Archive of Our Own ^beta

Springtime was in full bloom in downtown Tokyo. Students on spring break  were congregating in every public area, buying bento, holding hanami parties, even hanging out in the Crown Arcade. Motoki was in heaven. Mamoru was just annoyed. It was getting so that one couldn’t even hold a senshi meeting in relative peace.

“Ugh, I can’t believe how crowded it is,” Usagi complained, squeezed onto Mamoru’s lap in the usual corner booth. Mamoru forbore to mention that getting everyone into that booth had become impossible well before the current influx of liberated students. After all, at maximum attendance, there were eleven of them now. And two cats. Fortunately, the outers were not in presence today. They had been appraised of the alteration in the shitennou’s status and agreed to upgrade them from “shoot on sight” to “observe and report”. However, they felt strongly that this was a Golden Kingdom matter and had no desire to interfere. It was just as well. Even with Usagi on his lap and Rei scrunched indecently close to Jade, getting seven people into the booth was still a stretch.

“Okay, everyone,” Mamoru said authoritatively. “You all convinced me to wait until classes were on break to start seriously hunting for the other shitennou-”

“I’m sure it did good things for your grades, Mamoru-kun,” Ami pointed out.

“I doubt it,” the prince said dryly. “I may have been looking at the textbook, but I don’t think you could call what I did ‘studying’.”

“Oh dear-”

“Ahem,” Usagi cut in. If left to herself, Ami would go on about insignificant matters until the heat death of the universe. The bluenette was still having extreme difficulty with the idea that she had had a very serious, downright hot-and-heavy relationship with a man back in the Silver Millennium, and that said man might be walking and talking and lusting after her at this very minute. It didn’t help that Rei and Jade seemed constitutionally unable to keep their hands off of each other, even in public. If Ami didn’t stop blushing soon, she was going to give herself sunburn. But Usagi wasn’t going to let that stand in the way of true love. “I think Mamoru was trying to say that, now that break has arrived, it’s time to focus on finding the others and bringing them back into the circle.”

“Yes.” Mamoru cleared his throat. “Okay. What do we have so far? Jade?”

The other man jumped and looked up from his girlfriend. “Right. Sorry. I’ve been going through the consular records from the last ten years whenever I got the chance. Some of those passport pictures are pretty terrible, but I don’t think any of them have left the country.”

“What if they left before then? Your parents moved away when you were just a baby,” Makoto pointed out. “Or what if they’re orphans? Mamoru and I are both orphans. Then we’d never find them! Or what if-”

“Then we’ll deal with it,” Usagi said soothingly. Makoto had not required much convincing at all to embrace the probable return of Nephrite. Her dreamer’s soul and romantic nature had been enthralled by the story of love, betrayal and redemption. Holding her back until spring break had been the problem; Makoto had wanted to start going door to door right now in search of her soul mate.

“And my parents are an unusual case,” Jade pointed out. “They were only here briefly for my father’s final year of graduate work.”

“What if that happened to someone else? Maybe we should check the universities-”

“Makoto, relax,” Usagi ordered. Then she turned to Jade. “It is a valid question, though; shouldn’t we look back through the last twenty or so years at least?”

“The records are only computerized for the last ten years,” Jade sighed. “Apparently the Japanese government resisted handling customs electronically until they absolutely had to, and there’s been no funds for going back and digitizing the old records. And I can’t exactly start requisitioning old files without a good excuse.”

“All right,” Minako said practically. “Until we have reason to believe otherwise, we’ll assume that the other shitennou are still in Japan.”

“But what if they were never in Japan?” Makoto wailed. “What if they’re just from other countries? Then how will we-”

“That’s not likely,” Usagi cut in. “We were all born within the same district, remember, Mako-chan? Sure, Minako-chan and Jade-kun’s parents moved away, but it’s far more likely that they’re right here in Juuban.”

“I agree,” Ami said. Usagi beamed at her for overcoming her shyness enough to contribute. Ami really had been growing into a mature, confident woman before this recent setback. Hopefully she would soon come to realize that being in a relationship was not the end of the world.

Makoto seemed to accept Ami’s answer. “So what now?”

“Hospital records,” Mamoru said.

Ami twitched. “Wait a second, Mamoru-kun,” she tried.

“If they were born in Juuban, their certificates will be on file with the local heath board,” the prince continued. “And as medical students, Ami-chan and I have access to those records.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” the bluenette said nervously. “It would be an abuse of trust to misuse our access.”

“It’s not misuse,” Minako protested. “It’s love!”

“We don’t have authorization to look at their private medical records!” Ami argued.

“Sure we do.” Mamoru grinned. “I’m the prince of Earth, remember? They were my personal guard. I’m their next of kin from the Silver Millennium.”

“Mamoru-kun-”

“And I’m arguably their attending doctor, too.”

“That’s sophistry!” Ami protested weakly.

“No, that’s the law,” Endymion stated. “They are citizens of the Golden Kingdom and my subjects. That gives me all the rights I need.”

“I agree,” Jadeite said, throwing his support to his prince. “The law was very clear on this point.”

Ami subsided unhappily.

“Come on, Ami,” Rei said in a conciliatory tone, reaching across to tap the bluenette meaningfully on one hand. “I know this is making you nervous. You don’t have to jump right back into a relationship the minute we find Zoicite, okay? Jade and I are handling this the way we want to. You can do the same.”

Ami looked worried. “What if he expects more?”

“I doubt he will,” Minako said comfortingly. “He was more than willing to be patient in the Silver Millennium, remember?”

“No,” Ami admitted flatly.

“Well, take my word for it, he was.”

“I think we’re forgetting something,” Usagi said, bringing the conversation back around to business. “Birth certificates don’t include photos, and frankly, I doubt we’d recognize the shitennou from their baby pictures.”

“No, but we can compile a list of names in the right gender and age range,” Mamoru replied. “Then we can start refining by other lifestyle factors.”

“Meaning?” Makoto asked.

“We’re not professional royalty anymore, but a lot of our skills and personality traits seem to have remained the same from the Silver Millennium,” Usagi explained. “We can use that to our advantage.”

“Nephrite will have a reputation for honesty and diligence,” Mamoru continued, nodding at Makoto. “And we can ask around at various engineering firms for someone who hasn’t left their office in a month.” He grinned at Ami, who, predictably, blushed. Then he frowned. “Kunzite is going to be harder. He really lived for his work, and I have no idea what he might have started doing if he didn’t have his old responsibilities anymore.”

 “Police officer?” Jade suggested. “Bodyguard?”

Mamoru shook his head. “I just don’t know.” His gaze slid over to Minako. “Any ideas, Minako-chan?”

She frowned in thought, then shrugged. “No, but I’ll let you know.”

“Something with a lot of responsibility,” Jade said thoughtfully.

“Well, in the meanwhile, everyone keep your eyes open,” Usagi said. “After Luna woke me up, there started to be a lot of strange coincidences, remember? Bumping into Mamoru all the time, meeting Rei at the arcade, Minako transferring into our school. I think it was the crystal working to pull us all together. We may see a similar effect now, so pay attention to the details, okay?”

“We will,” Makoto said for everyone. Her eyes were far away, probably dreaming of her reunion with Nephrite.

“Okay,” Mamoru concluded. “Then let’s go.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

In a tiny office buried several levels underground, Kusanagi Zen stared at the numbers wavering disquietingly on his computer screen. They were nowhere near what he wanted them to be. Just in case, he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Sliding the lenses back on his nose, he looked again. Nope. Still wrong.

Leaning back in his chair, Zen sighed. This project, like most of those he found himself on, was weeks behind, way over budget, and failing to produce any meaningful results whatsoever. It was only after things had gotten bad that frazzled project managers called him in, hoping for a miracle. More often than not, he was able to provide one, thus saving the reputation of at least half of the section heads in the Ministry of Advanced Science and Technology at one time or another. Unfortunately, it was starting to look like this one was beyond repair.

Zen stood and stretched, feeling abused back muscles complain loudly that thirty-six hours in a standard-issue government chair were no picnic. His brain chose that moment to fizzle and short out, presumably on the grounds that thirty-six hours of energy drinks and ramen were no substitute for five real meals and a good night’s sleep. It was time for a break.

Riding towards the surface in an agonizingly slow elevator, Zen checked his watch. Apparently it was lunchtime topside. The good news was that meant the cafeteria would be open and he wouldn’t need to venture outside in search of food. The bad news was that the cafeteria would be crowded. AS&T had the best tofu on the entire campus of the Ministry of Defense, although that wasn’t saying much. Twice a day salarymen from all over the complex descended on their building to eat, chatter and generally make Zen wished he’d stayed in the lab.

Well, he hadn’t seen sunlight in days now. He was due, and the salarymen could just deal with the presence of a taciturn engineer in their midst.

It took far too long to get to the cafeteria proper through the congested hallways, and even longer to make it through the line and pay for his standard project-rescue-mode lunch. Moving into the seating area with tray in hand, Zen winced at the sea of suited figures stretching from wall to wall. Maybe eating in his office wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

By an inconveniently placed support pillar, sitting at a table tucked away in semiprivacy, a broad-shouldered man with white hair caught Zen’s eye and raised one hand in a familiar signal.

Zen shoved through the crowd, paying no attention to the herd, and put his tray down just in time to stop an aggressive woman from making off with an empty chair. “Konnichi wa, Yamazaki-san.”

“Kusanagi-kun,” the other man replied. He subjected Zen to a critical look. “You look paler than usual.”

“First sun in two days,” Zen agreed, breaking open the prefabricated chopsticks.

“Whose project is this?”

“Morouka-kachou’s.” Zen rolled his eyes expressively.

The other man said nothing, and to the casual observer, his expression had not changed. However, Zen had been eating random meals with Yamazaki for years now, and he was able to catch the extra degree of disapproval in the crinkling of the edges of his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Morouka was in for it now; Yamazaki was the department head in charge of staffing and budget for AS&T. Zen rather thought that Morouka’s next pet project was about to run into a critical shortage of funds and manpower.

“I was hoping you’d come up for lunch today,” Yamazaki said, surprising Zen. Usually the two men ate in a companionable silence, and rarely scheduled a meeting on purpose. The department chair was too busy to take lunch very often, and Zen’s schedule was unpredictable in the extreme, defined as it usually was by the needs of mismanaged projects. When they happened to sync up, they enjoyed each other’s company, but the only time one of them would deliberately seek out the other was…

The younger man looked up, a question on his face. Yamazaki nodded, a slight but significant motion of his head.

Zen looked back down at his food and discovered he wasn’t hungry any more. He threw down his chopsticks. “Let’s take a walk.”

Outside, the sun made him wince and pull out the shaded glasses he kept for times like this. They weren’t prescription, so when he switched them out, the world past his nose faded into pleasantly blurry shapes. Zen liked it that way. There were too many sharp edges lurking in the corners of his mind as it was.

“I take it you haven’t slept in those thirty-six hours,” Yamazaki surmised, setting out for the decorative shrubbery planted next to the AS&T building. It was as private a place for a conversation as they would find without leaving the government campus entirely.

“Nope,” Zen admitted.

“I had a very disturbing dream last night.”

“More of the usual?” Zen was not referring to ordinary nightmares of the showing up naked to work variety. It wasn’t hard to know when they had shifted to discussing other lives in an ancient kingdom. Those shared memories were the foundations of an unlikely friendship between the quiet department head and the skilled engineer.

Kusanagi Zen had always been gifted with electronics. That skill had won him entry into a prestigious high school and, when the time came, the world-renowned Tokyo University School of Engineering. He had graduated with a master’s in five years instead of the usual six, and been presented with generous offers from many top companies. It had surprised almost everyone when he chose government service instead. Many people asked him what drove him to that decision. Zen always told them that he had felt a sense of duty. He never added that he felt an even stronger sense of guilt and a need to make amends.

Walking into the cafeteria after a few months on the job, Zen was only been looking for a place to eat his lunch in peace. His new coworkers had already learned that the brilliant young engineer was also a retiring, difficult companion who preferred solitude to camaraderie. That day, just like today, the cafeteria had been full. Unlike today, Zen’s gaze had passed over the serious-looking man eating alone. Until that man had looked up and stared straight at Zen with shocked silver eyes.

Yamazaki Kanji was ridiculously young for his position, only twenty-five on the day Zen’s life had collided with his. But people said he had a gift for management. He was able to work the bureaucracy like a fine instrument. His ability to organize and inspire his people was legendary. Despite all this, he was a taciturn man, preferring actions to words, cultivating an acquaintance with many but friendships with none.

Ordinarily Zen would never have considered approaching someone who so far outranked him as Kanji, and whose reputation for reticence was only exceeded by Zen’s own. But after their eyes met, Zen found himself thudding down into the empty chair at his table without any conscious memory of crossing the room. One shared glance had been all it took to acknowledge the link between them. After work, they had spent the first of many nights getting quietly drunk in the privacy of Kanji’s apartment, comparing memories better forgotten and calling each other by old names better left unsaid.

The sound of cars speeding down the freeway brought Zen’s attention back to the present. He and Yamazaki had reached the edge of the campus and stood in a small clearing by the guardrail that separated them from eight gleaming lanes of concrete.

Yamazaki was answering Zen’s question. “No, not more of the usual.” He leaned against the metal guardrail, eyes distant. “Very different, actually.”

Zen leaned against a tree and waited. There was no point in rushing him when he was like this. Kanji would speak when he was ready.

“It was back in the palace on Old Earth,” the older man said at length. “Before we resumed contact with the Silver Alliance. We were all very young. Twelve or thirteen, maybe.”

Zen nodded to show he understood.

“It was Endymion’s birthday,” Kanji continued. “There had been a week of festivities. The prince was bored with the constant pomp and circumstance. At the end of it, when we were dismissed back to our normal duties, he was relieved.”

Zen was starting to get flashes of memory that tracked with Kanji’s story. It often happened that as one of them talked of the past, the other would begin to remember as well. When they first met in this life, they had talked often, late into the night, filling out their recollections of the past.

“We wanted to do something for him that he would actually enjoy. I told the master of swords that I wished to schedule an extra wrestling practice for the afternoon session instead of our weapons lesson. We met in the forested section of the formal gardens.”

“To practice on uneven terrain,” Zen said. “I remember.”

“Not that day,” Kanji said. “On that day, we climbed trees.”

Zen stared. “You never let us slack off, even when there was no one else around to see!”

“But that day was the prince’s birthday. So we had our own private celebration, and climbed trees.”

Slowly the memory filtered back. The sky had been clear and the breeze gentle; Endymion’s birthday was in high summer, but the canopy of the trees had gentled the sunlight and shaded the ground. Everyone had tried their hand at climbing, falling repeatedly until they got the trick of grabbing the branch and swinging their legs up to cling on. Nephrite had wanted to climb higher, but Kunzite had insisted they stay in the low branches. Even in fun he had not wanted to risk the prince falling out of the tree and breaking his neck.

Zen shook his head. “That’s a good one,” he sighed. “It’s nice to get a good one occasionally.” Then he paused, frowning. “Wait. You said your dream was disturbing.”

Kanji nodded slowly. “At the end of the wrestling practice session, we climbed back down and walked back to the palace. Endymion thanked me, and all of you, for the birthday gift.”

“Okay…”

“Then he turned to face me,” Kunzite said. “The trees turned into skyscrapers. The sky became dark, and the buildings all lit up with neon lights. When I turned back to look at Endymion, he was not twelve anymore, or even as old as he was at the end of the Silver Millennium. He was older- perhaps as old as I am now, or a few years younger. A man grown. He looked right at me and said, ‘Why are you hiding from me?’”

Zen sucked in his breath.

Kanji shook his head. “That is when I woke up.”

“That’s bad,” Zen said worriedly. “That’s just like before.”

He looked at Kanji, who was wearing that expression of worry that only five other people would ever be able to recognize, and knew they were both thinking of the same thing.

Zen’s memories had started returning while he was finishing his middle school program and studying for his high school entrance exams. At first he had been secretly thrilled. The unscientific elements of magic and reincarnation did nothing to damp his wonder at the technological capabilities of a society he was slowly remembering. The things he relearned how to do in his dreams were wondrous. A civilization where things like food and water could be created by machines instead of grown in the soil! Computers so advanced they could actually learn natural language by rewiring themselves, as the human brain did. A method of high speed transit that made the shinkansen look plodding. Zen had spent a month in heaven, doodling diagrams on any spare piece of paper that came his way, often waking up in the middle of the night or shooting out of the shower half-clean to seize pen or keyboard and record his latest inspiration.

Then the rest of his memories had returned, and joy turned to despair. He had betrayed the bright kingdom of his dreams. The glorious civilization of his memories had been dust and ashes for a thousand years.

The new memories had pulled at him, urging him to take walks down streets he had never seen and visit places he had never known. Zen had found himself caught by the news reports of the mysterious sailor-suited soldiers battling unspeakable evils in downtown Tokyo. He realized that knew them from the past, and that knowledge was trying to draw them back together. But Zen saw all too well what kind of welcome he could expect if he followed the pull of his soul. Instead, he had spent the time after graduating from middle school secretly finding out what getting drunk was all about.

Unfortunately for him, it did not work as advertised. When he woke up the next morning, all of his memories were still there to haunt him. More than all. New memories began appearing, ones seemingly set in the present day. Those were the ones he couldn’t bear to think about even in the light of day, because in those memories the face and hands were his own.

If he could not destroy the memories with drink, he could bury them with work. Zen threw himself into the punishing program at the prestigious preparatory school with a fervor that impressed his advisors and worried his parents, who were afraid he was going to work himself into brain fever and death. He did not tell them that, some days, he hoped he would do exactly that. He followed his obsession into the undergraduate program at Toudai, then the graduate program. When the end of the academic line finally loomed, Zen strongly considered transitioning to a new field of study and pursuing additional degrees. The cocoon of university was safe. Research could not harm anyone...

The recruiter for government positions had changed his mind. Nothing could expiate his sins, but if he was not going to succeed in destroying his past, he had a duty to do as much good as he could in this new life.

Meeting Kanji had been a bright spot in the grey days that followed. For the first time, Zen had someone with whom he could share the crushing weight of history. They could talk to each other when the guilt got too bad, and trust the other to get them home safely after a night where one too many beers had failed to chase away the memories of dying, horribly alone and reviled by the world.

But the dreams were starting again. Now that Kanji had alerted Zen, he could feel the subtle tug on his soul. It was nothing he could identify or ignore, but it was the worst kind of danger. Endymion calling for him, consciously or worse, subconsciously.

It meant weeks of second-guessing himself. Did he want to walk down to the corner store because he was out of milk, or because Endymion would happen to be there at the same time, picking up a late-night dinner? Was he planning an evening in the park for the peace that occasionally brought him, or was there going to be a youma attack at one of the buildings next door? Had he been called up by an old schoolfriend truly on a whim, or was Zen about to meet him in the same office building where a beautiful scientist worked to build a better tomorrow? The safest thing to do when the dreams started was to lock himself in his office and his apartment, seeing no one and going nowhere, until they stopped again and left him in peace.

“Sooner or later we’re going to go mad, you know,” Zen said to Kanji, only half joking.

Kanji checked the position of the sun through the trees and started walking back towards AS&T. “Maybe that would be for the best.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

Ami pushed open the stairwell doors and headed nervously down to the basement of the hospital. Keep your back straight, she told herself. Look natural. You have every reason to be here. She fought the urge to look over her shoulder constantly, and couldn’t keep herself from craning her neck upwards every time the stairwell turned on itself.

She just felt so ambivalent about the whole thing. Mamoru may assert Endymion’s right to look at certain medical records, but it felt like sophistry to her. And they would have to go through hundreds, even thousands of unrelated records to find the three for which they searched. It felt like a betrayal of the trust the hospital had reposed in her when they accepted her for the externship.

Thinking about betrayal had been the wrong move. Inevitably, her thoughts turned to him. The real source of her disquiet and unease. Ami was disgusted with herself. Avoiding problems was no way to go through life. She made herself think the name. Zoicite.

 

(“Lady Mercury, I was hoping you would have a moment. We’ve been looking into a new method for purifying water and I thought you might have some insight.”)

(Fascinating problems, a world unlike any she’d ever studied, one not perfectly maintained by magic and in constant turmoil)

(“Lady Mercury, perhaps you can assist us. Our scientists have suggested that it may be possible to refine energy from fossilized plants…”)

(Late nights and later mornings, held enthralled by an endless sea of opportunities, the rhythms of a new ecosystem to be learned and mastered)

(“A new method for curing rhinoviruses…”)

(“A better system for detecting tectonic vibrations…”)

(Looking up from the gas burner to see the same green eyes watching her back, sharing her feelings, for surely that emotion she saw in his eyes was for the knowledge alone?)

 

Even thinking his name made her shiver involuntarily. And whatever Usagi seemed to think, this continuing embarrassment was not her preferred state of existence. It was true that her experience with boys was, shall one say, limited. And that the thought of getting seriously close to one sent her heart rate through the roof. But anxiety was not the same thing as dislike. When she tried to consider it logically, the idea of being able to skip the standard early phases of a relationship was appealing. No nerve-wracking period of wondering if your feelings were reciprocated. No awkward first date, each trying to say and do the right things to appear to advantage. Best of all, from Ami’s point of view, no need to risk sounding like a complete loon as she tried to explain that she was actually a reincarnated princess from a magical kingdom on the moon who fought evil in her spare time and would one day help supplant the existing government in favor of her princess, a still-slightly-klutzy blonde who thought love would conquer everything and had the Silver Crystal to back her up on that one.

There was a conversation she would not mind skipping in the least.

So why was she so nervous about meeting Zoicite again? Was it the expectations? What if he didn’t like the new Mizuno Ami flavor of Mercury? Or what if he had changed and now wanted a traditional woman who thought three kids and a house in the suburbs was the height of achievement? The mere thought left her breathing faster and feeling trapped.

Slowly, Ami open the door at the bottom of the stairwell and slipped through to the basement hall of records.

 

(Walking past the war room at night, long after the strategists should all be asleep, watching the projections changing on the display as the red armies advanced towards the green cities of Terra)

(A muffled noise from within the room, a flash of golden hair)

(Venus crumpled over the control board, shoulders shaking in the shifting blood-colored shadows)

(A terrible tightness in her heart)

 

Down here, the lights were controlled by motion sensors, and stayed off most of the time to save energy. Ami didn’t want them to reveal her presence, so her first action was to reach over to the plastic box where the lightswitch used to be and flip the motion setting to off.

Although health care was heavily subsidized by the government, their ambivalence towards electronic records had fortunately not spread to the medical institution. There were still endless racks of paper files in the rear of the room- no reason to throw them out, of course- but doctors understood the importance of being able to cross-reference old cases and study trends from the past to aid the practice of medicine in the present. Juuban had recently completed a major digitization push and now boasted the largest backlog of electronic records in metropolitan Tokyo, going back a full forty years.

And that was just going to have to be good enough. Ami didn’t want to think about the problems it might cause if her boyfriend from the past were forty-one.

 

(“We have been at this for quite some time, my lady. I find I need to clear my head. Perhaps you would care to join me for a short walk through the gardens?”)

(Strange flora, growing so straight and tall, reaching towards the sky as if they knew that in this place, they would still find atmosphere there, well above the height of the buildings)

(A deep breath. A contented smile. She found the expression so strange on his face. She had never thought that a scientist, a seeker of knowledge, might ever consider themselves content)

 

The computers down here were ancient and took full minutes to boot. Ami spent the time cursing the misallocation of digitization funds that saw all the money spent on the shiny new data center downtown and left none for terminals in the actual hospital. The whirring of the CPU fans sounded artificially loud in the stillness of the room, and when the operating system started loading Ami honestly thought the machine might be trying to achieve orbit.

Finally the system was up and ready to serve data. She fired up the records index and keyed in the initial round of criteria she and Mamoru had agreed upon. Male, minimum age eighteen, maximum age twenty-seven. Names and addresses only. Born in the Juuban district. She tried to hold her breath while the search ran, but had to give up on that partway through.

 

(Watching him come closer. Wanting to move, to smile, to do something to signal that she wanted him to continue. Unable to move a muscle, even to breathe)

(A gentle kiss in the moonlight)

(Was this contentment?)

 

The computer beeped. Ami’s eyes skipped straight to the number of records found. Five digits, but a leading 1, thank Selene. She looked down at the size of the data if she copied the full records and winced. No way. Well, she had known that would be the case, and to tell the truth she felt better about just taking names and addresses. She could tell herself that wasn’t really sensitive information.

Ami reached into her messenger bag, pulling out an external hard drive that had been specially bought for this purpose. She plugged the power brick into the wall and the cable into the back of the computer. That last operation triggered an unpleasant cloud of dust and a short sneezing fit that made her freeze, half under the computer desk, and pray fervently that no one had heard. When the coast seemed clear again, she wriggled back out and dropped back into the chair. Send to external media.

Calculating estimate, the computer reported. 35 minutes.

Ami winced. Nerves singing with tension, she settled back to wait.

 

*                             *                             *

 

Yamazaki Kanji was not a man who placed much store in superstition. Whether it was consulting one’s almanac or praying for a good score on exams, he had always felt that time spent hoping was time not spent planning. And planning, as far as he was concerned, had a far better track record.

Today he didn’t seem to be having his usual success. Three meetings in rapid succession had told a story of projects inexplicably mismanaged by formerly competent subordinates. By the time Fukuda-san had scurried away, the word was spreading rapidly that Yamazaki was in an especially unforgiving mood. After that, his subordinates largely steered clear of him, and he finished the day in relative peace. Unfortunately, that did nothing to improve his mood.

What the hell, he thought when the clock stuck 7pm. I’m getting out of here.

If his staff were surprised to see him leaving at such an unusually early hour, they kept their thoughts to themselves.

The well-groomed pathways of the Ministry campus were filled with salarymen, emerging from the wide-flung buildings and funneling towards the train station on the eastern edge of campus. Kanji let himself be caught up by the flow, content for once to lose himself in a crowd. Snippets of conversation drifted past him, like listening to a dozen radio stations simultaneously.

“Yamada said that if we didn’t make our numbers this month, we’d be looking at layoffs.”

“Yamada doesn’t realize he’d be the first one out if that happened?”

He entered the train station.

“They say Senator Hino actually found someone interested in his daughter!”

“No way, who?”

“Some young lawyer over at the American Embassy.”

"Really? A foreigner…”

One corner of Kanji’s mouth quirked upward. Senator Hino had once tried to arrange a dinner meeting between his daughter and the then-recently-promoted Department Chief Yamazaki. To Kanji’s repeatedly expressed regret, however, their schedules had just never managed to sync up. Eventually the Senator had moved on to other prey.

And now he had apparently found an interested party. Kanji wondered if the mysterious lawyer really understood what he might have committed to.

His train pulled into the station. Kanji steeled himself and stepped on board with the others. He hated trains. But walking home would be an admission of weakness he was not prepared to make.

His parents had said proudly that Kanji was such a steady, reliable boy. It was the highest praise they could bestow. Both had worked at the same company since the day they graduated from college. They had met in the cafeteria, where each took lunch at precisely 12:30pm. They had courted on the train to and from the office, meeting as they changed from their respective expresses to the local that ran straight to the foot of their company’s office building.

 

(Kanji sat in his high school classroom, diligently working his end-of-term exam in mathematics. He had been struggling with pre-calculus, and these problems were absorbing his entire attention.)

(A knock echoing through the classroom made everyone look up. “Continue your exams,” the teacher directed, rising from his desk and taking the few steps to the door. He opened it and leaned out for a moment, then returned to the room. Through the window, Kanji could see the rain continuing unabated.)

(“Yamazaki-kun, please put down your exam and proceed to the headmaster’s office.”)

(Kanji looked up again in surprise. The teacher’s face told him nothing. Mystified, Kanji did as ordered.)

(His classmates looked at each other with wide eyes. To be pulled out of an exam was serious. No one could quite bring themselves to believe that Yamazaki-kun had been caught cheating or anything of that sort.)

(Kanji knew the headmaster to be a solemn man, not given to showing emotion. He was surprised at how deep the wrinkles on his face seemed. And he was unnerved by the compassion in his eyes.)

(The headmaster said there had been an accident on the Hibiya Line, just before Naka-Meguro Station. It had been the nine o’clock train. There had been deaths.)

(It was a Wednesday. Kanji was sixteen.)

 

The train pulled into a new station. Crowds of people embarked and debarked, going about their daily lives.

               

(Kanji found that, because of his age, he had options under the system. He was old enough not to be automatically placed in foster care or a group home, but too young to be granted emancipation as a routine matter. He had to demonstrate that he could care for himself.)

(His parents had been owed a generous pension from the company they had both served so long. Now that money came to him. Kanji drew up budgets, carefully listing every expenditure, showing that it was enough for a single boy to live on, if he were frugal. His high school was well-known and attracted many students from outside of metropolitan Tokyo. In consideration of his new circumstances, the headmaster arranged for Kanji to be eligible for dorm residency. His tuition was reduced to a manageable level. The school provided acceptable levels of adult oversight. He documented everything, drawing up detailed and exhaustive plans. He achieved his goal. Kanji was granted an exemption.)

(A government agent arranged for the sale of the house he had grown up in and most of his parents’ effects. The Tokyo Metro Corporation paid a settlement. It was enough for three years of college. Kanji could deal with that. He drew up a plan that allowed him to graduate in that amount of time and hit college running flat out. Every minute of every day was scheduled for study, class or sleep. His advisor shook his head and warned Kanji that overcommitting could have dangerous consequences. Far better to take it slower and graduate, perhaps in three and a half years, perhaps with some loans, than to have a nervous breakdown and not graduate at all.)

(Kanji listened politely, thanked his advisor, and then continued to follow his plan. He knew his own limits.)

 

When the dreams started at the end of his first year, the advisor’s predictions seemed justified. Kanji feared he was losing his mind. Too much work could do funny things to the brain. He was spinning an escapist fantasy of a golden utopia in order to evade the stress of his daily life.

But his dreams marched inevitably onwards, and Kanji learned the truth. This was no mental mirage. Life was not so kind. They were real memories of a time long gone by. And he would have been far, far better off had they slept eternity away in the recesses of his mind.

 

*                             *                             *

 

“I still can’t believe I did this,” Ami moaned, resting her head in her hands. “I feel terrible!”

“Relax,” Minako said soothingly. The two girls were sitting around the blonde’s kitchen table, where Minako had set up her laptop and hooked up the hard drive. Ami had a better computer, but just getting the data out of the hospital had upset her more than the leader of the senshi had bargained. When the bluenette showed up on her doorstep a nervous mess, Minako had made her a cup of tea and settled her down, then fished out the external hard drive and hooked it up herself. Now she was paging through the data while Ami had a minor breakdown.

“These are protected files,” Ami said despondently. “I took an oath.”

“I’m pretty sure the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t say anything about personnel records.”

“That’s only because they didn’t exist yet,” came the muffled voice.

“Ami.” Minako turned away from the computer and reached over, pulling Ami’s chin up to lock eyes. “You’re not really upset about the medical records.”

“I-!”

“In the past, you have hacked into the school board, the municipality databases, and the Sailor V arcade machine. You have stolen time from just about every supercomputer on Toudai’s campus in order to run analyses on enemy data.”

“Those were for a good cause,” Ami tried to argue. The edges of her lips betrayed her by quirking up into a proud smile at the recitation.

Minako smiled back. “Yes, they were,” she agreed. “And so is this. So what’s really bothering you? Is it Zoicite?”

Ami jerked away.

 

(A small square of solid magic, no larger than a credit card)

(His eyes, wide with pain and fear)

 

Time seemed to hang suspended.

 

(Her hands slick with sweat as she grasped the hilt of an unfamiliar sword)

 (Debris everywhere, dust so thick the air hurt to breathe)

 

“Ami!” Minako lunged across the intervening space, wrapping the blue-haired girl in a tight embrace. “Breathe, Ami, breathe!”

 

(The shock of impact so sudden, so unexpected, that for a moment it didn’t hurt at all)

(A jagged chunk of metal buried between her breasts)

 

A clenched fist pounding on her back-

“Ami!”

 

(The long and terrible fall)

 

She coughed, choked, coughed again, and hauled a deep breath into empty lungs.

Minako pulled away and stared at her with terrified blue eyes. “What was that?” She shoved a glass into Ami’s hand. It trembled so badly that water slopped over the edge and into her lap. Minako wrapped her own hand around Ami’s and helped the bluenette drink. She downed half of it, then pushed the glass away, sinking back into the chair, Minako’s arm still around her shoulder.

 

(kisses in the moonlight)

(blood in the dust)

 

“I don’t know,” she lied, eyes darting in terrified circles.

“Bullshit,” Minako said flatly. “I’ve seen that look in the mirror before. What did you remember?”

“I don’t understand it,” Ami whispered. “I don’t think I want to.”

Minako looked worried. “If thinking about Zoicite is triggering these memories, you’ll have to understand it sooner or later,” she warned. “I know it’s hard, believe me, but it’s worse to go through it alone or suddenly. We can talk to Rei, maybe try guided meditation-”

“No!” Ami found herself half out of the chair before the echoes of her shout finished returning to her.

Minako stared at her for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. “All right.” She rose fluidly, wrapped her hand around Ami’s wrist, and began leading her into the back of the apartment. “You’re in no shape to do any more work tonight. Come on. Bedtime.”

Ami pulled back. “I can’t sleep over. I have work tomorrow….”

“I’ll throw your clothes in the wash overnight. You can get to the hospital from here just as well as your own place.” Her eyes softened with worry. “Please, Ami-chan.”

She gave in, feeling her strength running out of her like water, like the magic she cast out to create fog or rain. “All right.” She let Minako propel her into the lacy bedroom, supply her with an oversized shirt in lieu of pajamas, turn out the lights and withdraw silently, Ami’s street clothes held in a pile to her chest. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

Outside, Minako loaded the clothes into her washer, twisted the appropriate knobs and pressed the start button. She waited until the machine clicked into gear and began filling with water, the sound of pumps and hoses effectively hiding any noise softer than a shout. Then she pulled out her cell phone and dialed from memory.

The ringing on the line sounded loud in her ear. She pressed the plastic closer, turning the volume down.

“Moshi moshi,” a sleepy voice answered.

“Usagi?” Minako glanced at the door to the laundry nook and turned, projecting her voice away from the aperture. “I think we may have a problem.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

“So then Morouka says ‘What do you mean the tests are failing?’ and I say ‘they’re failing, something is wrong with the code’. And he looks confused and asks ‘Why didn’t I hear about this before?’. I tell him, ‘Well, you apparently weren’t running any tests before’.” Zen paused to take another bite of tofu. “And Morouka says to me ‘Can you stop running them, then?’!”

Kanji snorted unforgiving, sipping his iced tea.

“Exactly.” Zen ate the garnish, a piece of garishly dyed bass, and set his chopsticks neatly on top of his plate. “He’s clueless, and I’m mad. Want to get drunk after work? I really need to unwind.”

“Sorry,” Kanji said. “I have a dinner engagement.”

Zen quirked up an eyebrow. “What? You?”

“Senator Hino is holding a gathering for all of the department heads at AS&T,” Kanji replied. “To congratulate us on an excellent quarter.”

Zen looked surprised, then worried. “He’s never done anything like this before, has he?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

The worried look on Zen’s face deepened. “I don’t like it. This is a bad time for us to be doing unusual things. I can still feel the pull, can’t you?” Kanji nodded. “You shouldn’t go.”

“It’s not that simple,” Kanji said calmly. “This is a business dinner. There will be career consequences if I don’t attend.”

“Say you’re sick,” Zen insisted. “Or schedule a meeting with someone too important to snub.”

“More important than Senator Hino?” Kanji raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t keep the Prime Minister on my speed-dial.”

“Sick, then. All this terrible cafeteria slop. You have food poisoning.”

Kanji did not smile, but his head nodded reassuringly. “It will be fine. The only attendees are the department heads and Senator Hino. All people I’ve met before. I’m in no danger.”

“And there won’t be other patrons at this restaurant?” Zen asked witheringly. “Passengers on the train? It’s too risky.”

“We can’t put our lives completely on hold,” Kanji said firmly. “Otherwise, we may as well just kill ourselves and spare Endymion the trouble.”

“I don’t like it,” Zen insisted.

“I will be fine, ‘toutou.” The affectionate nickname, rarely spoken aloud, calmed Zen, as Kanji had meant it to. “The dinner will be private. The train will be too crowded to pick out any one person. And I will be careful.”

Zen sighed, looking guilty. Kanji reflected that the younger man had always taken things too much to heart. It was clear to him that Zen was working too hard, probably driven by his fear of being found. “Relax,” Kanji repeated. “Don’t worry. Soon things will go back to normal.” And we can go back to being ghosts? Sometimes he thought they had made the wrong decision in running from their past.

“I’ll try,” Zen promised grudgingly. “But I’ll be happier when this is all over.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

Kanji was not the last to arrive at the ochaya that night, but he had timed his departure from the office carefully so that he joined the group well into its first round of drinks. Senator Hino was at the head of the table, enjoying his prestige as the patron of AS&T to the fullest. The conversation was already beginning to grow loud, and when the final member of their group joined them shortly after Kanji’s own arrival, it grew louder still. Yamada was more known for the volume of his leadership than its quality, but his division had beaten its numbers for the last six quarters running, so either volume worked or Yamada had some amazing subchiefs. Kanji was betting on the latter.

The appetizers arrived. Kanji was still working on his first drink, politely declining the offer of a replacement from the smiling hostess and making small talk with Tanaka on his left. The pattern of these events was familiar to him after years of forging a career in government research. Senator Hino would hold court until the main courses arrived. Then he would begin to work his way around the table, talking with each attendee long enough to convey the impression of a personal connection. In Kanji’s case, the discussion would revolve around his passion for martial arts. That was the only detail of his personal life he had allowed to escape into his workplace, so it was the default topic at affairs of this nature. Then the dessert would appear, Kanji would wait the requisite ten minutes, and finally, he would be able to gracefully disengage.

There was a slight disturbance near the entrance to the restaurant. Senator Hino looked up, eyes sharp. “Ahh, minna-san,” he said congenially. “I do hope you won’t mind an additional companion. I took the liberty of inviting a very promising young man of my acquaintance, a new lawyer at the American Embassy, whom I hope will very soon become part of my family…” He waved expansively towards the door.

Kanji kept his face neutral with an act of will. I knew he wouldn’t just hold a dinner to congratulate us, he thought with the barest hint of smugness. Then a tape of Zen’s voice started echoing unnervingly in his head. (“Are you sure you should be going to this? We’re vulnerable right now while the crystal is trying to pull us to Endymion. What if you bump into someone at the restaurant?”)

It’s Senator Hino’s latest prospective son-in-law. Some foolish American unable to dodge the most obvious trap in the book. Not exactly prince material.

The lawyer approached the table. Kanji looked up from his glass, prepared to offer a polite greeting, and felt the words freeze in his throat.

 

(The search committee had been traveling the southern lands for weeks. King Eltosian had issued the convocation months ago; more than enough time for all children of appropriate age to be brought by their parents to the nearest major city. They had visited every one of those cities, received every one of those children in an audience, searching for the Shitennou of the South. They had found no one.)

(Riding in the young prince’s train, recently called from the Eastern Lands, he learned that the wild tribes of the far south were only nominally attached to the Golden Throne. Their children did not attend the king’s schools and rarely visited the more civilized towns. They were nomads, horse breeders, and wanderers. Some whispered that they could trace the magic in their bloodlines to the days when fire was first brought to Terra. King Eltosian believed that the Shitennou of the South must be hidden among them.)

(They had left the last major outpost behind three days ago. The lands they travelled now were grassy, gently rolling plains, far from the dense jungles he had been taught covered the south. The rises and falls of the ground made him nervous. It was an excellent place for an ambush. He tried to edge closer to Endymion, but the press of guards and advisors prevented him.)

(The peaceful quiet of nature was shattered by an ululating cry. Suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, the gently waving grasses of the plains were trampled under the flashing hooves of many horses. They formed a ring around the slowly moving train, and his first sight of a southern nomad was a pair of excited blue eyes set under waving blond hair, ragged clothing, and a merry face that broke into a wide smile even as its owner soothed a fidgeting horse twice as big as he was.)

 

Slowly Kanji became aware of his surroundings again. No one seemed to have noticed his unusual silence in the face of the new arrival; clearly a case of his reputation for reticence coming to his rescue. He exerted himself to execute an appropriate bow-nod in the direction of the new arrival, then used the excuse of reaching for his drink to turn away.

The thud of body meeting cushion next to him, and the sudden warmth of another person nearby, alerted him to the newcomer’s presence at his right. Unwillingly he looked up and met the other man’s eyes. They were bright with recognition and a tightly held power that made Kanji very, very nervous. The other man was far too in touch with his past self. Was it possible that he…?

“Jade Devine,” the other man introduced himself with admirably controlled eagerness. “So good to meet you. I don’t think I caught your name?”

Kanji hesitated a beat, seriously considering lying. It was a very different reaction from his meeting with Zen, but Kanji had been relying on his instincts for two lifetimes now, and they were telling him that something was wrong. He glanced sideways and saw that Tanaka was leaning in, including himself in the conversation. No choice, then. “Yamazaki Kanji.” He inclined his head formally. “A pleasure.”

“Glad you could make it, Devine-san,” Tanaka said from Kanji’s left. He saw Kanji’s look of surprise and explained. “Devine-san is my new liaison over at the Embassy. A very hard worker!” Devine had the grace to look embarrassed by this praise, and Tanaka laughed. “Be nice to him, Yamazaki-san, he’s new to department politics.”

Kanji affixed a polite smile to his face. “Of course,” he murmured politely. “So you are recently arrived in Japan, Devine-san?” He turned towards the lawyer and hoped Tanaka would lose interest in polite generalities.

“I am,” Devine said amiably, following Kanji’s lead. “I began my work only a few weeks ago.”

“And had dinner with Senator Hino’s daughter three days after starting,” Tanaka added jovially, obviously keen to spread the news.

“Senator Hino mentioned something of the sort,” Kanji agreed. “I understand you and she had a pleasant evening.”

The American grinned, that very same unreserved expression of joy that Kunzite remembered from a lifetime ago. “Pleasant is an understatement. The moment I saw her, I knew she was my destined one.”

Kanji froze. What would have happened if I’d gone to dinner?

“Hohoho,” Tanaka laughed heartily. “You might want to be careful, kouhai, Hino-sama’s already telling everyone you’re going to be a member of the family soon!”

The other man’s smile moderated itself somewhat, but did not waver at this news. “Surely you remember what it was like to date, senpai,” he teased in return. Then his voice softened. “There was that time when you knew what you wanted to happen, but were afraid to speak it out loud, afraid to jinx it. That is how I feel now...” He turned his head to include Kanji. “Surely you know what it is like when you have had a dream for so long, and then suddenly find it coming true. How at first, you do not fully believe it, and are afraid to move, lest it vanish.”

Kanji felt very, very cold.

“Well!” Tanaka beamed paternalistically at Devine. “I will drink at your wedding, then!”

“Thank you,” Devine said seriously.

Kanji had never been so grateful to see a main course arrive in his life.

 

*                             *                             *

 

Jade excused himself politely to his right-hand neighbor, citing a need to use the facilities. His left-hand neighbor refused to look his way. The silver-haired man had been avoiding him as much as possible for two men seated next to each other at a semiformal dinner. Jade’s attempts at conversation were repulsed. His overtures of friendship were ignored. The most pointed references Jade dared to the Silver Millennium were met with bland incomprehension.

For most people, the silence would have been daunting and the professed ignorance convincing. Jade was not fooled. He had known Kunzite too well, worked with him trained under him told secrets with him died with him. Something was definitely up. Jade wasn’t going to be able to drag it out of him at dinner, though, and unless he missed his guess, the other man was getting ready to bolt as soon as he thought he could shake Jade loose. And since Kunzite’s magic was shadows and pathways, Jadeite was not confident that he could be tracked.

In the privacy of the restrooms, Jade pulled out his phone and started texting for dear life.

Hana no Yume Ochaya. Come quick. Kunzite.

 

*                             *                             *

 

The dessert had been brought out; Senator Hino had made a pretty little toast, thanking all of the attendees for their hard work and exhorting their continued diligence for the quarter ahead. Kanji had eaten a polite amount. He had smiled at the right moments.

Now he could leave.

A few other men had had the same idea; these parties always broke apart in waves, as one motion to leave called to like-minded souls. Kanji was not pleased, but also not surprised, to see that Jade Devine was among the first group of those who bowed thanks to Senator Hino and faded discreetly towards the door.

Kanji moved quickly, cutting through the crowd of other patrons with less than his customary politeness, hoping to gain a lead on Jadeite. He still did not understand why his instincts were shrieking at him to run, but Kunzite had not survived three serious assassination attempts, four border skirmishes and more battles than he could count in the Last Great War without trusting those instincts. It was not as if Devine would be hard to track down later, should that be his wish. For the moment, Kanji just hoped to escape back to his apartment undetected.

Outside the ochaya, he hurried towards the closest corner and turned into a shadowed alley. To even contemplate using his powers in this lifetime was risky in the extreme; in the old days, Endymion had been able to sense magical expenditures on the part of his shitennou, and neither Kanji nor Zen had been willing to test that theory the hard way in this life. But his blood was pounding in his ears that he was in danger and-

A hand closed on his elbow.

Two lifetimes of reflexes took over. He threw himself to the side, knocking his assailant off-balance, and pivoted to break the hold. One hand delivered a precisely placed jab to the unknown’s stomach and was met with a gratifying oof of expelled breath. The other went for the throat. At the last minute, Kanji’s waking mind cut in, turning the paralyzing chop into a hold, pinning the other man to the wall by the throat. It was Devine. Of course.

An unexpected sense of pressure on his chest made him look down. Jadeite’s right hand was flat against Kunzite’s sternum. He had withheld the blow, of course, just as Kanji had pulled his. But it was a sobering reminder that the man in front of him was every bit as much of a physical threat as he was. How could it be otherwise? They had shared the same masters and the same expectations.

He took his hand from Jade’s throat and stepped back. The two men stared at each other, both breathing hard from the unexpected exertion.

“Anata!” cried a long-unheard, never forgotten, infinitely precious voice. Unbelieving, Kanji turned his head and looked down the alleyway.

The figure was a blur of impossibly long limbs and improbably golden hair. It hit him at the speed of thought. He registered warmth, yielding softness, hot tears burning his skin. He realized that the world had blurred around him, and Venus was crying into Kunzite’s uniform, laughing and kissing him and weeping and holding as if she would never let him go.

 

(Her eyes were bloodshot with anguish and fatigue. She had shed the senshi uniform two days ago, and the simple cotton shift she wore underneath it was stained with sweat and dust. Her pale skin was dyed in shifting patterns of red and green as the strategy room’s master display cycled rapidly, running tactical projections that only ever ended one way.)

(She was the most beautiful thing he would ever see.)

(“It’s no use,” he said, voice rough from too many cups of khala and no sleep. “Without the ultimate power of the Golden Crystal in play, we cannot win, no matter what costs we bear.”)

(“I won’t accept that,” she said fiercely. “There is something we haven’t found. Something we haven’t thought of! There must be!” Her fingers worked the panel, starting another run of trials. Kunzite watched as the simulated defenders of the Golden Throne fought and died endlessly, pointlessly, in pinpricks of bloody light.)

(“Perhaps-” He had to stop and clear his throat, force the words out between his lips like sand running through his fingers, sharp and painful and cutting. “Perhaps it is time to consider alternatives to fighting.”)

 

The sound of heavy plate armor, settling as its wearer shifted, echoed down the alleyway. He looked up from her, knowing what he would see.

They were standing near the opening of the alley, but the sounds of cars and pedestrians had vanished while he fell endlessly in Venus’ embrace. The light from the street was dim and wavered oddly, particles refracting as they passed through the illusion separating the small enclave from the rest of the world. That would be Jadeite’s magic at work. Kanji was grateful for that small privacy, to shield his face as he beheld again his prince. Tall and regal now, not the impossibly young figure of his memories. Centuries had added wisdom to the lines of his face, and pain had gentled pride. This man would be a king to behold. Kunzite wished he could live to see it, but all he saw in his monarch’s face was death, swift and terrible.

Gently he pulled Venus’ arms from around him and stepped back. Her eyes flicked up to his, and he could see the protest die stillborn on her lips. She had always understood the heavy weight of duty and leadership as no one else could. Kunzite would have loved her for that alone, yet she had offered him so much more. Kanji couldn’t stop one hand from reaching out to cup her cheek, needing to touch her again. She closed her eyes and leaned into the contact.

Then his hand fell away. He turned and walked down the hallway to his prince, each step echoing loud as a gunshot in the magically-induced silence, until he dropped to kneel at Endymion’s feet.

The ground was old, some kind of concrete mixture with pieces of hard metal and stone that glittered where only he could see. Kunzite focused on one of those stones and let it fill his world, drawing his attention away from what he knew would come. He forced the words past dry lips. “My life is yours.”

There was a long silence. Then, above him, the sound of a sword hissing out of a scabbard. Kunzite wanted to look up, to see Venus again, but he forced himself to be still.

The blade came down with terrible force, and spent itself, resting harmlessly on his shoulder, sharp edges turned aside. The voice of his king echoed above him.

“I accept your life, your loyalty, your fealty, and your service,” he said formally, then softened into something more human. “Although I notice you left those last three out.”

Kunzite choked, unable to speak.

“You can stand up now,” Endymion prompted after a moment had passed.

Kunzite seemed unable to move. Jadeite came up behind him and helped Endymion haul the stunned man to his feet. Immediately his eyes sought out Venus. She was smiling at him, that full-body smile only she could produce, that could light an entire stadium with the energy of her love. “I told him everything,” she said, words ringing like bells. “He knows.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Kunzite said quietly, looking from Venus to Endymion and back again. “I still opened the gates. I still gave her the city. My motives are meaningless!”

“Your motives are everything,” Endymion contradicted sharply. He smiled suddenly, teeth flashing in the darkness of the alley. “Whom does the wise leader wish at his side?” His voice adopted the singsong tone of their old Master of Ethics, and Kunzite heard the words echoing down through the centuries. “Does he choose the one who agrees with him, and so lets him lead his people into ruin? Or does he prefer the one who speaks out when disagreement is truth; who leads the people with his example; and who acts when it is necessary, for the better good of all?”

“My actions did not turn out to be for the better good of all,” Kunzite whispered.

“And I should punish you for that mistake, when my own errors were so great?” Endymion demanded. He looked at his general for a long moment and sighed. “Very well,” he said, seeing that argument would do no good, “I will punish you.” He cut off Venus with a wave of his hand and made his voice solemn. “You will wonder, for every night of your life, if you could have made different choices that would have altered the outcome of the Silver Millennium. You will wish, vainly, for the chance to change the past. You will question whether you deserve a second chance. And you will work harder than any two others to prove that you are worthy of the chance that has been given you. That is my judgment.”

Behind Kunzite, Venus laughed triumphantly. Jadeite applauded, the sound muffled by his gloves, and gave his leader a very old, very familiar, very smug grin. Kunzite found himself automatically darting a quelling look down the alley and let it go in sheer relief.

“I..”

“Just say ‘thank you’, Kunz,” Jade advised.

“But!”

“Kunzite.” That was Endymion. “Say ‘thank you’.”

He swallowed. “Thank you,” he said finally.

“Good.” Endymion smiled. “And now I think we should all go get coffee and have a very long conversation.” The light blurred around him, revealing a well-built young man in street clothes. “Come on, everyone, out of uniform.” There were flashes of light from elsewhere in the alley.  “That’s an order,” the prince added to Kunzite.

Kanji looked down at himself sheepishly. “I’m not sure how to do it on purpose,” he confessed.

The young man before him laughed. “What do you do? For a living, I mean?”

“Government section manager,” he answered in some confusion.

“Ah. Well, think about going to work tomorrow. I bet you’ve got a bunch of meetings scheduled. You’ll have to deal with that subordinate who never quite does what you want the first time you ask-”

“Fukuda-san,” Kanji murmured.

“Something unexpected will crop up on your schedule, and you’ll have to change your plans to deal with it. You’ll be too busy for lunch, so you’ll eat at your desk-” The voice stopped, and Kanji looked down at himself. Suit and tie. “That’s how you do it,” the prince finished.

“Understood,” Kanji said.

Venus came up next to him and gave him an admiring once-over. “I like it,” she grinned.

“Come on,” the prince ordered, gathering the occupants of the alley up with a wave. “Coffee.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

When Kanji emerged from AS&T the next day at a far more normal hour, he was surprised to find Zen waiting for him. Such a meeting was outside their normal method of interaction, which relied either on the comfortable unpredictability of chance or a deliberation prompted by desperation. Kanji read neither in the younger man’s face, but held his peace, falling into step with him.

“Shouldn’t you be saving Morouka’s project?”

Zen made a quick, dismissive gesture. “It’s doomed.”

“That’s a shame,” Kanji said idly.

Zen was darting him fleeting looks from the corner of his eyes, not wanting to be caught challenging him so blatantly in public, not with Zoicite bleeding in around his edges. “You went to that dinner last night.”

“I did,” Kanji agreed blandly. “I told you I would.”

“And?” The question was almost a hiss. “What happened?”

Kanji raised a calm eyebrow. “I ate.”

Trapped among the steady flow of office workers making for their train and home, Zen could not spontaneously combust, stop short and demand answers, or shout uncomplimentary things about leaders whose speech patterns had not been altered by reincarnation. A wave of frustration brushed against Kanji’s mind, the spiritual equivalent of an angry yell. Kanji had to bite his tongue on the urge to round on the younger man and chew him out roundly for such a flagrant breach of secrecy. He fell back on the quelling look that had served Kunzite well at state functions in the past and was relieved to see that it had not lost its efficacy with the passing of millennia.

“I felt something,” the younger man whispered furiously. “It felt like him. You didn’t run into anyone? Meet anyone new?”

“Senator Hino invited that young lawyer from the American Embassy,” Kanji allowed. “The one he thinks he’s got on the hook for his daughter.” He saw Zen’s eyes widen and made a negating gesture with one hand. “Blond hair, charming personality. Not Endymion.” That had always been an accurate description of Jadeite, he thought wryly. “Though I think he really will marry her, for a wonder.”

Zen looked lost between confusion at this reassurance and amusement that the long-running saga of Senator Hino’s daughter might finally be reaching its end. He chose the latter. “Does he know what he’s getting into, do you think?”

Kanji couldn’t repress a small smile. “I think so.” Jade’s past love and current girlfriend had joined them at the Crown Arcade last night, and he had gotten the rare opportunity to witness the fire senshi and southern shitennou engaged in some unguarded moments. Mars seemed much more relaxed and open than he had ever known her before. Though, to be fair, his encounters with her in the Silver Millennium had been limited to occasions of stifling formality, while now he was sharing a plate of fries with her and listening to her rag on her father for almost trying to set her up with Kanji. Serenity- Usagi, he told himself- had reminded Rei that she owed her current relationship with Jade to her father’s inveterate meddling. That had earned Usagi an impassioned discourse on the inevitability of fate, the main point of which was that she and Jade would have gotten together just fine on their own. Kanji was privately unconvinced, considering his own nine-year record of successfully avoiding the sailor senshi despite living and working in the same city. But it had felt good to just sit with them and laugh, Minako pressed to his side in the overcrowded booth, insisting he try her far-too-sweet chocolate chip milkshake and ordering him fries despite his protests.

“What?” Zen’s voice spiked with panic, and Kanji realized he had been silent too long. “What else happened?”

Kanji winced internally. The need to keep Zen in the dark sat ill with him. Endymion could command him to anything, of course, and Venus had been convincing in her worry that something was wrong with Mercury that had to be resolved before Zoicite could safely reappear. It was just that there had been too many lies already.

“Nothing,” Kanji told him, falling back on his most granite face and steady voice. Only Venus and Endymion had ever been able to read him at his most inscrutable. “Just a long, boring dinner.”

Zen’s piercing gaze searched his face. Kanji held the expression and waited, even as the ground beneath their feet opened into the entrance of the train station and swallowed them up.

“Okay,” the younger man said finally. “I was just worried about you.”

“That’s all right,” Kunzite reassured Zoicite. “I’ve got everything under control.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

Ami walked out of the hospital at the end of a long shift and took a deep, soothing breath. The evening air filled her lungs with the smells of the city, familiar and comforting after the slightly antiseptic scent of the hospital. The setting sun was still visible over the tops of the buildings, gilding the skyscrapers in glorious reds and golds.

She had done good work that day. Much had been learned, comfort had been brought to the hurting, perhaps even health to the ill. Her current rotation, in the coma ward, was unexpectedly fulfilling. She found she loved the machinery of medicine, systems beeping with reassurance as they kept a heart pumping or lungs filling, while human minds, the most powerful force in the universe, labored patiently to restore life and vigor to still forms trapped between life and death.

“Nice evening,” a voice said behind her. Ami jumped, familiarity leaping out at her like a footpad in a darkened alley, demanding recognition instead of money. She turned slightly, unbelieving, hoping the voice would morph and change and belong to some passer-by, perhaps one of her fellow medical students, but it was still Kunzite when she saw him.

“I guess so,” she answered, not sure what to say or do when confronted so unexpectedly by one of the ghosts of her past.

“Yamazaki Kanji,” he introduced himself, walking past her with a gesture for her to join him. Automatically she did so, too surprised to listen to the part of her mind that wailed for her to run.

“Mizuno Ami,” she returned the introduction, somewhat breathlessly. His long strides were worth almost two of hers, and she found herself hurrying to keep up. The old Kunzite, concerned with diplomatic relations with the Silver Alliance, would have accommodated his steps to hers. Yamazaki Kanji paid it no mind, moving with single-minded speed until they had left the hospital far behind and gained the relative safety of a small local park. He stopped as abruptly as he had moved, turning to face her under the shelter of a clump of sakura.

“I had a very interesting dinner last night,” he told her, seemingly out of nowhere. “I met a young lawyer from the American Embassy. Nice guy. Turned out I used to know him.”

  And that, Ami figured, was as good a way as any for him to tell her that he was fully clued-in.

 “After dinner he introduced me to a few of his other friends,” Kanji went on. “Turned out I used to know them, too. They mentioned your name. So I thought I would come by and introduce myself.”

Ami nodded, trying for politeness. “Yes, well, that was very thoughtful of you. So,” she took a step backwards, “I guess I’ll just be going…”

Kanji held up an arresting hand. Ami stopped short, reflexes from a lifetime ago conditioning her to respond to his aura of command. The light was beginning to go as the sun dipped below the tallest buildings, and the weird shadows cast by the golden light made his silver eyes look molten and liquid with intensity. She was caught, unwillingly, like a mouse trapped in the gaze of a cat, afraid to run, terrified to be still.

“Do you want to know what I remember?” he asked almost casually. Ami tried to move, tried to shake her head no, but the strange paralysis that had taken hold of her limbs prevented her and she hung in its grasp as Kunzite continued. “I remember the tactical projections spelling out the death of Endymion’s kingdom. I remember deciding that my vow of loyalty extended to betrayal, if that was what it took to save his life and his people. I remember the look on those people’s faces as the youma poured into the capitol city. I remember the way Beryl laughed when she called me a fool for hoping to deceive her, and had me imprisoned in the depths of the Dark Kingdom while she prepared for the invasion of the moon.”

 

(The roads leading in to Luna Prime strange in their emptiness, the buildings shuttered, the people gone, ready for war)

(Donning her fuku with trembling fingers, hugging her senshi sisters for luck, taking up a place at the head of her division)

 

The sun was dying faster now. Across the city, evening lights came flickering on, painting Kunzite’s face in eerie shades of neon. “I remember realizing that Metallia’s forces were far more numerous and powerful than our most generous estimates. I remember praying that she had likewise underestimated the witches of the sky, and you would be able to fulfill the promises I had made on your behalf.”

 

(Her hands slick with sweat as she grasped the hilt of an unfamiliar sword)

(The roar of her enemies, the fragile wavering flame that was her force’s morale)

 

“I remember knowing Endymion was dead.”

 

(The shock of impact so sudden, so unexpected, that for a moment it didn’t hurt at all)

(The realization, that it was not she who had been hit, but Serenity, Serenity who was injured and dying-)

(The motion of her body as she turned, away from the battle, towards the palace, instinctively responding to the pull of her soul)

(A second impact, and this one hurt, radiating from the point on her back just to the left of her spine and running wild, sending sparks of pain jolting through her entire body as her momentum carried her through her spin)

 (A jagged chunk of metal buried between her breasts)

(The sensation of falling, so slowly, falling forever and the pain her body was nothing to the pain in her soul as she felt Serenity die)

 

His voice dropped to a whisper. “I remember the darkness closing over me, and knowing that I would be consumed.”

 

(The edges of her vision fading out, the ground so cold beneath her)

(She could no longer see colors, but the shape of the youma that rose above her was still clear, painfully sharp as it raised its sword to finish the job)

(Light so bright she could not look, closing her eyes as eternity rushed forward and claimed her)

 

“So.” The blinding glare resolved itself into a pair of silver eyes, burning with an inner flame even as darkness fell to shroud the city. “That is what I remember. And you?”

 

(Venus weeping in the control room where no one could see her)

(Endymion roaring like a wounded lion, cursing their names for everyone to hear, while the people of Luna worked frantically to evacuate the civilians, arm the fighters, and prepare the battlefield)

(A small square of solid magic, no larger than a credit card)

 

“What did you do?” Kunzite demanded.

“I gave it to him,” Ami whispered, eyes wide and unseeing, body shaking uncontrollably.

“What?” Kunzite’s hands were on her shoulders, holding her steady. “What did you do?”

“I gave it to him!” she screamed, the words ripping out through her soul, where they had lain buried for centuries. “And he gave it to Beryl! She skipped right over our defenses! It’s because of me! She walked right up to the palace and then… and then Serenity…” she swayed, suddenly ashen, and Kunzite caught her before she fell. “She killed Serenity. Because I loved him. I killed us all.”

 

*                             *                             *

 

Ami was not shivering anymore. All capacity for motion had left her completely. Tucked into one of Usagi’s armchairs, covered by a warm blanket, she cradled the mug of hot tea Minako had pressed into her hands automatically. She did not drink it.

  “Start from the beginning,” Serenity instructed calmly. “Tell us everything.”

“I was sneaking down to Earth,” Ami said dreamily. It did not seem real to her that she was in this time and place. In her mind, she was wandering the vanquished halls of the Silver Palace, seeing again the devastation of that last battle. Endymion and Serenity exchanged concerned glances, recognizing the symptoms of memory shock, but forbore to interrupt.

“Earth wasn’t linked into the system-wide transit system. We were sending people back and forth just using brute magic to teleport, but that leaves traces. You know.” Her head tilted slightly towards Minako, who had exploited that very fact a lifetime ago to track down Serenity whenever she ran off to Earth.

“So you found another way,” Serenity prompted, after a moment had passed and Ami evidenced no desire to continue.

“The old teleporters. Short-range, single-person, and you needed a receiving station at the other end. Left over from when the other planets were first settled.”

“And they still worked?” Endymion asked.

“Ours did,” Venus answered for Mercury. “It was part of the escape plan for Serenity in the event of an invasion.” Kunzite raised an eyebrow, and she answered the unspoken question. “We never got that far. Beryl bypassed our defenses somehow and… got to Serenity before our outer fortifications had even buckled.”

“The one on Earth wasn’t operational to start with, but we were able to get it working again.” A faint smile appeared on Ami’s face, while her eyes remained far away, watching memories no one else present shared.

“But they needed a key to make them work,” Minako said quietly. “So you gave one to Zoicite.”

“Yes. And then we were able to go back and forth as often as we liked, undetected. There were so many problems to solve on Earth, you see. A completely different ecosystem. They didn’t need magic to make it habitable, but nature was so wild and uncontrolled…” Ami fell silent, lost in her musings on the past.

“And then?” Serenity prompted gently.

“Then we fought,” Ami answered, the dreamy edges of her voice beginning to splinter as memories of blood and battle crept through her eyes. “I was on the outer edge of the line, on the hill overlooking the city, and I could see Beryl’s troops marching. I could see youma pouring out from within the city, coming from inside, and I knew they were coming through the teleporter, that he had let them in, that I had let them in-” Ami’s voice was rising steadily, building towards hysteria. “we were all doomed and I had doomed us all-”

“Stop!” Venus’ voice cracked sharply with command. Ami halted, like a puppet with her strings cut, not moving, barely breathing.

For a moment no one spoke or moved. The headlights from a passing car passed through the room, illuminating each face in turn.

Slowly, Ami crumpled inwards. She buried her head in her hands and sobbed.

 

*                             *                             *

 

“Well, she’s asleep,” Minako reported, closing the door to Mamoru and Usagi’s spare bedroom. The effervescent blonde shook her head. “If this keeps up, she’ll never spend another night in her own bed again.”

“It might not be a bad idea for Ami to stay here for a day or two,” Usagi mused. “Past life shock is definitely not helped by solitude.” Her gaze lingered pointedly on Minako.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

Usagi tilted her head, acknowledging the statement without conceding the point. Kanji looked between the two of them, mildly confused.

“The question is what to do now,” Mamoru stepped in. “If what Ami said is true…”

“Why would she lie? Admitting to a capital crime is the sort of thing you don’t make up.” That was more Venus than Minako, and there was an edge in that voice that cooled the air in the apartment perceptibly.

Usagi paled. “I don’t think we should throw around words like ‘capital crime’ lightly.”

“Not lightly.” Venus paced the short length of the living room, energy almost visibly bleeding away from her slender form as she struggled for control. “Don’t you get it?”

“No.” Serenity fixed Venus with her gaze. Unwillingly the other girl stopped and faced her. “Explain it to me.”

“I have never known how Beryl did it,” Venus said, voice tight. “How she got past our outer defenses and into the palace, by herself, while our lines were still holding. We were specifically watching for her. If we had been able to kill her, just her, it would have deprived Metallia of the ability to directly affect the world. We were prepared to lose anyone up to and including all of us to take her out. Yet, somehow, she was able to walk right past the entire assembled might of the Silver Alliance and get to you. And now I know how.”

There was a pause as she looked from face to face. Usagi still seemed distressed. Mamoru just looked blank. Kanji, though, was nodding. “Beryl took the card from Zoicite. She used the old teleporter to appear behind your defenses and attack you directly.” His expression took on a hint of irony. “Turn and turn about. You and I both tried to do the same to her.”

“Except we failed and she succeeded.” Venus turned her head significantly towards the royal couple.

Kanji raised an eyebrow. “I saw her strength when she took the capitol on Terra. And again, later... Lady Mercury’s actions may have sped your defeat, but they would not have caused it. Metallia’s power was beyond our imaginings in those days.”

“Even if you’re right.” Venus’ voice was harsh. “We might have been able to get Serenity off the moon. Giving that key to Zoicite is as much a betrayal as anything anyone ever suspected you of doing.”

Her statement hung in the air, accusing.

“Well.” Serenity’s voice was dangerously even. “I guess this is when we discover we’ve all done something we regret in our past.”

 “What are you talking about?” Kunzite looked sharply at the Moon Princess.

“You couldn’t have gotten me off the moon and you know it,” she said flatly, still speaking to Venus. “It didn’t matter if the key was in your pocket or in the middle of the sun.”

“And why not?” Venus’ voice had dropped to a hiss. “Why would that be, I wonder?”

 The two girls stared at each other, silence something real and tangible between them.

“So that’s really it?” Serenity asked, sounding stunned. “After all of this time, you still haven’t forgiven me for that?”

“For what?” Kunzite demanded.

“Killing myself,” Serenity whispered.

“How can I?” Venus cried. Tears were welling up in her eyes. She dashed them away angrily. “After everything we did! The fighting, the betrayal, the death! And you just threw it all away?”

“That’s not what it was!”

“Then what was it?”

Serenity sighed.

“Tell me what it was.” Venus spoke quietly, but there was steel in her voice. “Tell me it wasn’t because Endymion was dead.”

Serenity reached over and took her husband’s hand, but she faced the captain of her personal guard with clarity and strength. “We were all dead anyway. It was just a question of when and how. You knew it. I knew it.”

“Life is hope. If you’re dead there’s no difference.”

Kunzite leaned forward, claiming her attention. “There is a very great deal of difference in how you die.” Memory darkened his eyes, throwing his face in shadow. Venus looked at him, then looked away.

Serenity shook her head. “Don’t be mad at Mercury. We’ve all done stupid things in the name of love. You just as much as any of us; you couldn’t have run those tactical projections with Kunzite without giving him information on the moon’s defenses.”

“That’s different!” Venus cried, stung.

“It’s not,” Kunzite said softly. Involuntarily she looked up at him. “The only difference is that Mercury gave Zoicite something physical; something Beryl could just reach out and take. The knowledge in my head was harder for her to get, but if she’d broken me in time, it would have been just as bad for your forces. Maybe worse.”

 “I don’t blame you for it,” Serenity said quietly, only compassion in her voice now. “The more we learn about our past, the more I’m coming to feel that nothing we did back then could have saved our kingdoms. It was the end of an era; Saturn awoke and the universe was remade. Our only choices were what to die protecting.”

Venus took a breath, looking like she wanted to argue further. A moment passed in silence, broken when she turned away, shoulders shaking.

“I think we’ve gone far enough into the past for one night,” Endymion said finally. “Let’s meet up again tomorrow evening and discuss what we’re going to do with the present.”

“Okay.” A blond-haired young woman grabbed her purse; when she turned, it was definitively Minako again. “I’ll see you guys then.” She was out the door almost before her words finished echoing from the walls, and the door closed on Usagi’s outstretched hand.

She let it drop slowly. “I hope she doesn’t keep thinking about it all night,” Usagi worried. Mamoru flicked a questioning glance over to Kanji, who shook his head. He wouldn’t try to seek Minako out tonight. Some things had to be dealt with alone, and this was one of them.

“Thank you for talking to Ami,” Usagi continued, speaking to Kanji now. He acknowledged this sentiment with a nod, then grabbed his own jacket. Mamoru followed him a few steps out of the apartment.

“Are you going to spend all night thinking about it?” he asked, face and eyes serious.

“No,” Kanji said truthfully. Endymion looked skeptical. He tried to explain. “By the time I felt your death, I already knew there was nothing that could have prevented it.”

Mamoru winced. “I see.” He sighed. “All right. Good night.”

Kanji wanted to speak further; he felt like there really should be something more to say, something to make sense of the battles and the lies. Nothing came, however. He had never been the one with the gift of saying what need to be said. His talents had always lain in action, but there was nothing to be done.

Mamoru closed the door quietly. Kanji walked home alone, counting the stars.

 

*                             *                             *

 

Minako tilted her head back and stared at the sky. Sunrises on Earth still amazed her, when she took the time to appreciate them. They were so different from anything Venus remembered on the moon.

 An early morning run had failed to clear her head, though perhaps that wasn’t entirely surprising, considering the largely sleepless night it followed. Her mind kept running in circles. All of the images of that final battle on the moon, the ones she’d shoved into a box under the bed in her mind and hoped to never see again… they had played out on repeat before her mind’s eye last night, until she had wanted to scream and break something. There being nothing around to break and no socially acceptable reason to scream, she had tried the efficacy of late-night television instead. She could now report that it was utterly useless in dealing with past life guilt. Now she was just sitting on the steps outside her brownstone, watching the clouds. It wasn’t much better.

“Hey,” a voice said softly. She looked up. Rei.

“What are you doing here?” Minako asked.

The priestess sat down next to her. “Usagi told me what happened with Ami. I thought you’d want to talk.”

“What’s to say?” Minako sighed. “I can’t stop thinking that if Mercury hadn’t given Zoicite the keycard, Serenity might not have died when she did.”       

“No,” Rei agreed. “She might have died later, and cursed you for it.”

Minako flinched.

Rei rested her chin on her hands. “We’re not just bodyguards,” she said softly. “The princess was the visible symbol of the Silver Alliance. We were protecting the same things we fight for now. Justice. Mercy. Peace.”

Minako studied the clouds and said nothing.

“The Silver Alliance was done,” Rei said forcefully. “Saturn would have destroyed it regardless of the personal survival of any of us.”

“I know,” she admitted, feather-soft. “I’ve always known that. Seeing Serenity die was a shock, but…”

“Then what?” Rei challenged gently.

Minako brought her gaze down from the heavens and rested it on her friend. “Serenity dying was the one thing that would get Selene to use the ultimate power of the Silver Crystal.”

Rei’s eyes widened.

“This world we’re living in now? These wonderful lives we have?” She gestured out at the city, the trickles of commuters that would soon become a flood, the housewives walking to market, the joggers returning home. “It’s all because Serenity died at the end.”

“I don’t think…”

“It is,” Minako insisted. “It was Selene who healed the Earth. Who sent us forward to here and now. If I’d stopped Beryl on the moon, she wouldn’t have spent her power that way. She would have just destroyed Metallia and spent the next several centuries rebuilding the Silver Alliance. With or without any of us.”

Rei tipped her head sharply to one side, lips pressed tightly together. Minako had seen that look before. That look meant Rei thought you were being an idiot. “I see. So that’s how it was? We were going to be able defeat Beryl’s armies?”

 

(Venus didn’t need a tactical display or breathless scout reports any more to see their deaths coming for them. Her own eyes could see the battlefield just fine. Beryl’s forces were as inexorable as the oceans on Earth. They rolled forward slowly, like waves, sometimes being driven back for a space, but in the end they took more ground than they had lost.)

 (Serenity stayed at her side, trying to control her fear, keep her breathing even and her face composed. Psychological factors that in other battles would have helped the morale of the moon’s forces. It wouldn’t help in this fight, but Venus didn’t tell her. Order and calm was still a better way to die than chaos and hysteria.)

(Endymion turned his head from where he was directing the healers. The golden glow around him was spotty now, but it had been alight for so long that Venus could still see it out of the corner of her vision, burned into the back of her eyelids when she blinked. Terra’s last prince cast a look over the battlefield, then another one over the rows of wounded awaiting attention. Most of the moon’s healers were down by now, many still lying crumpled where they had fallen mid-treatment. Magic could restore vitality and return a soldier to the battle almost instantly, but it took its cost from the one using their gift.)

(Endymion’s eyes met Venus’ briefly. She saw one hand touch the sword at his side, like a promise.)

(She didn’t think he’d make it that far. The Golden Crystal was powerful, increasing the effectiveness of his healing tenfold, but it still came from his life force in the end. She estimated that he would collapse a good hour before the final wave reached the palace.)

(It would be up to her to take care of Serenity when the worst happened.)

 

Minako blinked away the afterimages, refusing to look at Rei.

“Ah. That’s what I thought.” Rei shook her head. “So Serenity would just have died later, after Beryl had taken the palace?”

“I might have been able to get her off the moon. If we still had the key for the teleporter…”

“If, if, if,” Rei repeated. “And what then? Serenity spends a few days hiding out on the outer planets, before Beryl hunts her down? Oh, yes, that’s a much better outcome. Shall we go ask Kunzite or Jadeite what it was like to be at her mercy?”

 

(The influx of wounded had slowed to a trickle. When Beryl appeared suddenly before them, Endymion was still standing, though the light of the Golden Crystal around him was flickering in and out like a candle in a high wind.)

 (The only difference it made was that he died sooner rather than later.)

 

“No.” Rei was staring out into the middle distance, but there was a cant to her head and an oddness to her posture that told Minako that Rei was listening to something more than her words alone. “No, that isn’t it. Tell me the rest.”

“I can’t help wondering if I wanted Serenity to die,” Minako whispered. “If I saw it coming and failed to protect her, because I wanted a second chance in this life.”

 

(When the haze cleared from her vision, she tried to move, but her body didn’t respond. Venus looked down, an impossibly long way, at the blade cutting her almost in half. She knew she hadn’t fallen against the wall like that. Someone had hauled her up and pinned her against it, like a butterfly on a card.)

(She looked up. Beryl was watching her, a cruel, cold smile on her face. Then the pretender queen looked past her, and Venus turned her head as well.)

(Beyond the scattered bodies, she could see Serenity, on her knees amidst the carnage. Endymion’s body lay partly atop her, still between her and Beryl. Venus wanted to call out to her to stand up, defy Beryl any way she could, run past her run away get out of here)

(“Now, little princess,” Beryl laughed, the light of madness glittering in her eyes, the dissonant chords of Metallia bleeding into her voice, causing the foundations of the palace to shake. “You will help me take the Silver Crystal. And then I will get to show you my appreciation for everything you’ve done for me.”)

(Serenity dropped her eyes. Beneath Endymion’s body, shielded from Beryl’s view, Serenity grasped the hilt of his sword.)

 

“Tell me the rest,” Rei insisted, intensity blurring the edges of her words.

“I saw her die and part of me was glad!” she cried. “Part of me thought it was the best thing that could have happened, because it meant Selene would be forced to act!” The words wrenched something inside her.

 

(The blade flashing as she yanked it free, the sudden shock in Beryl’s eyes, the feeling of the air screaming as Serenity swung once, twice, three times)

(The sudden spray of blood as the moon princess collapsed forward, dying, face turned away)

 

“The thought is not the deed.” Rei sounded very far away. “You know there was nothing else you could have done.”

Minako looked up. “I thought she was going to try to defend herself. Or just throw the sword at Beryl, do something to create a distraction, so she could run away…”

“And?” Rei repeated calmly. “What exactly could you have done, again?”

 “Something,” she insisted. “Anything.”

 “Nothing.” Rei reached forward and squeezed Minako’s wrists, shocking her back into the present. “Beryl had allied herself with one of the most powerful forces for evil in the universe. We hadn’t fought a war in a thousand years. Our training was as bodyguards, not generals. Now you look back and tell me, honestly tell me, what was it you could have done? Really, actually done?”

Minako opened her mouth to respond, but the words didn’t come.

 

(The long convulsive shudder that ran through her as Serenity’s lifeblood ran down the marble floors)

(Throwing herself forward, trying to act, forgetting the blade pinning her to the wall until it was too late)

(Darkness lapping at the edges of her vision)

 

“I…”

 

(The feeling like her soul was being destroyed)

(Beryl’s scream of frustration and rage)

 

 Failure was a cold weight in her stomach, a fierce pressure on her heart.

“…Nothing.”

 

(Dark now, and cold.)

 

“Nothing,” Rei repeated. “Nothing.”

 Minako wanted to cry, but the weight was too heavy for tears. Rei reached over and drew Minako gently into a hug.

“You did everything you could,” she repeated. “Thinking of the ramifications of everyone’s actions is what you were trained to do. You couldn’t have defended the moon so effectively without that skill. Realizing what Serenity’s death meant doesn’t mean you didn’t do everything in your power to stop it. I know it. Serenity knows it. Selene would have known it.” Rei’s sigh ruffled Minako’s hair. “You always put too much pressure on yourself. One adolescent girl could never have stopped Beryl’s armies cold. You did the best you could and made her pay dearly, but once she allied with Metallia nothing but one of the crystals could have stopped her. It was true back then and it was true again in this life.”

I wanted everything to be all right so badly. I wanted to fix everything.

“Try to let it go,” Rei advised. “This is life, after all. No one’s getting out of here alive.”

Minako choked, then found herself laughing, against all reason and logic, the emotion that couldn’t be expressed in tears coming out in as a series of involuntary, convulsive chuckles. Well, when you put it that way…

Rei smiled and patted her shoulder. “There you go.” 

 

*                             *                             *

 

The sun was sinking beneath the clouds as Minako jogged up the stairs to Usagi and Mamoru’s apartment. Of all the days for her agent to run long, it had to be right in the middle of sorting out the latest reincarnation mess. Oh, modeling was a dream job in many ways. There was travel to exotic locales, incredible pay, and visibility that would serve her well when it came time to explain to a stunned world that yes, that really was a princess from the moon and yes, those were wings. It was just that sometimes the time demands really got to her.

She knocked, then leaned against the door for a moment and let out a long breath. It’s all going to be okay, she told herself.

Usagi opened the door. “Come in,” she invited.

Minako hung back a moment. “Usagi, about what I said last night… I’m sorry. I was dealing with some guilt myself, but I shouldn’t have attacked you. Or Ami.”

Usagi stepped partway out of the apartment and hugged Minako. “Please try not to feel guilty. I don’t blame you, or anyone else. Metallia was like a force of nature. We got her this time, and that’s what counts.”

Minako hugged her back, blinking a few times to maintain some composure. “Yeah.” She sighed. “We did.”

“So it’s over.” Usagi stepped back and brushed some stray strands of hair away from Minako’s face. “Time to pick up the pieces, get everyone back, and build a future. Okay?”

Usagi’s smile was infectious, that sunny optimism never ceasing to amaze the more cynical senshi. “Okay,” she agreed, finding herself smiling back involuntarily. The tension eased in her chest, and she found the smile coming more easily. “Okay.”

“Now come in.” Usagi opened the door again and tugged them both inside. “Minako-chan’s here!” she called to the apartment at large.

“Sorry I’m a little late.” Minako followed her in. “Am I the last one here?” She took a headcount. Kanji smiled at her from the couch. Rei and Jade were snuggled on the loveseat. Mamoru had a chair. A rattling in the kitchen betrayed Makoto. “Where’s Ami?”

“At the hospital,” Mamoru admitted.

“You let her go?” She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

“We couldn’t really stop her,” he replied. “She wasn’t listening to reason.”

 “She’s having trouble integrating the revelations from last night,” Makoto said from the kitchen, emerging with teacups on a tray.

“Which kind of trouble?” Minako dropped her bag by the door and walked over to pick up a cup. “The ‘I-must-be-remembering-it-wrong’ kind, or the ‘shove-it-in-a-box-and-don’t-deal-with-it’ kind?”

“Both,” Usagi sighed, perching on the edge of Mamoru’s armchair. “It’s bad.”

“And this makes her want to go to work?” Jade sounded understandably confused.

“If you’re Ami, it does,” Minako answered, working it out. “Medical science is something that’s entirely Ami. Mercury wasn’t a physician. She goes to a modern building surrounded by a modern science and relies entirely on modern knowledge…”

“Makes it easier to shove her past into a box and pretend it doesn’t exist,” Usagi concluded.

“Can’t you talk to her?” Kanji asked, looking from Usagi to Minako in some perplexity. “She’ll listen to you, I’m sure.”

“Listen, yes. Act, no.” Minako flung herself onto the love seat next to Kanji. “I love her dearly, but all the sisterly affection in the world won’t help with this. She needs a male perspective.”

“Well.” Kanji looked uncomfortable. “No doubt Endymion-”

Minako laughed a little. “No, no, I mean a romantic male perspective. She needs to talk to Zoicite.”

“What? Why?” Kanji demanded, switching into troop protection mode. “I’m not sure bringing him into this is wise at all. Mercury is obviously still upset and we don’t know what she’ll say or do, as you just pointed out.”

Makoto appeared from the kitchen again, this time with a plate of cookies. She set them down on the coffee table and eyed them critically, wiping her hands down on a kitchen towel. Then she picked up her teacup and took the third seat on the couch. “How to explain?” she mused for a moment. “It’s because… Mercury saw Zoicite as an equal. He wasn’t her commander or her princess. He’s not part of her extended family.” One hand waved gently to indicate the other senshi. “She has no idea how she feels about you or Jade right now, and the outers were never really close to us. So that leaves Zoicite.”

Kanji tried to look stern and failed entirely, but did manage to keep the note of skepticism in his voice. “I don’t think that process of elimination is a good enough reason to bring him in at this stage.”

“That’s not what this is,” Rei argued. “He’s not just her equal because he’s the only person left. It’s intellectual as well as emotional. I don’t know if you really ever knew this, but Ami is really smart. We’re none of us shabby, but one day Ami is going to figure out how to cure cancer or control the weather or…”

“Or place the entire world in a magical crystalline sleep wherein they will not age, require neither food nor water, and wake in perfect health after a thousand years?” Mamoru suggested dryly.

“Yes.”

“The only reason she was even able to have a relationship with Zoicite was that she truly viewed him as an intellectual equal,” Makoto picked up the conversation earnestly. “It let him worm past her head and get to her heart. And she’s having a breakdown now less because of what she did than why she did it.”

Kanji processed this. “She’s not upset because she made a bad decision. She’s upset because the reason she did it was that she was in love?”

“Exactly.” Makoto nodded. “And now she’s trying to reason herself out of love.”

Kanji blinked.

Minako stepped in to translate. “You have to understand Ami. If she’d made a bad decision as a result of flawed logic or missing data or incorrect assumptions, she’d be back on her feet in no time. But this is different. I guarantee you that she is still in this funk because she tried to reason her way out of it and failed. And at that point our best shot of getting her out of this is sending in the big guns to remind her that being in love doesn’t automatically destroy your intellectual integrity.”

Kanji sighed. “I still don’t like it.”

“Your objection is noted,” Mamoru said, “but I agree with Minako. I’ve gotten to know Ami pretty well, and I don’t think she’ll do anything to truly hurt Zoicite. Be honest; don’t you think that he’d be hurt to know she’s this upset and we didn’t call him in?”

“Point,” Kanji admitted.

“She really does love him,” Minako added. “I can see it in her aura whenever she speaks of him. And you can’t get that upset in the absence of true emotion, deep emotion. She needs to see him again and finally exorcise everything she’s been carrying around since the end of the Silver Millennium.”

“All right, all right.” Kanji held out his hands. “I surrender. How do we do it?”

“Can you bring Zoicite to the Crown Arcade tomorrow after work?” Mamoru asked. “I can arrange things with Motoki. He pretty much figured everything out on his own a while ago. They can talk there safely.”

Kanji nodded. “I can do that. Zen has been trying to get together for drinks after work for a while. I’ll need an ‘urgent phone call’ just after we arrive.”

“Done.” Mamoru grinned.

“Well, if that’s decided, I’d better get home and catch some shut-eye,” Minako declared, jumping lightly to her feet. “I had to work today and, well, I didn’t get much sleep last night.” Serenity looked at her resignedly, but didn’t press. “I’ll want to be on hand tomorrow in case anything goes sideways.”

Kanji rose as well, gravely bowing thanks to the host and hostess. That piece of politeness earned him a giggle from Usagi, which he ignored, turning instead to Minako. “May I walk you home?”

 She looked at him in initial surprise, which quickly softened into pleasure. “Of course,” she answered.

They said their goodbyes to everyone else and departed in companionable silence. For the first two blocks, neither of them spoke, content to enjoy the sense of togetherness and peace.

The first interruption to the silence came when they reached a main thoroughfare. “Which train line are you taking?” Kanji asked.

“Actually, I was planning to walk,” Minako confessed. “I only live about ten minutes away, and it’s a lovely night. I can walk to your station with you, though.”

“No,” Kanji demurred. “I’d rather walk you home.”

He saw her smile by the light of a streetlamp nearby. Together they turned down the sidewalk into a less busy part of Tokyo.

 “I was wondering.” Kanji cleared his throat. “Are you doing anything this Friday?”

“No,” Minako answered demurely, flicking him a look from beneath golden lashes.

“Would you like to have dinner?”

Minako’s laugh rang out in the clear night air. “Are you asking me out on a date?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” Kanji said stiffly.

She stopped and turned to face him, laughter still sparkling in her eyes and cheeks. “You have known me for a thousand years,” she said with more poetry than accuracy. “You courted me according to the formal styles of both the House of Venus and the Terran Court. You have seen me after three days of nothing but khala and stress and still had the blindness to call me beautiful.” Minako leaned closer to whisper in his ear. “You know what I look like naked.”

Kanji’s cheeks were suffused with the faintest touch of red when Minako pulled back enough to see his face. “I want to do it right,” he said stubbornly.

“Didn’t you do it right back then?” she asked. “How you learned about some of those Venusian rituals I still don’t know!”

“Minako…” he sighed and gave in to the temptation to reach out and touch her hair, her cheek. “A Terran wasn’t good enough for you, back then. I had to prove myself in the eyes of the entire Silver Alliance.” She opened her mouth, doubtless to voice a scathing opinion of the Silver Alliance, but he silenced her with a finger on her lips. “Your court hated me. My people were afraid of you. We were negotiating the beginning of the first formal diplomatic relationship between Earth and the Silver Alliance in a thousand years. And Beryl was beating the drums of war.” Minako watched his face, fascinated. Kunzite had been a taciturn man, and Kanji had appeared thus far to have retained the trait. This outpouring of words was unprecedented and not to be missed. “We never had a chance to just be you and I, to establish a relationship on those grounds. One day we’re going to wake up and find that, at least for a little while, there are no enemies to fight. And when that day comes, I don’t want to look at you and realize we have nothing else in common.”

Minako felt herself melting. “I understand,” she said softly. “Let us do that.”

He offered her his arm. She took it, and together they turned down the sidewalk, just a young couple strolling beneath the stars.

 

*                             *                             *

 

“Do you remember it?”

Jade paused in the act of taking off his suit jacket. “What?”

Rei was uncharacteristically avoiding his eyes. “That last day on Earth. Trying to fool Beryl.” Her voice grew low. “Being caught.”

Jade draped his jacket over a hangar and started on his tie. “Some. A little bit.” He tossed the tie onto the dresser and swung the door of his closet closed.

In the mirror mounted on the back of the door, he could see them both: himself standing there, one hand still on the doorknob, shirt unbuttoned, eyes reflecting hollowly. Behind him, perched on the end of his bed, Rei fiddled with a charm bracelet, dressed down in blouse and jeans, face hidden in shadow.

There was a sudden gust of air through the open window. Diaphanous white curtains fluttered gently; the harsh overhead fluorescent lights were softened into a bevy of candles; the woman on the richly tapestried bed wore a magnificent gown of flame. Jadeite spoke to her across the centuries.

“At first we thought to stay out of her way; the less she saw of us, the better we thought our chances were. Beryl insisted on a public ceremony to show off our apparent change of loyalty to her troops, but she seemed satisfied. I don’t know if she knew even then. She took Kunzite with her to the war room to discuss the lunar invasion. He was planning to give her an altered version of the moon’s defenses and probable force dispersal, but I don’t know if he got that far.”

“And you?” Mars asked softly.

Jadeite walked over to the bed, reaching for her like a lifeline. “I was told to open the armory to Beryl’s forces. At first we had thought of telling her Endymion had changed the codes before he ‘escaped’, but then we decided it would be better to sabotage the weaponry instead. I went there with one of Beryl’s majors and showed him what we had.” Rei turned her face into his hand, kissing his palm and leaning her head against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her, reminding himself that she was here and close.

“Beryl’s major picked up the first weapon he saw. It was an infantry sidearm. Not that different from a pistol, to use, though I’m sure the propellant was nothing like gunpowder… he pointed it right at me and pulled the trigger.”

Rei made a soft, panicked noise, pressing closer to Jade. The comforter was plain cotton; the curtains were dark blue and did not stir in the calm evening air.

“It misfired,” Jadeite said softly. “He laughed at me. I tried to teleport away, but there were already two mages outside holding down a dome. I figured if I was going down anyway I’d at least take him with me…” Rei was silent in his arms. “It didn’t matter in the end. Beryl had me in a cell by sundown.”

Rei stirred, taking Jade’s face in her hands. “It makes a difference to me. Knowing you fought.”

 He kissed her desperately, trying to forget the inevitable sequel to those events in the armory. Rei seemed to sense his need, and let him bear her down to the bed. One day she would ask again, and he would tell her the rest; but they invoked no further ghosts that night.

 

*                             *                             *

 

“Are you sure you don’t want to just go to the bar?” Zen asked for what had to be the hundredth time since they had left work. “I don’t like the idea of going someplace new right now.”

 The skin around Kanji’s lips tightened briefly, and the younger man knew he was holding onto his patience with both hands. Most of the time, Zen was a quiet, hyperfocused engineer who had to be reminded that there was life outside his work and that it was easier to navigate it when one opened one’s mouth. Every now and then, though, when the moon was full and he had spent too much time in his lab and his supply of energy drinks had mysteriously emptied itself, all the words he never spoke rushed out of him like water pouring through a crack in the ice. He didn’t know what was causing the stars to align themselves today; he had slept six full hours, worked fewer than twelve, and eaten two real meals. Well. One and a half real meals. Bento counted, right?

“It’s not new,” Kanji tried to calm the other man down. “I’ve been here before. And I need something to eat. Fukuda-san was having a crisis and I skipped lunch.”

“Fukuda-san is always having a crisis,” Zen grumbled, looking nervously around himself.

“True, but he gets more work done between crises than any two of my other subchiefs, so he’s worth it.”

Zen shrugged, unwilling to enter in a fuller discussion of Kanji’s working habits. That wasn’t the point. The point was that he was inexplicably nervous and twitchy, and despite having spend the last three days cajoling his friend/companion/leader into a night of alcohol and forgetfulness, he was having a hard time not calling the whole thing off right now and running back to the lab for some overtime. After all, those tests weren’t going to run themselves…

 

(“The tests have all come back positive. The system should be operational within the week.”)

(Endymion’s smile was wide and pleased. King Eltosian was more reserved, but he nodded, a rare sign of approval.)

(“Excellent news. Once we are able to travel between the Earth and the Moon without the use of mages, we can establish a permanent diplomatic presence in Luna Prime.”)

  (“The Silver Alliance has agreed to this?” Zoicite heard surprise and wonder in his own voice.)

(“Some planets more reluctantly than others, but yes, they have agreed. They are beginning to see that Terra is no longer a younger sibling to be coddled, but an adult ready to take our place on the wider stage.”)

(“The negotiations are going more smoothly than I would have expected, then.”)

(“Jadeite is doing an excellent job,” Endymion said with pride.)

 

Zen stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk and nearly fell. It had been a long time since memories had clocked him out of left field like that. He had thought he was past that stage of random recollections, triggered by the slightest related word or scent.

“Zen?” Kanji asked, sounding very far away. He didn’t answer immediately. “Are you okay?”

 

 (The floor was colder and harder than any substance he had ever studied, and contact with it made his skin crawl. He tried reflexively to jerk away, but away from the floor meant a standing position, and Zoicite was too weak to manage standing unaided. He ended up slamming one shoulder hard against the wall of his prison, and a whimper escaped him despite his best efforts. The uniform fabric covering his body was no longer in the best condition, and slimy coldness seeped into his shoulder through the tears in his sleeve.)

(He heard a rustling sound from the darkness just beyond the bars and tried to brace himself for the pain to begin again. Instead of the expected forms of Beryl’s best torturers, though, he caught a flash of familiar silver hair and heard a voice he knew. It was terrible to wish his current situation on anyone, least of all his brothers, but the sound of Kunzite’s gruff tones in the darkness was the only lifeline he had.)

(“Are you okay?”)

 

“Fine,” Zen muttered distractedly.

 

(“You’re lying. How long has she had you on the table?”)

(Zoicite wanted to laugh at his commander’s choice of euphemism, but the strength for that had been spent hours ago on not screaming, not struggling, not doing anything but keeping his mind empty and blank, thinking of warm beaches hot sun shady trees anything but what she wanted to know)

(“A couple of hours. I think.”)

(“She’ll wait for a while before pulling you out again.” Kunzite sounded sure. Zoicite wondered how long he had been here to know that.)

(Kunzite had always had a knack for answering the unspoken questions. “She got me down here first,” he admitted, and Zoicite heard the tightness of pain buried underneath the usual roughness of his voice. That, more than anything yet, frightened the young shitennou. He had never heard his commander reveal weakness like that, not even during the assassination attempt in Cairo. “She never bought any of it.”)

(Zoicite sank back down to the floor, weary with hopelessness. “Oh no.”)

(“You’re actually the last to join us. She’s working Jadeite over now.”)

(“Where’s Nephrite?”)

(Silence. Then a quiet rumble. “He hasn’t been brought back yet.”)

 

“Zen?”

 

(Time lost all meaning. Very soon he ran out of the strength needed to not scream, but he buried his soul as deeply as possible, destroying his own memories to keep them from her hand, murdering his dreams and slaughtering his accomplishments)

(When the emptiness came for him at the end, he had nothing left to throw against it)

“Zen!” Kanji’s hand on his arm yanked him bodily out of the memory. He realized he was breathing hard and swaying on his feet. “You don’t look good. What was that?”

“A memory,” he admitted breathlessly.

“Come on,” Kanji’s voice said encouragingly, that same deep, rumbling voice that had he had followed trustingly into the darkness. “Almost there. Let’s get you something to drink.”

Zen felt himself bring propelled along and let it happen, focusing on trying to keep his head above the wave of the next memory he could feel rising against him. His own death was not something he cared to relive.

He heard the jingle of doors opening and was assaulted by an unexpectedly high volume of noise. Where was Kanji taking him, anyway? But then he was sitting blessedly down and the tide was receding, leaving Zen numb. He registered a glass of water in front of him, which had better be a placeholder for something harder to come, but he drank half of it anyway to wash the taste of blood and grit out of his mouth.

There was a soft thud in the seat across from him. Zen rested his head in his hands, covering his face to block out the too-bright light that was jumping and strobing oddly, and spoke without looking, words pouring out of him without preamble, an unfiltered continuation of his internal monologue. “It’s just that sometimes it all becomes too much, you know? You’re standing on the street minding your own business and then wham, you’re flat on your back and Beryl is standing over you. She’s got the poker in her hand and you know what’s going to come next but you can’t do anything to stop it, just try not to tell her what she wants, which is surprisingly easy at first because you can’t form words while you scream. But then you feel her in your mind, just sitting there, leafing through your memories while you’re a prisoner in your own soul. You rip up all of your yesterdays like paper snapshots, but you’re also throwing away the only things that are letting you resist her. She takes everything, she takes your loves and your loyalties and even your name, I tried to remember her smile just so there was something I could hold on to but Beryl made it her smile and then-” Zen choked, shaking with the force of his own revulsion at what his memories told him happened next.

The figure across the table was very, very still.

“I can’t remember her at all anymore,” Zoicite whispered, bleeding in around the edges of a young man who had always known himself helpless in the face of evil. “I reach out at snatches of memory but there’s a hole where she used to be. I erased her so thoroughly that Beryl never knew to use her against me, but now I don’t have anything left of her, not her smile, not her eyes, not even her voice. Sometimes I’d give anything to see her again. I’d let Endymion kill me, I’d walk down to Rainbow Bridge and throw myself off it if I could just hear her voice before I hit the bottom.”

Warm fingers were tugging at his hands now, trying to pull him back out of the past. He didn’t notice that they were too small and slender to be Kanji’s.

“I keep waking up in the middle of the night and reaching out, but she isn’t there. I hear something funny at work, and think, I’ll remember this to tell her, but I’ve never met her. Sometimes I come home at the end of the day and call out to her, but no one answers, and I can’t even remember her face.”

The fingers were more insistent now, moving with a force that overcame Zen easily, too easily, like they were stronger than fingers were ever supposed to be. The light around him filtered back in slowly, bringing water to his eyes, still adjusted for darkness. Those same gentle fingers reached up to wipe the tears away and cupped his face gently, raising it. “Then look up,” a voice whispered, sweet and beloved and familiar like a memory from the earliest days of childhood, indistinct but inexpressibly comforting.

Zen obeyed.

 

(Racking his brain for a new challenge, inventing a problem just to watch her solve it, blue head bent intently over the table, the sweep of her neck, the gentle curve of her fingers)

(Leading her outside, watching her face as she saw the gardens, that look of childlike wonder at a whole new world to be explored)

(Feeling her lips against his, hearing his heart beat loudly against his ears, then pulling back, so slowly, hoping not to see alarm or dismay or indifference on her face)

(A shy smile, eyes cast anxiously downwards, but a smile nonetheless)

 

Her eyes were blue, that was the first thing he saw, and they were swimming with anguish and trepidation and something he wonderingly realized was love.

 

(Problems invented to lure her to his side becoming challenges to be overcome together, even as the challenges faced by their peoples grew faster than trees in the formal garden at midnight)

(Her breath hot against his neck, her face lovely in the candlelight)

(Eyes fluttering closed as she forsook her analytical mind to just feel)

 

Her hair was also blue, and that caught him by surprise for a moment, the rarest color of all, but she was a uniquity beyond value, and he had always been astounded by her.

 

(Watching her face as she watched the sky from the shelter of one of the palace balconies, listening to rain drum on the marble roof and cobblestone pathways)

(“Does it do this often?”)

(“Yes, fairly. Weather is something we tend to avoid, because we have so much of it here.”)

(“I can’t imagine ever taking something so beautiful for granted.”)

 

Her skin was pale, too pale; she hadn’t been taking care of herself. He would take care of her now, make sure she ate and slept and saw the sun, all of those things he was so bad at doing himself, that made him understand what she needed and neglected. Beneath her hair and eyes her lips were trembling, the lower caught between her teeth, and it came to him unbelievingly that she was nervous. Zoicite had taken a fierce pride in being the first one to see into the heart Mercury kept locked away behind her head, and he saw that she was afraid, waiting for him to speak or act or move and tell her how their reunion would go.

 

(Running out into the rain together, letting her sweep him along to see the patterns water could make when it fell from the sky onto trees, fountains, anything and everything, she wanted to see it all. They ran faster as the sky began to lighten, and when Zoicite slowed down to see the first rainbow come bursting from behind the clouds, Mercury reached out and took his hand, leading him onwards and upwards)

 

“Smile for me, please,” he whispered longingly.

She did. It was like watching the sun come up on the first morning in Elysian.

 

*                             *                             *

 

Zen had never gotten that drink, but he didn’t care anymore. He far preferred what he had gotten instead. Friendship. Love. Forgiveness.

Everyone else had come in. Together they had taken over a corner booth and talked long into the night. One by one, as the evening wore on, the others had left in ones and twos, until only Zen and Ami were left, still holding hands underneath the table and not bothering to remember there was a world outside of the two of them.

He lost himself for a few moments in her eyes, remembering rain on cobblestones and the wonder of a new world.

“How did Beryl get it?”

Zen blinked the images of the past away. “What?”

Ami looked away from him. “The key.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. I tried to destroy it, but…”

“It couldn’t be destroyed,” Ami said, shaking her head. “Not with anything short of one of the crystals.”

“So I hid it instead.” Zen swallowed. “Not well enough, obviously.”

“Did she make you tell her what it was?” Ami wasn’t looking at him, but her hands were shaking in his.

“No. She just gloated. She knew what it was already.” He closed his eyes on the memory of Beryl’s triumph and his own despair.

“And the teleporter?” She hated to keep pressing, feeling the pain of his memories as if it was her own. But she had to know.

Zen sighed. “I think it took her a couple of days to repair it.  I don’t know for sure. She told me she had done it, but I’m not sure when… Keeping track of time was pretty hard, by then.”

Ami shook her head slowly. “I wish you could have escaped with Endymion.” Her eyes unfocused, and Zen knew she was thinking of a thousand years of darkness, a new life alone, and battles against a monster who wore his face.

Somehow, even though it was dark now outside and cold, the memories didn’t rise up and swallow him. It wasn’t that he’d managed to forget them; he would never be able to do that. Everything he had done while under Beryl’s command would follow him and haunt him for the rest of his days. But now he felt like he might yet be able to do something of value, in spite of or perhaps because of that time in the darkness. Something good that he could set against the bad to balance the scales of his lives.

Zen reached out and brushed a lock of hair from Ami’s face. “I’m here now.”

“And that’s… enough?” Wondering. Hoping.

He smiled, suddenly sure.

“If you want it to be.”

 

*                             *                             *

[Fin]

*                             *                             *