Oh, come the ******** on, self! Orcus closed her eyes and set her phone face down on the bricks in the backyard. This was her fourth.. Or was it fifth? attempt to access her phone in order to pay a long overdue visit to her homeworld. Each time, she’d chickened out at the last second, finger freezing over the little button that would send her into space.

Frankly, she was getting tired of it.

Taking a moment to ‘listen’ for hostile auras in the neighborhood, she sighed when nothing was detected and allowed herself to let go of her magical make-up. She needed to be able to think without the worry of her own aura luring unsavory types into the quiet street. Running fingers through her hair, she grabbed her phone and flipped it right side up, staring at the screen with its little accusatory home button. To think, after all the absolute s**t I’ve done and been through, this is what actually scares me. It was so stupid! She didn’t even have to stay up there for longer than a moment if the place turned out to be awful. So why was she balking so badly? “You need to figure this s**t out, girl,” she muttered to herself. “It’s not like there’s anything alive up there that could hurt you…”

Now, that thought brought a pause. Was that why she kept chickening out? Not because she was afraid of unknown things waiting to eat her face, but because she knew that there wouldn’t be anything except blasted and ruined landscape. Was that it? Niamh retreated into herself to examine the idea more closely. It… had merit. For all the things she’d done and seen and experienced in her relatively short life the idea of sitting by herself on a dead world was incredibly squicky. She wasn’t afraid of death as a concept. The idea of finding bones was kind of exciting rather than horrific. And she liked the idea of ruins and ages past. But as she tread further down that particular mental pathway, she realized that she found the idea of being alone on a completely dead world distasteful. Not necessarily frightening, but wrong, somehow. As if it was ghoulish to exist in a space where everything had been dust for millenia. Like she’d be flaunting how alive she was in the faces of everything and everyone who’d died there.

That was what kept giving her pause. Not horror, not fear. But the idea that it would be the height of rudeness to force her her living self onto a dead world and compel whatever ghosts it still held to deal with it.

She was still wrestling with the thought when she heard a soft, padding footfall in the grass behind her. She knew, without looking, that it was Nimue come to check on her.

“You’re still here?” her cousin’s voice was mildly surprised. “I thought that you would have been long since gone by now.”

From the corner of her eyes, she could see Nimue’s lanky figure plunk itself down on the brick next to her, just waiting. For a moment, Niamh resented the intrusion. Then felt a need to explain her thoughts to someone who might understand. Nimue had gone up to her own place after a long absence, after all. So, she began talking, explaining the odd fear and sense of intruding on the dead to her cousin. And, to her vast gratitude, Nimue did nothing more than listen. And, when she stopped talking, all Nimue did was reach out to clasp her hand and give it a friendly squeeze.

“All right, cousin,” the taller girl began, voice warm, but brisk. “Let’s consider this. You know that I only started going up to my wonder within the last two years. I told you all about it after. Do you recall one time I mentioned feeling surrounded by dead nothingness?”

Racking her brain, Nimah sought for the memories and had to shake her head slightly. Nimue had mentioned ruins, but also a small amount of new plant growth as well. Frowning, she turned her head slightly to see her cousin smiling at her, aware that she’d gotten to where Nimue needed her to be.

“I don’t see why my wonder would be an outlier in that regard. Even if there’s nothing growing on your world, you know we’ve both heard rumors of other senshi and knights making visits and finding new growth or even animals. Niamh, we were both at the Garde for that tournament thing. I sure didn’t see any signs of desolation or death there. Did you?”

Forced to shake her head, Niamh considered the Garde. No, she couldn’t say that it had been dead in any sense. But there had been a multitude of animals and plantlife. Those horse things… Accolades had been very much alive and well. Turning a sour look to her cousin, Niamh sighed and said, “You think I’m being ridiculous, don’t you.”

“Never that, cousin of mine,” Nimah answered firmly. “I do think that you tend to think of yourself as a bad person and thus anything intimately connected to you must also be bad. So, because you are Bad, clearly your homeworld must be dead and beyond even rot and resent you for not being equally dead. For what it’s worth, I don’t think your world could ever hate you for being alive. How could it? It’s part of you. But I’m certain that it misses you dearly. We both spent such a long time in the dark and then even more time after that trying to come to terms with ourselves. And our poor worlds have had to wait for us. Don’t you think you’ve kept it waiting long enough?”

It was one of Nimue’s longer speeches and surprisingly insightful given that most of the time, her cousin acted like a human equivalent to a golden retriever. It was, in fact, so good that Niamh found herself hard pressed to find any arguments against it. And that must have shown in her face because Nimue laughed and pushed herself to her feet with a soft, “Just think about it, will you?” before padding back to the house and leaving her alone again with her thoughts.

Pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around her knees, Niamh did think about it. Even to the point of closing her eyes and mentally retreating into herself to take stock of herself. It was true that she’d always considered herself a bad person. She enjoyed others’ discomfort, sometimes even their pain. She had been cruel, even sadistic at times. With all of that, how could she be anything but bad? Yet, Nimue had faith in her. The little theatre troupe that she watched over and worked for all cared for her. And she loved them all dearly. Enough that she’d been willing to die fighting the Hallow if it had meant keeping them alive and safe. So… she couldn’t be completely bad, right? Maybe Nimue was right and her world was just quietly waiting for her and missing her.

“We’ll never know for sure if we don’t at least try,” she murmured into her kneecaps. “Maybe it’ll be okay.”

Word Count = 1215