#sparklee art

[sparklee-gem]

Drawing of my personal headcanons for these two from years ago that I still love 💖

Lineart under the cut if you want that too

[inaudible-shrieking]

Yujou for my half of an art trade with @sparklee-gem :D

[kaitheenbydoesthings]

So, I wrote a thing. It was not planned. I was provoked by friends

I sent the prompt on discord because it made me laugh, and then @book-keeper and @sparklee-gem went to talking about it and Wormgi became a Thing

Also @shewithoutrain wanted to be tagged

There was even art made guys

I haven't decided if I'm going to put this on ao3 yet, so here's ~500 words of immortal x reincarnation puzzle crack, I guess

Atem knew that it was about time for his partner to be back, so when he felt the familiar presence nearby he wasn’t too surprised. 

The part that was a surprise was the thoughts coming through their bond. Well, ‘thought’ was the wrong word. It was more like simple emotions and vague impressions. Dirt, tasty, joy.

And then, as he followed the feeling out to the garden, he was struck with the strongest urge to watch his step. Even though he knew the paths by heart, after walking them for hundreds of years now.

The stones of the path were darkened by the recent rain, the sky still dark with clouds as the sun set. Water droplets clung to petals and leaves all around. The scents of roses, lilacs, chrysanthemums, lavender and petrichor mingled in the air around him.

Atem’s pace slowed as he followed the instinct to watch where he put his feet. His curiosity was rising, as he’d never quite experienced such basic “thoughts” from his partner before. Sure, he’d seen Yugi in likely hundreds of physical forms now, but until now they had always been able to communicate easily.

What had the Gods come up with that was limiting Yugi’s thoughts so severely?

That’s when movement under the lilac bushes to his right. Crouching down, he found a. A worm? Yep, that’s a worm flopping around wildly. He reaches out through the link in their minds, Yugi? Is that you?  

And to his absolute - Shock? Apprehension? Dismay?- who could say - the little creature stopped its thrashing to wiggle towards him. Still doubting this new reality, Atem rested his hand, palm up, on the dirt near the worm. And then he looked on in awe as the strange new form of his soulmate slowly climbed up into his palm. 

On his way back to the house to find his love a suitable home, Atem cradled the little creature carefully in his hand, doing his best to send calm and reassurances through their bond, even though he was kind of panicking.

A few minutes later he returned from finding a jar to keep his wiggly companion in.  "I know you used to ask me if I would still love you if you were a worm," Atem sighed, placing the newest form of his reincarnated lover in the jar of dirt, "but this is ridiculous.”

Another little while later, Atem is cuddled up on the sofa, worm-Yugi’s jar settled in a blanket nest beside him. His attention however, is fully on the laptop in front of him. Lots of research to do about keeping a worm happy.

[mahjastrax]

[OC ART, SONA] SPARKLEE... RAINBOWS!!!

i love rainbows... mb... gay gay homo ga

[bubblellop]

WAKE UP BESTIES, I'VE REDONE MY COMMISSION INFO!

[docholligay]

Perfection, Oil on Linen, Date Unknown

My sparklee was @everybodyknows-everybodydies! Thank you s much for letting me write to your prompt. I picked “Love is just a softer way to die” and this is set about a week before Episode 110. I hope you enjoy, and happy sparkling!! 

Michiru had been a primed canvas from birth.

She was the masterpiece of all her parents’ accomplishments, not a brush stroke out of place, not a misapplied color, perfectly framed in the wealth and privilege she had been born into, a museum piece under glass, never to be touched. Under those presentation lights, she shone, the lights against the darks, the soul of expression, as if this masterpiece was almost human itself.

Almost human, not quite.

As the years had made her more beautiful, more pedigreed, her value grew higher, and she grew further and further from the simple crowd, and she learned that she was not made to be touched, only to be gazed upon, for things lose their value when you touch them, when you use them. The oil from your fingertips will dissolve a painting, her mother once said, and she laid a sheet of plexiglass over what Michiru Kaioh might have been, a smooth surface that could be easily wiped of any grime the world came to commit.

Her destiny lay in choices were not hers, art galleries and museums and parties where she was whirled around the floor. See how beautifully she goes with the decor? Her worth extends into the millions. She will be attending the ball at the end of the season, of course.

When the rod had been slipped into her hand, another destiny that she had no hand in, it was hardly a surprise.

But Michiru was strong, and Michiru was preserved, and Michiru was under glass. She would not die for the sake of some princess she had never heard of, and though they could perhaps one day, force her to kneel, they could never force her to give herself over. She would stubbornly survive against all enemies and against all allies, an island to herself, fortified at all sides.

Michiru looked out the window, all of Tokyo laid out like jewels in a case, sparkling below her as if she merely needed to select one for a party. She had made promises to herself, when she had picked up the henshin rod, that she would continue on as she always had, and be this thing as well. Nothing would change.

She had lied. She had lied and now she would die.

She hadn’t known she was lying. Michiru lied to everyone except herself, and she knew herself well at a young age, and though she was petty and cold and self-interested and the thousand other sins, both small and large, that she assigned herself, she did not consider herself to be delusional.

I only wanted her, Michiru told the blinking lights, the Milky Way of mankind, stretched to the horizon, to possess her. I am owed something, am I not?

You would pass the cost to her? The lights replied.

“Haruka.” She mouthed quietly, not to lights this time, but simply as one might recite a prayer by rote, for the comfort of hearing it on the lips.

Of course, she might have said, before. She might have said that all of life is unfair, and there is no reason she alone should bear the weight of destiny. She might have protested that it was unlikely Michiru could have saved her from fate, anyhow. Michiru was unable to save herself, so why her?

She might have. Before. But now she held no answer.

Michiru wandered out of the living room with its barren and spare decor, down the small short hallway that held the door Haruka slept behind. She put her hand to it, knowing what lay beyond there. Haruka’s duffel bag that she brought to the house, stuffed with the handful of clothes she owned, the few hanging uniforms to Mugen, purchased by Michiru. A small collection of model cars Haruka had built. A threadbare quilt, tucked under her pillow.

And Haruka herself, curled into a tight pile, blonde hair going this way and that against the pillow like weeds in a garden. She would be in an old t-shirt and her boxers, snoring softly, her hand wound around the quilt under her pillow. Michiru often wondered what she dreamed, wishing that some aspect of her Sight could reach into Haruka’s mind and pull out the secrets that lay therein.

She felt a chip of pigment flake away inside her, another casualty of the girl that lay behind the door, whose fingertips dissolved everything Michiru had been, the perfect paint, preserved and hardened over the years, chipping and flaking and falling to the floor.

Let destruction come. Let decay and death and all of its horrors, all of the darkness come for her.

But not for the girl behind the door.

Michiru Kaioh would die in less than a week. She would be killed, in some grey and drafty building, and she had seen this play out over and over again, and she had seen the moves that could be made, playing out chess strategies in her mind, and in the end, she was the queen that must be sacrificed to protect the king. She would die, but she would die protecting Haruka, and for the first time in her life, sacrifice felt like a gift she was being given.

She would die because she loved her.

Love. Was it even fair to call it that? Would she know if it was? A painting represents the world and reflects it, but it does not create it, it does not live in it. Could she do anything but pantomime the acts in dripping oils and thick acrylics?

The wind rustled outside, and Michiru smiled at the thought of Haruka’s imagined whispers. She often pretended to her own sort of Sight, quickly adding to Michiru’s visions that she had seen the same, that the wind had told her one thing or another, eyes filled with the jealous desire to know the things Michiru knew.

To know was a burden, and she had laid enough on Haruka’s shoulders.

Michiru quietly turned the doorhandle and let a small ray of light spray into the small room Haruka called her own. There she lay, just Michiru had seen her in her mind’s eye, lips parted slightly in sleep, looking so much softer and younger than she tried to play herself, the armor she put on every morning stored away as she dozed, more elegant than any jewel Tokyo had offered only moments before. 

Sometimes, when one painting fell away, it revealed another underneath. Something hidden. The masters painted over their own works, hiding the painting underneath, the one that touched to near to heart hidden away, covered with some disconnected masterpiece until a careless art student or curator chips at the edge of it and sees the soul beneath.

She saw a glimpse of who she might have been, in the empty space next to Haruka on the bed, and dipped a toe into the room.

The boldness of it. The impropriety.

And yet she found she did not care, her footsteps soft as church whispers as she crept toward where Haruka slept, grateful for the newness of the floor in this charmless box of a monument to wealth, a friend to her own charmless self, not betraying her steps as Haruka slept on. She was close now, closer than she’d ever dared to come before, every inch of her pulling with longing to reach out, to touch her, to no longer be seen but to be felt by someone, to be a thing to be used and loved.

She knelt by Haruka’s bedside, expecting any moment that Haruka would awake and see her for the ugly thing that she was, not the prince that came to rescue this sleeping beauty but the witch who had enchanted her.

Haruka was beautiful. Perhaps someone might have insisted she was instead handsome or attractive, but they were all the more wrong and all the more swayed by the simple shortness of her hair, the masculine cut of her clothes. She was beautiful, and the moonlight streamed through the window fell across the lean musculature of her arms, tree limbs with their elegant waves and bends. The soft gold of her hair gleamed against the dark pillow and fell gently across her brow. Her features were cut like marble, still an unfinished and imprecise nature to her, rough at the edges,  but Michiru was both art and  artist, and could see what a work would become.

She glanced at Haruka’s hand, so tantalizingly near and so very far away. She shied away from Michiru’s touch. The was because she was not used to affection, to care, to gentleness, Michiru told herself, and nearly convinced herself was true, save for the times she looked in the mirror and heard it say to her that Haruka was good and noble, and could sense the bad in Michiru, and it burned her like a fairy to iron.

She swallowed the thought bitterly, turpentine filling her mouth. Love changed the taste of things.

Haruka had been terribly ill, a month ago, feverish and coughing, propped up quietly in bed as some podcast on the nature of cars droned on, Haruka slipping in and out of consciousness. Michiru had touched her, and she had not pulled away. Michiru hand slipped her long, delicate fingers around Haruka’s wrist and made a show of checking her pulse, and Haruka had slept on, each beat echoing through Michiru’s fingertips.

Michiru remembered it with pleasure, crouched in the darkness, and swiped away the bangs from Haruka’s forehead, even as she felt her own heart beat like a drum of war. You are a danger to me, as I was to you. And now you are a soldier, and I am the damned. Socrates with the hemlock he chose.

A little girl with dark teal hair and eyes the sparkled like the surface of the sea had once wished for love, the all-embracing kind that came like a wind from the seas and wrapped around, something that would take her far away and to something new in the movement of that adoration. An older girl with the same hair, but whose eyes had dulled from years of looking without seeing, had made a similar wish as she tuned her violin, but wishing instead that her heart could feel love. That it could be a living thing.

They were both fools, those girls. Wishing for things they didn’t understand, thinking they could take these things into their bodies and survive them, that love was some sweet and soft rain instead of the tsunami that crashed against everything Michiru had been.

Love is just a softer way to die, my loves, she might have said, if those girls would listen, and it will fool you praying for its embrace.

Michiru would die for Haruka, and the last bit of protection Michiru had would fall away, and whatever came after, they would see what had been painted there first, before she knew what would sell.

Michiru kissed Haruka’s forehead, and the poison tasted sweet.

[sparklee-gem]

Two of them

[sparklee-gem]

I love you Yugi Mutou you are my friend :]

Surprise under the cut:

Atem not being able to handle his bf’s goth boy swag

[sparklee-gem]

hi hello i just want to say that i adore your art, the style is so nice and it makes me really happy everytime i see it, thats all have a good day!

HI??? I’M GONNA CRY? 🥺💖💖💖

That’s so sweet anon, thank you!! ✨ I hope you have a wonderful day as well!

It makes me incredibly happy to hear that about my art, it really motivates me to keep creating and sharing what I make 🫶✨

[sparklee-gem]

Hi, I’m Lee!

I’m Sparklee_Gem over on Ao3 ✨

I’ve been involved in different fandoms over the years, but I only just started posting fics early last year, so I’m super excited to continue to share my works and connect with other authors!

I’ll be uploading updates on any new fics I’m working on or posted. Maybe some sneak peeks from time to time. #sparklee fics and #sparklee wip is how you can find them.

I also draw occasionally, and usually more than I write haha, so I’ll also reblog any art I post onto here, and tag it #my art on this blog.

I’m currently in the ygo fandom (specifically DM) and I’ve been here for almost three years now,, but I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon.

I’m still figuring out how to be an active author, and organizing everything through social media, so please be patient with me, but I’m very excited to share more with y’all! 🙏🏼✨

[docholligay]

Sparkle Sparkle 2019!

By popular request, and the help of @awashsquid so i don’t have to do this all by myself, THE SPARKLE SPARKLE GIFT EXCHANGE HAS RETURNED FOR 2019. 

For those of you who haven’t joined in before, this is a fic/art gift exchange between anyone on tumblr who is into Harumichi. You don’t have to follow me, like me, don’t have to have interacted with any of us, etc. All you need to do is have the desire to write or draw to a Harumichi-based prompt, and want receive same!

How it works: You will receive a fic or piece of art from someone for the holidays, based on one of three prompts that you submit.

How to join:

  Fill out this survey, from this link, by January 1st 

 ONE EXTRA prompt can be something other than Harumichi: BroTP, Reinako, Happy Outers Family, fuck, Pharmercy, I don’t care. That way, if you get drawn for someone who also enjoys the same thing, you can go down that road too. (so if you do this, it would be FOUR prompts total) 

 I will randomly draw your partner and email their form to you January 3rd

 Publish your work on your blog with an @ and an ask to your person, and a link submission to @awashsquid, by February 2nd

Please only enter if you reasonably believe you can fulfill the request, though I will pinch hit. Please tell me as soon as possible if you can no longer participate. I am also looking for people who could pinch hit as well.

HAVE LOADS OF FUN WITH THIS

 Oh, and it’s MEANT TO BE A SURPRISE so don’t tell your sparklee that you have their name! If you have a question for them, just ask me or @awashsquid! We’ll pass it on! 

The form, explained:

Tumblr name: I feel like if you don’t know the answer to this, I can’t help you. (Example: Docholligay)

My three prompts are: enter your three fic or art ideas here. (Example: Haruka and Michiru go to monster trucks, DROWNED HARUKA, Haruka tries to teach Mina how to drive)

I particularly love: Stuff that just plucks your guitar string. No guarantees, but this will give your person some guidance how to please you! That’s all everyone really wants. (Example: ‘blueblood’ Michiru, AU fic, The BroTP)

I do not really enjoy: Now, don’t be rude here. But if there’s something you don’t like, I’m sure your person would like to know that too! (example: Happy Outers Fam, Crystal Tokyo.) (Optional to answer)

Other characters and pairings I like: This just gives your sparkler a rough idea of who to think about,if they want to. (Example: Reinako, Mina, Rei) (Optional to answer) 

My email is: this is only for me and squid’s eyes, and will only be used to communicate with you about Sparkle Sparkle. 

If you have any questions feel free to ask me or @awashsquid!

FAQ:

-How do you draw these? I use random.org to make a list, and put it up against the list in order of how they came in. The only time someone gets switched is if they get themselves. This worked really well for me last year.

-Am I required to use their likes list? No, it’s only to help you please them because that was something people were worried about last year. It’s not a demands list, for sure. I would shy away from things on their dislikes list; so far everyone’s been really reasonable.

-Am I required to use their prompt list? Yes. That’s why there are three.

-what if I don’t get a gift? You will. If your person drops, I or someone else will pinch hit.

[docholligay]

A Crack of the Heart Crystal

@rhiorhino YOU WERE MY SPARKLEE...and I’ve had this in my drafts since before my trip whoops, so I hope it serves, I used your “Haruka fucks up in an early days mission” There were many things Michiru Kaioh quite enjoyed about her new partner. Partner, no, that perhaps seemed a bit intimate, considering the fact that they had been forced together by fate. Comrade...that seemed either a bit Communist or a bit jovial, and she couldn’t decide which she liked the least. Colleague. Yes, that seemed to fit the best, at the present moment, whether the relative distance of it pleased her or not. Her colleague had a number of very positive attributes, some of which, Michiru was pleased to say, she had noticed long before she’d realized Haruka Tenoh was Sailor Uranus.

Her raw athleticism, her keen sense of physicality, her kinesthetic grace--these things benefitted them in the field, and also, strangely, seemed to lower Michiru’s requirements for the heating bill, though this particular benefit she thought best kept to herself.

But for all of Haruka’s gifts, both practical and aesthetic, there were certain things that worried her.

For one, Haruka had a hero complex. Michiru recognized that this would not be seen by most as a negative for someone, who was, in fact, a superhero, if they could be called that. But Michiru saw things differently. Courage and impetuousness and commitment to duty were all very well in the storybooks,  but in the context of an intergalactic war, she simply saw it leading toward an even earlier grave.

Discretion is the better part of valor, she had told her once, after Haruka had charged unthinking toward an enemy, the shot from its arm digging deeply into her shoulder.

Haruka had simply shrugged, and mumbled something about how she knew that.

“You don’t understand a word, I don’t believe.” She had snapped it dismissively, and leaned forward. “I mean to say it’s more heroic to avoid danger than to run straight into it like some...foolish cowboy. Do you understand that?” Haruka’s brow had knitted in embarrassment, her shoulders riding up. In later years, Michiru would look on this moment of condescension with great shame, wondering how she ever ended up with Haruka lying beside her, but in this moment, all she felt was irritation.

Haruka pulled away from her ministrations, the edge of the bandage flopping with the movement of it.

Two inches, maybe? From her heart. We can die, Haruka, if we are injured too gravely, too quickly. Do you know that? Do you know that I have no wish to see you, pale and quiet, on the ground?

However, heeding her own advice, she thought it better not to ask Haruka what she did and did not know.

The tension of that moment had passed, replaced by new and constant tensions between them, and in several months it had developed into an uneasy partnership, bound together by the twin ropes around their necks, placed there long before birth, waiting together for the drop.

__

She’d been in the bathroom half an hour, which even she had to admit seemed excessive. She was meeting Michiru at a cafe downtown in...too soon. To discuss business. Official business. Official SENSHI business.

Her hair seemed unwilling to lay down and accept the meeting in either a business or an official capacity, however, and it this only added to her frustration. She tried, always, to give off some air of respectability when she met with Michiru, particularly after seeing the circles she ran in, and the girls who courted her.

She assessed herself in the mirror. Her jacket was clean and she had mended it reasonably well, and the vest, she thought, did not match, but it did go, and both looked like something she might have seen in a discarded GQ, and covered the thinness of her shirt. She tugged at the edge of it. It isn’t too much, with jeans, is it? No, there was a shoot that had something llike this, pretty sure. Maybe not. No. Yes? I mean yeah.

Her hair sprung up again, and she sighed heavily as she headed to the cafe.

For all of her concerns over her looks, Michiru did not seem to notice one way or the other, and Haruka felt an immediate disappointment and relief, looking at her elegance and beauty, a silver bracelet hanging from her delicate wrist, smelling softly of roses and jasmine.

“Haruka, I believe I’ve found our next target.” It was a difficult guess, always, but then again, Michiru had a way of relishing in the times that life was difficult, for, at the very least, they confirmed her suspicions about the larger world.

Haruka leaned forward over the picture of the girl and bit the inside of her cheek. Oh god, not her. Whoever they took the Talismans from would die. But many would live. You must sacrifice them for the greater good, Haruka. You must sacrifice yourself.

She was a sweet-looking girl, grinning brightly over her many cooking awards. Her name was Emi, and she had gone to school with Haruka before this whole talisman mess. She gave Haruka leftovers after school, a lot. Begged her to take them, said her family would never eat them. She did that for other people, too, and pretended like she didn’t spend her free period cooking for it.

She was kind. It made sense she would hold a pure heart.

“You’re sure?” Haruka mounted as a weak defense.

“Of little in life am I absolutely certain, but it seems a fair assessment.” She took a sip of her tea, and looked over at Haruka. “Is there any particular reason she seems a poor choice? Some scandal of which I am unaware?”

“No.” Haruka shook her head and touched the edge of the photograph. “Not at all.”

Michiru looked over at her kindly, a sudden sadness seizing her as she studied Haruka’s woebegone gaze.

__

If occasionally, life gives us gifts, today’s gift was that, as the pure heart was pulled from Emi’s body, it seemed clear to Haruka that it wasn’t a talisman.

She would have conceded the point that she wasn’t entirely sure what the talismans were supposed to look like, and Michiru had not seen fit to share that information, but she was fairly certain that it would at least look different, and Emi’s pure heart looked the same as all the others.

She threw a swing at the daimon, but it was quick, and dodged nimbly around her, catching her in the side. Michiru came around the back of it, her small fist drilled in behind its ear, and she took Haruka by the hand, leading her to the side for a moment’s breath.

“It isn’t a talisman, Uranus, we may as well leave the daimon to it.” She brushed a piece of imaginary dirt off her skirt and began to walk away, her earlier kindness forgotten amidst the realization of how tough this particular foe could be.

Haruka shook her head firmly, a tin foil covered dish appearing in her mind. “No.”

Michiru looked at her, annoyed to be directly disobeyed. “I beg your pardon? You are aware, I hope, that we are a finite resource.”

Haruka did not meet her gaze. “I can’t let Emi die. She’s nice.”

“This is madness.” She threw her hands in the air. “I will not back you.”

But she was ignored, denied even the dignity of a response, and Haruka headed back into the fray, silently wondering why the daimon couldn’t just return the heart crystal, and then Haruka would detransform and take Emi home, and no one would be the wiser. If it wasn’t a talisman, all of this was unnecessary.

She reflected on these things as she whirled around the daimon, but quickly realized why Michiru had been so reluctant to fight it--it was swifter and more agile than others they had fought, and as quick as Haruka was, she struggled to match the creature.

There was also the question of the spears it carried, which added an exciting tone of doom to the affair.

She was caught out, and she had overplayed her hand, and she was exceedingly aware of all of these things, and yet she could not compel herself to stop, could not join Michiru and forget about Emi lying there. She knew the world depended on their lives. She knew that someone would have to be sacrificed, and oh, how she wished she were strong enough to have it be someone who had showed her kindness. Michiru had that strength. She did not. She was nothing next to Michiru, in every sense.

The spear was coming.

Haruka closed her eyes, and prepared for the sharp blade into her ribcage.

Instead, there was a strong shove from the side, and Michiru snatched the spear out of the air, whirling it and stabbing it deep into the chest of the daimon. She did it with the elegance and grace with which she strolled down the sidewalk, and Haruka was not sure she had ever seen her fight with such ferocity. It was as terrifying as it was dramatic, and if Haruka knew as much about art then as she would come to know, she might have compared it to Judith slaying Holofernes, remembering how it felt to stand in that room with the huge painting and bask in its terrible beautiful violence.

Haruka tenderly scooped Emi’s pure heart up from the ground and placed it into her chest, ignoring the pain, just pleased to see her stir, even slightly.

Michiru turned to Haruka, her face dark.

“I hope you’re pleased.”

__

In later years, the seesaw of justice and discretion settled, and Michiru and Haruka read each other well enough that the arguments on matters of military strategy were rare. In those times, after a battle, they would gently bandage each other’s wounds, drink tea or hot cocoa, and wrap up together, gently adjusted into the most comfortable position for them both. It was warm and intimate and it almost made the battles themselves worthwhile, for Michiru.

But that time was still years off, and all Michiru felt right now was the sour mix of relief and anger in her mouth. She set her purse down on the table in the entrance, just hard enough that the chrome feet of her Hermes back cracked against the cool tile of the small table.

“I apologize the girl was your friend, but her life is only one, Haruka. We are the only ones who can stop what is going to happen. We two. If you throw that away for some--”

Haruka had limped in weakly behind Michiru, but the accusation found her with a renewed vigor, breaking through the exhaustion and fear into pure bellicose frustration.

“I KNOW YOU THINK I’M STUPID!”

Michiru whirled around and stared her in the eye. “I think you are foolhardy and impetuous and that you believe these things pass for gallantry, but they most certainly do not.”

“JUST SAY WHAT YOU MEAN FOR FUCK’S SAKE”

“I AM AFRAID YOU WILL DIE, HARUKA.” Her voice cracked, just the smallest, most fragile twitch, like the miniscule line in the glaze of an old pot, barely visible to the naked eye.

But there it was, laid just a little bare.

Haruka recoiled as if she’d been bitten, taking a step backwards, her eyebrows knit in confusion. Her mind flickered to the hopeless, terrible thoughts she had dreamed, that MIchiru could ever look on her with anything other than passing tolerance, that she might ever know what it was to really touch MIchiru, in the soft way that cherry blossoms caressed her cheek as they fell to the ground, unconscious of the gift they had been given.

And for a moment, just one lost moment, she thought she saw that hope reflected in Michiru’s eyes.

But of course, Michiru’s eyes were an unending sea, and she saw only herself, as Michiru shook her head.

Haruka cleared her throat. “The mission’d be harder with one.”

Michiru looked up and gave a soft huff.

“Yes. The mission.”