OH MAN THIS IS MY SHIT I HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR ME GOING OFF FOR NEARLY 900 WORDS.

• Okay, so, Mina shocks everyone by saying she doesn’t want
  them on the team.
• “Yes, thank you for your help against Galaxia, but we can’t
  rely on you, given your circumstances. Have a nice life.”
• She feels in her bones that all it would take is one offer
  of restoring Kinmoku and they’d turn traitor.

• Usagi doesn’t want to overrule her, but she begins hatching
  a Plan.
• The Plan involves a lot of “Oh my God Mina, we didn’t know
  you’d be here! Seiya, Taiki, and Yaten and I were just hanging out, what a
  coincidence we ran into you.” “Usagi, this is my house.”
• The Starlights can tell when they’re not wanted, and so they
  drop playing along and the Plan, ultimately, fails.
• But they don’t go away, they each have connections that,
  with the loss of everything else, they can’t discard.
• Taiki spends a lot of time with Mako, helping her with
  plants and learning about cooking. It takes a long time, but eventually Mako
  starts learning from her, too. The sort of plant life they had on Kinmoku, the
  way the smell of cinnamon reminds her of the palace. That she never had a name
  before they disguised themselves on earth, she had a title and that was who she
  was.
• (Mako does not have great memories of the Silver Millennium,
  but she knows that Jupiter was once like that. She begins to wonder if the
  Starlights might come to love their new home better.)
• Yaten adopts a cat. They have one thing they like on earth,
  and it’s cats. They get a cranky old shelter cat to be cranky with.
• And occasionally, they go bother Rei. Not because they care,
  but because Rei is the least annoying and Seiya won’t stop telling them to get
  out of the house.
• They ask Rei about the fires, about things she sees, about
  how she can believe any of it is real. Yaten is a skeptic, always has been,
  they questioned the beliefs of their home culture and now—well, it was all
  wrong, wasn’t it? They were right, the fires of Kinmoku were not eternal and
  the Light of Hope could never be salvation for all. So how can Rei say she
  knows the future, how can—
• Rei silences them with an ofuda over their mouth. She
  explains the things she sees are possibilities. She explains the way her faith
  works, the things she believes and the things she doesn’t, the way she takes
  what she feels and what she knows and makes a way to live.
• Yaten says they still don’t care, but they listen. And
  sometimes, when they have nothing better to do, they help out at the shrine a
  little. Just because Seiya has forced them to get out and socialize. Not
  because they want to be there.
• Seiya struggles, and tries to hide it. She was supposed to
  be the protector, of her princess, of her planet, of everything she loves. And
  now, everything she loves is gone, except for one person, and that person has
  other (better, she is sure) protectors (whom she cannot join) and a different
  love, and it’s hard for her to not project all of her feelings onto that one
  thing, onto that one person, because rejection is easier to think about than
  lost lives and lost homes. It is easier to think she is not good enough for one
  person than to feel the weight of all the millions of people she failed.
• For all she yells at Yaten to socialize, she secludes
  herself. She just does it outside of the house.
• She capitalizes on her fame to go to clubs, to dance but
  never have conversations with anyone, to sometimes sit alone and be admired but
  never approached.
• It’s actually Haruka who draws her out. Haruka hates her,
  but it’s hard to hate someone when they’re laid low. She tries to goad Seiya
  into fights when she sees her. Seiya takes no bait, until Haruka makes a crack
  about her abilities as a soldier and it hits too close and Seiya snaps.
• She tackles Haruka, and Haruka ends up on the ground
  prepared to take a hit, because she understands the self-loathing better than
  anyone.
• Of course Seiya realizes she’s not fighting, and they have a
  very honest, emotional conversation that they both agree to never speak of to
  anyone ever.
• The others notice, though, that they become sparring
  partners and gym buddies, competitive as ever but with a kinder undertone than
  they ever had before.
• Mina observes it all, and considers. She is not ready to
  integrate them yet, but she’s seeing she can’t stop the trust forming between
  them and her soldiers. She begins to strategize what roles they’d fit into.
• Yaten is a good stealth hitter, she decides, while Seiya is
  another power house. Taiki is harder to place, though Mina figures she’s a good
  support for the more single-minded soldiers, and she could cover the back of
  Mako or Seiya (Michiru already covers Haruka fully).
• When a threat comes she does not invite them, but she does
  not stop them when they eventually join the fight. They fall into line with few hiccups.
  She still keeps an eye on them, but whether she likes it or not, they’re on her
  team.