Prior Knowledge
Usagi wonders when it became so hard to see other people in love whenever she goes out with Mamo.
She can feel it in the pit of her stomach, not a raging kind of envy, but a low heat of jealousy slowly simmering under her skin. Those people loved each other, for no other reason than that they did. Nothing about past lives, nothing about being meant together because it was destiny, nothing that told them they never had any other choice.
Usagi never says it, but she thinks it's unfair that she never really had the chance to fall in love.
Maybe it's harsh, she knows, but sometimes she's so bitter that she swears she can feel the ache right in her bones.
It's not that she doesn't love Mamo-chan, she does, but she wishes she had the chance to fall in real love with someody-not somebody her past life had loved and never had the chance to let go of.
She wishes she could have fallen in love for real. She could have loved Rei or Seiya or Haruka. She could have loved someone she met at work or school or someone she met on the street. Maybe it would've been Mamo-chan anyway, but with the knowledge of her past life, she wants too pretend it would (not) have been.
She feels guilty, but sometimes she feels like she loved him much more as Serenity than she does as Usagi.
She wonders if Haruka and Michiru ever feel the same, if they ever feel like they're only in love because they had no other choice, if the feeling of confidence in their relationship stems from the idea that they'll surely be together in the future and not that they'll never leave each other because they don't want to.
She wonders if they ever want to.
It's not even that she wants to leave Mamo-chan exactly, but she's desparate to know that she could if she wanted to. She's afraid that the answer is that she can't.
To be fourteen and find her first love is one thing, to find out later that her first love would be the only love she'll ever have is something else entirely. She can't help but feel that she was cheated out of a very important aspect of growing up and living her life: heartbreak.
She supposes she sounds selfish. Plenty of people would kill to never know heartbreak, but she can't help but feel like the whole loved-each-other-in-a-past-life thing makes their relationship less organic, less real, less theirs and more Serenity and Endymion's.
Serenity and Endymion were in love. They were in an undeniable type of love that started and ended a war, a love that spelled both the end of two kingdoms and the beginning of an entirely new era, a love that made two souls chase each other forever.
Usagi can't help but think she and Mamo feel suspiciously like an afterthought-like they only exist because the tragic story of the Moon Princess and the Earth Prince needed a happy ending, complete with a white palace and a pink-haired daughter.
What would've happened to Chibi-Usa if she and Mamo hadn't fallen in love?
Logically, she muses, Chibi-Usa never would have existed, never would have gone back in time to try to retrieve the Silver Crystal, and never would have given her and Mamo-chan the knowledge that the existance of a small child and an entire kingdom rests on their teenage shoulders.
She can't help but think that it was too much for a fourteen year old girl to bear, yet she handled it with all the grace she could muster, nodding her head despite her bright red face, and accepted that this was her fate.
The boy she met much too young and fell for much too quickly was the only person she was ever gonna love in her entire life. Her entire, eternal, immortal life.
She wonders if he ever feels the same kind of doubtful wonder, the kind of longing for a life that didn't include him unless she wanted him to. She wonders if it would hurt if he did.
It's as close to a genuine heartbreak as she's ever gonna get.