Warning: This story involves two women together. If it doesn't tickle your fancy, I wouldn't suggest reading further. Thank you!

Disclaimer: I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

Suggestions: Try the veal! No: on a serious note, this story can be read as a companion piece to my other fic, Together, or it can stand alone. If you intend to consider them as complimenting each other, however, you should read Together first. The events of this fic occur approximately two months following those of the other, give or take a mangy Saturday.

Early

The other woman sat up next to her in bed. She trembled in the darkness; the shadow of sweat-soaked curls fell over her eyes. Her pale fingers twisted the sheets, pale shafts of moonlight tipped in crescents of quartz, and the throb of her heart ran like the back leg of a rabbit between the walls of the small room.

Haruka, eclipsed from sleep this night and sharp-eyed as a result, propped herself sideways on her elbow and fumbled with her other hand to clear the hair from her face. She was unused to company in her bed and even the flesh of her brow was riddled with the angry rise of startled goosebumps. "A nightmare?" she asked, and glanced at the digital clock perched on her bedside table. It read 3:56 AM.

Michiru said nothing. The tears rimming her eyes winked in the low blue glow of the clock, a diamond-dusting of misery; the azure silhouette of her face, so morose, was like dying. Haruka sat up too.

For several minutes silence stretched between them, not so much companionable as understanding. Michiru cried the way a faucet drips, slow and sporadic and somehow methodical, with no complaints otherwise but the occasional tremble of a lip and the hitching torment of an inhale. Haruka comforted her by being there, her hands in her lap, her elbow brushing the pale soldier's own, the faintest and still most certain of reassurances.

There were sometimes points in these long nights when, following combat, they held one another and felt their burden bearing down upon them with such pervasive intensity that they buckled under it and sobbed, their limbs afire and their hearts aching. There were times when they patched each other's wounds and worries by embracing, by stealing hot glances over dinner, by calling late in the night—and there were times when the world ran cold and they sat in their separate agonies, unreachable and distant. It had been almost four months since their first battle in the garage. Haruka had learned quickly when to reach for Michiru and when to leave her alone. Patiently, faithfully, she waited.

This late evening marked the first that Michiru had spent the night, and it was only because they had both been too exhausted and too cut up following the day's battle to drive the paler woman back to her apartment. Haruka had scarcely been able to steer the motorcycle this far; Michiru had almost fallen off twice, her arms loose and wobbly in their clasp of Haruka's ribs. They bled on the seat and Haruka dripped her grim sanguine victory over the handlebars. Even in normal clothing, they knew, their injuries were obvious, and those civilians they did encounter before they managed to get well away from the public eye gawped at them in shock. Because the taller soldier's building was closer than Michiru's and they could not afford to continue driving in daylight, they had come here, and they had walked up the stairs shoulder to leaning shoulder. Once inside, Haruka remembered, they had undressed one another, showered separately; she could summon no memory of dinner.

She did recall preparing the futon for the two of them, and the slow, exhausted shift of Michiru's body to hers beneath the fresh sheets. The other woman had clung to her as she fell asleep; Haruka had a recollection of smoothing her hair in the gathering darkness, keeping her tucked close until Michiru's breathing was easy and slow and sweetly sinful, breasts brushing Haruka's with every innocent inhale. Despite her own fatigue and best efforts in the attempts, Haruka herself had been—and apparently still was—unable to sleep. Now she was insomniacally glad, and she watched her lover from the corner of one slanted green-glass eye, concerned but tacit.

Michiru at last chased the tears away with her fingers, smudging them into salty smears over her cheeks. Haruka looked at the clock again and saw that it now demonstrated 4:07 AM. Michiru's moment of weakness had persisted a little over ten minutes. Feeling a stab of admiration for her partner's strength, the blonde woman slid from the futon, rose, and padded into the bathroom. She gave the small shower stall a furtive, guilty glance. Just this evening she had wept out her own anxieties there, crushing the soap in her strong fingers, her forehead pressed to the slick wall, blood and grit and antibacterial suds singing down into the gurgling drain. Her shower had taken twenty minutes, and even then she had thrust her face into the towel to hide her last few furious tears. Her cries, muffled by the cloth, had been reminiscent of a manual transmission's grinding gears.

She flicked on the bathroom light and the porcelain tile of the shower stall went up in a cataclysmic flash of white. She squinted against the harshness and turned to the mirror. The face she saw in the reflective surface was a sunset's horizon of bruises, one blonde eyebrow split open, the stern lower lip slightly swollen and puffy. Her throat was covered in orange-purple tracks laid by the lucky knuckles of the enemy; they throbbed with every breath and made her chest sear when she swallowed. She probed them gingerly, frowning—they were going to be hard to hide for school.

Shifting her attention from them, she turned on the tap and plucked a small cup from the stack next to the sink, positioning it beneath the cold gush. Once the cup was full, she set it temporarily to the side and swung her hand into the stream of water, cupping a palmful. She studied her reflection in that too for a moment, then tipped her fingers to her lips and swished the mouthful around with a wince, tasting copper, feeling grit splash against her teeth. She leaned over and spat in the sink, enraptured—but not surprised—by the crimson flecks speckling the basin's curves. She repeated the process twice more and gargled once for good measure, satisfied with her efforts when the blood in the water was only a hair-thin pinkish thread running round the drain.

She washed her face too, twitching away from her own touch as her fingers traced the bruises, the wounds, the reminders of a strange life carried out between sunset and sunrise in a damnable dark blue miniskirt. When she was done she picked up the cup of water and trotted quietly back out into the bedroom, easing down onto her knees next to Michiru's side of the futon to produce her offering. She had never had someone with her this late, much less in this state. She thought—hoped—she was being a good host.

The other woman took the cup with a grateful murmur and sipped at it, looking at Haruka sidelong in the darkness, one warrior's gaze hedging to another. Haruka knew she was deciding whether to divulge her nightmare.

When the silhouette of liquid in the cup said it was half-empty and—with another glance to confirm—the clock on the table read 4:21 AM, Michiru murmured, "Do you think they feel anything but pain?"

"Who?" Haruka asked. She thought she already knew. Putting her palms against the hardwood floor, which was cold but obsessively clean, she rocked backward off her knees and sat cross-legged, watching her partner.

"The enemies. The monsters that attack the people we scout, or grow from them." Michiru paused. Each aquamarine eyelash was a curved spire in the glow of the clock, and Haruka thought that she was beautiful even ensnared in her own personal anguish. She reached to take the woman's hand and held it in her own, feeling its smallness, its clenched warmth. Michiru smiled at her and continued a little more easily, "Do they have lives? Are they separate from the people that draw them close and spawn them, Haruka?"

"I think they're the worst parts of people." Haruka tasted the words in her mouth and realized they were like cotton. She'd given the matter a bit of thought herself, turned over the concept of monsters and creeping crawling things in the small, dim moments before sleep some nights. To a point, it fascinated her: that such things could be real, and that she was among those responsible for fighting them, for putting them back in the dark where they belonged.

She felt Michiru's hand tense a little in hers and ventured, "But that's not really what you want to know, is it? Whether they just know pain or not, I mean."

Michiru looked at her sharply, dropping her eyes in the next instant. "No," she admitted. There was glass in her voice, cracked and shimmering and close to a final shatter.

Haruka lifted the pale hand to her mouth to kiss it. Michiru looked at her in a mix of surprise and abrupt flattery. Drawing her other hand up to cup her partner's smaller palm between her own, the blonde woman licked her lips—she could taste Michiru there, sweet and faint—and allowed, "You want to know if destroying them makes you a murderer."

Silence again. Michiru's nails bit into Haruka's lifeline, seeking comfort and answers. Another blue minute went by on the clock, a small flicker of time lost, and the dark-haired soldier said at length, "They scream when they die."

It was Haruka's turn to say nothing. She waited again, intent.

Eventually a small shurring sound in the room slipped between them. It was the air conditioning coming on, and Haruka blinked. Her nighteyes had come and she could see the outline of the dresser in the corner of the room, Michiru's bra hanging from one of its knobs in the manner of a tattered flag. Shifting up and forward onto her knees again, she nudged Michiru aside on the futon so she was able to crawl back inside its low warmth. She jerked the sheets over them and rested breast to breast with the other woman, her chin curved protectively over the green head of curls, her throat an arched column of muscle and grace. When they were still again, hands tucked between them, and she was sure Michiru had no other contribution, the blonde soldier spoke once more.

"They scream because it hurts. Of course it hurts. Of course they die. Of course we kill them. Every night, we kill them." Her voice came out harsher than she wanted and she felt Michiru cringe against her. Frowning, she softened her words in her head and went on, hoping they emerged with more an air of compassion, "But they don't have lives, not the way you and I do. They come alive to kill, and that's all."

"We kill too, Haruka." Michiru's lips brushed her throat. Haruka felt the blood rise in her cheeks and chest and wanted, with delicious immediacy, to pin her lover and make time stop, this war of worlds be damned. Michiru would let her, and Michiru would like it. They had been waiting for what felt like a long time for one another, a dance of destiny and twisted bedsheets.

But a distraction was not what her lover needed right now, and Haruka knew that. She forced the thought from her mind and whispered instead, "We're murderers—and more." She ran her fingers down the opposing spine, feeling the faint scars there from their first meeting, hissing despite herself at the faint arch Michiru made up into her touch.

"You make it sound sexy," Michiru whispered back accusingly. Laughter lurked in her misery, shafts of sunlight in the dark belfry of a warrior's heart. Haruka smiled and pressed her lips to her lover's brow. Michiru was a brave one.

"I think it's just my natural charisma." She thought about it and went on seriously, "No. I mean, we were something else once. We still are by day. We're more—more than they are or ever were. We have to believe that." She wanted to sigh and stifled the urge. Sighing was a fluttery forebear of defeat. "You have your violin, your swimming. I have my racing. We do that because we're human." There was a heaviness in her own words that she marveled at and hated, because she knew it was a blossom of tears waiting to open again, a flower of sorrow, and tightly furled bloom of anxiety. Swallowing it, she finished, "We only kill now because we're soldiers. One day we'll be able to stop."

Michiru's mouth curled against Haruka's collarbone and instantly the blonde woman knew she'd said something wrong. She loathed herself for it and for not knowing what it was, and especially for not having the foresight to keep her words to herself.

"How do you know that?" Michiru was adamant in voice and vehemently hot in body. She wriggled against Haruka, their knees knocking together in a rhapsody of delicious, awkward touch. "What if they were like us too, once?" The hair on the back of Haruka's neck prickled at both the thought and the raw fear in her companion's voice. "What if we're like them eventually? You know how I mean. Someone else's mess to clean up. Something other soldiers will have to fight in the dark."

She reached up and settled a cool hand in the short, fine hairs at the base of Haruka's skull, only just able to gain purchase on them with a gentle clench of her fingers. Her nails grazed through the low well of flesh in the center of the opposing soldier's nape, and Haruka shuddered, unable to help it.

"Like them?" she echoed. She licked her lips again, partly because she could feel Michiru rubbing against her all the way down and partly because she was sincerely considering the question. Michiru was naked. Haruka was nearly so. To steel herself, she looked at the clock. 4:34 AM, the glacial numbers on the hateful little box told her. She wished they were ice cubes so she could hold them against her burning cheeks.

"Like them," Michiru insisted, and shifted a knee up between Haruka's own. She did it slowly.

Clenching her jaw until it throbbed hard enough to keep her sane, Haruka managed at last, "People turn into monsters all the time. That's part of the reason we have to fight—to stop them once they've gone down that path." She drew in a shaking breath and finished, "But they turn into monsters because they have nothing to keep them from it. We aren't like that, Michiru. We have one another. You won't let me." Her words were almost ragged, and her lover's knee edged higher as though in encouragement. "I won't let you. I promise."

Michiru paused, and Haruka wanted to die. Her heart drummed a dream on the backs of her ribs and she felt her lover against her through a rising haze of heat. The pad of the paler woman's thumb teased its way up behind one of Haruka's ears, a careful, thoughtful caress that wobbled a little. Michiru's eyes were shining again in the glow of the clock, her expression that of one who has been reassured and is grateful, and she showed Haruka just how much she appreciated the effort by leaning up to kiss her. The embrace was a teasing, nibbling thing that smelled of salt but tasted sweet, and when Michiru pulled back, Haruka followed her. They wrestled gently, carefully; Haruka let Michiru end on top. The sheets slithered from the woman's body and she was beautiful, tinged blue by time and bruises all, such that the blonde soldier choked on her breath and reached up in something like reverence to hold her.

"Monsters aside, maybe we can let each other get a little wild sometimes," Michiru suggested. She cupped Haruka's cheek and it became an invitation spun with a playful grin, the break of sunlight through storms. Her lover accepted it and wrapped her arms around Michiru to draw them together, the sudden strength in her limbs and the flush in her cheeks fierce enough to dry the remaining tears between them. Inexplicably, there was laughter. Unwaveringly, there was love.

By 4:55 AM, they were twined and sleeping.

Notes: After a long hibernation, I've come rumblingly awake again! First off, I'm not sure whether to continue this story or not. I could, and easily—I have an idea of where I want it to go. But do you, dear readers, like it enough to read more? Critique it, comment on it, and let me know! As always, I appreciate any and all feedback, and I especially adore fluffy hats. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Lastly, is a T rating okay for this, or should it be M? I'm going with the former, but will change it if necessary.

—Bainaku