

So, no matter how much she wished that it were otherwise, Monoceros’s defection seemed genuine.

Going to ask General Ashanite how he was doing supported that conclusion: he hadn’t wanted to discuss anything, had tried to insist on how fine he was while projecting an air of anything but, had offhandedly said something about At least Monoceros didn’t try to ******** murder me on the way out, like Lapis did! (That incident must have happened before Andesine had joined the Negaverse, and either way, she didn’t feel like “Did not try to murder General Ashanite” was something that merited extra-credit.)

All up, there weren’t any two ways about anything: Monoceros was just gone.

There had to be a way to get him back, though, didn’t there? Whatever he’d been feeling that had led him to take such a drastic step, they could talk things out, right? Friends did that for each other. If Monoceros had been hiding a depression or some similar personal crisis, then maybe turning to the White Moon had been the equivalent of turning to whiskey, opiates, benzos, or something instead of trying to tackle whatever difficult, terrifying circumstances had built up for him, which had probably felt insurmountable from his point of view.… If that were true, then it could have been that he hadn’t felt able to talk to anyone on their team about his struggles. He might have felt as if he were unfairly burdening them by asking for help, or as if he didn’t deserve any kindness from them (which was obviously wrong; for all the kindness he tried to put into the world, Monoceros deserved at least as good as he gave in return).

So help her, Andesine needed to believe as much. Needed to believe that Monoceros could still recant this obvious nonsense, that Ashanite and their team could save him from the White Moon’s lies, that she could help him see reason once more and come. back. home. Come back where he belonged, with the people who actually cared about him, not like the smug, stuck-up, moralizing White Moon bastards who’d seduced him away from his team, his real friends, his General. Those filthy little liars likely only wanted to trot Monoceros out as propaganda about how many people they could “save” from the Negaverse. In all likelihood, they only wanted to demean and degrade him by using him as such an example instead of respecting him as a whole person, and to force him to thank them for “rescuing” him by making him dance like a wind-up doll or a performing bear.

Despite what some people liked to think based on his insistent kindness and his good heart, Monoceros wasn’t stupid. Surely, at some point, he would come to understand that the White Moon didn’t care about him in the slightest, that they only saw him as a toy they could play with and use to make their duplicitous, bullshit points, so they could sell more naive fools on their heartless propaganda.… He’d need to understand, sooner or later, how much better he could do than letting them treat him like garbage in that manner.

……But Monoceros had already come to the Negaverse after being rescued from the White Moon.… Andesine’s back-reading in the Negaverse’s intelligence database had been quite clear: returning to the White Moon as an Eternal senshi would likely knock him back down to the rank of Super senshi, as it had apparently done for some Lysithea of Unicorns and an archer senshi called Cybele. General Faustite had written reports on them both before and after their defections, as had others. Moreover, he’d ostensibly had at least some kind of working relationship during their time in the Negaverse (judging from one of his entries on Cybele, he’d even been the one to personally liberate her from the White Moon or at least intimately involved in the process of her liberation). Both of them had been Eternal senshi while in the Negaverse, but had needed to regain that standing after they’d left.

If that pattern held true, then Monoceros was likely in the same boat right now. Who even knew what might have happened to him if they pulled him back to the Negaverse before he’d at least ranked up back to Eternal?

If they could get him back to the Negaverse.… No, ******** that. They had to get him back. Andesine needed to believe that it was possible, that what she’d known of Monoceros had been real. She needed to believe that she hadn’t wasted her friendship—genuine! friendship!!—on someone who’d only been waiting for a chance to run away.

She needed to believe that Arsenolite’s brother-but-memory-loss-made-it-complicated had only run away out of some terrible misunderstanding, that they could reunite again.

She needed to believe that Ashanite hadn’t seemed so wounded over nothing but lies.

Then, when she finally heard someone leaving the apartment building at her back, Andesine needed to work fast. She’d seen Jeanine’s Pete coming from this way earlier, his arm curled around the shoulders of some skinny, blonde thing, seemingly just as vapid as Helena’s Mallorie and possibly just as shallow, though inherently more sympathetic due to (most likely) being a victim of Pete’s lies in her own right. A city parking lot sat nearby, a perfect place for him to have left his car while following the flippity blonde up to her apartment, then violating Jeanine’s trust in him and the boundaries of a relationship that was supposed to be monogamously committed. Now, if the person leaving the building would do her the solid of being the right guy…….

And he did. Oh, bless his heart, he did.

Andesine slunk into the shadows as the footsteps she heard diverted from the sidewalk, into the alley. And there, right there, came Pete: taller than Andesine but not by much, burly but well-built, a slip of hairy chest visible through his unnecessarily tight shirt’s V-neck collar. Waiting for him to come closer, Andesine barely drew a breath. As he passed her, apparently not noticing the woman in black and wine-red, Andesine swooped in. Bashed at the back of his neck, sharp wrist jingling venomously as her bracelet of bells collided with him.

He crumpled like wet tissue paper. Fell to the ground face-first and unceremoniously.

Frown curling up her lips, Andesine scoffed. She flipped him over with a swat from her boot. Easy as making pancakes. It was almost insulting how, after she had, in her own mind, built this moment up into something bigger—something infinitely more significant than reality had wound up being—everything came together so quickly, so easily.

Then again, who was Andesine to argue?

Crouching by the body—the body belonging to a man so pathetic, he didn’t even deserve his soul—Andesine placed her hand over his chest. She focused, tried her best to breathe deeply, no matter how fast her heart raced or how hard it pounded. Have to get a move on, she thought, fingers poised over his heart and ready to work. Can’t let anyone find me here. Not like this.… Surely, they’ll hear the beating of this hideous heart.…

All of this had felt so easy with the delivery boy in Southside Park.

Then again, Andesine hadn’t actually stolen a starseed from the delivery boy in Southside Park. She’d blustered, and maybe that fiery little White Moon b***h had thrown that Avernian Eruption magic at her, but Andesine hadn’t done more than make a lot of noise, act tough, and feel like she’d been set on fire when the magic had hit her. But—this was what she’d come out here for, wasn’t it?

Didn’t she need to prove herself? Prove that she had what it took to do things she found personally distasteful, all in the name of the Negaverse, and Metallia, and their mission to fend off the sell-outs from the White Moon?

Andesine shut her eyes. Tried to focus on what stealing this starseed meant. How it would liberate Jeanine from this trash-garbage jackass who didn’t deserve someone so genuinely nice in his life at all. What it would mean to steal her first starseed, whether or not anyone had ever made it up to Captain without doing so. (Statistically speaking, Andesine assumed the answer was “yes,” but she didn’t want to commit to that and didn’t have access to the files that she would’ve needed to paw through in order to find out.)

She thought of General Ashanite. How he had so firmly Not Wished To Discuss Monoceros. How Monoceros had abandoned them, General Ashanite most of all, and sold out to the White Moon. How he had betrayed them.

Holding her breath, she plunged her hand into this idiot’s chest. Easy as plunging into water. She dug through him, down to his soul, and curled her hand around the part that radiated the most power. Then, she yanked it out.

Immediately, his body went lifeless. If she had bothered to check his eyes, she would have found them dull and empty. But Andesine did not bother with such things. She only stared, awestruck, at a little crystal as she rolled it around her palm. When it caught a ray of moonlight or the streetlamps’ halo, it glimmered maliciously as broken glass.

So much power, she thought to herself, for such a tiny little thing.…

Something behind her crashed. Startling, Andesine fumbled the starseed—but by someone’s grace, she caught it before it hit the ground. As she turned around, she felt like the world’s biggest idiot—not just because she’d only startled over a cat knocking things over as cats always did (not even a Mauvian, as far as she could tell; Andesine couldn’t make out a star on its forehead), but more importantly because she needed to get out of here, before someone found her crouching by a body.

So, she stood. Put the Starseed safely in her subspace. Dusted herself off and slipped out onto the sidewalk like nothing in creation was or ever had been wrong. She walked five blocks before slinking back into an alley, and putting a call out on her tablet.

She needed to find a Captain or a General, a Super or an Eternal Senshi—someone who could get her back to Negaspace. Knowing General Ashanite, there was a strong chance he’d still be in his office around now. Andesine needed to bring him this starseed for herself.

Needed him to know that, while it was far from the same as him and Monoceros, she wouldn’t abandon him or their team. Never.

wc: 5,185.