title: fireflies
chapter: one
summary: Set between STC Season 2 and 3. Rei. Hotaru. Death is not an option.
disclaimer:Naoko Takeuchi owns Sailor Moon.
author's note: This fic is a companion to the series Subject to Change. It will make absolutely no sense if you have not read STC Season 1, which is available under the profile EightofSwords, and Season 2, which can be found on JadeEye's profile page.
"fireflies" follows Hotaru and Rei after they leave Japan to keep Hotaru hidden from anyone who might try to revive Sailor Saturn. Reading it isn't necessary to understand Season 3, but it will eventually intersect with its plot.
O
"The burnt child dreads the fire."
– Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass
O
Rei's not a liar, not any more than the dark-haired fourteen-year-old who's been trotting quietly after her for these past two months is a chatter-box. But the fact that she's been dragging the child across literally every continent except Antarctica and still hasn't told her why is beginning to make her feel like she is one.
And she doesn't like the feeling.
Of course, the fact that Hotaru has docilely trotted along after her for every kilometer of said trip and never once asked what the hell are you doing with me? bothers Rei, too, but she's not sufficiently self-aware yet to realize that it's Hotaru's very docility and apparent trust in a person she really doesn't even really know that bothers her. Instead Rei puts the itchy frustration she feels down to impatience with the job and with herself, and not down to an overprotectiveness of a girl she's only known for two months. And she decides that she's going to tell Hotaru the truth. As soon as they get out of this musty-smelling taxi and into the apartment Rei saw advertised in the newspaper at the airport, she's going to tell her.
O
Sailor Mercury had begun to apartment-hunt in the weeks leading up to Christmas, circling newspaper listings and talking to real estate agents and property managers and researching utility costs and dragging an annoyed Rei through every step of the process. Now, of course, Rei realizes that Mercury had never intended to rent an apartment herself but had in fact been preparing Rei for this day. It would have been shocking for Rei to realize that even then Mercury had known that they would find Saturn's reincarnation and send her into hiding with Rei, had Rei not already been thoroughly accustomed to just how far into the future Mercury's planning always extended.
To her, the rest of them were little more than pieces on a chessboard, and while this thought irritates Rei, she finds herself wishing, as she walks into the apartment lease office with her heart in her mouth and feeling like her youth and inexperience is as obvious on her face as Serena's ugly scars, that she had paid a little more attention to Mercury's careful preparation of her.
But as Rei clears her throat and says – pretty confidently, she thinks – that she wants to rent a two-room unit, the apartment manager leads her and Hotaru up to a second-floor unit without even an arched brow at how young they both look. This lack of curiosity in itself is enough to make Rei declare the unit satisfactory, though she registers little more than dark rooms, plastic-covered furniture, and a tiny kitchen. They go back down to the manager's office, where he takes her (fake) ID card and deposit without batting an eye, and sneezes into a wadded-up tissue as she completes the paperwork he hands her.
Fifteen perspiring moments later, she has three keys (two for the room, one for the mailbox) clutched in her sweaty hand, and she and Hotaru climb the stairs again back to the apartment.
A tiny breakfast bar with two stools separates the kitchen from the living area. Rei, her legs feeling absolutely like noodles beneath her, goes to sit on one. But the moment she is sitting down her muscles begin to tremble even harder, and she stands back up again, gripping the fake granite countertop and looking at the pale girl who is still hovering by the door as if unsure of where to be.
Rei tells her that she's Sailor Saturn and that if she transforms, it'll destroy the whole planet.
O
In retrospect, Rei's haste to get the whole thing off her chest may have made her phrase it a bit…tactlessly.
This fact becomes apparent to her as Hotaru goes gray-faced and lists suddenly toward to the ground, one of her legs appearing to give way beneath her. With Senshi reflexes Rei catches her and helps her to the plastic-covered couch, which crackles noisily beneath her.
The girl's so thin that her pulse seems to radiate like heat from her sunken chest, her lathe-like wrists. Or maybe that's just Rei's own blood pounding hard as she hovers too close to Hotaru, suddenly regretting her bluntness and hoping that it hasn't just shocked Saturn's flash-form right out of Hotaru. But no, she can't wake up without all three talismans, right?
"Wh–what are you going to do to me?"
"N-nothing!" Rei is horrified to hear herself stammering, too, shocked by the absolute vulnerability in the girl's face as she cringes back into the couch. It's the guilt talking, the fact that when Mercury first explained Sailor Saturn's danger to her, Rei's first thought was that the obvious thing to do with the girl was eliminate her.
She hopes she's changed since then.
"I'm here to protect you," she mumbles, and shoves her hands into her pockets. The motion makes Hotaru flinch, and their eyes clash, and a strange thing happens to Rei then. She is used to seeing phantoms overlaid the places she walks through, the echoes of the past or fluid phantoms of the future superimposing themselves over the world around her – a laughing child here, a crying mother there. But right now, as she lets her eyes meet Hotaru's, it is as though she has been lifted out of her own mind and into Hotaru's: she is looking up at herself. Except she sees not Rei, with her darting eyes and bitten lip, but Sailor Mars, wearing her old sweater and jeans with shoulders back so that she may as well be wearing her fuku, flames burning behind her eyes and into the girl before her.
This is how Hotaru sees her. Not as a human being but as a Sailor Senshi. Alien, dangerous, frightening.
Rei has never felt like that; she has only felt too-on-the-edge, always scrambling to stay on, screaming or flailing or holding her breath and staying absolutely still lest she topple over into the crevice. The person Hotaru sees shakes her to her very core. She doesn't know how long she stands there, or how long it is before her mind descends again into her own body and she is looking down at the girl toward whom she can now almost tangibly feel herself softening. There is a strange ache in her arm, as though it wants to be lifted, and she realizes that it – she – wants to touch Hotaru comfortingly, to somehow make her less afraid.
She puts her other arm up, holding it to her side. "That's not an option," she says stiffly, and goes to the suitcase in the corner to begin unpacking.
O
Hotaru can remember only one other moving-in in her life. It was after the fire that killed her mother. There had been a brand-new house, brand-new furniture, brand-new pots and pans…brand-new Papa. A Papa who carried boxes silently and tirelessly into the new house one moment and gasped with sudden strained hysterical laughter and sank to the floor with his hands in his hair the next. Hotaru had walked on eggshells around her father then, and now, with Sailor Mars, it seems prudent to do the same.
The Senshi seems like she wants to say something – she keeps taking a breath and looking up as though about to speak, then letting out the breath in a short, tense exhalation and going back to unpacking wires and a Radio Shack's worth of computer equipment from out of that invisible magic pocket of hers instead. Hotaru wishes she would just say whatever it is, because she has dozens of questions bubbling up in her own throat. But she doesn't dare break the silence, so they build up like fizz in her stomach, making her feel nervous and sick. "Not an option," she had said. What kind of answer was that? Did that mean she wanted to get rid of Hotaru, she just couldn't? Or wasn't allowed to? Or that it wasn't an option – yet?
"Dinner?"
Hotaru looks up from folding her small pile of clothing. Mars has her hands in her pockets and is by the door.
"You ready for dinner?" she clarifies without looking at Hotaru.
Hotaru scrambles to her feet, trotting after her down the steps. The apartment building is located on a street otherwise occupied by small houses and looming oak trees that makes it seem purely residential, but a few blocks down Hotaru can make out a shopping plaza's lights glowing in the twilight. It's in this plaza that they find a fluorescent-bulb-lit pizza joint, clearly meant more for delivery pick-up than to eat in, but there are a few uncomfortable tables on the dingy white and black tile, and Mars and Hotaru slide into one as they wait for their pizza. It's a plain cheese pizza; Hotaru doesn't dare ask if she can have anchovies added to her half.
"So," says Mars.
Hotaru's eyes slide from the blue-haired boy popping gum at the register to Mars.
"What I said before," Mars begins to say, then seems to change her mind. "You know, I'm not…I'm not really…Mars."
Hotaru doesn't understand. "You're pretending?" she says blankly. But she had seen her attack that other Senshi with fire –
"Not pretending. It's just that – I'm not Mars. I'm Rei Hino."
Hotaru nods. Fidgets with her straw wrapper, folding it into a tiny accordion. "I see." They don't talk again until the pizza comes, and then, as they politely each wait for the other to take a piece first, and neither of them do, Mars gruffly grabs a piece and puts it on Hotaru's plate, then takes one for herself. They chew silently for a few minutes.
Then Mars bursts out: "So…that's it? I see? That's all you have to say?"
Hotaru swallows a mouthful of oily cheese. "Um?"
"I mean," says the older girl slowly, "if someone told me I was a Senshi and didn't give me any proof, I'd have questions."
"Like…are you on mind-altering pharmaceuticals?" ventures Hotaru.
Something that can't possibly be an honest-to-God smile pulls weakly at the Senshi's mouth. "Exactly."
"You…you gave me proof, though. I mean – I've seen you as a Senshi." Too late, Hotaru remembers that they're in public, and her eyes widen apologetically, but Mars just raises a brow, and Hotaru realizes, You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. She's in America, and most people here have probably never heard of the Sailor Senshi, and in fact, those that have probably don't think they're real. She herself had thought they were just another live-action Power Ranger rip-off until she saw them in action in the park one day.
It also suddenly occurs to her to wonder if she's speaking in Japanese right now. If she is, would she be able to tell, or would the device Mars gave her to put in her ear just make it sound like English anyway?
"But the rest of it." Mars hesitates again, though her intense dark gaze don't flinch away from Hotaru's. "The world-destroying part, you…you seem to be believing me pretty easily on that."
Rei doesn't add that if it were her, she would bluster and deny to anyone that they could blame that on her, that she would get violently defensive about it, not just lie down and ask if they were going to kill her.
"I…see things, sometimes." Hotaru hesitates. How to say, even to someone as battle-hardened as a Senshi, that you see people as skeletons sometimes. That was how she'd seen Mars the first time, when she appeared outside Senator Hino's mansion. It was something that had happened to her since she was little, and she had put it down to something wrong with her, maybe something related to Papa's modifications – he had told her as much, the first time she tried to tell him about it, and the flash of interest in his eyes had scared her, made her make the sights seem like less of a deal and less often than they were, so he had lost interest and said that it could merely be little glitches as her native neurons and the ones he had implanted struggled to communicate with each other. And maybe it was, but maybe it had something to do with this Sailor Saturn thing, too.
All she could remember from school was that in mythology Saturn had been the father of the other gods. How did that translate, power-wise? Mars was the god of war, but Sailor Mars had the power of fire. "What is Saturn the Senshi of?"
"Death."
Hotaru nods. "That makes more sense."
Mars doesn't ask why. They finish their pizza in silence, and on the short walk home discuss very mundane things: grocery shopping that will have to be done, enrolling Hotaru in school, what kind of transportation they will use. Hotaru almost hates to peek out from under these safe, everyday things that wrap around her like a protective blanket, but she has to ask one more thing before Mars returns to the grim-faced taciturn person she was before tonight.
"How do you know I – I mean, Saturn will destroy the world if she wakes up?"
The keys stop scratching in the apartment door's lock. Mars' shoulders are stiff. A moment passes, then she moves the keys, unlocking it with a single wrench. It's only after she wrenches it open, and after she has disappeared into the darkness inside, that her low words drift back to Hotaru.
"Because it's happened before."