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Pendour was walking in the park again. That was a good sign, she thought, that she was getting braver.

It was probably a good sign overall that she was getting better when nobody tried to stop her from going out on her own in the dark, that nobody so much as gave her a concerned look as she slipped past the door.

She didn't rush towards any Chaos. She didn't know if she was feeling brave enough to try to deal with all of that, just yet, but the stars were pretty. She wanted to look at them, t the way that they always seemed brightest in the winter when the air was crisp. She wanted to remind her about how many beautiful reasons there were to be alive, one reason at a time.

Of course there were plenty of those reasons with her family, but this was nice, too.

There was an Order aura around, she realized, just as she'd curled herself up on a bench. It didn't take long after that for her to see him out of the corner of her eye.

He was lithe, inhuman, pale as pale. Pendour might have been intimidated if she hadn't already seen so much, but as it was, her smile was soft. She raised a hand in greeting.

The frown on his face or his brusque answer didn't shake Pendour. She still smiled. She turned her face to her side a little, ostensibly to hide the scars, but that was more out of reflex than anything else.

"It's just a greeting," she told him, soft as soft. "I wanted to say hello to you, that's all."

She knew from some of the others that a lot of the senshi that were coming to Earth from other places had been trapped on dying worlds for the last thousand years or so. It was no wonder that someone who had gone through that might be a little jumpy. Pendour put in the effort to unclench her jaw, and to soften her gaze, and all of the small things she did when she wanted to be more intentional about not being a threat.

"I like to talk to people, sometimes, but if you're busy, you can go." She looked over her shoulder, in the direction that he'd been nearly racing towards a few seconds ago. "Are you after something?"

"It depends," said Pendour with the smallest of shrugs. "A lot of times I seem to end up talking to people about space." A moment passed, and she glanced up to the skies with a tilt of her head. She couldn't see Neptune without a telescope, but she kept track of things enough that she knew where it sat on the horizon.

"Although maybe that's my fault," she raised a glowing arm, "Being all invested in my Wonder. Or, sometimes, people want to talk about ethics."

That was usually the more sympathetic of the Negaverse agents, though, the ones who would stop and talk to her if she looked at them sadly enough, or maybe if she'd given them enough of her own energy. Of course she'd talk to people from Order about it, too, if they seemed interested, but for some reason, he didn't seem the type.

"Other times, um, whatever else seems interesting. Food. Alcohol. Childhood."

It was strange, how much being asked what she liked hit her like a stake to the heart. She was the one that people came to when they were struggling with hardest questions of life. When they asked things like why they shouldn't kill, why they should consider leaving things behind, in the case of purification, what they could do to combat the void of trauma and depression, she always could come up with some soft and thoughtful answer for them.

This, though?

What she liked to talk about?

She didn't know if she'd thought about what she liked in years. It wasn't about her. It was about Encke. It was about Faustite. It was about the dozens upon dozens as others. It wasn't-

"Plants," she murmured, and she breathed.

"Flowers. I like gardening."

This question was just as difficult, but for a different reason. To the first question, it had seemed like she had no answer. For this one, there were too many, all flooding into her mind at once. There were a million petal shapes, and delicate scents, and scents, and sizes, and colors. Then you could get into breeds and variations, double-bloomed, curly-leafed, variegated.

Luckily, it was something she'd already given some thought too.

"Lilacs, maybe, if I had to choose," she said, "But there's a lot of others that I like, for different reason. Roses, I love the way that everyone loves them. There's so many varieties, and I love the way that they always come up in stories, in poems. I like snowdrops and crocuses, the first signs of spring."

Her voice was thoughtful, steady. Her eyes lit from within as she spoke.

"Lilies, they always make me think of stars. There's a few kinds of them, too. Maybe I can find one here that you don't mind so much, but I believe you, that the ones on your world are better."

She didn't ask about the health of his world, not yet. She had some guesses about what state it might be in.

"Oh, um, what's your name?" she asked instead.

"Oh, I'm Pendour," she said, like it didn't matter much, but she smiled anyway.

It was hard not to, when he was talking about one of her favorite things, when he seemed interested in it. Although, as she looked at what she could see of the plants around her, all gray-brown and spindly bare-branched, she had to shake her head a little at his timing.

"It's not a good time of year to find flowers for you. Even the crocuses won't be for a few weeks still." She glanced upwards, thoughtful, but didn't seem satisfied with that, either. "I have some things on my Wonder, some roses, but not everything there is blooming, either." The lilacs weren't. Even in the temperature controlled environment, they only bloomed every once in a while. Anyway, she'd gone up yesterday, so she couldn't go up today even if she'd wanted to.

There were pictures, maybe, but she didn't even suggest that. For some reason, she felt like he wouldn't be impressed with anything that was less than genuine.

"If I write you a letter, when I find a flower you might like, will you come look at it with me?"

Vilenius didn't have to show any radical enthusiasm. If they were talking about this, Pendour could carry all of the smiles, all night long.

"Of course I can show you what you can eat," she told him. "Lilies are one of them. Did you know that?"

He seemed like the kind of person who might already know that.

"Does it have to just be flowers, or can I show you vegetables, too?" If anything, she seemed even more excited about that in her soft way, her eyes wide and bright, her fingers curling and uncurling around her hair. Vegetables had been her first attempts at gardening, back when she was a child, and where she'd fallen in love with it all.

Of course she loved the rest, too, but if he wanted heirloom tomatoes? She could give him so many tomatoes.

"Although those are mostly later in the season. Um, May for all but the earliest."

Then through the summer, and the fall.

"Not soon," Pendour agreed. She narrowed her eyes in thought for a few seconds and whispered as she counted something on her fingers, then said, "A hundred days, maybe?"

Maybe. She wasn't good at math.

"The last month of spring," she told him, because he would understand that, she thought. "And you're capable of growing things. Anyone is. It's the plants that do most of the work."

Houseplants could be finicky, but anything grown outside depended more on the sun and the rain than what people did, although there were things that you could do to help them along.

"I will write you when it's warmer. I won't keep you here longer tonight, but, later, okay?"

It was nice, finding someone who wanted to know more about plants.