A/N: Gah, so great to hear from all you guys! Thanks for waiting so long! And for taking the poll – Ami won overwhelmingly.

            Brief reference this chapter to Season 1’s Chapter 29. Shout-out to Sue for sending me a sketch of Mikai and Ami right after I had finished this chapter (months ago) even though she had no idea it existed. (Unless she did. She’s kind of psychic that way.)

            Last and most importantly, thank you to Jade. This chapter’s for her. You guys have no idea what an angel she is. Please let her know how much we appreciate her in your reviews.

Disclaimer: I do not own Sailor Moon.

Date: 9.23.11

Warnings: Rated M for Mikai. Just a little language, really.

 

C

 

Subject to Change

Season 3

Chapter Two: Ami

 

C

 

            “ – san! ” She jerked up, eyes screwed shut and arms flying up to block the attack hurtling toward her.

            Except silence stretched around her. And no attack hit.

            Tentatively, she cracked an eyelid open. Between her fingers something was visible: a mecha anime poster. She lowered her arms the rest of the way, realizing that she wasn’t on a Tokyo street with Sailor Pluto, as she had thought, but alone in a bedroom. A familiar bedroom.

            Kentaro-san’s bedroom.

            Relief rushed through her, constricting her limbs and lungs like a tight , warm embrace. She nearly choked on it; it filled her and made her clumsy as she scrambled out of the bed that smelled of shampoo and motor oil. Her feet were bare, sinking into the deep carpet as she ran to the closed door. She burst through it and there he was, balanced on the arm of his couch, watching the television.

            He heard her coming and turned to face her, sliding off the couch. His hands came up as though to catch her by the shoulders. She let him, smiling so widely up at him her cheek muscles hurt. Around the smile she tried to say, “Do you have it?”

            But he was searching her face, saying, “You’re up! How do you feel? Any pain? Are you hungry?”

            She shook her head; none of that was important. “The talisman! Do you have it?”

            He tilted his head. “The what?”

            Her smile dimmed. “The Garnet Orb.” She searched his eyes, feeling the first flickers of fear. “The talisman, Kentaro-san! It was in my hand–”

            “How do you know my name?”

            She could have shaken him for playing his Terran games with her when so much was at stake. “This is no time for joking, Kentaro-san! Serena’s in danger!”

            “Serena–? Who–”

            Frustration filled her. It spilled through her fingertips and sent ice racing up and down his arms, encasing them from his elbows to his fingertips.

            Kentaro-san recoiled. “You–”

            “I was holding a metal-wrought heart with a red jewel inside it!” She nearly trembled at her own audacity – she had just frozen him! She had just frozen Kentaro-san! – but she didn’t release her grip on his wrists. “Where did it go?”

            “ –just froze me!” he finished sputtering. “Who are you?”

            She stared up at him in frustration and panic so overwhelming they left her mute. And then she noticed something. Something that she should have seen as soon as she saw him.

            His hair was dyed electric blue. Not the reddish-orange it had been the last time she saw him. And the third hole in his auricular cartilage, where he usually wore a titanium hoop, was closed-up, the nearly invisible dimple there indicating it had been closed for at least a year, if not longer.

            Her gaze wandered past his face to the living room. There was a new afghan tossed carelessly over the back of his leather sofa, which looked more worn than she remembered, and the place of honor below the TV that had been occupied by Naruto DVD boxsets the last time she saw it now held a series she did not recognize. Her gaze returned to his face, and noticed, as she had not before, faint, barely discernible new creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

            “Oh.”

            Kentaro-san looked down at her hands, then back to her face. “What? What is it?”

            “What…year is it?” she heard herself say faintly. Of course. Of course she had not really escaped Pluto…

            Kentaro-san lifted an ice-encased hand and pointed at a calendar on the wall. February 2011.

            Four years had passed since Pluto pointed her staff at her and tried to freeze her in time.

            Tried? repeated a voice in her head. Succeeded. Pluto’s attempt to freeze Sailor Mercury in time must have struck her just as Ami attempted to teleport them to Kentaro-san’s apartment. The magics had then somehow mixed – literally freezing them – her, she thought dazedly – in time.

            “Oh,” she said again. She looked down at her fingers, flexing them, feeling the strange feeling of possession, of them being her fingers. Responding to her thoughts. She forced her arms to her sides and looked up at Kentaro-san. He was watching her with hooded, careful eyes, and she suddenly felt a relief so strong it nearly liquefied her patellar ligaments.

            Because it was sheer, dumb, incredible luck that she had ended up in Kentaro-san’s apartment four years away from her own time. Every statistic dictated that she should have popped out of time into a time millions of years in the future, when the Earth was little more than space debris around their system’s supernovaed sun, or thousands of years in the past, into some shallow warm sea in the Cambrian era. Landing in a time when Kentaro-san was still alive, much less still in the same apartment, out of the billions of possible years she could have ended up in, was like landing on the head of a needle in a universe-sized haystack.

            Struck a bit dumb by how close she had come to being stranded millions of years in the future or past, she could only swallow.

            But after a moment, the nagging knowledge that she wasn’t done yet, wasn’t safe yet – that no one was safe yet – wriggled through her. She forced her eyes up to Kentaro-san again. He still watched her closely, suspiciously – he didn’t know her. Didn’t recognize her. And it wasn’t that he didn’t recognize her because she wasn’t Mercury. If that was the case, he wouldn’t have asked who Serena was. Something else was at work here; something, or someone, had taken away his memory of her. Sailor Pluto? The High Senshi?

            In four years, anything could have happened.

            She searched his dark eyes, trying to find some hint of the Kentaro-san she had known, the one who had gotten Ami Mizuno a chess set for Christmas and threatened Mercury for her sake. There was a dull ache inside her along with the apprehension. This moment was supposed to have been different. She was supposed to have been able to say, “It’s me, Kentaro-san! It’s me!”

            And he was supposed to have been proud of her.

            She shook her head, shaking the thoughts away. She met his eyes again. “You’re sure you don’t recognize me at all?”

            He studied her with the same intensity he could remember him training on Mercury when he was trying to figure out one of her plans. “Should I?”

            Not answering, she touched a finger to his arms. The ice encasing them collapsed into liquid, sluicing down to the ground. Without conscious thought she waved her hand, freezing the falling water before it could splash into the carpet. She looked at her pale reflection in the pane of ice, thinking. Sailor Pluto could have taken the Shittenou’s memories, but why? Pluto wanted the prince kept alive so that Serena wouldn’t die when she fought Chaos, and the Shittenou were one of the prince’s best – only, she heard herself think – lines of defense. Why would Pluto have removed their memories, rendering them incapable of protecting him? She still needed them, didn’t she, because the flash-forms couldn’t have surfaced yet; Pluto wouldn’t have let them unless she had the Garnet Orb to wake Saturn, and she didn’t have it. Mercury had taken it.

            Her eyes moved up from her reflection, guided by some vague intuition to Kentaro-san’s jeans pocket. An Orb-sized shape bulged there.

            Relief made her eyelids flutter for a second. “Kentaro-san, do you remember Shields-san?”

            “You mean Darien?” He shifted. “Yes. Uh, could you maybe look at my face when we talk?”

            She lifted her eyes, peripherally puzzled by the slight dilation of his pupils as he met her gaze  but mostly occupied with the fact that he remembered Darien but not Serena. Why? “Is he all right?”

            Kentaro-san snorted. “As all right as a sociopath can be,” he muttered under his breath, but he sounded more sad than angry. “Look, kid, enough of the one-sided interrogation.” He took a step toward her. “Clearly there’s something you expected me to know, and I don’t know it.” He took another step closer, gripping her shoulder. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

            She hadn’t stepped back when he stepped forward, instead staring into the wall over his shoulder, trying to think of what Mercury would do in this situation. Her eyes went to her reflection in the now-blank TV screen. There were only her own dark eyes staring back in the reflection, not Mercury’s icy ones…

            A gasp escaped her. She spun, wings materializing at her bare feet, and a blink later she was in the icy cavern where Mercury had spent so many hours training Rei. Floating above one of the ice-rimed consoles, slowly revolving, was the Time Mirror that Mercury had stolen from the Time Plane.

            Frost covered its surface. She lifted a hand to wipe the frost away, remembering as the movement let cold air draft about her bare legs that she was wearing little more than an over-large t-shirt. Despite herself, she blushed, looking at her reflection in the mirror to see just how indecent she looked – and saw Kentaro-san’s reflection staring back at her over her shoulder.

            She spun around, the movement jarring his hand from where it had been on her shoulder. Stupid, stupid, stupid! How could she not have noticed him holding onto her when she teleported?

            Mercury would have noticed. Mercury would never have made such a mistake.

            “What is this? Your Fortress of Solitude?” Mikai was turning slowly on the spot, taking in every detail of the cavern.

            Before she could answer, the mirror emitted a flash of light. She jerked back around to face it. Everything around her, even Kentaro-san, faded from her attention as images began to race across the glass.

            She saw her own body disappearing, and an explosive power, so white and hot it burned away everything in the glass. Then it dimmed into Kentaro-san’s face; he was holding a hand to his ear, looking shocked and frightened – then his image gave way to that of the little boy who had been so often with Serena and Shields-san at the arcade, except now aura pulsed from him and gold horns protruded from his hair…

            On and on the onslaught of images went. Serena with the brown-haired girl-child, Shield-san with her…Sailor Lanai and two High Senshi hurtling throuh the sky…Uranus walking away from Neptune…a white-haired man with bloody fingers…Venus’s blue eyes…Serena plunging a knife into a dark-haired man’s back…Serena fighting the Wiseman….Serena watching memories float from her friends’ mouths…

            Serena leaving with the High Senshi.

            On the image of the childishly drawn picture of Serena and the girl, the mirror froze. A spiderweb of cracks erupted at its center. Then, all at once, the mirror crumbled into a pile of glittering dust on the ground.

            Standing there, she felt as though her insides had done the same thing. It looked like Serena had saved the timeline, but at what cost? She had left with the High Senshi to fight Chaos – and that had been four years ago. She could be dead now. She could have been dead for years already!

            No. She tried to get herself under control. To stop the hyperventilation she could feel clutching at her lungs. Mercury wouldn’t react like this. Mercury would think it throughly calmly. Reason it out.

            Fact: Mercury had sensed when Serenity died, back in the Silver Millennium. There had been a torn, bloody space in her soul, an overpowering pain that nearly eclipsed her own death throes. It would valid to assume, then, that Ami would feel something similar if Serena was dead. But she did not. Conclusion: Serena wasn’t dead. Yet.

            Fact: Serena had taken Endymion, Jupiter, and the Shittenou’s memories of her away when she left. If Mikai was any indication, they had also lost their memories of their powers and past selves as well, which made sense, considering they had all uncovered their powers as a result of meeting Serena – except, possibly, for Darien? He had been Tuxedo Mask as early as Serena’s first transformation into Sailor Moon, possibly earlier. She filed away the possibility to think about later. What she did not know was if only the people who had been physically present with Serena and the High Senshi had lost their memories. Did the Outer Senshi and Rei remember still Serena? For Rei, the question was moot – Mercury had put airtight precautions in place to ensure that even she wouldn’t be able to track down Rei and Hotaru. Conclusion: She might be the only one on the planet who remembered Serena.

            Fact: She would never be able to save Serena on her own. Saving her meant fighting not just Chaos but the High Senshi who wanted to use her as cannon fodder as well.

            “Ami,” she had said that day, that horrible day when Ami was so exhausted and scared. “Ami, you don’t have to do this.” She had stretched her hand out; her glove had been so white before her blood splattered onto it.

            Fact: Trying to save Serena almost certainly meant dying.

            “I don’t want you to worry about this ugliness anymore.”

            Conclusion: She was going to try anyway.

            She turned to Kentaro, touching two fingers to the back of his hand, and with a thought, she teleported them both back into his apartment. Then she was at the other end of the room, one hand on the front door and the other gripping the talisman she had slipped from his pocket.

            “Thank you,” she said, and could not keep a shy smile from her lips as she tilted her head, “Kentaro-san.”

            Then she disappeared.

 

C

 

            “Wai – !”

            But she was already gone. Mikai tore through the front door, thundering down the porch steps in his bare feet and looking left, right, left. But the street was empty in both directions, the twelve a.m. darkness broken only by the wan streetlights.

            “Shit.” His mind was spinning. For a minute, he put his hands out to catch himself in case as the world around him seemed to spin, too. All he could see was Darien’s face as it had been in that mirror, smiling and sarcastic and alive as he looked at the girl with the weird bunned hair. And the tortured look on the ice girl’s face as she watched the pictures of the same girl, how she had whispered without seeming to hear herself, “Serena,” and “We have to find her…”

            There was something else, a less-clear memory, nagging at Mikai’s brain, too. He ran back up his front walk and the porch in two leaps and punched his keyboards to bring the two desktops idling in the dining room back to life.  He brought up several internet browsers on the two computers he had idling on his desk. Darien and the others – that kid Motoki, he remembered vaguely, and that other kid who had followed Darien around all throughout high school, the artsy one; who would have seen either of them becoming superheroes, but then, he never in a million years would have believed someone who told him Darien would prance around in a tuxedo fighting crime – had been wearing their Infinity uniforms, which meant he was looking at something three years ago or earlier. He set his first filters searching, then, as he thought again of that blond boy whose name he couldn’t remember, he remembered that he had been a diplomat’s son – and he hit the source of the nagging feeling.

            The black-haired girl. The one there had been a brief flash of in the mirror – she was the daughter of that senator who had died a few years back. Hino. He quickly googled it and almost immediately hit paydirt. Amid the numerous articles covering Hino’s death, there was a link to a newspaper article titled, “Disappearance Linked to Senator’s Missing Daughter?”

            And it was purple, not blue. Meaning he had clicked on it before. Even though he had absolutely no memory of doing so.

            He remembered the self he had seen in the mirror, the one with the fiery hair and brash grin and freaking magical powers, and felt a strange thrill, as though he had just seen a ghost reflected behind him in the mirror. He must have been the one to look at the article.

            He didn’t even have to scroll down in the article to find what he was looking for. Right beside the first paragraph of the story, the photo of a sad-eyed girl stared back at him. Ami Mizuno, read the caption, was reported missing about the same time as Rei Hino according to Tokyo Police representative Kaidou Kasaburanka.

            Ami Mizuno. He rolled the syllables slowly on his tongue as he scanned the rest of the article, and then made a quick hacking excursion into new mainframes: Tokyo Electric’s and Juuban Second General Hospital’s. Then he leapt out of his chair, shoved his feet into a pair of loafers, and ran out the door again with keys in hand.

            He found her not at her mother’s apartment but at her hospital. She was perched on the edge of one of the plastic chairs in the ER waiting room, a too-large baseball hat pulled over her head to conceal her face. Where she had gotten it, or the pullover and jeans she was wearing, he didn’t know, but he didn’t know how – or when – she had managed to snag the talisman thing from his pocket, either.

            From beneath the cap, she was watching the nurses’ desk like a hungry orphan watching a family out to dinner, her gaze following each white-coated physician that moved to and fro behind the nurses’ station. Her hands were knotted, white, in her lap.

            His voice came out low. “Ami.”

            She gave a terrible start, like someone who had just felt a cold gun barrel pressed to their neck. Her huge-eyed gaze scrambled onto his like a frightened creature, all tiny clutching hands.

            He hunkered down in front of her. She stared at him, and he put a hand around one of her ankles, feeling how she trembled through the tight denim.

            He squeezed her ankle gently. “Will your magical Hermes-travel carry us to this Serena person?” he asked. “Or are we taking my car?”