”Fides!”

Leander winced as he held his bleeding shoulder, an irritated growl grumbling in his throat. Dammit, he had let his guard down. How was it that she always managed to do that to him? He loved to be prepared and yet, when she was around he could only go with the moment. Even back then he had been so easy to surprise by her… He was a tall man, built and bred to fight. He had never made any qualms about his strength; Leander always loved to dance thinly on the line between pain and please, strength and weakness. He closed his eyes for a moment and he pictured his beloved sitting on the bed before him, a pretty and gorgeous little thing. She had always been so frail compared to him, especially when there was now fuku and armor between them, when the only thing that stood between them was a thin sheet. He wanted to show her he was so much stronger, wanted to let her be weak, wanted to let her be the treasure to be guarded instead of that hated jewel…

He had called to her, and he hadn’t meant, too… It was too much to hope that she hadn’t heard him. When he opened his eyes he saw his blood making a small puddle of droplets in front of him and suddenly, a different sort of pain ripped through him. A pain that had lasted over a millennia. A heartache and frustration and anger that would never go away… Leander had called to his dead princess and she was answering. Slowly he stood, ignoring the woozy feeling in the pit of his stomach and watched as she slowly dropped to her knees, the fuku disappearing into nothingness. He watched her with hard, guilty eyes. With the eyes that regretted Shay’s existence… Fides shouldn’t be trapped in that body. She should still be with him. Her looked up from underneath his baggy white bangs. His hair had once been a dark shade of golden brown, but now it was simply colorless from an eternity of heartache and stress.

As he looked down at the senshi, he saw that jewel that had ruined everything, falling from a tear. He hated it, and wanted to smash it to itty bitty little pieces, but he didn’t move forward.. She knew now. There was no sense in playing charades anymore. He was he was… She spoke to him. The secret was out. ”I loved Fides... It was her distrust that killed us.” Slowly he reached down to touch her hair but stopped, his hand curling up. ”Fides was mine… I would have never hurt her beyond repair. She’s not ‘destroyed’… She’s a part of you. I know she’s in there, I felt her… Aren’t you, Fides? Why don’t you come out to play?” He was teasing when he shouldn’t have been and he knew that, but it was the only way he hope to get a reaction out of the senshi’s inner. Fides had no right to blame this all on him. It was just as much her fault as his. ”I was just getting rid of her duty, of her restraints.”