Usagi walked slowly along the road leading toward her apartment and stared at her friend in abject shock. "I still can't believe you're really Shinigami, Duo-kun," she repeated yet again.

"I said I was, didn't I?" He seemed just as dazed. "You know I never lie. Why didn't you tell me you were Selene?"

"I had a hard enough time believing it myself. After everything I've seen and done in my life, I never expected to hear I'd become a god. Even now it seems impossible. Why should you believe it if I only barely do?"

"What do you mean, everything you've seen and done? You're younger than me, Usagi."

"When I first arrived at that school you and Heero-kun were at two years ago and we first met, I told you I wasn't from around here. I'm from a Tokyo two thousand years in the past."

He looked at her briefly as though she'd lost her mind. "Explain, Usagi."

"I and four of my friends were the defenders of our world. Enemies from a future a thousand years between our two times attacked. We followed them to that future, then they took the fight back to my time. We were following them through the Time Gate (which is how you travel through time) when this weird electricity shot out of nowhere. I remember it hitting me and knocking me away from my friends, then the next thing I remember, I was waking up under a tree here. And that's my story. When did you become Shinigami, Duo-kun? For real, I mean."

"When my partner was destroyed."

"Deathscythe?"

"Hai." He didn't elaborate on the situation, that he had been in a square full of people when the transformation occured, a huge group of people who had died in an instant. "When did you become Selene?"

She sighed, looking at the ground, at her own slowly moving feet. "Some hotshot OZ private tried to. . ." A warm and familiar hand touched her shoulder, and she smiled up at him.

"You told me about that then. You don't have to now."

"Arigatoo, D-chan. When I woke up, I'd leveled the entire block."

They walked the next block in silence; if anyone who knew either of them were present, they would never have believed what they saw. "How are we going to handle this Thanatos guy anyway?" Duo finally asked as they stopped at the apartment building she was current living in and she fished the key from her jacket pocket and unlocked the door, letting them into the lobby.

"I don't know if we can handle him alone," Usagi answered. The elevator door opened, and they both stepped inside. "He's very powerful and very ruthless."

"And he's already gotten Hyperion." Almost instantly, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "Sorry. I know how close you two were."

The bell dinged as the doors opened on the correct floor. "Arigatoo. In the meantime, though, we need to figure out what to do against him. Do you think it would help if we contacted someone, one of the others?"

Duo thought about this carefully as she unlocked her apartment. "If we contacted someone else, we would have back-up and that would be good. But we'd also be risking them and their power against him."

She looked up from taking off her shoes. "That's why I almost didn't contact you, Shin-kun."

"Shin-kun?"

She shrugged. "I thought it was cute. Look, there won't be another bus by here tonight, and there's no point in you walking all that way back. You might as well stay here tonight."

"Hontoo?"

She turned around and grinned at him. "On the couch, ecchi."