Chapter 43: The Most You've Lost On A Toss
The tip of the unwrapped cigar landed on Kunzite's chest after being neatly sliced off by the sharp clipper. Quickly flicking it away onto the floor, Kunzite placed the other end of the cigar between his teeth, reaching over towards the bedside table.
"Hey," Venus protested, picking her head up from the other side of the bed and looking over at the discarded fleck of refuse from the cigar. "I've got a deposit I need to get back on this room, you know."
"I'm sure you can afford it," Kunzite countered, raising a lighter up in front of the cigar tip and igniting it. "I'm making you a fortune."
"A fortune that I'd rather spend on more important things," Venus said.
Their clothes were piled up haphazardly on the floor at the foot of the bed, the room dimmed with only the natural light sneaking through the curtained windows to illuminate things.
"You can't light that thing up inside, I'll lose the deposit for sure," Venus argued as Kunzite reached over to the bedside table.
"I will pay for the deposit, now stop ruining the mood," Kunzite said stiffly, fumbling around until his fingers closed around a thin black lighter.
"Feel better?" she asked as he ignited the tip of the lighter and placed it up against the thicker end of the cigar.
"Mm," Kunzite murmured. "Not that this has done anything to fix my problems."
"Well, it's fixed at least one of them," she insisted. "Give me some kind of credit."
Kunzite began to puff smoke out of the cigar. "There's been no progress with Cronus," he said quietly. "Our one year commitment to work in his lab is coming to a close in less than a cycle and a half."
"Oh, stop," she said dismissively. "It's all going to be fine, I don't need to hear about the journey. The destination is good."
"I wish I had your confidence," Kunzite murmured. "It's becoming harder and harder for me to even imagine a positive outcome, honestly."
"Re-considering my suggestion?" she asked sarcastically. "Again, I would personally prefer that you didn't, but if you seem so convinced that this can only end in your death, it would just be smart to find a way to disappear."
"I…" he shook his head. "No. I'm not doing that. My fate is tied to Prince Endymion's fate. If he has done things that doom him to an early death, then all there is for me to do is to either do everything I can to stop it or to die with him."
"I'm sure you've been told things like that over and over in the last few years, and it's easy for you to convince yourself it's true, but I'm telling you, it doesn't have to be," Venus continued.
"Are you sure you don't want me to run away?" Kunzite asked, continuing to blow thick plumes of smoke out of the cigar, up towards the air vent above his head, the fumes quickly getting sucked in. "Because you sure seem set on convincing me."
She shrugged. "You won't be any good to me dead. What I want is for you to do what I know you're the best in the universe at, and eliminate your target, but if you're so convinced that you can't do it, then why not act in self-preservation." She propped her head up on her right palm, putting her elbow down into the mattress. "It's not as if you spent your whole life thinking you were going to be an Earth general, did you? You must have imagined yourself doing something else with your life before that."
"What does that have to do with anything?" Kunzite asked.
"I'm just saying, it shouldn't be that hard for you to imagine yourself doing something else. You weren't just born to be the Prince's bodyguard without any other possibility. Come on, what did you think you were going to do with your life before becoming a general was on the table?"
Kunzite lightly scowled, staring down at the lit tip of his cigar.
"Don't tell me you were thinking about being an Earth general when you were six years old or something," Venus teased.
"Regional governor," Kunzite said after a moment. "That's what I thought I was going to be when I was younger."
"Oh boy," Venus groaned.
"I'm serious," Kunzite said. "My father's a local governor for a small county in the eastern hemisphere called Kaggir. It just made sense that I would try to take the next step up from his position and be placed in charge of the entire region. That's the way it was going to go until my father realized that my abilities would be wasted behind a desk. And of course, there's no higher position of power I can aspire to than to be the right hand of the future King."
"Local governor?" Venus repeated. "That's a little disappointing."
"What?" Kunzite asked competitively.
"Oh, nothing, just...your ascent to having such an important role in the Earth Palace isn't quite as impressive when you've got a silver spoon in your mouth," Venus said casually.
"That doesn't happen," Kunzite said defensively. "You don't go from the slums to the palace, that's fairytale nonsense." He sternly pointed his right index finger over towards the blonde princess. "Jadeite's father owns the biggest shipping company in the far east. Nephrite's father was a seven-time All-World professional handball player—"
"Okay, okay!" Venus said, waving her hand casually over towards the Earth general. "I wasn't trying to make a big deal out of it."
"All...all Earth generals come from wealthy families," he muttered.
"Either way, that's not exactly what I meant," Venus said dryly. "What did you think you wanted to be? Not what someone told you you were going to be, or what you needed to be to advance the family lineage. What would you have done if you didn't have any of that pressure? What if you could have just done whatever you liked the most?"
Kunzite shifted his head back and forth slowly a few times, tilting it around.
"Please tell me you had hobbies or something," she goaded.
"Hunter," he finally said. "Like a trophy hunter. I think I would have liked that. I did a lot of hunting growing up."
"Okay, now we're talking," Venus encouraged.
"In the woods outside Kaggir there are a lot of Cabaras. You know what those are?" he asked.
"Not a clue," she admitted.
"Four-legged. Big. Pretty similar to a wolf, but a lot more vicious and deadly. They serve no useful purpose, they're just menaces that attack and kill people. There are no restrictions or regulations on hunting them, there's no interest in keeping them alive. On more than a few occasions, we've had squadrons of elite soldiers comb through the entire forest, trying to exterminate them, but you can never get them all. They live deep in caves, underground tunnels. It takes a lot to put one down. They move quickly. Even if you get ninety percent of them, a year later they've bred their way back. But we do what we can to keep their numbers down. So, every autumn and spring after I turned thirteen, I would get out there with my father and brothers as often as possible, and mow down as many of them as we could."
"Okay, that's the kind of stuff I like," Venus said, pointing emphatically over at Kunzite. "That's how I wanted to imagine you were raised."
"Now, most people, the only objective was to kill them. Obviously, right? Big, ferocious pack animals that think nothing of ripping a full-grown man to pieces in a matter of beats, if you run into one, all you want to do is fill it with holes until it can't hurt you anymore. But sometimes, you'd be able to sneak up on one that had strayed away from the pack, was all alone. And me, well, when something like that happened, I liked to go for bonus points. I wanted a skin. Something you could carve up and stuff, make a statue out of. You'd have to plug them right in the neck, right in the spine, or else you'd just make them mad, and then it'd just become about survival. Hardly anyone ever even tried, but I always did. I have eight stuffed Cabaras in a display room back home in Kaggir. More than half of all currently in existence. A collector offered me half a million creds for one of them, but I can't bring myself to part with them."
"So, what you're saying is, you could have been the greatest trophy hunter who ever lived," Venus suggested.
"Maybe," Kunzite acknowledged.
"So it shouldn't be that hard for you to imagine doing something else! That's all I'm trying to say. Just something to consider," she insisted.
"Well, I'm not considering it," Kunzite said as Venus curled up closer to his side. "And after I'm done with this, I have to go." He held the cigar up in front of his face before resuming working on it.
There was a short silence in the room, Kunzite blowing more smoke up towards the vent.
"To be clear, I don't want you to," Venus finally said. "I want you to bury Cronus like I know you're fully capable of doing, I want you to come out on the other side of all this without a speck of dirt on you, and I want our business relationship to continue for years."
"You know, Your Highness, it's only because of Cronus that we have a laboratory and materials. Once he's gone, I'm not sure how we continue to work together," Kunzite pointed out.
She shrugged. "Then we figure something out. That's too much potential money for any of us to just walk away from. But it only matters if you stay alive."
"
"Uh, Serenity, sweetie, it's me. Um, I just...I just wanted to talk to you real quick, but, uh...well, I just wanted you to know that...well, I love you."
Serenity pursed her lips down at her disc-shaped communicator as the holographic soundwave disappeared, and she quickly reached forward to tap a button along the outer edge of it.
"Uh, Serenity, sweetie, it's me. Um, I just...I just wanted to talk to you real quick, but, uh...well, I just wanted you to know that...well, I love you."
After this repetition of the recorded message, Serenity, curled up on the bed inside Prince Endymion's bedroom, turned her focus to a text-filled tablet in front of her, holding it up in front of her face. A news story was spread out along the screen.
HEAD SCIENTIST AT GALEN LABORATORIES FOUND DEAD IN SPACE, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED
With her face lined with wrinkles born of concern, she scanned the cycle-old story, detailing the report of Viluy's corpse being found amid a wrecked freighter in the middle of deep space. She had already read the story before, and had heard about the incident when it had originally happened. But there was something about it that was starting to nag at the back of her mind, something that made her keep coming back to it.
The bedroom door opening didn't distract her from her readings, and neither did the collection of young men piling into the room. She barely paid attention as her husband began speaking.
"Rule number one, burn these to cinders when you're done with them," Endymion said, tossing a stack of text-covered sheets of paper onto the bed next to his blonde wife. "No paper trail, ever. Just count it up, and…"
Endymion trailed off on realizing that she wasn't paying attention to him, leaning over to look at the tablet in her hands. "Hey, sweetie?"
Serenity slowly brought her head around to look at her husband, now noticing that all four of his generals were behind him as well.
"Something the matter?" Endymion asked, blanching a bit when he realized what she was looking at on her tablet.
"That call you made to me a while ago. Why did you do that?" she asked.
"W-...what? What are you talking about?" He blinked rapidly a few times, still clearly focusing on the news story she held in her hands.
"That call, you left the recording, you just said that...that you loved me. Just out of nowhere, no context, just...why? What got you to do that?"
"Oh, what, I shouldn't have?" Endymion shrugged. "Come on, I can't just tell my wife that I love her? I have to have a reason?" He reached over, trying to gently take the tablet out of her hands. "Now—"
"Did you know this person?" she asked suddenly, yanking the tablet back towards her and away from Endymion's fingers, tilting the screen towards him. "This woman, were you working with her?"
"U-uh...w-what?" Endymion's face puckered up. "Where did THAT come from?"
"This woman, she was the lead scientist for Galen Laboratories," Serenity continued. "Run by Cronus. That's who you've been working with, right?"
"Uh, I...oh, Gods," Endymion muttered, spinning around and heavily falling back into a sitting position on the bed, groaning as he did so. "How do you have time for all this sleuthing? You've got a young daughter."
"So, it is? There aren't that many people in the galaxy that it could be. It makes too much sense. It's him, isn't it?" she continued, rolling up onto all fours and putting her head up by Endymion's shoulder.
"Serenity, you don't need to know everything about what I'm doing," Endymion grumbled. "It doesn't matter who I'm working with, it's actually better you don't know. He might see you knowing as a problem. He wouldn't like it." He waved his hand over towards his four generals. "Okay, we're taking up their time now too, they're here to go over some figures with you, can we get to that?"
"Endy, did you know Viluy?" Serenity continued to press, clearly unwilling to just drop things. "The lead scientist for Galen, you were making imperium for Galen, you must have been working together."
'I was, maybe, a few times, in the same room as her," Endymion said, clearly annoyed. "I wasn't working with her, most of the time we weren't even on the same planet. She really had nothing to do with my work."
"And then she just shows up dead like that?"
"Nothing to do with me!" Endymion insisted. "I...I don't know what happened there. R-read the follow-up stories, I'm pretty sure it was some sort of terrorist attack, unrelated to me!"
"Are you sure?" she continued, voice laced with urgency. "Because, I've been thinking lately. The black eyes, that call, it just...are you in some sort of danger?"
Endymion sighed. "Serenity, we've been over this. I'm just a man with an extremely well-paying job."
"No, I don't think so," she continued. "I think you called me because...because you were afraid. Like, you were scared that it might be your last chance to say something to me."
"Serenity, that's ridiculous," Endymion snapped. "I...I'm the Crown Prince of Earth, next in line to become the High King, possibly the most powerful person in the galaxy. Nobody is going to do anything to me. Things like that don't happen. I wouldn't put myself in that situation if there was danger."
"Then why don't you quit today?" Serenity asked. "Just stop going in to work, call Cronus and tell him that you can't do this anymore. You said you couldn't. Said you were stuck working for him."
"Because...because, I made an agreement with Cronus, and I want to honor it," Endymion protested, squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head.
"Endymion, I mean it," Serenity continued. "If you are in danger, then you need to extricate yourself from this business. Nothing else matters. If you're in danger, we go to your father."
Endymion hiccuped with laughter. "Oh, my father, that's a wonderful idea. He'll be so understanding and supportive when he realizes what I've been doing the last year. Serenity, listen to yourself."
"It's better than you...you going into work one day and getting shot in the head!" Serenity yelped.
"Oh...you're reading too many fiction books!" Endymion shook his head. "I'm not getting shot in the head. And by the way, if I do go to my father, I spend the rest of my life in prison, so I'm not really seeing that as a viable option."
"Well...definitely not," Zoisite chimed in, finally bringing the four generals back into some degree of focus in the conversation.
"Hm?" Serenity prompted.
"Just...you wouldn't go to prison," Zoisite explained. "You have the most valuable bargaining chip in the universe. Enough imperium to run the galaxy for over a century. Whatever happens, we can use that to cut any kind of deal we want."
"Okay...no one asked you," Endymion said gruffly, waving his hand over towards Zoisite, who quickly faltered. "And either way, my father will disown me if he finds out about all this. I'm potentially a couple cycles away from being given the throne, I'm not doing anything to endanger that right now!"
"Better disowned than dead!" Serenity pointed out. "You can go buy a nice vacation home on Neptune or Mercury, live out the rest of your life in comfort and luxury, I...Endy, I am not saying any of this lightly. I understand, this is not what I want. But I think your life is in danger."
Endymion got to his feet, resting his hands on his hips, aimlessly pacing a few steps back and forth.
"I don't think you're telling me everything, Endy. I think you're in over your head. You've spent your whole life in a palace, surrounded by servants, you're not someone who can...just become the kind of person who can...who face death every day! You're not some hardened criminal!" She sighed. "I tried, Endy. I tried to be okay with this, but...really. You have a daughter, you're a father. You can not put yourself in this situation if you're in danger."
"Serenity," Endymion said sternly. "You don't understand what's going on here." He pointed up towards the ceiling. "There's a freighter currently out in the middle of deep space holding quadrillions of creds in raw imperium. It's the only thing that can save this galaxy from complete collapse over the next century." He tapped himself on the chest with his right palm. "And nobody can get to it but me. That makes me untouchable!"
"Endy, no—" Serenity started.
"I'm the lynchpin holding this entire solar system together! Without me, it'll all be doomed to fall into darkness. Do you have any idea how much money I make Galen Laboratories every single day? No business, no corporation in the entire galaxy generates more profit than I do. Organizations with hundreds of buildings, millions of employees, I outdo them all with one partner and a single lab. And without me, it's gone forever! So long as that imperium belongs to me, I'm bulletproof! I have nothing to fear, nobody can touch me. I'm not just the man you married anymore."
"Oh, believe me, I know," Serenity said thickly.
"No, you don't," he insisted. "Clearly, you don't. You still think I'm that...clueless kid! As if I just fell backwards into this world, that I don't belong here. Serenity, I'm here because I'm the most important, most powerful person in the galaxy! Nothing real, nothing significant happens without my permission! I die, the galaxy dies!"
Serenity sighed, covering her face with her hands. "Endy, you can't honestly think any of that. You're not invincible. These things you're saying, none of that is going to save you." Slowly, she looked up, over at the bedroom door. "The more I think about it, the more I...I just feel like, one day, these people that you're working with. They're going to come here, kick that door down, and kill us both. A-and all this, all this...talk, all these things you're saying, none of it is going to save you. You're still just a man."
Endymion seemed halfway to seething at that statement. "You really don't get it. You still don't." He pointed over at the door. "It won't be this door. And I'll be the one kicking it down." With that statement, he turned on his heel and marched right through his gathered generals, all four of them jumping to the side to clear way for him as he went over to the bathroom. Serenity continued to glumly stare over towards the bedroom door, all four generals watching the Prince slam the door shut behind him.
Amid the uneasy tension, Jadeite leaned in close to Kunzite's ear, whispering below the notice of the Princess. "My room, tonight, after dinner."
Kunzite quickly nodded as Jadeite moved to repeat the short message to his other fellow generals.
"
Jadeite, with a couple of emphatic thumb-presses on the remote, engaged the locking mechanisms in the door of his room, assuring a solid seal between the four Earth generals and the outside world. He tossed the remote down to the bed surface, then looked around at his three colleagues.
"Alright, gentlemen, it's time. We need to have a real conversation about this," Jadeite began.
"Yes, you should trade for defender depth, your left flank is weak and you need the team to win now so you can turn around and sell them for a profit," Nephrite said.
"I'm trying to be serious here!" Jadeite snapped. "And I don't need you to tell me how to run a handball team, by the way."
Jadeite leaned back, hands on the bed surface behind him to support his weight. Nephrite and Kunzite stood right across from him, in front of the wardrobe, both staring at him. Zoisite was curled up in the corner, arms crossed tightly over his chest.
"Anyway, I think we all know what's going on here." He looked over at Kunzite. "Buddy, we've already talked about this, and I've tried to see it your way, I've tried to just ignore things and trust your judgement, but...look, I'm not by myself here. I've talked to Zoisite and Nephrite over the last cycle, in private, and they're seeing the same things I am."
"Can we get on the same page here?" Kunzite asked. "What are you talking about?"
Jadeite rolled his eyes. "The Prince! Knock it off, you know exactly what this is about! We need to take action, fast."
Zoisite bit down on his lower lip. "I'm certainly not happy about it, but...it might be time to actually do something about this. You should know better than any of us, things have gotten out of hand."
Kunzite sighed. "Can't stand up to me on your own, so you get them to back you up, I see."
"It's not like that!" Jadeite protested. "Look, I just...I needed to know that other people were seeing the same things that I am. It's not just me."
"Kunzite, he's got a point," Nephrite chimed in, turning towards the eldest of the four generals. "I get it, my job is to follow orders, but there's another consideration here."
"Alright. Fine." Kunzite squared up towards Jadeite. "Lay it on me. What's on your mind?"
Jadeite sighed. "We all have the same order from the High King. We serve the Prince, but we also monitor him. All four of us were warned that he might have inherited his mother's mental illnesses. And that if we had reason to believe that he had, we had to report it to the High King."
"Yes, I'm aware," Kunzite stated.
"Well, from my perspective, the Prince has exhibited behavior and taken actions that give plenty of reason to believe that he's got his mother's illness. So, I'm suggesting that we need to take this to the High King, now. Need I remind you that he's just a cycle or two away from taking the throne, at which point none of this will matter?"
"Okay," Kunzite said. "Where do I start?"
"I r-really wanted to wait for you to realize it on your own, I thought that...with you spending so much time around him by yourself, you'd figure it out on your own, but we're running out of time!" Jadeite said, speech hurried and quick. "Kunzite, please, he's...he got himself neck deep in the criminal underworld for no reason, that alone is enough to suspect that he's not right in the head. And the fact that...I mean, really, he's marching into that lab every other day, knowing that one day he's going to be walking right into his own execution, and he just keeps doing it! Sane people don't do that!"
"Because he has no other choice," Kunzite stated flatly. "And no, turning himself in to his father is not a choice."
"Isn't it?" Zoisite said. "We already discussed this, he'd never see the inside of a prison cell once they realize what he has to bargain with."
"It doesn't matter, it's not an option, you heard him this morning," Kunzite insisted.
"Did you hear him this morning?" Jadeite snapped, jolting up into a standing position. "Ranting and raving about how...nobody can do anything to him, that he's invincible, and you know better than anyone that none of that is true! How can you listen to him act like that and not conclude that something is wrong with him?!"
"He knows it's not true," Kunzite said, putting his right hand out towards Jadeite to try to calm him down. "I assure you, he knows exactly where he stands. He was just...trying to ease Serenity's concerns."
"Well, he did an amazing job of that," Nephrite muttered. "Probably just made it worse."
"That's besides the point," Kunzite dismissed hurriedly. "The point is, he doesn't actually believe that he's bulletproof."
"Alright," Zoisite said. "We can debate the little things, but the bigger point remains. Endymion's been acting oddly for a year now. And we have our order from the High King."
"Yes, we do," Kunzite said. "Our order is to inform him if we are given reason to believe that Prince Endymion has inherited his mother's mental illness." He tilted his head to the right. "Are any of you aware of what happened to his mother?"
"Every case is different, dementia...can manifest itself in different ways," Zoisite pointed out.
"She was forgetting words, dropping her train of thought constantly, struggling to string sentences together. I've seen none of that with the Prince, and none of you have either," Kunzite countered. "The High King never asked us to inform him if his son started acting strangely, or made questionable decisions. It was specific to dementia. And I see nothing here to indicate dementia."
"Well, none of us are doctors!" Jadeite spread his arms out to his sides. "None of us have the knowledge or training to diagnose mental illness, all we can do is make educated guesses, and then hand it off to the experts. And what we've seen is enough to make an educated guess that he's not right." He stared over at Kunzite. "Kunzite, if there's something really wrong with him, and he takes the throne, what do you think is going to happen to the Kingdom of Earth? Are we really going to just sit there and let that happen?"
"Okay." Kunzite leaned up against the wardrobe doors behind him. "So. How exactly do we tell the High King about our concerns without admitting to his activities over the last year? I'm sure you have a plan for that, because sure you can't be thinking that our next move is to confess all of his crimes to the High King."
Jadeite pushed his right hand's fingers through his blond hair. "Kunzite, this is bigger than that now! We are nearing the point of no return! Order One becomes moot as soon as he takes the throne. The whole Kingdom is at risk."
"What happens in your head once we bring all this before the High King?" Kunzite questioned. "What do you think happens to us, once Kasios is told that we've been helping him all this time? That we've had every opportunity to stop him, and have done the exact opposite?"
"We were following our orders," Nephrite said. "Our instructions are to serve the Prince, we were doing that. Our belief that he might be suffering from dementia is something that developed very recently, at which point Order One took priority."
"Alright. Suppose you're wrong," Kunzite continued. "Suppose that he's fine, no mental illnesses, no signs of his mind deteriorating. Suppose all the best experts in the galaxy come together to run every test known to man, and they come back with nothing. What happens then?"
Jadeite sighed, giving a grumpy glance over to the wall to his left.
"We will be responsible for the Prince being disowned and removed from the line of succession. You get that? You see how high the stakes are? You three starting to understand that we can't just go hand a report off to his father and then just hope everything works out?" He shrugged. "Guys, think it through."
A thick silence hung in the room for several beats.
"Princess Serenity had the right idea this morning," Zoisite mumbled, barely audible. "Better than him being dead."
"Is it?" Kunzite asked.
"Wh-...yes, yes it's better!" Jadeite jumped in enthusiastically. "Kunzite, you care about him, I know you do! You said it yourself, he has a noose around his neck, he's just waiting for Cronus to yank the rope! Mentally ill or not, if we turn him in to his father, at least he'll be safe!"
"It's not our place to make that decision," Kunzite insisted. "We are duty-bound to a strict and narrow interpretation of Order One, that's it."
"...well...maybe we shouldn't be," Jadeite continued, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. "At least he'll be safe in an interrogation room on board The Savery, telling the agency everything he knows about Cronus. He wouldn't have to stick his head back out until until he and his whole operation is reduced to ashes. We're supposed to protect him, aren't we?"
"He would not consider it to be protecting him if our actions guarantee he never takes the throne," Kunzite reminded his younger colleague.
"Kunzite," Zoisite began. "Do you have...any confidence, any reason to believe that you can handle Cronus before he acts? Do you even have a plan right now?"
Finally, Kunzite's resolve faltered a bit in the face of that question, and he glanced down towards the ground. "It's a...it's a long process."
"So what are we talking about here?" Zoisite continued. "Nothing for us to do but just sit here and wait for him to get killed? I hate to say it, but Jadeite's right. Even if we're wrong, we can save his life by doing this. I'll agree with you, he probably doesn't have what his mother had. I hear you. But maybe this is the time to stretch the language of the order a bit in order to save the Prince from something worse."
Kunzite exhaled out of his mouth, still looking rather defiant even as his strict incredulity was beginning to crumble. "You're all fools if you think we won't be banished," he reminded them. "Even if we bargain our way out of prison."
"We'll live," Nephrite reasoned. "Which is more than we can say for you if you keep showing up at that lab."
"Kunzite, I'll bottom-line it," Zoisite began. "All three of us are on the same page. We think it's time to take this to the High King, and we've all had the chance to weigh the risks and downsides. Maybe it's not exactly what his mother had, but it's getting harder to deny that something is wrong with him, and he might not be fit to rule, that alone is enough reason." He pointed both hands over towards the elder general. "But we're not doing anything without a unanimous decision. It's up to you."
"Well, good," Kunzite said. "Because if any of you were to try to sneak around behind my—"
"Kunzite, none of us are going to do that," Nephrite interrupted. "You've been around him longer than any of us, you know him better than us, you spend more time with him than us, nobody is better qualified to make the final call than you are. You deserve to decide this."
"But you really have to decide it!" Jadeite added. "That means, you need to actually really think about it. Think about his actions, his words, his behavior, put it all together in your head, and decide, is this enough of a warning signal to report it? You need to actually be objective about it. Not just...standing here, arguing for the sake of arguing, or arguing because you don't want to see Endymion disowned. You need to give this an honest shot in your mind."
Zoisite nodded. "Kunzite, please. I know you don't want to do it, but you need to think about whether or not you need to do it." He pointed towards the door. "So, you go do whatever you want to do tonight, mull it over, really try to consider all the angles...and you tell us what you want to do in the morning. And whatever choice you make, we'll respect, but we need you to actually take it seriously."
Kunzite had fallen silent for quite a long time now, listening to their request of him, and found himself continuing to weaken in his resistance in the face of the more reasoned discussion on their part. He straightened himself up off the wall, blinking rapidly. "A-alright. Sure. Tomorrow morning before breakfast."
"Really think about it!" Jadeite insisted. "Please! Because, really...I think he needs help."
"I will," Kunzite said, voice quiet and not as commanding as usual. "Just...the ramifications of taking this action are massive."
"The ramifications of inaction might be bigger," Zoisite pointed out. "You know history. What happens to Kingdoms when they're ruled by someone mentally unsound?"
He gave a half-hearted shrug, then turned towards the door. "Unlock please," he murmured.
"
Kunzite sat at the bottom edge of his bed, staring straight forward at the wall of his boring, dull, uninteresting bedchamber, doing exactly what his colleagues had requested he do. He was deep in thought, considering every single action that the Prince had taken since that day in the mines, remembering every word that he had personally heard come from his mouth.
"
"I'm sorry."
Before Jericho could reply, Endymion kneeled down by his head, grabbing him by the hair and holding him with his left hand. His right hand emerged from his inside pocket, holding a broad dagger, maybe a couple palms long. In a single, smooth motion, he jammed the sharp blade into the back of Jericho's neck, firmly shoving it through the flesh, pushing it all the way to the hilt.
Endymion knew enough about human anatomy to know that his goal was to sever the spinal cord, cutting the brain off from the rest of the body's nervous system. Quick and relatively painless. He tried to focus his mind on little informational factoids like that, and not the horrible little death rattle that Jericho gave off as his body stiffened, then relaxed, falling limp to the stone floor.
Endymion withdrew the blade from Jericho's body, quickly standing up and releasing his head. Without even really thinking about it, he dropped the weapon to the floor, vaguely hearing it clang and clatter against the rock ground. He took a couple shaky steps back from the warm corpse on the ground, staring down at the panicked expression on its face.
He felt a vague swirling in his head now. He felt dizzy, detached. His arms went slack at his sides, suddenly feeling quite weak. Unpleasant tastes were building inside his mouth.
And then, he was pulled out of this miasma by Kunzite roughly grabbing his right shoulder and spinning him a quarter-turn so they were looking right at each other. His expression contained a level of rage that Endymion didn't know his guardian could possibly direct at him.
"You should have let me do that," Kunzite growled, staring Endymion directly in the eyes, reaching up to grab Endymion's hair and holding him.
"I...I…" Endymion babbled, still feeling slightly shaky and hard of breath.
"What are you thinking?" Kunzite snapped, closely examining Endymion's wide, dilated eyes. "I never asked you to be the executioner, I would never ask that."
…
"Go ahead, then," Endymion dared. "Kill me, get the raw product from Kunzite, and then kill him. I've made it very easy for you, and you seem to have plenty of confidence in your ability to somehow get away with it, I'd be fascinated to hear how you plan on pulling that off, actually. Kill us, and leave yourself with a hole in the ground worth tens of millions of creds. Your dealers will have nothing to distribute, your entire distribution chain collapses without us. And if you're fine with that, then you go right ahead."
Cronus, with nothing but a twitch of his finger between him and killing Endymion, continued to just hold in that pose, the barrel of the weapon starting to shake slightly.
"Do it," Endymion taunted. "Throw away a revenue stream worth hundreds of billions of creds, destroy the infrastructure you've spent the last decade building, surely that's how a successful businessman does things. Do it. Do it!" He took a few more steps towards Cronus. "DO IT!"
Finally, Cronus slowly lowered the barrel of the gun down towards his side, an action that seemed to take no small amount of effort. Kunzite released a breath that he didn't realize he had been holding in. Though the thick tension in the room remained for several beats, eventually, the weapon was pointed down at the floor, no longer an imminent threat to Endymion.
"Yeah," Endymion growled.
…
Endymion closed his eyes, right hand closing down on the lever as his left hand went across his body to rest against the jump button. The alarms kept screaming at him, protesting against every single movement he made, and the flashing red lights felt like they were boring through his eyelids. Nevertheless, he slowly brought the thin, silver lever back towards him.
He was snapped from his trance-like state as Kunzite's large hand grabbed his left wrist and ripped it away from the button. He opened his eyes just in time to watch his white-haired guardian yank him out of the pilot seat and spin him over towards the right side of the cockpit, with more than enough force to get him to let go of the silver lever.
Frantically, Kunzite pushed the lever back into a forward position, then pulled back on the one above the seat. The audible and visual alarms deactivated, instantly easing the environment of the cockpit by eliminating the red tinge that filled the entire compartment. As if racing against the clock, he zipped through menu options on the ship's main control panel to reactivate the jump lock, making sure that the ship would only accelerate to maximum speed if the route plotted was obstruction-free.
With the immediate danger sated, Kunzite turned to face his charge, mouth slightly open as he looked him over. Clearly too shocked to say anything, he just slowly let his eyes scan the Prince up and down, as if expecting him to suddenly morph into a demon, with the real Endymion tied up somewhere in a bathroom.
…
"I was just thinking...wouldn't be such a bad way to go," Endymion continued, looking back out towards the freighter in the distance, which was now moving purposefully to the east. "Would look like an accident or a malfunction. Nobody would be wondering what happened to us. Be instantaneous, we wouldn't feel a thing. And, hopefully, nobody would ever find out about all the things we've done over the last year."
Kunzite's forehead knitted together as Endymion slowly put his hands behind his back, clasping them together.
"That wouldn't be such a bad thing. You know, I had sex last night?" He turned back around to face his guardian. "I felt it, too. For a few minutes, we loved each other again. All the shit from the last year just...melted away, and we were just husband and wife again. Not a bad final memory to leave. I wouldn't mind going out on that note."
"Endymion, I...I—"
"It's better than just...waiting," Endymion interrupted. "Waiting for Cronus to decide he doesn't need us anymore...waiting for my father to peel back the layers and drill down to the truth...hell, waiting for our billion dollar money laundering scheme to get exposed. Honestly, I don't know which way I'd rather go down anymore." He shrugged. "At least this way, it'd be on my terms. I'd see it coming. Just...seems like it'd be better."
"
Forcing himself to give an honest assessment of the situation, he began to realize how strong of a case was being put in front of him. And even though his heart was doing everything it could to convince himself that there was no decision to make, his mind was starting to fight against that.
It wasn't often that Kunzite didn't know what to do. But it was starting to happen more and more often lately.
He thought about Endymion's mother, who had gone from a mentally sharp woman to a babbling invalid in a year. And despite his insistence on following orders to the letter, he also thought about Cronus, looming over the both of them with an axe, just waiting for the right moment to swing it down.
Was he going to be able to protect the Prince from Cronus when the time came? Was he better off under protection from the agency?
There were many thoughts racing through his head, bouncing around, and the more time Kunzite found himself taking this possible course of action seriously, the more painful he found it.
Suddenly, he jumped to his feet and marched over to the wardrobe. Pulling it open, he began fumbling through the half-dozen uniforms, large fingers feeling the pockets until finding one with a hard object inside it. Reaching inside, he pulled out a large gold coin. On one side, a picture of a fancy crown was imprinted in the metal. With a quick flick of his thumb, he saw the other side, a rough engraving of the Earth Palace. Some tiny alphanumeric strings went along the top and bottom of this side of the coin as well.
Glancing to his left, then his right, just to make sure he was at least alone, he propped the coin up on the top of his coiled thumb. He took several beats, frozen in this position, and then fired his thumb up. The coin spun around rapidly in midair, launching up high above Kunzite's head before rapidly falling down back to Earth.
It bounced a few times on the carpet before coming to rest, occasionally flashing a bright bit of shine up towards Kunzite as it reflected back the lights.
Kunzite slowly crouched down over the coin as it stopped moving.
"
"Alright, let's get this batch started," Endymion said, quickly jumping into the protective suit and zipping it upwards, covering his entire body. "I want to get home as fast as possible for tonight."
Kunzite absentmindedly scratched at his face, staring over at his charge with a pensive look. After a few beats, the Prince gave him an odd look.
"What are you waiting for, get in the suit!" he called out. "Something the matter?"
Kunzite seemed to startle awake at this. "O-oh, no, sorry, Your Highness, uh…" he shuffled over to the hangar that supported the weight of the various protection suits and took one off. "I'll start on pouring the Phental into the vat."
Endymion, just about to finish zipping the suit all the way up to his neck, suddenly turned towards his guardian. "Um, not before you get the acidity right, I hope."
"Hm?" Kunzite said.
"If you put the Phental in before the acidity is at the right level, it reacts and transforms into gas," Endymion said quickly. "Am I remembering that right? We don't want that."
"Mm," Kunzite muttered. "My mistake, Your Highness, I was just...skipping steps verbally." He began to open up the full-body suit. "What are you going to soak the catalyst bed with?"
Endymion looked up. "Probably around a point seventy-one concentration. Should probably be a little higher since it was so low by the time we finished up last time. Maybe even point seventy-three."
Kunzite gave a thin little smile to himself.
"Why are you asking me?" Endymion asked. "Don't tell me you're starting to slip a bit, Kunzite. You know I need you. If you're mind starts failing you, we're all doomed."
"Oh, just...wanted to see how you felt about it," Kunzite said quietly, nodding to himself.
"
It bounced a few times on the carpet before coming to rest, occasionally flashing a bright bit of shine up towards Kunzite as it reflected back the lights.
Kunzite slowly crouched down over the coin as it stopped moving.
The Earth Palace was pointing up towards him.
Kunzite grimaced, and again twisted his head back and forth to check that he was still alone.
Quickly, his right hand darted down towards the coin and quickly flicked it over, leaving the crown side face-up. Just as fast as it stopped moving, he scooped it up in his fingers and closed his fist around it, as if he was trying to quickly hide it.
Unleashing a stress-reducing, shoulder-heaving sigh, rapidly shook his head back and forth, long white hair flying in all directions. His decision concluded, Kunzite turned his focus to easier considerations, like preparing for his trip to the lab tomorrow.