Scene #8415: Backhanded Reunion

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	PHONE: Petra Soroka dials from an unknown number, her voice clenched tightly enough to creak, "Hey. Don't freak out." PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana only transmits audible breathing for a moment, before-- "Pet...ra? Petr--!" And she cuts herself off and audibly swallows, probably only because of the request. The effort she has to put into lowering her voice is extremely noticeable. "I-Is that...really you?" PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "Yeah. Tough luck, huh?" PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "...Sorry. I-- I'm just-- it's me, yeah." PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "I'm-- fuck, I should've figured this part out." PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "Don't tell people I'm back. Not-- not yet." PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana says, "N-No, you don't have to ap--it's n-not--" Another abrupt pause, and then a swallow. "...I'm the one who's sorry. I'm just--..." PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana says, "...O-Okay. Not yet. I just didn't know if I'd ever get to--...hear you again." PHONE: Petra Soroka says, her voice hoarse, "...Yeah. I know. I'm sorry." PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "But... I'm--" PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "There's something I need to tell you, Bikki. A-and there's only one way I can say it to know that you'll understand." PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "There's, um. I'll send you coordinates. I-I'm just--" PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "Stuff still really sucks, Bikki. But I'm working on making it better." PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana says, "Huh...? O-One way you can say--? I don't get i--" PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana stops herself, shakes her head hard enough that it transmits through, and then, "Y-You mean...face-to-face, okay. Alright. That'd--...that'd be good." PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana says, "There's--there's a lot I want to talk to you about, too. Too many things, s-so--...anything you have to say, I'll listen." PHONE: Petra Soroka says, "...I hope so. See you then." PHONE: Phoning Petra Soroka, Hibiki Tachibana swallows again, and her voice cracks. "...Y-Yeah. I'll come running...as fast as I can." A beach beside one of America's Great Lakes. There's a road, about a 10 minute walk away from the lake itself, that goes between two cysts of suburban sprawl big enough to have a bus system that navigates between them. Someone could ask that bus to pull over and let them off midway, in this strip of nothingness, if they were insistent enough. Or if everyone could tell that she wasn't the sort of person who should be on the bus in the first place. It's sort of beautiful, in the ways that halves and in-betweens are. Not quite rural enough to evoke the awestruck wonder of 'natural beauty', it's still largely untouched, though rare bits of trash still find their way here, somehow. Sloped hills covered in pale-bleached scrubgrass and bushes block the lakeside from being seen by the road, somehow feeling even more colorless than bare ground would be. There's one tree visible no matter what direction you look, bare of leaves despite the season.
Petra Soroka	Petra herself is standing at the bottom of a somewhat steep slope by the lakeside, in the grass more than in the thin strip of sand, though the boundary between them is indistinct. She looks, superficially, as usual. Bomber jacket, shitty jeans, clean and presentable, though with a cigarette between her lips. Closer, though, and discrepencies become apparent. Her eyes are faintly glasslike and infinitely complex in optic detail, patterns folding into patterns. The corners and lids of her eyes have a thin silver sheen, and the inside of her mouth, when she opens it, is pure gleaming metal. She looks like she's wearing makeup, almost, with subtle silver eyeliner and tar-black accents. Around her neck is-- her dark green scarf, concealing anything that might be there. When Hibiki arrives, Petra is looking out over the lake, both fists thrust in her jacket pockets. She doesn't immediately turn to face her, or speak up.
Hibiki Tachibana	It goes without saying, when Hibiki said she'd come running as fast as she can, she meant it. Their meeting point could have been at the very bottom of the deepest of the Great Lakes, and she'd have found a way. Some of the more subtle unpleasantries about the actual location are utterly skipped over in her mind in her haste, too. Any other time, and she might reflect on how she was invited to a faded-out old road like this, where the lake it leads to can't even be seen. But her head's been spinning ever since yesterday, at the terrible state that she saw Lilian in. With the slow and unsure attempts to pull herself out of her downward spiral these last few months, the Magical Girl of Courage, the disaster that was their first trip to Floating City New York, and then the last one--everything feels like it's turned upside down all over again. And now Petra is back, all of a sudden? Out of nowhere? When Lilian was so sure they'd never see her again? ...The day after-- "Petra!" Hibiki held herself back over the phone, but in person is something else. The steep incline doesn't stop her at all from sprinting straight down the whole way, nearly losing her footing and slipping more than once. Her body is moving much faster than her thoughts. From the back, from a distance, she really does look the same as ever. It'd almost, almost be enough to make her think that magically nothing had changed all the time she'd been gone. "You're actually here...! Right in front of me...! I didn't think--after everything, I--" She's tripping over her words almost as much as her boots, hitting the grassy portion of the beachside herself, panting and heaving for breath - only for it to slowly quiet. Not just from recalling that Petra had something plainly serious to talk about. But from how obvious the sleek and silvery changes to her are when she's this much closer, even when standing behind the other girl and off to the side. No. It'd be silly to even dream of nothing having changed. But something like this--isn't what she expected. Confusion, more than anything, is what's all over her face, and it takes her a moment to force out much more subdued words while she's trapped in the middle of it. "--Petra? What's--going on...?"
Petra Soroka	Petra exhales towards the water, thick black smoke streaming from her mouth as the last of the cigarette crumbles into fine white powder. Neither of which-- Hibiki may or may not be aware-- is normal. At Hibiki's frantic approach, Petra is unnervingly calm, just lazily tilting her head back to look over her shoulder at the magical girl, hair falling away to reveal the silvery metal plates beneath each of her eyes. No-- not lazy, and not calm. Hibiki knows that kind of posture, the way tension collects in back and shoulders, the microexpressions of eyes and corners of the mouth that betray pent-up, seething anger. Instinct gives her a split second of notice before Petra swings a punch directly at her face, hard enough to send her sprawling across the ground. "What the fuck, Bikki?! Do you have any idea how mad I am at you?!" Petra shouts at the downed Hibiki, who likely has just gained some amount of appreciation for how mad Petra is at her. She stalks over to her, her whole body trembling with suppressed force and the effort of shouting. "You fucking liar! You coward! You, all of you lied to me about Lilian! To cover your own asses!" The words are bitterly overflowing with acid, but the fact that Petra doesn't attack again until Hibiki stands up is a clear display of what kind of fight this is. "I talked to her! To Lilian! Because apparently none of you fucking know her at all! None of this would've turned out this way if I'd done that from the start!" Heavy beads of quicksilver run down Petra's arm from underneath her jacket sleeve, pooling on her clenched fist. She wrenches her fingers open, and metal droplets scatter everywhere, landing on sand and grass with weighty non-absorption, glittering like tiny stars. The remainder, still, because the flow of silver keeps increasing each second, amalgamates and stretches into a simple, shining polearm, blunted on the end, which her hand naturally closes around. "Since this is apparently the only fucking language you speak: tell me what the fuck a command seal is, Hibiki!"
Hibiki Tachibana	Not lazy. And not calm. Hibiki would know better than anyone, with how many times she's lost her cool in recent times. That's exactly why she can't understand why Petra, out of everyone, is making that kind of expression at her. She didn't know what to expect, no, from the other girl calling her out here with something important to speak about. She didn't have any idea what happened to her body either. But seeing this now is like a mental disconnect, what she's seeing unable to reach her head. "What--" That's all she gets out, in the moment her body told her to move, before she's swung onto dead-on like a wide-eyed deer stuck in car lights, head and then body turning with the blow that sends her off her feet and roughly onto her back in the bleached patches of grass. Untransformed, a quickly-forming bruise shows exactly where the blow landed, and a shaking hand comes up to brush at it as she struggles to even sit up. Not because of the physical pain or disorientation, but from her mind tries and nearly fails to even adjust for the whiplash. Even as every single word hits her, like a brick impacting much harder than any punch ever could. She doesn't get it at all. Lied about Lilian? Talking to her? What did they-- It's only the very last demand for answers to a totally unexpected question that gets her eyes to momentarily focus somewhere far off past Petra in front of her, breath squeaking out of her throat in a choked gasp. And you conveniently left out every little detail that didn't fit, until she self-destructed at your pleasure. All of you did. You self-absorbed revisionist fucking liars. "T-That's not...I didn't--" She didn't make a mistake that simple, did she? Back then--all the way back then, during that first talk with Petra? She didn't...lie, did she? But Petra's anger is genuine. As genuine as can be. Slowly, the look on Hibiki's face goes from shock and bewilderment to tightening up, quivering lips pressed tight together and fingers digging into dirt as she woozily rolls over onto her hands and knees. A few droplets of definitely-not-quicksilver fall down into it. "B-Balwisyall...nescell...Gungnir tron--!"
Hibiki Tachibana	Casual clothes are replaced by the undersuit and metal of her Symphogear in flashes of light - but the mark on her face remains as Hibiki forcibly pushes herself up to her feet, stumbles when turning around, and--doesn't throw a punch at Petra. Instead, her hand goes to clench around the polearm she's made, as if to stop her from even trying to bring it to bear. Or maybe she needs the support herself. Her grip is clamping down like she's trying to break it, one hand and then the other working to lock around it, and face-to-face with Petra again, she's a mixture of teary-eyed sniffling and raw, desperate emotion making every word come out at the top of her lungs. "They're--they were the symbol of the bond I have with someone I care about a lot! That's what they were to me! For me, that made them irreplacable! A sign that someone trusted me /that/ much! Something special that I didn't want taken away! But--" After an unfiltered moment, she grits her teeth and turns her head, wet eyes scrunching and voice breaking. "...I didn't think about her. I wasn't thinking about her until we /fought/! I was only worried about him--and myself! Even now, I--!" She still has those gifted gloves, sitting at home, even after all this time. She never forgot that. Or maybe she just thought she didn't.
Petra Soroka	"I know you didn't think about her! You're never thinking about her! None of you are!" Petra's other arm, the one not holding her new spear, trembles as if she's about to punch the crying Hibiki as she clings to her for support. At this distance, Hibiki can hear a distant-sounding, resonant hum, whirring higher and higher pitched. The way Petra looks at Hibiki, matching that teary stare with narrowed eyes burning with-- something Hibiki hasn't seen Petra direct at her before. Contempt. Bordering on hate. "You don't think about anything other than how good you look for being there! For being so fucking noble, and empathetic, and forgiving, so that you could come out the other side being heroes by association! It's disgusting! It's cruel!" Petra tears the spear away from Hibiki, and hits her in the chest with the butt to send her stumbling backwards. She keeps stalking forwards, jabbing Hibiki with the base of the spear to emphasize her words until she deigns to hit back. "If it was so important to you, you would've mentioned the fucking thing to me! In eight months! Not a single time! But you didn't. You didn't! Do you know why? You coward?!" Every time she gesticulates, more of that silver splatter sprays across the grass. If Hibiki looks down-- if she's too much of a bitch to meet Petra's eyes-- she'll see that the droplets all quiver of their own volition whenever Petra shouts. "You were all scared to admit your own culpability! Embarrassed that Lilian might've had a reason to be upset at you! You all rewrote the story to make Lilian into an unstable monster, because that's how you all still treat her now! You're a horrible friend to her!" "And the worst part. The worst part!" Welling up in Petra's eyes, screwed nearly closed from the intensity of her words, are beads of quicksilver tears, identical to the fluid stream draining out of her sleeves. "You thought I was one of you! That I'd want to treat her like a ticking time bomb! That I'd be in awe of you for fucking taming her! That you could wave your friendship with her in front of me as a badge of fucking honor!" At some point, Petra stopped advancing at all, and her emphatic slams of her spear were directed into the ground instead, the point, even blunted, digging inches into the ground with each violent swing.
Hibiki Tachibana	In the state she's in right now, every biting word is making Hibiki tremble and shake as if they had physical force. Being yelled at - /called out/ - like this stabs at her enough, in every imaginable sore spot she's been nursing. But it's that much worse because it's...Petra. Petra is the one glaring at her with that much unfiltered, genuine contempt. The same Petra she focused on trying to help, at Lilian's expense. If you cared about those other people, you could have started with helping them, not chasing after the girl who hates them. Despite all of that, despite everything that happened--or maybe because of it, now that Petra is the one defending Lilian. It's no wonder she barely even defends herself. The magical girl stumbles when her support is taken away, and gets beaten back step by step by step as the dull sound of impacts echo across the beach. Every time her mouth opens with half-formed words, all that comes out is simply choked sounds that might be coming from air being hit out of her lungs, her own distress, or both. She only stops when Petra stops, half-slumped with a hand on her chest, teeth biting into her quivering bottom lip - staring at her for three whole seconds before her head turns down. ...Stop it. Please stop. It's not like that. I already told you I never thought I was anything close to a hero. All of this...just proves it. Her chest feels like it's tying itself in knots. But her hand at her side, hanging and shuddering, slowly tightens up. "Tell me something /I don't know/, Petra!" It's forced out so roughly, her voice scratches and her shoulders square up, just saying it. "I already /know/ I'm a coward! I had all that time to do better by you, half of a whole year--and even more do better by /her!/ And I never did! It never had anything to do with being afraid of her!" "I just pretended and desperately wanted to hope--what we had was 'good enough', even though I didn't do a single thing to /actually/ help her back then! I just got cut down and /killed/, like everybody else, until Phony managed! Because she was one of the only ones who really understood her! I never did, even when I wanted to! And I didn't even treat her right, after everything! I never put myself in her shoes, even when I said I cared!"
Hibiki Tachibana	Her face is an utter mess, where it's hard to tell if hurt or self-directed anger is what's more prominent. Even so, Hibiki stomps forward and finally gives Petra what she's been trying to get out of her - a wild swing of her fist, thrown towards her face. It's entirely lacking any of her usual style, like it's coming from some kind of cornered animal instead of someone with any training. And right behind it is another. "Do I think I'm not an awful friend to her!? Do I think I wasn't an awful friend to you!? That I haven't been selfish, and terrible!? /What do you think!?/" It's hard to tell if she's trying to force Petra back on purpose, or if it's just from every tear-scattering overswing looking like she might fall forward throwing it. "I've spent the last two, three months thinking about nothing /but/ that! Losing two people I cared about as friends because for all my talk, I couldn't actually help either of them! I'm some hero alright, when I can't even save one person in front of me! And then--then just in one day, Lilian is the worst and most vulnerable I've ever seen her, and you come back for this!? Did you come all this way just to grind in how much of a hypocrite I am, treating her the way I /know/ hurts, as if everything else wasn't enough already!?" "Because if you did, you're doing /GREAT/ at it!" Even with all of that--it doesn't sound like Petra is the one she's actually shouting at. Not at all.
Petra Soroka	With her eyes nearly shut and spear driven into the ground, Petra recognizes Hibiki's motion to retaliate far too late. Her fist slams solidly into her cheek, bruishing flesh and breaking bo-- it's like punching a solid wall. Skin fractures and spreads into rifts of silver, like the half-dried film in a bucket of paint, and more globules of metallic blood spray behind her, falling with the density that Hibiki feels in Petra's body on contact. Hibiki is, however, very good at punching walls. Petra's head snaps to the side, and the followup punch sends her staggering backwards, dazed and unsteady. All at once, it's like a switch flips in her brain, and her stance tightens and restabilizes, and she swings the spear around to threaten Hibiki out of reach. That focus immediately dissolves again, when Petra glances down to the ground, her eyes settling on one of those increasingly frequent droplets of mercury on the ground, and she shudders. She retreats a few more steps, spear readied to prevent Hibiki from easily closing the distance, and continues her verbal assault once she's made her space. "Yeah? You know all that already? Then why aren't you fucking doing anything about it! You pathetic limp-wristed loser! What happened to the Hibiki I knew, who would fight for her friend's happiness? Are you all done trying, after someone like me got thrown in jail after abusing one of your friends and murdering another? Is that it? Fucking fragile, huh? You were never really that willing to fight in the first place, were you?" "And then--then just in one day, Lilian is the worst and most vulnerable I've ever seen her, and you come back for this!?" Petra's shoulders hunch up, and her breath strangles in her throat. Her eyes go wide, and the expected thudding heartbeat of panic is replaced with a reactor whine building to volumes that Hibiki can hear from meters away. The puddles of silver nestled into the sand and grass vibrate and writhe in place, like water placed in front of an enormous speaker. "What about you. Lilian's in that state, and you didn't bother to mention it until hours after we first talked. So, either you didn't think of it, because you don't give a shit about her." Petra swallows, and her eyes narrow, shoulders trembling. "Or you already knew that I was the one who did it to her. And you came skipping over to meet me anyways."
Hibiki Tachibana	Hitting Petra feels--wrong. She shouldn't be /able/ to punch Petra like this, this hard. She doesn't even know what made her be like this - what gave her the kind of body that makes it difficult to tell if she's hitting into something solid, or an extremely dense liquid. But that's only one wrong-feeling thing in sea of dozens, and as Petra recovers and brings her spear around to bear again, Hibiki doesn't advance immediately. There's only so many things she can take active notice of at once, and laser-focused on Petra's face as it is, it's hard to tell how much she's actually registering the shower of silver litering the earth - other than that deep, inherent 'off' sensation. She didn't advance immediately because she's caught in her tracks by the other girl's words. Righteous insults she can't bring herself to disagree with, forcing out a shuddering wince and a dry swallow as her head tilts down. I'm beginning to miss the Tachibana who would take action when people are wrong. All the tears and fist clenching in the world won't change-- "...Shut up already," she mutters under her breath, even though her heart isn't in it at all. Just undirected anger. "...Do you think drawing your courage out is that easy...? After you've had all the times you've screwed up thrown back at your face? Why am I the bad guy, just because I couldn't stop myself from buckling under the weight...?" For whatever reason, it's the sight of Lilian, tired and trying to hide from the table behind Tamamo, that springs to her mind. All the times she's lost her temper in recent memory--and the Hermit, along with the Servant of Wrath. Beozzi, and the Magical Girl of Courage. She's silent and still as reactors whine and silver quakes. And--
Hibiki Tachibana	Her fists go white-knuckled, and her face scrunches up. 'I was the one who did it to her'. It's not just because of that - she already had a horrid feeling, deep down, that the timing was too much of a coincidence to be anything else. She hates that it's not a surprising as it should be. But... ...everything else she said right then isn't wrong, either. Hibiki /is/ right here, while Lilian is hurting. And Petra is here, not for the delayed reunion she leaped for without thinking, but for Lilian's sake. In spite of whatever she did. "I'm /trying, damnit!/ It took me this long to stop doing anything but piling my issues onto other people! I nearly lost it all again when we got into that argument with Lilian! It took me until just yesterday for it to sink in how bad it really is--and do even the tiniest thing about it! I'm sorry if it'll take a little longer to be /half as brave as you are right now!/" One step becomes a miniature crater in the ground, with an abrupt forward lunge at the same time the last word is shouted. Without any regard at all for the polearm being used to keep her at bay--Hibiki rears back her fist and makes to get inside its range in the blink of an eye, throwing a heavyhanded blow for Petra's center of mass. And then angle down to slam her all the way into the grass, and then let sheer momentum carry them both forward, all the way until the bleached grass and dense dirt she's being dragged through becomes loose beach sand.
Petra Soroka	You're the bad guy," Petra practically spits, Because you're one of them. Because you, all of you, knew what she'd been through, and you all chose me over her anyways. You all thought, 'what's one more for the pile'. You sympathized, with the girl who was abusing your friend!" Petra's fist clenches around her spear, white-knuckled to mirror Hibiki. The silver morphmetal buckles, bends, and then all at once shatters down its length, shards softening into droplets, splattering against the ground. "Because you all thought that you understood me more than you'd ever care to understand her. The next person in line to stand up to that evil bitch Lilian Rook. Another arc. One after the other. A fucking rite of passage." "But I'm not!" Petra stomps her foot. There's no summoned attack or combat skill, or even a defensive posture, it's just a petulant way to punctuate her sentence. "I'm not like that! I'm more like her, and she's more like me, and I'm so fucking mad that everything and everyone kept us apart for so long! Long enough that I did horrible things to her, which I'm trying to fix, because at least I admit when I fuck up for her sake!" Petra's body, as a warrior of the Silver, comes pre-familiarized with a vast array of combat techniques and the ways to defend against them. Petra's mind has a healthy dose of respect for Hibiki Tachibana's fists. The two are not-- yet/ever-- in alignment over how to respond. Petra takes the hit directly in her core and is driven down and back, feeling like an anchor dragged through the sand, leaving a rut carved into the landscape behind her. Crushed into the sand, silver staining the fuzzy lining of her bomber jacket-- still zipped up, despite everything-- Petra's first movement after recovering from the stunned collision is... to readjust her scarf after the slam into the earth pulled it down. What was under there? Hibiki didn't think to look at Petra's neck before her hand movement drew attention. "...A little longer?" Petra hasn't got up from where she's sprawled on the ground. She might not be able to, battered-looking as she is, with Hibiki still looming over her. "You've had years. When does Lilian get 'a little longer'? When does she get the kind of, c-constant forgiveness and, and allowance, a-and patience and sec-second chances, and protection, that you and I-I-I take for, for granted?" Petra's words break down into choked stuttering, as her whole body trembles. She pushes herself up to one knee, and wipes at her eyes with her knuckle, smooth metal rasping on metal. Dislodged quicksilver tears drop from her eyes, plinking into the growing pool lining the bottom of the trough that the two girls are standing in. "Hibiki. If later, next year, another person like me shows up again, and starts acting like I did towards Lilian again, I'm killing her, the first chance I get. Not taking her to karaoke. How could you think that Lilian deserves that? Knowing what you do?" Ripples thrum through all the spilled quicksilver in unison, so violently that tendrils of it seem to climb into the air. That reactor whine, shrill and constant enough to have faded into the background, reverses course and plummets from a piercing high to a painful bass, as built-up energy releases all at once. Every puddle and droplet, from tiny ones in the sand to the thin gleaming creek the girls stand in, erupts with jagged ferrokinetic spikes angled towards Hibiki, crushing, piercing, and pinning her from every angle.
Hibiki Tachibana	You're the bad guy. She really is. She has been, to both of them. Another arc. One after the other. It always seems like it has to get worse before it gets better. At least I admit when I fuck up for her sake! How much more do I have to s--no, what do I have to do? After the fact, Hibiki is indeed left standing over top of Petra, panting and heaving for breath with a shuddering fist. Emotionally exhausted eyes are locked down on her, just to half-shut as the muscles in her face tighten back up. Eyes flash towards the overattention to her scarf. A rough and half-formed sound starts in her throat, just to die down at the sight of the other girl forcing herself back up. There's no attempt to stop her. "...I--" When she finally does start managing something, it cuts out, too. Under the sheer and immense weight on her chest of the tears dropping from Petra's face, and the force of her words. Because you talk all that big fucking game about how you all know me and care about me and understand me, but you can't be fucked to raise a finger when someone makes my life miserable for half a year, even though you can flinch and brace for death when I slam my hand on a table, and in the end, all your fucking care-kayfabe isn't durable enough to last one shitty evening. Certainly not durable enough for karaoke nights and zoo trips and diner dates and sleepovers and skate parks and months of free therapy. She stops. And at that moment, all of the silver that's been giving off danger signs finally makes its move, and she's assaulted from too many directions to count. Her body doesn't move consciously, but on its own, just enough. A shift of footing her, a twist there. There's more than one splash of blood. The end of the burst of movement ends with Hibiki half-doubled as she stands over Petra, stabbed through a half-dozen times in locations all just narrowly made non-lethal or crippling a split second before the fact, and pinned by far more limiting her movement besides. One eye is nearly shut in a trembling wince, and her lips are pursed tight almost like she's trying to not let out any noise. Still, a small trickle of red manages to seep past.
Hibiki Tachibana	"...She doesn't deserve it," Hibiki croaks out. It's not from the pain - this isn't enough to bring her to her knees, not yet - but from the knot in her chest. "She didn't deserve it. I didn't know how to understand her, or help her--so I never tried as much as I should have. I tried helping the person in front of me instead, I really wanted to, I thought I could--...and I guess this is how it turned out. I'd say sorry...but words by themselves don't count for anything." She gives a shaky exhale, that comes out almost like a tired scoff. Admittedly, being skewered through tends to take you out of it a little. Enough that she's stammering a little herself, despite otherwise seeming oddly calm. "I don't know w-what happened, those months...but it looks like you already get her a whole lot more than I did. I guess t-that's...on me, too. I don't know if it makes me angry...or jealous...or something else. Maybe I'm just upset everything really did get worse, and I did all the wrong things. 'Helping is pretty tough sometimes'...you sure said it, Hod." "But--" Despite the ferrokinetic entrapment, Hibiki forces a leg off the ground and upwards. It digs some of them in deeper, drawing some more blood, but she grits through it. "...I already know. If I keep being afraid of making the wrong decisions, beating myself up for things I can't change! What the hell is that going to do!? I'm so tired of just...withering away! Doing that, and just watching people I care about have to hurt--that's what eats me more than anything!" And higher. And higher. The armor plating on her legging shifts. "Even if I end up still being an awful friend--I want to at least be able to call myself /a/ friend, one day, without feeling like I'm a liar! If that means I have to screw up even more, reach out the way I should have from the start--give her whatever 'little longers' I can give now, instead of when she needed them--then FINE!" And it comes down. It'd be a frustrated stomp, from almost anyone else. Hibiki Tachibana is not 'anyone else'. The impact with the earth is no less scary than her devastating gauntlet pilebunkers, and in a split second, a wave of sheer force nigh-instantly rips apart the quicksilver-strewn dirt, begins blasting the ditch into a crater, and threatens to destabilize and rip apart the mass of spikes pinning her - into countless raindrops forced to scatter off into the distance surrounding them. The boomburst is deafening, and the quiet that'll come after will almost be scary. And, presuming she doesn't have the bodily support of at least half a dozen ferrosilver skewers any longer, she's promptly going to fall over onto her face almost immediately afterwards.
Petra Soroka	Silver spikes, both those impaling Hibiki and the forest of the rest, splinter to pieces in the shockwave. Shrapnel of broken metal softens into droplets moments after impact, looking for an instant like the spray at the base of a metal waterfall, before showering back down with weight like hail. The beach is blasted apart, Petra along with it, thrown to the far wall of the crater that was excavated just a little too close to the water of the lake itself. Petra wordlessly shakes, taking multiple false starts to try to stand up from her crumpled position and failing. Right when she slumps to the ground for what seems to be the last time, painted with a sloppy silver brush and exhausted, is when the unstable crater wall of sand collapses. Chilly water pours on top of Petra, soaking her and her clothes, and her startled shriek breaks the tense atmosphere. "Ack-- augh! No way!" Petra scrambles, half upright, half on all fours, away from the water, to collapse besides Hibiki, dripping wet. "Ech. Ugh. God." She coughs, then faceplants in the dirt. "Oh. Bikki. You're bleeding. I-- shit, this fucking stuff, I don't, I--" "...I missed you, Bikki." Spilled drops of Silver inch their way back towards their source, crawling through the grass. Viewed from the air, one would see them naturally aligning in shifting crystalline fractal patterns while they move, in an alien, coordinated dance, but both of the girls are on the ground, beaten and drained. "I fucked up. Really, really badly. I-- I can tell y-you the details, later, but, but I, I just want to fix it, finally, for o-once, a-and I can't, I can't do it alone, you know? I don't-- I don't even know how. It's-- I was, I-I was scared of you giving up on her-- you, o-of all people." Petra rolls over and scrubs at her face with the back of her hand, quicksilver tears streaking out of the corners of her eyes. "I can't do it alone. E-everyone's been so shitty to L-Lilian, a-and god knows that includes m-me, and last I-- last I knew, last I heard, everything was falling apart, and it's only g-gotten worse, from what I've seen." "I don't want it. No more arcs. I'll make it better, even if I have to stab every Elite in the sector to do it." Petra pushes herself up to a sitting position with a groan. Her hair and skin are already dry, water slid off of them like glass, but her bomber jacket and jeans are dark and heavy with lakewater, streaming into the mud beneath her and smeared all over her. "...Do you have Ishirou's number? I lost my fucking phone, in jail. Last thing I heard was that he was being an unbearable piece of shit, and knowing him, he's fucked it up even worse in the last few weeks, but he's supposed to be Lilian's friend. So I'm going to make him act like it, too."
Hibiki Tachibana	For a few moments, as the two lie fallen next to each other, it seems almost like Hibiki might be entirely out of it. But, when that shriek echoes through the air - there's a sound that's somewhere between an utterly drained chuckle and a heavy cough, and the magical girl turns her head so the side so that she's not swallowing dirt. Or metal. "...I missed you too, Petra." She forces her eyes open just enough to look at her, only the tiniest and barest curl of her lips on her face. "I'm sorry...you had to do all of that. To get through to...an idiot like me. You really are brave." Her breath comes a little sharper than she'd like. She didn't get stabbed anywhere serious, but it was still a lot, and it hurts. When Petra rolls over, Hibiki shifts just enough to prop herself up on an elbow. The bare minimum to be able to reach the other hand over, and gently rest it on her shoulder for a moment. Just while she listens, takes it all in, and then urges her aching body into something vaguely resembling sitting with drawn-up knees. She's a mess, but somehow, it's the bruise still on her face of all things that her fingers come up to. "...I don't think anyone could do it alone. I came--so close to wanting to give up. A lot more than once. So...thank you." That feels different from her usual 'thanks', and it's followed with a heavy and tension-relieving exhale. "/We'll/ make it better. I'm--...so sick of it, too. How everything has been. When it should have been better the first time. So whatever it takes...I'll give everything I've got to fix things, too. And make sure it actually stays that way after." And, at the mention of Ishirou, Hibiki momentarily shuts her eyes - remembering a particular exchange in New York - and her Symphogear vanishes in a flash of light. Her casual clothes are still perfectly clean, but they won't be that way for long, the both of them sitting in the mud like this. It's necessary, to yank her phone out from her pocket and hand it over, contacts list up (which conveniently avoids letting Petra see her wallpaper). "If everything else has been falling apart, then /that's/ been totally collapsing," she murmurs. With how Petra and Ishirou's last engagement weighed on her, you think she'd be more apprehensive about this. But she really is a lot different now. After going through that, she knows. And the silver doesn't have anything to do with it.