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Somehow, she gets him all the way back to her apartment. Somehow she gets him ''into'' her apartment without dropping him, an accomplishment owed mostly to the fact that for once she forgot to lock the door - not anything she should be making a habit of, but at the moment Makoto really can't be bothered to care.
Not like Dark Generals bother to use the front door, anyhow.
When Mamoru regains consciousness again, he is - surprise - on Makoto's couch. Mako herself isn't far. She's kneeling on the floor nearby, slumped over the coffee table with her head on her folded arms, a posture of one hundred percent exhaustion; there's a cup of cocoa cooling nearby on the tabletop, mostly untouched.
She hasn't come out of henshin yet.
----
He wakes up in the clothes he was wearing before he went to go investigate Ail's shenanigans, feeling like he got hit by a truck-- an altogether too familiar feeling, that-- and recognises where he is immediately, and just as immediately, his gaze zeroes in on Jupiter. No matter how he feels, there's a higher priority in the room, and Mamoru's expression is half pained and guilty horror, half burning determination.
Sliding his legs off the couch, he doesn't so much get up as slide the rest of the way to the floor and make his way over to the exhausted Senshi of Courage, never actually rising to his feet. Without even saying a word, without any of the hesitation he normally has regarding touch, even aside from his semi-regular (in comparison to other people) taking her hand, the tall and thin and battered older boy half folds himself around Makoto in an awkward shielding hug, almost cradling.
"I'm so sorry--" he says, but the words are faint over the cotton-wool summer-day warmth and air and energy and life he's wrapping her in. The gold is visible. Maybe it's costing him, maybe it's not. He got some recovery time. She carried him here after god knows what. "I'm so sorry, Mako-chan."
----
"Cut that out," she says, but there's no heat in it at all, not even a proper grumble. Too bad, she thinks muzzily; she hasn't even gotten to lecture him properly on why what he did in the fight with Ail was stupid. "I'm fine. Heal yourself first."
It feels good, though, the bloom of relaxing warmth over aching muscles and joints. Even without his power seeping strength into her to replace what she's used up, the sheer comfort of touch, of being held, is something Makoto always craves and can never get enough of. He should save the golden glow of his power for himself, but for right now, at least, she can't bring herself to push him away, and he can feel her relax a little within that awkward embrace.
With a faint, rose-scented shiver of air that stirs both of their hair and clothes, she finally releases her transformation, and Sailor Jupiter gives way to just Makoto Kino.
"What are you apologizing for, anyway?" She might even be smiling, faintly. Hard to tell when she's facedown on the table. "Unless it's for letting that guy's monster stab you twice. Dummy." Still no heat. She mostly sounds tired, a little bit fond.
----
"I'm fine, I got to sleep and you didn't," Mamoru insists, and given how much *more* trauma she dealt with than he did, due to him spending a lot of time passed out, he's probably got something resembling a point in there, even if the details are sketchy. She doesn't push him away, and he doesn't let go-- but the glow does, at least, dim; it stops when he feels they've reached some kind of equilibrium. His idea of equilibrium. She's tougher, she should have more, is how it goes.
When Makoto detransforms, he loosens the wobbly awkward hug a little and sits on the floor next to her, but doesn't entirely let go. Instead, he gives her a hint of a tug toward him: if she wants to keep letting him hug her, he's encouraging it. It's the only way he feels like he can protect such a protector, especially now.
"That's exactly what I'm apologizing for. If I hadn't been so-- if I hadn't been ''so sure'' I could make the point actually stick in that jerk's head, we'd both have been in way better shape to deal with the other jerk. I might have been able to help, and instead I just--"
Was exactly the liability he worries he is, sometimes.
"--ended up costing you. But we're alive. You did it. Whatever you did, you did it."
----
Makoto sits up, sort of, when Mamoru does, at least in as much as she braces both hands against the table and starts to lift her head. It doesn't take much coaxing to get her to trade one support for another, though - that encouraging little tug leads her to lean against his side, and her head settles against his shoulder as the breath goes out of her.
"It's okay," she murmurs. "You were doing what you thought was right, weren't you? Although it was dumb to let him come back for seconds once you knew he was going to be a jerk about it." There's the grumble, just a little; it passes quickly, and Makoto sighs.
"...I'm not sure I did anything," she says after a moment's silence. "It was... really weird."
----
"He didn't get it," says the upperclassman quietly, arm draped comfortingly around Makoto as she leans into his side, head on his shoulder. "I was doing what I thought was right, but it turned out to be just stupid. I won't let it happen again." He sounds serious enough that it's probably even true-- at least for that particular brand of stupidity.
When she sighs, he glances down and sidelong at the top of her head with a questioning expression she can't see; when she elaborates without elaborating, he squints. "Um. Weird how? I mean-- when he grabbed my neck and threw me, I thought that was that; I blacked out. So the last I knew he'd basically lost his mind and--"
''...'was sure I'd gotten you killed too, no matter how strong you are'...''
"--he was messing with you just to see how he could make you explode before he killed us both. I guess he got around to actually asking you stuff instead of just setting you off...? What the hell ''did'' he want, anyway?"
----
"Princess Jupiter." She tries to glance up at him, but being able to see his expression would mean having to lift her head, and Makoto gives up on it after a moment. "You remember, he was asking before--" Mamoru should remember, she thinks, recalling belatedly that he'd tried to throw it in Nephrite's face back in the fight at the boutique.
"I'd forgotten about it," she admits. "I thought he was talking about Minako-chan at first. But he was so furious when I realized - not just because I couldn't tell him what he wanted. It was like he was offended that I didn't know who she was. He went on this huge tear about the Moon Kingdom."
Mako falls quiet for a short space, pensive. She's been turning the whole thing over in her head, but it still hasn't made any more sense. Her voice is quiet and filled with confusion. "He said, 'I don't want to hurt her.'"
----
"But he thought it was lies..." Mamoru says, plainly bewildered as he sags back against the front of the couch, so he can lean even while Makoto's leaning on him. He just stares at the wall across from them -- well, the plants in front of the wall across from them, anyway.
His eyes light on the rose from Eri, and he looks away, way too tired to deal with an entirely unrelated set of independently exhausting emotions caused by inexplicable people. He looks down at the floor in front of the plants instead. "And she's someone he doesn't want to hurt... what was the tear about? The Moon Kingdom, yeah, but what about it?"
His own voice, at least, has put confusion aside to go into analysis mode, as he starts to fish for pieces. "Do you think every planet has a princess?" he asks absently, not really expecting an answer. "Or every planet and moon? And it was two people he was asking about-- Endymion was the other one. There's a Greek myth about that guy falling in love with the goddess of the moon, but he was just some Earth king, a mortal. And she thought he was so beautiful that she didn't want him to get old, so she had her dad put him in an eternal sleep, and apparently had fifty kids with him. While he was sleeping."
Leave it to Mamoru to get distracted from the actual conversation with the results of research.
"Can you imagine if he ever woke up? Like, hey, congrats, you're a dad! Of fifty! Fifty demigods! Good thing he's a king, can you imagine when tuition time hits?"
----
Makoto is exhausted enough to find this derailment really funny, and she giggles in spite of herself. "Did people think that kind of thing was romantic back then, do you think?" she wonders. "I can't ever tell with these Greek myths. It seems pretty unfair, if he didn't get a say in it..."
She spends a little while struggling to drag her thoughts back to the important parts of what they were talking about, following a wandering chain of thoughts back towards the source of the whole conversation. "...maybe that's part of what he was so worked up about," she muses, and a frown comes over her face as she tries to remember what it was that the Dark General had said. "Nephrite. He was talking about the Moon Kingdom taking everything from the Earth. Forests dying, the ground full of rocks and weeds, people starving and the Moon Kingdom wouldn't do anything."
The confusion is clear in her voice. It makes no sense, doesn't fit in with anything else she knows, and yet-- "He said that's why he's fighting for the Dark Kingdom. For the Earth, to keep the Silver Millennium from coming back and taking control of it."
----
"There was a lot of unfair in Greek mythology," Mamoru says with a half-smile, rueful, winding down from the brief grin at Makoto's giggling. "Mortals always got shafted. I mean, granted, that's really kind of along the same lines as 'the devil made me do it' -- blaming gods and demons for the sins of humanity, attempting to evade culpability for our own actions..."
He sighs, stretching his legs out sort of under the coffee table. "And maybe that's what the Dark Kingdom's doing, or did. You go back and look at wars and groupthink and propaganda, and read the sociopolitical and cultural analyses of the societies that spawned the various types, and... in a lot of cases, it ends up being that people will believe anything, people will look for a scapegoat for their misfortune. And if it's the fault of someone in charge, you'd better believe they'll point at someone they don't like, or another country that's got them in their sights, or a group of people that disapprove of them, as the cause. All they need is good publicity and spin doctors and crooked middlemen, and they've got a nice ready frothing mob poised to flatten their opposition. I mean--"
Seriously, this kid reads way too much. Makoto better be careful about looking too interested, or he might get the idea he could tutor her again.
"--if he was talking about Earth being in a shambles, maybe the Dark Kingdom propaganda'd him in the face while he was upset about it, before he could figure out why it was actually happening. The thing that gets me, though... if he thinks they're the good guys, trying to prevent misery, it... really doesn't make sense causing misery to prevent it. Not to mention I hate being in the dark."
----
"I think there's something broken in his head."
Makoto says it quietly, and very gravely. 'Crazy' is a term that gets tossed around for all sorts of reasons, but this isn't a conclusion that Mako's reaching casually; she sounds serious, a little worried. Not quite pitying... but maybe it's something close. "Like some kind of split personality. There's no way to tell which one you're talking to until you say something or... I don't know, look at him wrong... and then he loses it and tries to kill you. Or lets you go."
Her legs are starting to fall asleep underneath her, but Makoto only shifts her weight a little, turns her face in toward Mamoru's shoulder a bit more. She'd close her eyes, but she's not sure what she'll see if she does.
"He had us, Mamoru-san," she murmurs. "I couldn't do anything. He could've killed us, or dragged us back to the Dark Kingdom, or whatever he wanted. But he let us go."
----
"He let us go," Mamoru repeats, but it's quiet and firm. "That's all we can afford to focus on tonight, Mako-chan. We're alive, and we're not in the Dark Kingdom, and we're safe and sane and we get to fight another day, and we can worry about figuring out what we learned from it when we're not..."
Too tired. Still in shock. Too confused. Too tired, mostly.
The older boy sighs, then tightens his arm around Makoto a little bit. "When we're not too tired to think. Right? It'll be okay. We can talk to Minako-san about it, I think-- I think she might be able to figure out more than we can. She's been doing this longer, she knows more. And-- we have to tell Usak-- Usagi-chan. She's the leader. She needs to know. And-- and maybe you can stay over at her place a little while again. Do some fun things with her, and... beat up some pixel monsters or something. You need some time off from worrying."
Reluctantly, he starts to shift, to get ready to pull his aching self up off the floor, and help Mako up if she'll let him. "Tonight you should take some aspirin and a really hot bath and go to bed."
----
She really doesn't want to get up. For all the sense that makes. She can't just sit here forever, and even if she could, it wouldn't make anything make any more sense. Still, Makoto makes an inarticulate little noise of protest when Mamoru starts to move, before she lets him help her up.
"I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as time off from worrying, Mamoru-san," she tells him ruefully. Once she's on her feet she wobbles drunkenly on numb legs, and takes a few moments to get her balance, grimacing as the pins and needles begin to set in.
The rest of his suggestions, she doesn't really have an answer for. She looks down at the futile and long-cold mug of cocoa on the coffee table and sighs. "...do you think this means he might back off now?" she wonders, vaguely hopeful. "Go back to usual Dark Kingdom business, stop being our personal boogeyman? Now that he knows we can't tell him what he wants to know."
----
"Don't know," says Mamoru a little breathlessly, clearly taking the route of not actually thinking about it right now; he steadies himself on the back of the couch. "What I do know is, if I end up fried after a fight again, or if you are, we leave in a group with other people until we're somewhere reasonbly safe, okay? Or we call the for help, or a ride, or whatever. No putting pride before safety, not when there's the chance of something like that happening again. If you need help, there's no shame in it."
There's a sheepish pause. "Speaking of which, is it okay if I sleep on your couch again?"
----
Not thinking about it right now is probably safest, anyway. Makoto deflates only a little at the non-answer... and then makes a really fantastic stinkface for a moment right around the time Mamoru gets to 'there's no shame in it' and she realizes she's hearing more or less the same thing she told Sanjouin-san the other day.
''Ugh.''
But what else can she do but shake it off, and smile wryly at Mamoru when he asks to take over her couch. "I'll pull out the futon," she tells him, and since her legs seem to be working something resembling properly, she turns away to go do just that.
Not like Dark Generals bother to use the front door, anyhow.
When Mamoru regains consciousness again, he is - surprise - on Makoto's couch. Mako herself isn't far. She's kneeling on the floor nearby, slumped over the coffee table with her head on her folded arms, a posture of one hundred percent exhaustion; there's a cup of cocoa cooling nearby on the tabletop, mostly untouched.
She hasn't come out of henshin yet.
----
He wakes up in the clothes he was wearing before he went to go investigate Ail's shenanigans, feeling like he got hit by a truck-- an altogether too familiar feeling, that-- and recognises where he is immediately, and just as immediately, his gaze zeroes in on Jupiter. No matter how he feels, there's a higher priority in the room, and Mamoru's expression is half pained and guilty horror, half burning determination.
Sliding his legs off the couch, he doesn't so much get up as slide the rest of the way to the floor and make his way over to the exhausted Senshi of Courage, never actually rising to his feet. Without even saying a word, without any of the hesitation he normally has regarding touch, even aside from his semi-regular (in comparison to other people) taking her hand, the tall and thin and battered older boy half folds himself around Makoto in an awkward shielding hug, almost cradling.
"I'm so sorry--" he says, but the words are faint over the cotton-wool summer-day warmth and air and energy and life he's wrapping her in. The gold is visible. Maybe it's costing him, maybe it's not. He got some recovery time. She carried him here after god knows what. "I'm so sorry, Mako-chan."
----
"Cut that out," she says, but there's no heat in it at all, not even a proper grumble. Too bad, she thinks muzzily; she hasn't even gotten to lecture him properly on why what he did in the fight with Ail was stupid. "I'm fine. Heal yourself first."
It feels good, though, the bloom of relaxing warmth over aching muscles and joints. Even without his power seeping strength into her to replace what she's used up, the sheer comfort of touch, of being held, is something Makoto always craves and can never get enough of. He should save the golden glow of his power for himself, but for right now, at least, she can't bring herself to push him away, and he can feel her relax a little within that awkward embrace.
With a faint, rose-scented shiver of air that stirs both of their hair and clothes, she finally releases her transformation, and Sailor Jupiter gives way to just Makoto Kino.
"What are you apologizing for, anyway?" She might even be smiling, faintly. Hard to tell when she's facedown on the table. "Unless it's for letting that guy's monster stab you twice. Dummy." Still no heat. She mostly sounds tired, a little bit fond.
----
"I'm fine, I got to sleep and you didn't," Mamoru insists, and given how much *more* trauma she dealt with than he did, due to him spending a lot of time passed out, he's probably got something resembling a point in there, even if the details are sketchy. She doesn't push him away, and he doesn't let go-- but the glow does, at least, dim; it stops when he feels they've reached some kind of equilibrium. His idea of equilibrium. She's tougher, she should have more, is how it goes.
When Makoto detransforms, he loosens the wobbly awkward hug a little and sits on the floor next to her, but doesn't entirely let go. Instead, he gives her a hint of a tug toward him: if she wants to keep letting him hug her, he's encouraging it. It's the only way he feels like he can protect such a protector, especially now.
"That's exactly what I'm apologizing for. If I hadn't been so-- if I hadn't been ''so sure'' I could make the point actually stick in that jerk's head, we'd both have been in way better shape to deal with the other jerk. I might have been able to help, and instead I just--"
Was exactly the liability he worries he is, sometimes.
"--ended up costing you. But we're alive. You did it. Whatever you did, you did it."
----
Makoto sits up, sort of, when Mamoru does, at least in as much as she braces both hands against the table and starts to lift her head. It doesn't take much coaxing to get her to trade one support for another, though - that encouraging little tug leads her to lean against his side, and her head settles against his shoulder as the breath goes out of her.
"It's okay," she murmurs. "You were doing what you thought was right, weren't you? Although it was dumb to let him come back for seconds once you knew he was going to be a jerk about it." There's the grumble, just a little; it passes quickly, and Makoto sighs.
"...I'm not sure I did anything," she says after a moment's silence. "It was... really weird."
----
"He didn't get it," says the upperclassman quietly, arm draped comfortingly around Makoto as she leans into his side, head on his shoulder. "I was doing what I thought was right, but it turned out to be just stupid. I won't let it happen again." He sounds serious enough that it's probably even true-- at least for that particular brand of stupidity.
When she sighs, he glances down and sidelong at the top of her head with a questioning expression she can't see; when she elaborates without elaborating, he squints. "Um. Weird how? I mean-- when he grabbed my neck and threw me, I thought that was that; I blacked out. So the last I knew he'd basically lost his mind and--"
''...'was sure I'd gotten you killed too, no matter how strong you are'...''
"--he was messing with you just to see how he could make you explode before he killed us both. I guess he got around to actually asking you stuff instead of just setting you off...? What the hell ''did'' he want, anyway?"
----
"Princess Jupiter." She tries to glance up at him, but being able to see his expression would mean having to lift her head, and Makoto gives up on it after a moment. "You remember, he was asking before--" Mamoru should remember, she thinks, recalling belatedly that he'd tried to throw it in Nephrite's face back in the fight at the boutique.
"I'd forgotten about it," she admits. "I thought he was talking about Minako-chan at first. But he was so furious when I realized - not just because I couldn't tell him what he wanted. It was like he was offended that I didn't know who she was. He went on this huge tear about the Moon Kingdom."
Mako falls quiet for a short space, pensive. She's been turning the whole thing over in her head, but it still hasn't made any more sense. Her voice is quiet and filled with confusion. "He said, 'I don't want to hurt her.'"
----
"But he thought it was lies..." Mamoru says, plainly bewildered as he sags back against the front of the couch, so he can lean even while Makoto's leaning on him. He just stares at the wall across from them -- well, the plants in front of the wall across from them, anyway.
His eyes light on the rose from Eri, and he looks away, way too tired to deal with an entirely unrelated set of independently exhausting emotions caused by inexplicable people. He looks down at the floor in front of the plants instead. "And she's someone he doesn't want to hurt... what was the tear about? The Moon Kingdom, yeah, but what about it?"
His own voice, at least, has put confusion aside to go into analysis mode, as he starts to fish for pieces. "Do you think every planet has a princess?" he asks absently, not really expecting an answer. "Or every planet and moon? And it was two people he was asking about-- Endymion was the other one. There's a Greek myth about that guy falling in love with the goddess of the moon, but he was just some Earth king, a mortal. And she thought he was so beautiful that she didn't want him to get old, so she had her dad put him in an eternal sleep, and apparently had fifty kids with him. While he was sleeping."
Leave it to Mamoru to get distracted from the actual conversation with the results of research.
"Can you imagine if he ever woke up? Like, hey, congrats, you're a dad! Of fifty! Fifty demigods! Good thing he's a king, can you imagine when tuition time hits?"
----
Makoto is exhausted enough to find this derailment really funny, and she giggles in spite of herself. "Did people think that kind of thing was romantic back then, do you think?" she wonders. "I can't ever tell with these Greek myths. It seems pretty unfair, if he didn't get a say in it..."
She spends a little while struggling to drag her thoughts back to the important parts of what they were talking about, following a wandering chain of thoughts back towards the source of the whole conversation. "...maybe that's part of what he was so worked up about," she muses, and a frown comes over her face as she tries to remember what it was that the Dark General had said. "Nephrite. He was talking about the Moon Kingdom taking everything from the Earth. Forests dying, the ground full of rocks and weeds, people starving and the Moon Kingdom wouldn't do anything."
The confusion is clear in her voice. It makes no sense, doesn't fit in with anything else she knows, and yet-- "He said that's why he's fighting for the Dark Kingdom. For the Earth, to keep the Silver Millennium from coming back and taking control of it."
----
"There was a lot of unfair in Greek mythology," Mamoru says with a half-smile, rueful, winding down from the brief grin at Makoto's giggling. "Mortals always got shafted. I mean, granted, that's really kind of along the same lines as 'the devil made me do it' -- blaming gods and demons for the sins of humanity, attempting to evade culpability for our own actions..."
He sighs, stretching his legs out sort of under the coffee table. "And maybe that's what the Dark Kingdom's doing, or did. You go back and look at wars and groupthink and propaganda, and read the sociopolitical and cultural analyses of the societies that spawned the various types, and... in a lot of cases, it ends up being that people will believe anything, people will look for a scapegoat for their misfortune. And if it's the fault of someone in charge, you'd better believe they'll point at someone they don't like, or another country that's got them in their sights, or a group of people that disapprove of them, as the cause. All they need is good publicity and spin doctors and crooked middlemen, and they've got a nice ready frothing mob poised to flatten their opposition. I mean--"
Seriously, this kid reads way too much. Makoto better be careful about looking too interested, or he might get the idea he could tutor her again.
"--if he was talking about Earth being in a shambles, maybe the Dark Kingdom propaganda'd him in the face while he was upset about it, before he could figure out why it was actually happening. The thing that gets me, though... if he thinks they're the good guys, trying to prevent misery, it... really doesn't make sense causing misery to prevent it. Not to mention I hate being in the dark."
----
"I think there's something broken in his head."
Makoto says it quietly, and very gravely. 'Crazy' is a term that gets tossed around for all sorts of reasons, but this isn't a conclusion that Mako's reaching casually; she sounds serious, a little worried. Not quite pitying... but maybe it's something close. "Like some kind of split personality. There's no way to tell which one you're talking to until you say something or... I don't know, look at him wrong... and then he loses it and tries to kill you. Or lets you go."
Her legs are starting to fall asleep underneath her, but Makoto only shifts her weight a little, turns her face in toward Mamoru's shoulder a bit more. She'd close her eyes, but she's not sure what she'll see if she does.
"He had us, Mamoru-san," she murmurs. "I couldn't do anything. He could've killed us, or dragged us back to the Dark Kingdom, or whatever he wanted. But he let us go."
----
"He let us go," Mamoru repeats, but it's quiet and firm. "That's all we can afford to focus on tonight, Mako-chan. We're alive, and we're not in the Dark Kingdom, and we're safe and sane and we get to fight another day, and we can worry about figuring out what we learned from it when we're not..."
Too tired. Still in shock. Too confused. Too tired, mostly.
The older boy sighs, then tightens his arm around Makoto a little bit. "When we're not too tired to think. Right? It'll be okay. We can talk to Minako-san about it, I think-- I think she might be able to figure out more than we can. She's been doing this longer, she knows more. And-- we have to tell Usak-- Usagi-chan. She's the leader. She needs to know. And-- and maybe you can stay over at her place a little while again. Do some fun things with her, and... beat up some pixel monsters or something. You need some time off from worrying."
Reluctantly, he starts to shift, to get ready to pull his aching self up off the floor, and help Mako up if she'll let him. "Tonight you should take some aspirin and a really hot bath and go to bed."
----
She really doesn't want to get up. For all the sense that makes. She can't just sit here forever, and even if she could, it wouldn't make anything make any more sense. Still, Makoto makes an inarticulate little noise of protest when Mamoru starts to move, before she lets him help her up.
"I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as time off from worrying, Mamoru-san," she tells him ruefully. Once she's on her feet she wobbles drunkenly on numb legs, and takes a few moments to get her balance, grimacing as the pins and needles begin to set in.
The rest of his suggestions, she doesn't really have an answer for. She looks down at the futile and long-cold mug of cocoa on the coffee table and sighs. "...do you think this means he might back off now?" she wonders, vaguely hopeful. "Go back to usual Dark Kingdom business, stop being our personal boogeyman? Now that he knows we can't tell him what he wants to know."
----
"Don't know," says Mamoru a little breathlessly, clearly taking the route of not actually thinking about it right now; he steadies himself on the back of the couch. "What I do know is, if I end up fried after a fight again, or if you are, we leave in a group with other people until we're somewhere reasonbly safe, okay? Or we call the for help, or a ride, or whatever. No putting pride before safety, not when there's the chance of something like that happening again. If you need help, there's no shame in it."
There's a sheepish pause. "Speaking of which, is it okay if I sleep on your couch again?"
----
Not thinking about it right now is probably safest, anyway. Makoto deflates only a little at the non-answer... and then makes a really fantastic stinkface for a moment right around the time Mamoru gets to 'there's no shame in it' and she realizes she's hearing more or less the same thing she told Sanjouin-san the other day.
''Ugh.''
But what else can she do but shake it off, and smile wryly at Mamoru when he asks to take over her couch. "I'll pull out the futon," she tells him, and since her legs seem to be working something resembling properly, she turns away to go do just that.