The world she’d built crumbled underneath her feet and the hard ground of reality rose up to meet her with bone-shattering impact. Hands flexing around her henshin pen, Hestia’s eyes once again followed the wisp that slowly traced the path of the stripe on her skirt like a floating toy train. And her world didn’t want her.

No. Wait. Maybe her world did want her. Hestia wanted and welcomed everyone, herself included. It just didn’t need her. And isn’t that just…

BULLSHIT?!

In the muggy night, she seethed on a rooftop, abruptly done with any attempt at patrolling.

Isn’t it just some hurtful, cruel bullshit after all the years she spent working, worrying, and striving to be worthy of it? Buckling down her instincts to fight, constantly feeling like a wrong and inadequate child in the face of her world’s culture and history, her world that had kept her at arm’s reach? She stared at the wisp’s gentle motions and saw over a dozen years worth of small achievements marching in step with a sense of failure so vast that it had no horizon.

So it doesn’t matter, right? No amount of repairs. No amount of visitors. Not rediscovering the teas or the incense or any other piece of the past given new life. None of it was what her world expected of her.

It was Miss Mindy all over again, but without the benefit of a lifetime of love and sisterhood to soften the blow of an assumed role, suddenly rescinded. And now there wasn’t anything to take its place, now was there? Someone needed her badly? How the hell…

How. The. <******** she supposed to know who or what that meant now? A thousand years later and who really, and truly needed her now? There were no Keepers to guide her, and if a Mauvian knew who she was meant to serve, none of the ones she’d met over the years had seen fit to tell her.

Hands clenching harder and harder along the sturdy, smooth form of her pen, she realized that it wasn’t even a matter of looking at worthiness. Because it wasn’t her place to judge and measure such things. But then again, wasn’t that just another thing on the pile of faults that had formed her, head to toe? She judged. She hated. And if she cared about people in a capacity greater than she ever had before trying to assume this role? It didn’t mean she cared enough to help them all.

Especially those she feared.

Closing her eyes, Hestia relaxed her hands and exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled.

It was a trained reaction to the surge of fear and hate and helplessness that had haunted her ever since the first time she’d powered up a whole ocean away from Destiny City. The first time she learned why Destiny City was both extremely dangerous and also the safest place for a senshi to exist. The exercise she used to remind herself why killing wasn't the obvious and sure answer to a lot of persistent problems and the people who created them. The meditation that helped her hold herself back in a state of all too passive mediocrity.

But right now it helped center her thoughts around the (worthless) self training and (idiotic) guidance she’d persisted in when (ineptly) crafting the (fake) Cleansing Way. A series of simple, to the point, questions accompanied each breath.

What is the goal?

To know her goal.

What is clouding her vision?

Ignorance.

…emotions. A lot of emotions.

What is blocking her path forward?

…

Nothing, actually. Maybe?

Just knowing where the path was.

Ignorance, once again. She needs to know more. After over a decade of toiling in the dark, her world owed her that much. A moment later and her phone had replaced the henshin pen. She couldn’t, even in this moment, hear the welcoming sound of hundreds of brooms sweeping in time and inhale the warm scent of incense without feeling moved by it. Without feeling like she was going home. A place she was meant to be. A role she was meant to play. An oath she was meant to take.

Home again.

And again.

But not forever.

Not anymore.