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Halia was pissed. So majorly pissed. Her entire body vibrated in anger and vitriol and she definitely opened the door of her workplace a lot more aggressively than she ever had in her life. The cuts on her skin stung from the cold beneath the bandages, stinging worse when the warmth of the cafe touched it. During the fight, she had taken some decent damage from her left shoulder to her elbow, as well as her side, having turned just as a sword was slashed at her.

She looked over at the counter and met eyes with Kieran, looking fierce and admittedly furious, incredibly out of place for someone usually so quiet and withdrawn. "I need to speak to you. Now please." The cafe was thankfully customer free and there was another coworker on shift who could watch the counter. Without waiting for a response, Halia swiftly made her way back to the stock room, pacing back and forth as she waited for her friend.

She didn't want to yell, necessarily, but she had spent the rest of her night cleaning herself up and turning the entire event over and over in her head. It was wrong. It had been so very wrong. And the more she thought about it, the more it felt like anyone who answered that call for help had been drawn into an incredibly messed up trap. She needed answers, and Kieran was the only one she knew to look to for them.

Her usually soft pale brown eyes were vivid with fury, looking up from her pacing. The tone of her voice was even despite the clear anger. "Do you know what happened last night? With the SOS that went out?" Her body trembled subtly, though it wasnt clear if it was from the emotions she was feeling or from trying to ignore the ache in her side. "Did you know that people on our side kidnapped someone?" Her voice raised on the word "kidnapped", clearly distraught. She desperately wanted to believe he had no knowledge of this, that he was completely uninvolved in the utter <********> that she had walked into.

Unable to stay still, she continued pacing until she knocked against a shelf. It looked like she had barely brushed into it, but the pain on her face said otherwise. She grit her teeth and sat on a crate behind the door, trying to force the pain down. The pain killers must not have been working as well as they were advertised to. Maybe it was time for her to get new ones. She could worry about that later, though. When she wasn't having a moment.

Taking a deep breath to try and calm down, now that the jolt of pain helped clear her mind a little, she looked up at Keiran again, steadily meeting his eyes as she began to explain. "I responded to an SOS last night while I was on patrol. All it said was that a group of them were trapped and being attacked by the Negaverse. Turns out, they deserved it. They kidnapped someone and it pissed off some seriously powerful people. Faustite I think they called him. He was there, but I didn't see him. Just....felt him. I never have felt anything like that....it was overwhelming, Keiran. It was overwhelming and terrifying." She remembered reading his name in the sos but she had a feeling the intense feeling of chaos she felt there was from him.

"I thought we were the good guys. And last I checked, good guys don't kidnap people or take hostages. And good guys don't call for backup and not say that the attack was well provoked. Good guys don't lure backup into a trap, and that is exactly what it ******** felt like." Halia never swore, never yelled or raised her voice, nothing of the sort. She was always so quiet and mild mannered, always trying to blend in with the wall as much as possible. Perhaps it was the pain in her arm she kept babying, covered with a thick, plush cardigan. "Good guys don't put their own faction at risk, put their own people at risk, because they wanna leave out the fact they ******** did something awful. They don't do stuff like this....it isn't right..."

It had been, in so many words, A ******** Night.

Between finding Heliodor—Aelius, though hopefully the Negaverse would get him sorted out on that front quickly—bound and tortured in that dingy apartment, to dragging Kaifeng out into the night to help him snitch on their fellows among Order, to playing Faustite’s doe-eyed captive and getting starseeded about it, to waking up on Grieve’s home-world, well. A ******** lot had happened. Kiyoshi had been extremely grateful not to have a shift at work today……and yet, he found himself swishing through the front door at Puppy Paws anyway.

“What is it with people who don’t have shifts showing up today,” asked Madison, one of the coworkers currently behind the counter, as she rang Kiyoshi up for his green tea and brownie.

“I need to bother Keiran about something,” Kiyoshi explained with a shrug, strategically leaving off exactly what he had come to bother his Blossom about. Could never be sure with anybody you met out in civvies, whether they were involved with the great magical girl gang war or not (statistically, probably not), and if so, on what side (Order and the Negaverse felt like they both had pretty equal chances for random people turning up as members of them, while the Dark Mirror and the Vanguard aliens were significantly less likely simply due to them having fewer people). “He’s around right now, yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” said Madison, pointing a thumb over her shoulder, toward the back area. “You know where to look.”

Strictly speaking, Kiyoshi didn’t, but at least it wasn’t difficult. Once he had his drink and his little treat in hand, he checked the break room. Finding it empty of any adorable, blue-haired thots, Kiyoshi went to check the stock room instead. It was the blue hair that he spotted first, and absolutely nothing else—nor any other person, for that matter. Thinking that it was only Keiran and himself in here right now, Kiyoshi announced his presence with a loud, dramatic sigh, the sort that deliberately oversold the feeling behind it but, like, only because Kiyoshi needed to Be Like This in order to honestly express himself to the fullest.

“Blossom, gurl, you would not believe the absolute flaming garbage that I got myself into last night,” Kiyoshi said, projecting his voice like a dyed in the wool theatre kid, rather than truly raising it. Even so, he progressively lowered the volume and projection as he got closer, more in the vicinity of his normal way of speaking. “And I do use the word ‘flaming’ with very pointed intent right now, seeing as one of the primary participants in said bullshit is both extremely homosexual and literally on fire.”

Rounding the corner where he saw Keiran lurking, Kiyoshi leaned on a sturdy-seeming stack of boxes. “He seems to be doing about as well as usual, by the way. Which is to say ‘Not very, but bless him, he thinks he’s making it work, and I don’t know, by standards relative to his position and unique ******** of achingly specific trauma, he’s probably not wrong.’ Not that some of our esteemed associates made it easy for Faustite to make anything work last night, which I fully suspect was at least part of the point they thought they were making, and……”

Kiyoshi trailed off, turning his head toward Halia as he finally noticed that Someone Other Than Keiran had been here this whole time. “……Oh, hey, uh.” He threw on an apologetic grin. “Sorry, Halia, uh—I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?”

There was something fascinating about witnessing this. Keiran was very careful about telling anyone about anyone else's magical business--that just wasn't the sort of thing you spread around. Were Kiyoshi talking about this around anyone else, around someone who wasn't magical, Keiran would have rushed to stop him, but....here they were.

"Halia was just telling me about the spectacular ******** that seems to have occurred," he said, smiling tightly, and moving to give Kiyoshi the space to come in and be dramatic as he was wont to. "So while you're interrupting, it's with relevant information. I understands there was a kidnapping? One of Faustite's harem, then?"

Oh yeah. ******** around and find out. And it sounded like people had very distinctly found out. Not that Keiran was unsympathetic--Faustite was ******** dangerous, that was the whole thing, it was hard to forget exactly what he'd threatened Kerberos with and equally hard to forget how fanatically his team had shown up to defend him, and all of them seemed pretty goddamn unhinged. But it sounded like it had spiraled pretty damn badly, so here they were.

"You're both okay, though? No really serious damage? We can take off for somewhere quieter if you need more than basic first aid." Because he was not powering up in his cafe's back room, there was no way he was gonna paint that target, but he had healing magic now. There was no way he wasn't going to offer it.

Halia's mind was reeling, her brows seeming to pull into a permanent frown. "How many of us even work here..." It was more a question mumbled than actively asked. At Keiran's question of injuries, she carefully removed her cardigan to reveal a decent amount of bandages. "I got... sliced up decently. Shoulder down my arm, and my ribs to my waist. They had a sword." She once again thought back to Drombeg and hoped he was okay still.

And then her heart froze. Her eyes grew wide and she stared at Kiyoshi. "Wait. Wait. You had your starseed ripped out?" All color drained from her already pale face and she quickly came over to him, looking him over in extreme worry. It was something that had genuinely scared her ever since Kerberos told her about it when they first met, and something that had made her ever so cautious. "How can you be so calm about that?" She looked like she wanted to hug him, but didn't want to overstep boundaries. Well, that and the fact that lifting her arm hurt like hell.

“Miss Thing, I’d want to know all the details about that situation because what the ********>, Negas can just do that?”

This would have been an ideal time to have gotten a cold drink, Kiyoshi thought. Something in one of those big, annoying travel cups that made the distracting rattle noises when you knocked the ice around and the metal straws that slurped way too easily. Immediately busying his mouth with something else would have been a perfectly valid reason for him to not say anything vaguely word-shaped, if also instantly clockable as a stalling tacting. Alas, Kiyoshi had gone for green tea, and so he found himself tapping his fingers against the side of his cup, awkwardly trying not to look at the ceiling, or the floor, or the opposite wall.……

Anywhere but at Keiran and Halia, basically. Seeing as both of them were reacting to a situation that was obviously ******** fine, uh.

Well, very much like Yuki had done, actually. Minus the behavior-correction spray bottle that he had longstanding permission to break out whenever Kiyoshi was being unfairly down on himself, or overly neglecting his self-care, or saying anything that sounded like he wanted to apologize to Faustite for last night and, indeed, felt it was incredibly important that he do so.

A deep breath. A dramatic sigh. A b***h who owed Keiran and Halia actual answers.

“Okay, being real though,” Kiyoshi said, his tone dropping to something less effervescent by way of indicating that he was taking this conversation seriously. “Why I can be so casual about this, Halia, is…… It’s a long story? Some weird alien robots are involved? Somebody told them that they could become actual people and join the reincarnation cycle if they got themselves some starseeds. One of them, who happened to be from my senshi homeworld, nabbed mine. I was still with the Dark Mirror Court at the time, though, and being a Mirror senshi puts this, like? Reflective gunk all around your starseed like a straitjacket or a chastity cage.”

Wrinkling his nose, Kiyoshi traced one finger through the air, in a circle around two of his other hand’s fingers. It in no way resembled a starseed, but maybe, it conveyed the sense of “around,” in the same way that the Mirror-Coating stifled every single Dark Mirror senshi’s starseeds. And most of them didn’t even know, which was just……heinous and depressing to think about, honestly.

“Not to put too fine a point on it? Starseeds are not supposed to look all sterile and chrome and ugly. They’re beautiful and alive with color. Apparently, even weird alien robots know that, so Kimadesir was already having some second thoughts on seeing that, at the time, my starseed probably looked both extremely disconcerting and ********. Fortunately for me, this one—” He gestured at Keiran, “—came along and talked Kima down the rest of the way by being a bad b***h who knows when you’re not being your best self. And Kima was very sorry for everything and full of regret for what he’d done. Plus, I think he was friends with Airan, the last Sailor Sexy b***h of Hunger, and he’d been grotesquely misled, so I don’t think we should judge him too harshly, okay?”

Which still left Keiran’s questions to address more seriously.

Which, in Kiyoshi’s mind, merited another dramatic sigh.

“As for your hypothetical, Blossom,” he went on, “I would genuinely want to know all the details about that suspiciously specific situation. It sounds like some drama and you mentioned it to me, of all people. But—yes, I would not appreciate you being so blasé about your own safety like that. And okay, not having another Sailor Kerberos again? Also important. But I’m always going to be more concerned about the Sailor Kerberos who’s right here in front of me than about whoever you’ll reincarnate into, and I think I’m very brave and gay for standing by that.”

He also suspected that Orah would probably agree with him, but: 1. most likely, she was either sleeping or busy, and given she was a nurse, both of those things were important and made perfect sense; and 2. bringing up Hime-sama to emotionally manipulate Keiran was a low blow, so Kiyoshi wouldn’t go there. He would certainly think about it loudly, but he wouldn’t actually say anything to this effect.

“……If you are interested in my reasons for being so blasé,” Kiyoshi said, mostly making them up as he went (or at least rapid-fire trying to pin down his feelings for real instead of just Saying Words that felt mostly accurate), “then I would like to point out that Faustite did give my starseed back. I also had a rescuer in the form of an enormous, semi-feral alien senshi who bites.” Literally. Just like she’d been doing to Aelius last night. “And anyway, Faustite only took the scene so far because I didn’t pull any verbal punches on being sassy and playing the upset hostage. We didn’t discuss too many hard no-go’s before running in, since the kidnappers were talking about killing Heliodor and had been torturing him. I might have tripped a nerve and upset him for real, and arguably, not pulling my starseed could’ve been a tip-off that something was up with the façade.… Or he lashed out in anger but felt bad about it.… I’m……admittedly not as certain about what happened as I’d like to be.”

And Kiyoshi was gonna have to apologize to Faustite. Hopefully, in some way that didn’t involve recruiting Kaifeng and borrowing his signet ring (because he’d already been implicated in all this enough and was also a major risk for snitching to Yuki). But Kiyoshi didn’t think saying that out loud would go over too well right now, so he decided to test his tea with an experimental sip.

Damn. Still not steeped enough.

LenaxxRoze

Noir Songxxbird

"Corrupt Senshi can," Keiran corrected. "Well, alright. Officers can also do it, but they won't stay conscious when they do. So it's very stupid. But for Corrupt Senshi, as long as they're in contact with their starseed, they stay conscious, so...yeah, they can pop it out. Neat party trick." Sometimes, it was easy to forget how little people on this side knew about Chaos. How little they understood the specifics, the mechanics, the....details.

Finer things.

"And yes, Kiyoshi and I were both Chaos before we came over. It's possible to make that choice. To leave. But it's a whole process." He waved a hand. "Only sort of the point, anyway. The real point is, Kiyoshi: just because you lived, both times it's happened, doesn't mean it's not serious. A General-King pulled your starseed in a volatile combat situation, where any number of things could have gone wrong and resulted in your starseed being lost or damaged. He decided that risking your life was an acceptable cost for getting whichever of his boys was being held prisoner back. That is not the behavior of someone who cares about you. And I don't care what you said, it doesn't justify him going off in such a dangerous way."

There was so much information swirling in her mind that it was hard to pick just one thing to focus on. Halia frowned a little and nodded as Keiran spoke, definitely planning to ask him more later. As far as she was concerned, the more information she had to work with about this whole magical thing, the better. As Kiyoshi spoke, however, her heart ached just a little for him.

She nodded along, listening intently. She hadn't exactly met any Mirror senshi that she knew of, but she had assumed that they weren't the best news for someone of her faction to run into. At least, not based off how Keiran had explained it when she first met him as Kerberos. She squished down the fascination and curiosity for now and listened more, her lips quirking in a small smile at the want for knowledge that Kiyoshi had, finding it relatable. "Sounds like someone in the Mirror faction should really get it together and put pen to paper about it. You'd think in a cosmic war of good and bad that they would want to know the origin of where their side comes in." Or at least she would, if she were one of them. But then again, she was too scared to even visit her own planet on her own, too scared to see what had become of Aruna and whatever people that might have been there, so she supposed that senshi in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Her brow furrowed as he spoke of Faustite and she couldn't help just a little bit of sympathy from crawling up. The way Kiyoshi spoke of him made him sound a bit like a victim of really shitty circumstance, and something about that tugged on her heart a little. She quickly squished down the idea of wondering if Faustite was the sort to be amenable to talking rather than attacking on sight, remembering the horrid feeling of his power the night before. That would be a bad idea waiting to happen, and she really didn't need to add burn wounds to her already existing battle ailments.

At the implications of what his magic could do, Halia's cheeks colored slightly. She wondered exactly what it might make her want, and she mentally shook her head, not wanting to think about just how desperate to be liked she was or how utterly touched starved she knew she would be, how hugs never lasted as long as she would like or how praise felt so short lived. It was definitely something she would do her best to avoid getting hit by, not that she needed to say anything about it. And then her mind screeched to a stop. "I'm sorry did you just say they eat themselves?" She looked an odd mix of horrified and almost sad. While she had no love for youma, she had thought of them as something akin to very angry, very aggressive wild animals in a sense, and the thought of them trying to eat themselves made her heart hurt for them.

Upon hearing the General King referred to as a Tsundere, Halia choked back a laugh, covering her mouth. Somehow she highly doubted the guy would enjoy being called such, but that made it somehow even funnier to her. And then a sobering thought hit her. "Not that I'm....about to go make friends or anything but... makes me wonder if maybe there's a reason for him not outwardly showing he likes someone. I know that... sometimes s**t messes you up and makes you find it hard to be okay with liking someone, even just liking as a person. Sometimes life hands you a reason to be anxious about attachments and not know how to process that." Was she projecting? Absolutely. But neither of the guys in the room really knew that. "Maybe it's the fact you're someone he can't control that makes him unable to stop." It was more an idle comment than a suggestion, but she said it before she could stop herself. There was so much about this guy that made her curious, from everything Kiyoshi said. Humanizing an enemy was objectively a bad idea, but she couldn't help herself as she wondered just what had happened to twist Faustite this way.

Something clicked in her head and she arched a brow at Kiyoshi. "You were the one who tipped him off, then. About the s**t show last night." She had to admit that it was equal parts insanely stupid and insanely brave that he had put so much trust in someone who was very much not friendly. And then another realization sunk in. "I....wish I could have helped. Wish I would have known about you being part of this, she gestured vaguely, indicating the entire magical shitshow as a whole, "and that I could have helped, I don't know, get people out? I'm not saying I want to defect or anything, to be clear! I just.....disagree with everything that went down. If I would have known, maybe I could have helped somehow is all. Accidentally knocked some people down with a 'misplaced' landslide or something to help get the hostage out. Less damage to innocents that way." If they had known each others identities, maybe he could have looped her in as well. Maybe she could have helped. And maybe she wouldn't have sword slices down her left side. Instead, she still was sour over having gone in blind after the sos.

She gave Kiyoshi a small smile, reaching over and lightly squeezing his arm. "Now that I do know, will you let me come help next time?" Though hopefully there wouldn't be a next time, she wanted to be of any help that she could. Especially if it meant doing the right thing, like getting a hostage out of a very bad situation.