A/N: This is the last chapter of Season 2. Relevant reminder: remember Chapter 34 when Ikuko took Rini aside to ask her about a homework assignment her teacher hadn’t turned in?

           Song for this chapter: “Held” by Natalie Grant. The chapter’s title comes from a stanza in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Mother of Nothing:”

 

You who stand at pre-school fences

watching the endless tumble and slide,

who answer the mothers’ Which one is yours?

with blotted murmur and turning away.

 

            Gore, Situational and Middle Book Syndrome warnings.

 

            Disclaimer: I do not own Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Mother of Nothing.” Nor do I own Sailor Moon.

 

 

            Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to take this moment to dedicate STC, in its entirety, to JadeEye. I wouldn’t be writing anything at all if not for you.

 

-

 

Subject to Change

Season 2

Chapter Forty-Two: Mother of Nothing

 

-

 

            When Serena woke again in Endymion’s bed, Serenity was screaming inside her. Her anger pounded against Serena’s mind like a prisoner’s fist against cell walls. She wouldn’t let Serena hurt Endymion, she wouldn’t let her touch him–

            Tears rolled down Serena’s cheeks. Serenity’s pain was not her own, but she knew exactly how it felt. The terror, the need to do anything if it would save Darien from dying.

            Serena began to slip. Silver crept from the roots of her hair as she thought of Darien and what would happen if she stayed in the past with Endymion, protected from Chaos by his blistering power and his fiery blue eyes, and he would protect her, and they would be happy instead of worrying about people who never cared about her and no one would be able to touch them and he loves me and I will not let you kill him!

            Her body stumbled to the floor. Her hands clenched in her hair, fingernails digging into her scalp until they drew blood, and she gasped, not with pain but with memory because she could remember pain like this: burning, wet pain on her head, a whip and shaking arms and whispers of “Odango, wake up.”

            The memories were like a rope. Serena crawled up them, panting, hurting, struggling against Serenity’s crushing power. But it was hard, so harder, and it seemed cruelly unfair that she could stand against Diamond’s hypnosis as Serenity could not but she couldn’t stand against Serenity–

            Serena’s eyes snapped open. She squinted as thought against a very bright light, spots of blue swirling back into her silver eyes. Swaying, she rocked to her feet. Hands splayed against the wall for support, she made her way through Endymion’s rooms to the outermost door. It was flanked by two guards in mesh tunics. Wordlessly, she pressed down on their minds with an intention that was hers and a power that was Serenity’s. They slumped to the floor. She stumbled over them, and then down corridor after corridor, always heading toward the pulse of two familiar auras.

            Darien’s flared with recognition as she came half shuffling, half falling, down the dungeon’s stone steps. Serena did not have the room in her mind to attempt to conceal her aura or even to shield herself from the rope. His relief and panic burst into her like a cherry bitten open on her tongue. She felt herself beginning to gag. She forced the feeling back and stumbled past the cell where she could feel him to the cell where a metallic, darkly eager aura waited instead.

            “Princess,” Diamond murmured through the slats. He sounded dazed and uncertain, not like the confident man who had hypnotized her each night. “You’ve come for me.”

            Serena put glowing hands to his door.

 

L

 

            Back in Endymion’s bedchamber half an hour later, Serena could feel Darien pounding at the door to her mind, the same way he had begun to slam his shoulders against his cell door as he sensed her releasing Diamond from his cell. But just as the sound of his shoulders against the stone had faded as she and Diamond stumbled up the stairs back toward Endymion’s chambers, the sensation of Darien’s aura pounding against hers faded as she let more of Serenity’s consciousness filter into her. Serena poured it carefully, her control trembling like fatigued fingers, as though she was pouring batter into the bowls in a cupcake pan, being careful not to pour too much lest the batter swell up and over and swallow her.

            Diamond had stepped not-quite-steadily into one of his voids, bleeding badly from several wounds that burned with Endymion’s aura. She had had the energy to heal the worst of them but had dared not to do too much, fearing that if she restored him too much he would have the strength the overpower her. She was not quite sure she trusted him despite the agreement they had come to, that in return for her promising him what he wanted, he would stay in his void and wait there for her signal to come out if she needed him. She had pulled a strand of golden hair from her head and given it to Diamond. If it turned completely silver, he would come out and use his hypnotic eye to force Serenity’s flash-form back into her submerged state inside Serena.

            The more of Serenity that trickled through Serena, the more fiercely the cut that Serena had made to give Diamond the oath he had required of her burned with pain. To Serena, the fairly shallow cut had been no worse than some of the scrapes she had gotten while fighting youma. But to Serenity, who had never fought a battle in her life, the wound was agony. She lifted Serena’s fingers to it, sewing the cut shut with silver energy. Serena’s eyelids fluttered, the flecks of silver energy suddenly reflecting in her irises and spreading.

            Then the bedroom door swung open.

            She lifted her head and eyelids. They felt very heavy, as though the planet’s gravity had suddenly doubled. She watched metal-tipped black boots and leather-strapped trouser legs step toward her. Calloused fingers touched her chin and lifted her face.

            Somewhere inside her drifted the thought that Darien had turned away so many times, instead of lifting her face like this. Then she saw herself reflected, white and scarless, in deep blue eyes that made her feel safe. Not penetrated, just safe and protected, even from the eyes themselves.

            “Endymion,” she murmured, and felt his grip tighten.

            Distantly, but closely enough that gold still lingered in her hair, she recalled the diaphanous white gown she wore. She recalled how to lift and lower her shoulder so that the filmy sleeve slipped down, nearly to her elbow.

            Endymion’s teeth did not change shape. But somehow, in the way the air shifted around him, the way he shifted forward through it, he seemed more animalistically ravenous than that other black-haired...

            His hand came through the hair at the back of her neck to grip it and drew her head to his. The kiss was hard, hot, and long. She could not breathe and did not know where to put her hand, her lips, her tongue. Endymion did not seem to notice. He moved forward against her, his hands tangling through her hair, palming the back of her head, moving it for her, and took what he wanted.

            She felt a hole open in her, all the way to her stomach, like the earth had dropped out from beneath her. His hand gripped hers and pinned them to the pillows above her, making her aware for the first time of the cushion beneath her back and the weight atop her chest. She felt as though Diamond’s void had opened inside her and was sucking her insides out but simultaneously spewing things back in, grimy, squirming things that made her want to curl into a ball.

            But at the same time, she was surging forward against the weight pinning her down, taking Endymion’s mouth with the same fervor he was taking hers, one of her hands struggling free to dig seeking fingers into the metal fastenings at his shoulders. The metal bit into the unprotected flesh beneath her fingernails at the same time his teeth closed around her lower lip. Her eyelids fluttered languidly open.

            The metal fastenings, gold rings set in the leather, met her eyes.

            Blue filtered back into her silver irises. Serena let her eyelids sink shut again and brushed her hand along Endymion’s hip, searching for the subspace pocket’s tell-tale catch in space.

            Her fingers found it and, after a fluttering hesitation, dipped inside.

            Endymion made a ragged sound into her mouth. Suddenly he was crushing her to the bed, his mouth on hers so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Somewhere inside her there was fierce, pulsing ecstasy, and somewhere else, as the Golden Crystal’s spikes bit into her palm, there was deep, throbbing anguish, tears burning in her eyes because she could remember when she had reached into Darien’s subspace pocket, when she had thought he was dead–

            Thinking of Darien was her fatal move. Suddenly longing was pouring through her, and it was a flood that brought Serenity coursing back through its depths.

            She was elated, and she was angry, and she was panicked, and she made Serena’s body tighten with the emotions, and Endymion was shushing her, “Hush, darling, I’m here,” and sweeping her hair back from her face and kissing her neck, and she had her arms around him and was crying into his shoulder and letting Serenity surge over her because it wasn’t fair that he had to die–

            He eased her other sleeve down, the material scraping down her chest. But she barely noticed the butterfly-soft sensation of the fabric or the hotter, wetter one of his lips tracing down her collarbone, because a heavy weight tumbled free from her loosened bodice. The warm chain with its star-shaped weight, somehow suddenly there, sliding into the hollow of her throat, was as familiar to her as the person who had given it to her.

            Serena’s fingers tightened in the hair at the back of Endymion’s head, holding him to her. Her other hand pulled the long shard of crystal Diamond had given her out of her subspace pocket.

            Then she thrust it between Endymion’s shoulder blades.

            His blood seeped into her dress before the comprehension seeped into his eyes. She stared back into his shocked blue gaze, her body stiffening as she waited for his full weight to collapse upon her.

            But he kept staring at her, holding himself up on his elbows on either side of her. His breath continued, hot on her face, ragged but still strong.

            Not once, in all the nightmarish ways Serena had pictured this happening since she had learned she would have to do it, had she imagined that one stab would not be enough. She panicked and brought the sword down again.

            Again.

            Again!

            She was only distantly aware of him beginning to fight her with suddenly weakened strength, of him trying to pull back and trying to grasp her hand and twist her wrist, because his eyes were open, and she needed to close them, she needed to close them so they would stop looking at her and understanding what she was doing, and there was only one way to close them, and the Golden Crystal was burning between her breasts as hot as a kiss and as sharp as a bite–

            Diamond came out, then, although Serena barely knew it, a silver-streaked strand of golden hair falling from his fingers, and he came to where she and Endymion had tumbled from the bed, their legs and arms tangled. She struggled to get up, his blue eyes were still open and he was on top of her, still moving sluggishly and reaching for her, and her hair, trapped beneath his weight, kept her face trapped beneath his–

            Then suddenly there was Diamond’s black knife cutting across the powerful cords of blood in Endymion’s throat.

            That should had been the worst of it. Feeling Endymion’s hot blood gush suddenly down  her head and shoulders and plaster the filmy white gown to every inch of her body should have been the worst of it.

            But it wasn’t.

            The worst came when an aura clashed against hers as she retched over the floor, vomiting up everything inside her as she sat crouched between Endymion’s motionless legs.

            When she looked up, panting and crying, and saw Darien in the doorway.

 

L

 

            Sailor Pluto came for them then. Breathing effortfully as though dragging in her last breaths, the dark Senshi pulled Serena from the puddle of Endymion’s blood, tugging her long, dripping gold hair from beneath the prince’s unmoving body.

            Darien still stood in the doorway. He did not move except for the heaving of his chest.

            Diamond took off his cloak and put it around Serena. It settled over her shoulders, red spots seeping through and blooming on the white fabric.

            Pluto lifted her staff parallel to the ground and turned it like a key in a lock. A wavering image, like a mirage, of steel-gray sand and lightning-cracked gray sky, appeared. They stumbled through it, and then they were on a Tokyo street, standing beside an overturned car and mound of asphalt that had been gouged out of the street before them.

 

L

 

            The High Senshi’s arrow never hit its target, for Endymion suddenly disappeared.

            There was no flash of light to indicate that some attack had done him in or that he had teleported away himself. He was simply, suddenly, gone. The only sign that he had even been present at all were the bloodied Senshi and Shittenou and the destruction all around them. Sapphire, was still holding the Terran woman who had screamed and tried to run toward the child Shittenou when Endymion attacked him, felt her go limp with relief. He did no such relaxing, his muscles still tense and his mind scouring the minds around him, for he felt…

            “On your guard!” shouted one of the High Senshi. But Sapphire was already thrusting his hands into the air. The air molecules around him and the two Terran females beside him darkened to blue and hardened to stone, forming a dome just as staticky yellow energy slammed into them. Sapphire staggered, and the Terran woman sobbed out again, ducking over her infant, but the sapphire shield held fast.

            “Wiseman,” Sapphire gritted out, grinding his teeth. The onslaught continued without pause, forcing Sapphire to keep generating fresh stone as the Wiseman’s attack ate it away. Above the sounds of cracking stone came the sound of the his laughter. Annoyance stabbed through Sapphire as sweat trickled down his forehead; if the Wiseman had appeared sixty seconds earlier, Endymion could have gone after him instead of after his own Shittenou.

            But soon enough there was little room in Sapphire’s mind for such thoughts. The minds around him, shrill with adrenaline, were shredding through his own, breaking down his concentration and interfering with the shield–we’re going to die he’s gone Mom my baby where are Serena and Dare–

            Silence.

            Suddenly all Sapphire could see was a laughing girl with hair like sunwheat and bright blue eyes looking at him he loved her but it wasn’t enough his queen’s command he was slipping a ring onto the finger of a girl with space-black hair in buns as Minako smiled behind her happy for them both she didn’t know he would never let her know but Luna figured it out resented her and for all that he wished he could love her it was a relief to die when Minako killed him to know that he wouldn’t have to live wishing for her anymore and that hadn’t changed this time around–

            The spate of images and thoughts ended, and Sapphire was left staring down at the battered white cat slumped on the ground at his feet. Energy pumped through him, a barrier between his mind and the overwhelming thoughts, and he knew from the aura of the energy that it had been the animal’s. He looked up and saw the infant’s blue eyes fixed solemnly on him, and they were the very ones that had filled the cat’s mind.

            But there was no time to follow this revelation, for at that moment, four massive auras materialized in his senses.

            Sapphire spun. Through the glassy blue dome his sapphire had formed around them, he could see his brother’s white cloak fluttering not fifty meters away.

            Then he saw the Wiseman’s energy crash down onto it.

            “DIAMOND!” The scream tore from Sapphire’s throat. He phased through his sapphire wall, sprinting toward the metallic energy splashing away from where he’d seen his brother. Above the pounding of his ears he could hear the Wiseman’s booming laughter. Shrapnel was tearing through his tunic, and he lifted his hands to shield his eyes from it and the violent wind.

            Then, abruptly, the wind and noise stopped. Sapphire lowered his hands from his eyes, squinting.

            Silver energy was eating through the Wiseman’s dark-veined yellow aura. It was narrow at first but grew wider, like the wake of light left behind by a shooting star. As it slowly but steadily pushed back the Wiseman’s energy, Diamond’s white cloak became visible again. The person wearing it wasn’t Diamond. It was a woman with long, tangled gold hair, holding something glowing in her hands.

            Peripherally, Sapphire noted that the woman was Sailor Moon. But as soon as he saw that she was not Diamond, his eyes had flicked immediately away from her to the three people behind her. One of them was Diamond, his white tunic stained with red. Sapphire sprinted toward him.

            Then the sidewalk in front of him exploded.

            Sapphire went flying, his body tumbling. He slammed into something hard, and his back turned to fire as he slid down it, crumpling on the asphalt.

            “Sapphire!” he heard. There was the sound of running feet, and more of the Wiseman’s laughter. He forced his eyes open, blinking back the blood streaming into them. His brother’s face panted above him. “Sapphire!”

            Sapphire’s bleary eyes skittered through Diamond’s. He could not absorb half of what he found in his brother’s mind–fragments of blood and energy and a thousand feelings, torture and betrayal and regret and why he’d given the moon girl his cloak–but he could feel that Diamond wasn’t dying. Relief softened his pain-clenched face. He felt his eyes beginning to drift shut. “Diamond…”

            “I don’t know that I’ll ever have a more satisfying kill,” came the Wiseman’s voice. “I would incinerate you both at the same time, but I think your brother should see how desperate you were to surpass him, shouldn’t he, Diamond?”

            Diamond’s eyes snapped wide. So did Sapphire’s. He struggled to sit up, heart pounding. Diamond was shaking his head like a dog trying to escape a choking collar. His thoughts rang into Sapphire’s mind loudly: run run run–

            Sapphire reached for him. “Diamond–”

            His brother’s eyes snapped wide, nearly popping from his sockets. His third eye glowed a sharp, violent silver like a shard of metal protruding from his forehead. His hair and tunic flapped as though in a fierce wind. Then there was the sound of ripping fabric. The sleeves of Diamond’s tunic tore open all the way up to his shoulders.

            Beneath them, a pair of gold cuffs glinted on his wrists.

            Sapphire stared at them. A moment passed before he felt himself stagger up, as though his horror had shoved him to his feet.

            “Sapphire,” Diamond whispered, staring up at him.

            The Wiseman laughed, once. The cuffs clinked open on Diamond’s wrists.

            And he burst into a human-shaped cloud of sparkling ash.

 

L

 

            Lanai looked away from the gruesome tableau: the stunned look on the man’s face as his brother’s ashes drifted onto him, the Wiseman’s fleshless grin as he watched. Instead, she looked to where Serena and Darien had materialized with Diamond…and with the Sailor Pluto who had contacted her through a time mirror to explain what had happened and would happen.

            Had there been time, Lanai would have marveled at how different this wan, uncertain Sailor Pluto was from the one she had encountered a year ago, but there wasn’t time. Whatever Pluto had done in the past had clearly fixed one thing–the future Endymion had vanished completely, erased from the timeline–but there were still dozens of other things to deal with. Not the least of which was Darien Shields, whom Lanai could see gradually coming back to life where he stood, blank-eyed and zombie-like.

            But even as Lanai saw this, Pluto turned, lifting her staff. It trembled terribly in her hands, as though too heavy for her to lift, but she touched it to Darien’s shoulder like a king dubbing a knight, and he went completely still, eyes closed, frozen in time. Farther away, Sailor Jupiter and the Shittenou all slumped to the ground, rendered unconscious by more of Pluto’s magic.

            Lanai looked away from them all, to someone far more important. “Sailor Moon!” Her voice was sharp, the voice of a drill sergeant displeased with a student’s performance. “Where is your sword?”

            The blood-covered girl, standing in the middle of the gouged road with silver swirling in her blank eyes did not seem to hear her.

            The Wiseman laughed. “Is your princess not the prodigy you expected, High Senshi? How disappointing.”

            “Sailor Moon!” Lanai shouted again. “WHERE IS YOUR SWORD?”

            Even at her distance from the girl, Lanai could see the silver in Serena’s eyes slowing its swirl. Blue mixed into the silver, and Lanai watched the girl’s head rise. She moved her hand slowly up to her throat as though touching something there. Silver light shot out of it, a narrow beam racing up into the sky through the clouds. The red-stained white cloak on her shoulders rose as though wind was slowly lifting it. Then two pairs of white, feathery wings burst out from beneath the cloak, sending it fluttering to the ground and revealing a gauzy, gold- and red-edged fuku. Then Sailor Moon was blurring through the air so quickly that Lanai could barely see her.

            What she did see was the explosion of silver-flecked yellow light in the sky as the Silver Crystal’s power collided with the Wiseman’s.

            Something shot out of the burst of light, slamming through Infinity Academy’s glass windows. Another blur sped after it. There was another burst of light, brilliant silver fireworks edged with duller yellow. A massive cloud of plaster dust and sparkling glass blew from the hole in the skyscraper. Then a silver light crashed out of the other side of the building, the Wiseman’s yellow aura streaking after it.

            It caught up to the silver, and there was another explosion of energy in mid-air, this one almost completely yellow. Lanai rocketed toward it, her wings angled steeply against her back. But she didn’t dare get too close to the two combatants; their auras were bursting from them every few seconds like bursts of superheated vapor that would fry her to ashes if she got caught in them.

            Still, for all the power Moon was slamming against the Chaos creature, Lanai could see that she was slowing. Her speed was declining, letting Lanai catch glimpses of bloody white wings as she and the Chaos creature collided with each other again and crashed into another glass-paneled skyscraper. For a few seconds, there was silence and nothing but the sound of the broken glass showering to the ground ten stories below to indicate that two super-beings were fighting.

            Then a white and red shape came flying out of the other side of the building and hurtling toward the ground.

            Lanai streaked after it. But she knew even before she began moving that she would not be fast enough. She was too far away and Serena’s body was falling too fast.

            The girl’s impact was anticlimactic. Even to Lanai, who had fought thousands of battles, it seemed that a being as powerful as the Moon Princess should have made a gaping crater in the ground, sent up a sprawling mushroom cloud of dust. But there was only the buckle of her body, the snap of her spine and her head smashing into the pavement.

            Lanai swallowed her horror and pity. She saw Jupiter and one of the prince’s Shittenou sprinting toward Moon, and she flung a wall of knives like the ones she had used to train Serena. They thudded into the ground around them, lengthening as they dug into the pavement and forming a cage around the two warriors. Jupiter screamed her rage and slammed bolt after bolt of electricity into the knives while the Shittenou–he was the  one who had been her student, Lanai recalled dispassionately, recognizing his bruised and blackened face–flung fire at them, but the wall held. Above them, surrounded by Moon’s drifting, bloody feathers, the Wiseman laughed harder, the sound echoing all around them.

            Teeth gritted, Lanai turned her attention back to Sailor Moon. The young Senshi was still spread-eagle on the ground, her body motionless but her eyes open and streaming tears. For a moment, Lanai’s mind flashed to Darien, standing motionless beside Pluto. Then she landed on the ground a few feet away from Moon.

            “Get up.”

            The girl mumbled something that Lanai couldn’t hear above the sound of the shouting Shittenou and hissing flames and booming laughter. She took a step closer. “Get up! How do you expect to protect anyone if you can’t stop one measly Chaos minion, Serena?”

            Moon didn’t move, although by now Lanai’s boots were only inches from her face. Tears and blood ran down her battered face into the cracked asphalt beneath her. “…ni,” Lanai could hear her gasping. “Where’s…Rini…”

            “You want us to bring Rini here while that monster is still alive and looking for her?” Lanai forced herself to keep her voice harsh as she lied. “You can see her when you’ve killed it. Get up.”

            She dug her foot under Moon’s back to underline the command. Moon curled into a ball around it, still shaking with sobs. Then she reached up, gripped the hem of Lanai’s fuku, and pulled herself up.

            For a moment, she swayed. Half of the fabric of her fuku was gone in the back, her skin glinting across her spine as though silver thread had stitched through it, sewing it back together. There was a pop as one of the wing’s joints pulled itself back into place. Moon staggered, clutching Lanai’s sleeve.

            “Listen to me.” Lanai locked gazes with her. “You have to be the one to do this. We only have the power to seal him away like Metallia was. You’re the only one strong enough to kill him for good.”

            Moon looked at her. Something burned in her eyes. Lanai couldn’t tell if it was fury or anguish or just plain exhaustion. All she knew was that it reminded her of the Wiseman’s gaping, empty eye sockets. She opened her mouth to say something. To apologize, to say that she was doing this for Serena’s own good, for everyone’s good.

            But Moon was already a streak in the sky.

 

L

 

            Breaking through the two High Senshi’s barrier was like diving into a swimming pool. Serena felt her momentum begin to slow, her body held back by the barrier’s resistance.

            Then she burst through the barrier, back into air. She tumbled straight into the Wiseman’s crackling, malevolent aura. Her eyes opened and saw nothing but black, the same as when Metallia had absorbed her and Darien.

            “Hello, Your Highness.” The Wiseman’s voice came from all around her. It slithered into her ears like little wet worms, wriggling inside. Serena cringed, pressing her hands to her ears as though to shield herself, but she felt his aura anyway, squeezing against every weak part of her, trying to crawl inside. She dug her hands harder into her ears, eyes squeezed shut, mouth clamped closed, pressing her nose to her knees and clenching her legs together.

            Yet his voice still reverberated inside her skull as though he had stuck a tuning fork to her temple. “I’m not going to kill you, Princess. Not when we both just went through all this trouble to make sure you would bear Endymion’s child.”

            Serena curled more tightly into herself. She felt sick. No.

            “Give her to me.” This time the Wiseman whispered, but the sound was only more intimate and horrible than his normal voice had been. It wriggled inside her like something cold and wrong. “Give her to me, and I’ll let you go.”

            No… She wouldn’t. She had made a promise. Of protection and comic books and love. Rini was hers. After all that had happened, that was the one good thing, the thing that made everything else worth it. Rini was her baby. Serena would never give her up to the Wiseman. She would never give her up to anyone.

            “But you already have.”

            Images filled her head. A hospital room and a silver-haired woman on the bed, her face smooth and eyes shut as though asleep. Her silvery-lavender eyes sliding open and going not to the tiny infant being lifted from between her legs by the white-coated doctor but to the black-haired man sitting at the bedside with his hand splayed atop her stomach and a proud smile on his lips. The same hospital room with nighttime instead of daylight visible outside its windows, the woman sitting up and curled into the black-haired man’s side, as a nurse brought the baby in, the woman taking it into her arms for a moment before putting it down on the bed at her feet and tilting her head up to receive the black-haired man’s kiss. One of the Shittenou stationed at the end of the bed stepping forward and taking the forgotten baby into his arms.

            The same Shittenou arguing with the man and woman. Being struck by the man. Standing at the hospital room window by the empty bed with the baby in his arms as a rainbow of auras flared and then disappeared in the courtyard outside.

            The silver aura leaving her baby behind.

            “No,” she heard someone whisper. “I’m not her.” There was salty water trickling into her mouth and power searing at her forehead and her fingertips. She bit down hard on her tongue and let it tear free, as though if the power could shred through the Wiseman it would shred through the future she had just seen, too, and leave it in tatters that no one would ever be able to put back together. She smelled it, the acrid scent of his burning flesh, and heard the sound of herself screaming: inarticulate shrieks of rage and pain. But his laughter was echoing in her ears, getting louder and louder, and he moved faster and faster, evading her attacks.

            “You can’t kill me, Princess.”

            “Shut up!” she screamed and attacked faster, her wings whirling and crashing and power steaming and snapping from her fingertips, her movements like lightning and her aura like fire. But just like before, the more quickly she moved, the more quickly he did, too, and suddenly he was there in front of her, a cloud of black aura swirling all around her, the cowl of his hood rippling against her temples, and he was exhaling into her mouth, “You can’t kill me.”

            His hands were on her neck and now sliding up to her jaw, angling her head as though to kiss her, or to wrench her skull from her spine. His touch was like paralyzing venom, immobilizing her.

            “Do you want to know why you can’t kill me?”

            She gripped his wrists and tried to wrench his hands from her face. But they dissolved like smoke in her hands.

            “I’m Nemesis,” he whispered, slipping away, and around her, the way Kisenian Blossom had. Entwining his aura around hers. “Do you know what Nemesis truly is? Not a planet, but a god. The god of…” He slipped around her again, bringing his face back to hers. “self…righteous…” Each syllable faded off like smoke, dragged like a tongue across her cheek, “…anger.”

            He slid around her again, his hood rippling faster against her cheek. “Unless you wholeheartedly believe that you are right and that I am the source of all the wrong that has come to you and to those you’re trying to protect, you can’t defeat me.”

            He slipped closer. “That’s why you keep missing.” They were entwined now. “You know that you’ve caused just as much suffering as I have.”

            A new movie began to play in her mind, one of all the people whose lives her existence had damaged. Haruka, his body warped into something it never should have been, forced to hide him true self from everyone in the world, including the woman he loved. Lita, her eyes and hair a flaming green, every vestige of self-awareness burned away as she aimed a lightning bolt at Motoki. Ami, pale-faced and crying, so terrified of fighting, shoved so deep into her own mind that she didn’t even know she existed. Mayuko, her face splattered with blood as she clutched her dragon-horned son with one arm and the baby with Venus’s eyes in the other. The list of people went on and on, and it was her fault. All of it.

            Self-loathing tore through her, and with it, every vestige of power in her soul.

 

L

 

            The light that burst through the massive black ball of energy that had filled the sky wasn’t silver, as Lanai had expected it to be. It was a dreary gray. And it didn’t burst through the black so much as chew arduously through it. But chew through it it did, and the mass of black energy disintegrated into millions of tiny sparks of black energy that disintegrated before they reached the ground. As they drifted slowly toward the ground, Sailor Moon’s body hurtled swiftly toward it. Lanai’s heart leapt into her throat, and she streaked into the sky, knowing that she was already too late to stop her from impacting–

            At the last second, Moon’s wings burst from her back. They snapped out and yanked her briefly upward like a faulty parachute finally deploying, and then she plowed into the ground.

            Lanai’s wings nearly tangled in her haste to reach the girl. “Serena!”

            Moon’s body skidded to a stop only a few meters away from where Pluto had sunk onto her knees, her staff planted in the cracked asphalt the only thing keeping her upright. Lanai hit the ground running, sprinting toward the body, but the heap of bloodied wings and golden hair was already pushing itself up. It managed to crawl a meter closer to Pluto before collapsing to the ground again, panting hard.

            “Rini,” Moon croaked to the green-haired Senshi. “Where’s Rini?”

            Tears ran down Pluto’s dark face. “She is gone.”

            Moon’s bruised eyes stared at her. Her lips rustled, “Gone?”

            “She had a choice.” Pluto was breathing more laboriously now. She had warned Lanai that this would happen, that Chronos would exact his punishment for breaking his laws. She had warned Lanai, too, about what would happen to the child, but Lanai hadn’t thought, then, that Moon would be as attached to the child as she clearly was. “She was no longer supposed to exist, now that by changing the past you have changed the future.”

            “No,” Moon whispered.

            “By virtue of her sheer power, the Small Lady could have continued to exist,” Pluto rasped. “But her existence would always have pulled this present toward that future, making it more likely that you would become the flash-forms who were her parents. She chose to let herself cease to be so that you could be yourselves…” Pluto struggled to finish, her dark red eyes already glazing over, “and have a child you would love…from the beginning.”

            Lanai looked away from Moon’s face.

            “She wanted me…to give you this.” The Time Senshi’s trembling hand held out a cylindrical shape. Lanai saw that it was a fat pink pen, a jewel at its end, a roll of paper rolled around it and secured by the pen’s pink clip. It slipped from Pluto’s fingers as her body went limp and dead.

            White hands seized Pluto’s throat. Lanai realized with a start that they were Serena’s.

            “Bring her back.” The blonde shook Pluto, her hands squeezing so tightly that Pluto’s dark skin was turning white around her hands, and now she was screaming, “Bring her back!”

            But it was no use. Pluto was already dead, her eyes rolled back in their sockets so that only the whites showed. Lanai looked away from the sight and saw that, around them, most of the Senshi and Shittenou were still unconscious, their state unchanged by Pluto’s death and the subsequent dissolution of her time freeze. But Jupiter was stirring, and so was Darien, his aura lashing violently against the unconsciousness and time freeze that still held him.

            They needed to be away before he woke up. Lanai looked back down at Moon.

            “Sailor Moon,” she said. And when Moon did not stop shaking Pluto: “Serena! Pluto’s dead! She can’t bring the child back.”

            “Even if Pluto was alive, the child doesn’t exist anymore,” Lethe said coldly from where she had stood silently for the past while, watching. Her eyes were on Moon, contemptuous. “You can’t bring someone back if they no longer exist anywhere in time.”

            “Lethe,” Lanai said sharply.

            Lethe only narrowed her eyes. “I guess now the princess gets to experience loss just like the rest of us.”

            Darien’s aura was close to exploding. Lanai crouched down beside Moon and gripped her shoulder. Their eyes met, and there was a vaporizing rage in the silver-flecked blue eyes that was a thousand times hotter than the one crackling in Darien’s aura.

            A bead of sweat trickled down Lanai’s forehead. “Serena,” she said, as another rolled down her neck. “Listen to me. You have a chance to help millions of other mothers from losing their children.”

            “You lied to me.” Moon’s voice was raw and broken. “Everything you said was a lie.”

            “Was it?” said Lanai harshly. “You went and saw how it was in the Silver Millennium, and you still think I lied when I said it was disastrous for you and Darien to be together?”

            Moon’s eyes went to Darien. The anguished expression on her face was like an open sword wound, more horrible and disfiguring than her scars had ever been. She turned away, lowering Pluto’s body to the ground.

            Lanai reached out to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it and pulled back. “Do you see your friends?”

            Moon looked at the barrier that still contained her friends. The Shittenou were all still unconscious, as was Mayuko. The baby was in Mayuko’s limp arms, its ageless eyes unblinking, unnerving, and yet somehow managing to look worried. A few meters away from them both, Jupiter was pushing herself up on her elbows and looking around. As her eyes found Sailor Moon, they went wide, and she began banging on the barrier with her fists.

            “You can protect them,” Lanai said quietly. “If you come with us to fight Chaos, you can make sure that they never have to fight.”

            Jupiter yelled, “Serena!”

            “We can make it so that none of them remember any of this,” Lanai said. “They won’t remember you, or having had to fight. They can live normal, happy lives.”

            A moment passed, broken only by the sound of Jupiter shouting and hitting the barrier. Then Moon’s eyes fell away from Lanai’s. She clenched her fists on her knees.

            “Do it.”

            “You’re sure?” said Lanai, and then pressed her lips together. Why had she said that?

            Moon looked at her. Her face was dead. “Yes.”

            Lanai looked at Lethe. The Senshi was already stepping forward. Mnemosyne fluttered behind her, holding tight to her sister’s wrist, pressing her face to Lethe’s shoulder. Their positions changed slightly: Lethe wrapped her arms around Mnemosyne’s waist, and Mnemosyne raised her face until she was cheek to cheek with Lethe, looking over her shoulder. Their eyes began to glow, the air around them rippling as though they were underwater.

            As Lanai watched, the Shittenou’s eyes and those of Jupiter and the woman and her child began to glow as well. They each glowed their respective colors, greens and reds and blues, but the auras of memories that began to wisp away from their eyes like blood from an underwater wound were streaked with silver. As they wisped into Mnemosyne’s eyes, her irises glowed faintly silver as well.

            Lanai continued to watch each of them–Asanuma, whom she had known from her classes; Lita and Motoki, whom she had known only by name and appearance; the other Shittenou and the woman and the baby, none of whom she had never met. The Black Moon man had vanished, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care.

            At last, almost dreading it, she forced herself to look at Darien. She had a shock: his eyes were glowing as well, the memories wisping from him, but streaked with gold as well as silver, and he was shaking, lines of pressure forming at the corners of his mouth and eyes like a clay mask about to break, and suddenly he was lunging to his feet.

            Lanai jerked to her feet and reached out; Lethe spun around–

            Moon reached him first. She flung a hand out, striking him sharply just below his chin. He went limp and still. Silvery memories bubbled from his blank eyes as he sagged into her arms. They wisped slowly over her shoulder to the two Senshi behind her.

            Moon lowered him gently onto the curb. Then she turned to Lanai. Her eyes were red and wet.

            Lanai smiled sadly at her. “Ready?”

            Moon stood up. Lethe and Mnemosyne stepped apart, their eyes fading back to their normal blue, and as Jupiter slumped back into unconsciousness on the sidewalk, the barrier that had trapped her dissolved.

            Lanai took one look at Pluto’s body. Already it was fading, becoming so transparent that she could see the asphalt beneath her. Within seconds it would be gone completely.

            And within seconds, so were they.

 

L

 

            They led Serenity’s reincarnation onto Lethe’s ship, a cramped boat of a thing that the Council had probably only requisitioned for her to use if it was necessary to bring Serenity, or her daughter from the future, back unconscious in the case that they had resisted them. Otherwise the Council wouldn’t have spared it: spacecraft were too precious and too needed for transporting refugees who did not have the Senshi’s ability of travelling through the vacuum of space.

            Ignoring Lethe’s glare, Lanai quietly brought Moon to the single cabin and told her to lie down for as long as she needed to.

            “You aren’t going to leave her unsupervised,” Lethe said under her breath, half disbelieving, half challenging.

            “No.” Lanai turned until her back was to the bulkhead next to the cabin’s door and slid down it until she sat on the floor. “I’ll keep watch.”

            Lethe stared down at her, nostrils flared, for a long minute. At last she jerked her head. “Nem’ll keep watch. You come up to the bridge with me.”

            Lanai sighed but pushed herself back up to her feet, following Lethe. Mnemosyne watched them both with wide, uncertain eyes.

            “Don’t let her out,” Lethe said quietly to her. Her voice, though still commanding, was kinder when she spoke to her sister. She put a hand atop her pink hair. “Call us if you need anything.”

 

L

 

            Mnemosyne’s call came barely two hours later.

            “She’s been crying for an hour,” her soft voice said through the comm system. “She won’t stop. I’m frightened, Lethe. Should I go in and–”

            “I’ll go,” Lanai said, and without waiting for Lethe to say anything, she unstrapped herself and ducked back out of the bridge toward the cabin. Serena’s sobbing, though muffled, was audible back here, even through the alloy cabin door. “Go up with your sister,” Lanai told Mnemosyne.

            Mnemosyne moved to obey, then hesitated, hanging back. Not meeting Lanai’s eyes, she pulled a small pouch from her pocket. “It’s sleeping powder,” she said softly. “Lethe has bad dreams sometimes.”

            Lanai eyed it suspiciously, then sighed and took it. Whether it was Mnemosyne being generally kind or more of the High Senshi’s plotting, she shouldn’t interfere. Mnemosyne slipped away, and Lanai put her forehead against the cabin door. The crying, though quiet enough, was more easily audible through the door. Lanai stood there for a minute, her forehead grinding against the cold metal. Then she loosened the pouch’s mouth and scooped up a handful of the glittering white powder inside it. She stood on her tiptoes to reach the air vent just above the cabin door and blew the powder from her palm through the metal slats.

               Within a minute, the crying had stopped. Lanai waited another minute just to be safe, then opened the door.

               Moon was curled up in a fetal position in the corner of the bunk. Wetness still shone on her cheeks. Her fuku was torn and blood-crusted, and the blood-matted wings curled around her twitched and shuddered. The girl herself was entirely still, her eyes shut and her breathing unnaturally slow, almost as though she was a corpse.

               Lanai went to the edge of the bunk and crouched. The reflections of light on Moon’s face looked different from this position, almost as though her silver scars had returned. But something else had captured Lanai’s attention. Both of Moon’s arms were clenched close to her body, and in one of them, her head bent over it as though it was what she had been crying over, was a pink shape and something red.

               Lanai reached for them. A moment’s work of uncurling Moon’s stiff fingers revealed the pink pen and piece of paper Pluto had given her. Lanai glanced once more at Moon’s face, still dead with unnatural sleep, and unfolded the paper.

               It was a piece of red construction paper like the kind Lanai had used for younger children when she had taught classes at the elementary schools years ago, back when Serena was a child. There was a slip of white paper glued neatly to the back. Instructions were printed on it: Tuesday Night Homework: Draw a picture of your Christmas wish and write a sentence to go with it.

               Lanai turned the paper over. The crayon drawing on the front was crude, little more than a pair of stick figures with identical buns on their heads eating ice cream cones as the bigger figure read a book to the smaller one. But the sentence at the bottom of the page was written in neat, careful letters.

               I wish Serena was my mother. 

               For a moment, Lanai gazed at the wet spots darkening the red paper. Then she folded the paper back up, rolled it around the pink pen, and tucked it gently back into Moon’s hand. 

               Then she rose, crossed to the door, and closed it behind her, leaving Moon in darkness.

To Be Continued