The trip down memory lane with Bacchus had been...a lot.
There really wasn't a better way to put it.
Worrying. Eye-opening. Devastating. Depressing. So much more. She'd expected to learn more about his past eventually, sure. Maybe fill in a few blanks he'd never quite gotten around to explaining. She hadn't expected to watch an entire life unravel in front of her.
No wonder he was the way he was. He'd lost everything.
His home. His people. His planet. Friends. Family. Thousands of years of memories she'd never even be able to wrap her head around. Hell, he'd even wound up shoved all the way back down to a low-ranking senshi. As if the universe had looked at everything it'd already taken from him and decided, hey, you know what? ******** this guy.
They'd talked about some of it before. Of course they had. Bits and pieces had slipped out over the last year whenever conversations wandered into uncomfortable territory. But hearing someone tell you about grief and watching them live through it were two very different experiences.
This...
This had made it real.
Medusa shut her eyes again.
God.
She needed to find him...eventually. She frowned.
That was the problem with Bacchus. Sometimes he wanted company. Sometimes he needed space. Sometimes he insisted he was fine right up until the point he absolutely wasn't. She'd gotten better at reading him over the past year, but there were still days where it felt like trying to solve a puzzle without knowing what the finished picture looked like.
A star charm she'd found on the ground rolled idly between her fingers as she rolled it between them. Someone must have dropped it. Maybe she would try to figure out who later, but for now, it was grounding her. She rolled it idly between her fingers.
Back.
Forth.
Back again.
The repetitive motion gave her something to focus on besides memories that weren't even hers. It was soothing.
Maybe she'd figure out who it belonged to later.
Right now it was doing a perfectly respectable job of keeping her brain from spiraling.
Eventually she opened her eyes and took stock of the little alcove she'd managed to hide herself away in. It was quieter back here, tucked far enough away from the rest of the archives that the distant sounds of people talking had softened into little more than background noise.
Directly across from her hung one of the most beautiful tapestries she had ever seen.
It wasn't the size that caught her attention.
It was...everything else.
The material shimmered ever so slightly whenever it caught the light, threads woven so tightly together they almost seemed liquid. Ancient, obviously, but impossibly well-preserved. Whoever had made it had possessed the kind of patience Medusa was fairly certain she simply hadn't been born with.
Her eyes drifted toward the border.
Something wound around the edge.
A snake.
Or at least something that looked enough like one that her brain immediately supplied the comparison.
It curled around the entire tapestry, weaving in and out of impossibly intricate patterns before slipping into the scene itself. Sometimes it disappeared beneath layers of color only to emerge somewhere completely unexpected, tying everything together in a way that made the entire piece feel alive.
Absolutely fascinating.
Before she realized she'd made the decision, Medusa had climbed to her feet and wandered closer.
She knew better than to touch something that old.
Especially in a place like this.
Instead, she simply stood there, following the threads with her eyes as colors disappeared and reappeared, each little detail somehow leading naturally to the next.
She became so absorbed in tracing the serpent's path that she never even noticed someone approaching behind her.
The Space Cauldron
Room 2
