title: fireflies

chapter: three

summary: Set between STC Season 2 and 3. Rei. Hotaru. Death is not an option.

disclaimer: Naoko Takeuchi owns Sailor Moon.

<O>

            Hotaru calls her father every day.

 

<O>

 

            There’s a graffiti-covered pay phone between the student parking lot and the cafeteria at the high school in which Mars enrolled her. At first Hotaru was afraid to use it because only a few meters away a group of older kids sit sprawled on the curb, passing something back and forth between them and watching everyone who comes near with gazes that are both hazy and metal-edged, watchful, reminding her of Papa.

            But school was the only time that Mars let Hotaru out of her sight. Hotaru had surreptitiously tried, and failed, to call her father from the grocery store, the mall, the apartment lobby, even a pay phone on the corner of their block that turned out not to work. So finally she braved the phone booth at school, inching toward it, glancing cautiously at the older kids. Two of them were watching her; a skinny boy in a too-big jacket had elbowed the bigger boy next to him, saying something, and they both watched her silently, like lions watching an antelope edge toward the watering hole. Hotaru fairly ran the last few steps to the booth, picking up the sticky phone. She had already used a coin to scratch visible the numbers on the international phone card she’d slid into her pocket on their last shopping trip. She didn’t know if she’d been more terrified then, stealing for the first time, or now, pressing her back to the cold metal of the phone booth and trying to split her attention between the numbers on the card and the upperclassmen watching outside. A thought flashed through her mind, bright and fleeting as a flash of lightning: What would it feel like not to be scared?

            (that was the first time she imagined what it would be like to transform into Sailor Saturn)

            Then her father’s voicemail message was playing. “This is Dr. Soichi Tomoe. Leave your name, number, and reason for calling—” And Hotaru was gabbling something scared and sobbed and pleading into the phone. She’d rehearsed, rewritten, played in her head for weeks what she would tell him, something that would be enough information to let him know she was okay but not enough to tell him where she was, but she didn’t even know what came out of her mouth in those moments, if she’d asked him to come find her or told him where she was; in fact, when the beep cut off her message, she realized she didn’t even know if she’d spoken Japanese or English.

            “Use your words, Hotaru.” That’s one of her first memories of him with his new eyes, her face hot and puffy from sobbing and the pain, and a teddy bear being pulled from her hands. “Adults don’t respond well to crying. Express yourself like a human being.”

            She was crying on the message, and suddenly there’s this new terror in her, that even if he understands it he won’t listen to it, he’ll delete it like the messages he gets from students or professors he deems unworthy of his time. She wasn’t calm enough, wasn’t succinct, mature, enough. So she swallows down the fear, the tears and mucus in her throat, tries not to see the kids outside nudging each other as they watch her and twirl their fingers “cuckoo,” and dials the number again.

            “Papa—” Her voice hoarse but clear this time, in careful Japanese that sounds strange on her mouth after so long without speaking it. “Papa, it’s Hotaru. I’m sorry about my last message. I’m…” A pause, a deep breath. Clearly, Hotaru. “I can only call right now, at—” She did the math and felt slightly hopeful; it was 2 a.m. in Japan now, maybe he was sleeping and hadn’t heard his phone ring, “two o’clock your time. Can you…can you be at the phone then tomorrow?” She gripped the phone more tightly. “Please?”

 

<O>

 

            Hotaru calls her father every day. But not once has he picked up.

 

<O>

 

            Until today. There’s a different pause that comes after the eight rings, a longer one, like someone’s picked up the phone. And Hotaru’s heart pauses, too, breathless. Then:

            “Sorry. Client’s message box is full.”

            An automated voice. Hotaru puts the phone carefully back into its cradle and looks out across the street, blinking away the hot film on her eyes.

            Mars is standing on the opposite curb.

            Leaning against an electric pole, arms at her sides. Looking past Hotaru like she doesn’t even see her there.

            But she does. Hotaru knows she does. Knows it at the same time she suddenly knows that Mars has never actually had let her out of her sight, that she has known each and every time Hotaru tried to call her father.

            (it’s the worst feeling of violation)

            Hotaru half runs, half strides out of the phone booth, right into one of the kids who sit and watch her every day as he is coming out of the cafeteria with a basket of mozzarella sticks. All she bites out is “Sorry,” not a flinch, not a double-take of fear, just her hand shoving open the cafeteria doors and her feet carrying her inside, inside a crowded place where Sailor Mars can’t follow her.

            For the rest of the school day she imagines going to the police. Planting her feet in front of them and saying, “I’m Hotaru Tomoe. I was kidnapped.” But even as she imagines it she shrinks from it, because that’s the thing about anger (her anger); as soon as tries to do something with it, it darts back inside her, like a groundhog scared by its own shadow, huddling inside her, safe and cramped in the dark. No, Papa, it’s okay.

            The red Honda pulls up in the car line at three-thirty sharp. Hotaru gets in. There is silence. When they get to the apartment, Hotaru’s torn between creeping silently to her room and stomping up to it to make Mars know she’s furious. She begins to do the latter, but her footsteps are so loud she flinches into the former, flushing and face prickling and all the more furious, this time at herself for being such a coward.

            She folds herself up in the closet, putting her suitcase in front of her and piling dirty clothes on top of herself, hoping Mars will come to find her and not be able to find her and panic that she has run away.

            She wants Mars to be scared. She wants Mars to hurt.

            She must fall asleep in there, because she wakes up in the dark a while later and hits her head hard against the shelf above her. There’s some light coming through the window blinds from the streetlamps, and it reflects off something on Hotaru’s bed: Mars’s dark eyes. She sits against Hotaru’s headboard like a corpse, facing ahead; she doesn’t look over at Hotaru even though she must have heard her head hit the shelf.

            Get out of my bed.

            But it’s not Hotaru’s bed, not really. Nothing here is hers, nothing in the whole world is hers, and she crams herself deeper under the shelf, smelling mothballs and unwashed clothes and the too-sweet scent of deodorant from the dirty t-shirt into which she’s pressed her face.

 

<O>

 

            In the morning, Mars is gone, Hotaru’s bedspread as neat and smooth as if Mars had never been there, and Hotaru’s neck is sore and aching.

            (the pain makes her remember)

            Remember waiting for the right moment to ask Papa to sign a permission slip for a field trip to the skating rink he thinks is too dangerous for you to visit, or to the cherry blossom festival at the temple even though he doesn’t approve of religion? Remember waiting until after a painful procedure, when hot water had leaked out your eyes despite your best efforts, and your head drooped far enough forward that the tears plopped onto Papa’s hand? So he couldn’t ignore it, and the furrow of his forehead above his artificial eye would unwrinkle a bit as he looked at you, and he looked like your Papa again, your Papa from before.

            That was the moment to act. That moment, when he put a cold hand to your shoulder and asked if there was anything he could do, anything I can do to make it better, my little girl, you’ve been so good, so brave.

            Pain and guilt, they’re tools just like anesthetics and anticoagulants, and if you apply them in the right amount they work just the way you need them to.

            (and that’s the worst part because if you’re a victim you’re supposed to be blameless but being a victim teaches you how to deceive, how to cheat—

            —how not to be a victim)

 

<O>

 

            In the seventeen days since settling into the apartment, Rei thinks that she and Hotaru have settled into a routine. At six-thirty every morning, Hotaru comes into the main room, where Rei sits at their little breakfast bar, scanning various cities’ news on her laptop: Hong Kong, Moscow, Auckland, New York, London, Zurich.

            Not Tokyo.

            Sometimes, in those early gray hours limned by the red glow of the microwave clock, before Hotaru shuffles in with her bed head and heavy-lidded eyes, Rei wonders when that weight between her shoulder blades and inside her sinuses, like some divine gaze pressing down on her, will stop. If it ever will. If it’s Mercury, or if it’s Mars. Because sometimes it’s hot and sometimes it’s cold, and never is it comfortable.

            Breakfast for Rei is coffee, black with two sugars. Cereal for Hotaru. Rei doesn’t ask if Hotaru wants Cocoa Puffs; they just appear in the pantry after she sees Hotaru eyeing them wistfully at the store. Hotaru crunches each puff individually, studiously, sometimes with her front teeth, sometimes with her back, as she studies the dietary facts on the back of the box each morning. She must have every daily value percentage memorized by now, but Rei’s too busy (scared) to start a conversation. She’s never done this before, never taken care of someone before, been responsible for their safety (their happiness). Deep down where she won’t admit it to herself she’s terrified and ashamed of her failure at it thus far. She thinks of Grandpa a lot more often than she wants to, reliving old memories from his perspective, feeling bad for every time she’d brushed off his attempts to talk to her or ignored the not-quite gifts he’d left out for her: new shoes on her bed, or fugu in the fridge, or a new, old picture of her mother on the table.

            Hotaru wears long sleeves, always. There are no uniforms in the small Wisconsin town they’ve settled in, but Hotaru dresses like there are: skirts and sweaters, black leggings, and neatly collared white shirts. Rei wears whatever she spent the night in, sometimes plops a baseball cap on her head. There’s nothing to dress up for: Once she’s dropped Hotaru off at school, she just drives in long, slow circuits around it, idly, sometimes parking, sometimes not, always listening. Sensing. Waiting. Ignoring the ghosts that sometimes finger her aura hopefully, sad and confused.

            (the worst ones are the ones that don’t care about being sent on, the ones who’ve lingered here so long that they just float, translucent and mindless like jellyfish in the water, drifting through her instead of against her)

            At three o’clock she turns the Honda back toward the school and pulls into the pick-up line to wait for the three-thirty dismissal.

 

<O>

 

            Hotaru begins to look wan and anxious when she slides into the car. Rei worries about bullies, ghosts, the flu that’s going around. Flashforms, mono, nightmares that could be keeping her from getting enough sleep. More bullies. She pictures cruel notes left inside her locker, sticky things blown into her hair, feet extended in the hallway to trip her, jeering in the locker room. Teachers who don’t care, teachers who care too much. She takes Hotaru shopping, buys her the fashions in the display windows and on the posing mannequins, wonders if she should buy them a different car, a newer one that no one could make fun of.

            Hotaru won’t tell her anything, won’t even admit anything’s wrong, and Rei slides her hands back and forth across the steering wheel, the laptop keyboard, the countertop, the bedspread in Hotaru’s room as the sound of uneven breathing comes from the dark closet.

            (maybe…maybe I should take you to see someone, her grandfather had said. I think you need to talk to someone. and you won’t talk to me…what can I do? What can I do for you, Rei?)

           

<O>

 

            “Bra shopping,” Rei says that afternoon when Hotaru slides into the car. “I need a bra. Let’s go.”

            Hotaru doesn’t say anything, just leans her head against the window.

            Rei drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “Did you…did you have something you wanted to do this weekend?” She hasn’t asked if Hotaru has made any friends, wonders now if she should have. “I can…take you, if you want.”

            A quiet sigh of air from Hotaru. “No,” she says in a small voice. “I know we have to keep a low profile. I understand.”

            That isn’t what Rei wanted. Not what she wanted at all, but she’s only realizing that now. “Hotaru, you can have friends. You can have a normal life.”

            “How?” says Hotaru. “You won’t even look up Tokyo news on the computer because you’re afraid someone might track us I’ve seen the list of places you have for us to go once we’ve stayed here too long. Why should I try to make friends and have a normal life when we’re just going to be leaving?” She turns her face back to the window, head drooping against the glass, her voice not angry or accusing, just tired. “Better not to try.”

            Rei feels wretched. “What can I do?” She knows she can’t even begin to make up for what she’s taken away from Hotaru, and that an attempt to try is only to make herself feel better, but she wants this more than anything. What can I do? What can I do for you?

            “Can’t I talk to Papa?” Hotaru’s voice cracks. “Just once?”

            Rei goes cold. And hard. Like Sailor Mars. Her fingers stop drumming the steering wheel and grip it instead. “No.”

            A hiccup, a strangled sound. A trembling breath sucked in.

            “Mars, please.”

            Rei flinches at the name. Hotaru watches her swallow, push past it.

            “I don’t understand why you want to talk to him,” she says, and the (hurt) bewilderment her voice sounds like she really is trying to understand. “Hotaru, he experimented on you.”

            There’s no reason Hotaru could give her that would make sense to her. no reason Hotaru has that makes sense to herself. There’s just that he’s her papa and even if she’s scary he’s still there. He’s still hers and she’s still his because he’s the only one these scars belong to other than her, and sometimes she thinks the scars rope them together more than their blood does, because if she’s the one who has to bear them he’s the one that caused them, and it’s the guilt that keeps him with her. Everyone else is scared and repelled by them but he will (can) never be, because they’re his as much as hers.

            “He’s my dad,” is all she says, because Mars won’t (doesn’t want to) understand.

            “You’re scared of him,” Mars says.

            “You can love someone and be scared of them.”

             “You shouldn’t.”

            “I’m scared of you.”

            Mars doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then, abruptly, she says, “He went missing. After we left. I don’t know where he is.” Her eyes stay on the road, her hands on the wheel. “I swear I’m not lying to you.”

            Hotaru. Stares at her.

            Scrabbling up the inside of her skull there’s terror. Terror that he’ll come for her and terror that he won’t.

            “He’s coming for me,” she says, half asking, half warning.

            Mars’s lips tighten. It doesn’t seem possible that they’re having this conversation, in the glaring afternoon sun with a Top 40 channel playing quietly on the radio and loud high schoolers skateboarding gleefully across the crosswalk in front of them. “I think he’s dead.”

            It was like the moment when you wake up from a dream and you have to blink, to resituate in your brain what is reality and what is not.

            “I—I don’t believe you,” she says, cold and hard, because maybe Rei’s rubbed off on her more than either of them know.

            Mars just hands Hotaru her own cell phone. The icon in the top corner of the screen shows it has an international SIM card; with trembling fingers, Hotaru dials a number she hasn’t dared (hasn’t wanted) to call.

            “Hotaru?” comes a familiar voice after only two rings. “Oh, God, Hotaru-san! Where are you?”

            “Ka-Kaori-san…”

            “Hotaru-san, where are you? Is Soichi with you? Please say he’s with y—”

            Hotaru slowly lowers the phone. Closes it and puts it back into Rei’s open palm.

            Mars rolls down her window and throws it onto the road in front of them. Hotaru imagines she can feel the bump as the car’s tires crush the phone to bits.

 

<O>

 

            Ten minutes later, they are at the apartment, packing their things. Three hours later they are twenty-five thousand feet in the air, Hotaru ignoring the bag of peanuts on the fold-down table in front of her in favor of staring out the dark window.

            Eight hours later, as Hotaru dozes on a hard plastic airport seat, waiting for their connecting flight, Rei opens her laptop and connects to the airport’s wireless internet. Her fingers hesitate on the keyboard. And then, because maybe Hotaru has rubbed off on her more than either of them know, she types her father’s name into the search engine.

            Hotaru makes a sound in her sleep, one leg jerking. Rei murmurs, “Sshhh,” and rests a hand on messy dark hair. Her eyes are filling with something warm and wet as she reads the links that the search engine brought up, as she blinks rapidly because she doesn’t know why she’s crying. She hated him. She hated him.

            Sshhh. It’s okay.

            (it’s not)