A/N: You know how after you read a wonderful book or watch a movie with romance in it, you get this burgeoning NEED to write romance? It just swells up inside you, and you've got to do something with it. Except that there is just no room for REAL mush between Serena and Darien in the plot of STC right now (which makes me feel very stopped-up and stressed-out and reluctant to study. GAAAAARRRGGGHHH!). Ahem. So, instead, must-write-romance urge swells up in little one-shot pustules like this one. It's set (as all the most delightful MoonMask stories are) in the first season, before Serena and Darien find out each other's identities. (Mostly.)
3.14 times 10 to the 89th power thank you's to Jade-eye, as always, for being the most DELIGHTFUL and GIVING friend ever in HISTORY!
Disclaimer: You know when you have an urge to write a really funny disclaimer…but you just can't come up with one? Dattebayoooouuu!
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Midnight Tapestry
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She felt him behind her, like a shadow made of velvet. These post-battle silences had become normal to her, like a second hand's steady tick around a clock's face. So too had the tides of adrenaline that ebbed slowly away, leaving behind hollowed coves of weariness and futility.
He sat beside her. Sometimes it was windy, and his billowing cape would join her flying hair, both of them held aloft by the wind like the train of a wedding gown carried by a bridesmaid. On other nights it was hot, and she could smell the mingling musk of their exertion swathing them like a veil.
She leaned toward him. Sometimes she rested her head against his shoulders as they watched the moon's inching climb toward its zenith. Sometimes he laid his head against hers, and she could feel the tremble in his muscles, like a wild animal about to leap – whether prey or predator, she did not know. And did not care.
Luna and the Senshi would be horrified, she knew, to discover the true reason behind her chronic tardiness and mid-meeting naps. But these nights spent with him were worth the blank check that she had written in anticipation of that eventual, inevitable discovery.
"I don't know who I am," he said one night, his head on her lap while she sifted her fingers through his sweat-spiked hair.
"Who does?" she said. And she continued to stroke his hair.
They were insubstantial, these midnights. Like pieces of sugar floss that clung to her tongue in a rush of tremendous sweetness – then faded to a phantom flavor at the back of her throat. They left only the silky texture of his damp hair against her ungloved fingers.
"I'm not sure what love is anymore," she confessed one night. The crown of her head touched the crown of his head as they lay atop a roof. "I never used to think about it, but now I do, and now I don't know."
"Does anyone?" he said.
And she was silent, thinking that perhaps he was right. But she wanted to know.
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I don't know who I am.
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Each strike of twelve was like another knot in a strand of thread. The tug, when it came, like resistance from a fabric that refused to widen for the accumulated knots, should not have caught her by surprise.
"Do you know who you are?" he asked on one of those clumping nights.
On the tip of her tongue was the answer that had become their own inside joke – 'Does anyone know?'
But he seemed to sense this response approaching, in the same way that he always knew when a storm lurked on the horizon, and he said, "Who you are by day, I mean. Your name."
It seemed a very strange question, perhaps as though he wanted to know her real identity, and she shied away from it in the same way that she did when her comb caught in a snarl of hair.
"Why?" she asked.
Barely had the question left her tongue when realization filled her like cold, slimy soup. She wanted to spit it out.
"You don't?" she whispered.
"I do," he said hastily. "Now."
"I've always known," she said quietly. Guiltily. She could not imagine not knowing… Her fingers brushed carefully over the hideous deep gash in his arm from the youma that night. She could not imagine waking up with injuries the origin of which she did not know.
Her hand tightened around his elbow.
He covered it with his own. "I just wondered," he said quietly, looking at the moon, not her, as he spoke. "It's alright."
"What did you – " She remembered Molly's bewilderment at her strange absences, the way her friend had pried at her before the rift came and she spent all her time with the girls. "What did your friends say?"
His face still had not turned to her. But she saw some brittling in his profile. As though a shadow had crossed it, although there were no clouds in the sky to cover the moon.
The silence and the shadow were answer enough to her. She squeezed his hand. "I'm here now."
Now he looked at her. He did not speak. His fingers, gloved and warm around hers, made his reply.
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…he wanted to know her real identity, and she…
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" – and she was walking over to her, and she'd just opened her mouth to ask him out when he turns around, and he was actually a she with really broad shoulders!"
Tears of mirth streamed down her face as she finished her story about Lita's encounter.
A grin had split his face. "What did she do then?"
"Ran, of course!" she managed around her gasps for breath. "And she hasn't stepped foot in that bakery ever since." She calmed down, slightly. "I wish I was as brave as her, though. Better to mess up sometimes than never take a chance at getting what you really want."
"I…envy that type of courage also." He spoke slowly, as though the sentiment surprised him.
Gooseflesh swept up her bare arms, but heat bubbled beneath her skin like lava. She shivered a little and stared up at the empty sky, trying to distract herself. How seldom that nights of the new moon donned a cloak of clouds. It discouraged her. At least when the clouds covered the sky she could pretend that there was a moon. At least when she was waving the wand around she could pretend that she had any purpose at all –
"Sailor Mars was just venting her frustrations on you. She didn't mean it," said Mask, his voice as quiet as the whisper of his gloved hand through his hair.
"No," said Moon dully. "She was right."
"Then, like her, you've forgotten that you're the one who invariably dispatches the youma."
"We all know that's not me!" she snapped, surprising herself. She felt as though she was hiding beneath a blanket during a thunderstorm and watching the warped shadows painted onto the wall by the lightning. She could close her eyes and hide under the blanket instead of watching, but she was too frightened of what the shadows might become when she wasn't looking. "It's the wand!"
"I would think that the wand belongs to you for a reason."
"Because I'm the only one who can't make an attack out of thin air." She kicked the empty air before her wearily, her anger already fluttering away like rose petals in a strong wind.
Her legs fell still as her shoulders slumped. "I don't know why I was made Sailor Moon at all."
Her words were a mutter beneath her breath, not meant for his ears to hear. But his hand found her fingers and pressed around them like a protective cocoon.
Then he lifted her hand, carefully, and brought it to the small nick on his collarbone, where a blade thrown by the youma that night had just sliced his skin before she tackled him out of its path. For a moment he was quiet, and her fingers trembled like butterflies against his hot skin.
Then he said, flippantly, his mouth against her forehead, "Because no one looks as pretty in red and blue as you."
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…ran, of course.
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She never thought to overthink their encounters.
In daylight, beneath the sun, conversations were picked apart; careless gestures were analyzed; conclusions were drawn; and happiness was built or broken from even the lightest, most absent-minded of touches.
Their midnight meetings in starlight and shadow held more fuel for fantasy than all the events of the day. Her fingers in his hair, his chest against her back, the stitches of soul-surveying by which their alter identities were bound. These things were vivid primary colors with which her imagination could have painted a throbbing masterpiece against which the pastel encounters of daylight would have been as ghosts.
But she did not overthink them. The night spilled heady starlight into its dark hours, diluting its reality until she wondered if she had only dreamed of this youma or of that conversation. And he was a fixture of the night, just as Sailor Moon was; he left no footsteps to daylight. There was no bread crumb trail that she could follow to find reality.
Sometimes her mind mouthed that it did not want to find reality.
If reality was Serena Tsukino's life, then the stretching years of cheerfully smiling would crush her into insanity. If reality was Sailor Moon's life, then death would grope her into its embrace before the year's end.
If reality was these midnights spent tranquilly on the rooftops, then she wanted to stop dreaming.
"People don't have to know who they are," he told her one night.
She could not remember if she had voiced the question to that answer aloud. He may have plucked her uncertainty straight from her thoughts. "They only have to act like who they want to be."
For the first time she felt a distance from him. As though she had thought that they were standing together on the same step, and now she found out that he was much higher up the staircase than she had thought, and taller, too – so much taller and higher and more aware and alive than she was.
Then he said, "Or at least I read that in a book once," and the empty terror of her ribcage was filled back up like air rushing into a vacuum. The distance evaporated like a mirage, and he stood behind her on the step again, warm and close.
Yet now she knew that the distance could exist, and she did not know what to think. She pressed her thumb into the purpling bruise along her knee; she watched dark fade to white.
His gloved hand entered her line of vision. It pushed her fingers away from the bruise. She looked up at him despite herself.
"Don't hurt yourself," he said quietly. Then he continued as though he had not paused. "It's a clever enough idea. But then one has to decide whom, exactly, one wants to be. And that prompts a sudden and inconveniently-timed fondness for one's own personality…"
He trailed off, propping his elbows atop his knees and staring out across the white-edged waves.
Looking back and forth between the two, she felt that the choppy water was not much more agitated than his deep blue eyes. She placed his tense arm around her shoulders, tentatively. She felt him relax, muscle by taut muscle.
"Can there ever be an inconvenient time to like yourself?" she asked, more absorbed by the warmth seeping through her fuku from his arm than by the words falling from her tongue.
He made a sound through his nose – not quite a laugh but not just a snort either. The gust of breath against her neck ignited a hot flush beneath her skin. Flustered, she almost did not hear him say, "There's an inconvenient time for everything."
She felt, for the first time, a –
Clouds cloaked the sky that night.
"Is it going to rain?" she asked him, for she had learned that his bones knew water as intimately as her limbs knew weariness.
"A short shower" was his reply. "It will bring a warm front."
He held his arm out for her then. Gingerly, gratefully, she folded herself inside it. The chill night air surrounded them like a frozen pond, the ceiling of clouds above forming the frozen surface. Her bare legs felt numb, but she would rather catch cold than miss talking to him. She drew her knees to her chest and burrowed into his side, wrapping her arms around him beneath his jacket to share her own warmth. He shifted in response to her cold fingers. She buried a grin in his silken black vest.
They did not speak much that night. It was too cold, and he had the beginning of a sore throat tickling his esophagus. Her teeth chattered when she spoke. Sooner than usual she pulled away: slowly, regretfully.
He did not relinquish his grip. She froze, peeking up at him from beneath her lashes. Her breath knotted in a pause of disbelief – unwove in a melting, flooding, gushing hope. She watched as he reached up with his other hand to detach his cape and settle it atop her shoulders.
Then he let her go. She hugged the petal-smooth, summer-warm fabric around her and watched him as he stood and melted into the dark horizon.
– melting, flooding, gushing hope.
By the time the blinders clattered from her eyes, they had passed the need for words. Looks worked so much better. Touches worked best of all. A hand pressed gently to his jaw extracted the poisonous panic from his eyes more effectively than a dozen words. A strange effect, she thought, to have on someone so logical.
With his mouth, he said in reply to this observation that she had made him illogical. His twinkling glances said that she had made him happy. Those velvet-lined eyes spun a cocoon around her, dark and safe like their meetings, and in the dim tranquility she felt like she knew her purpose.
"You didn't used to smile," she told him.
"I didn't know you then," he responded, a faint grin threading his lips. "Now I do."
There was a hook of importance in this statement; it caught in her mind and tugged at it. But then he fidgeted, pulling at his gloves, and distracting her from her quest for the importance, he said, "I have dreams."
This seemed like an introduction to some important confession, she thought, like the first petal slowly pulling away when a flower blooms. He was peeling back the petals, blossoming, to show the beauty inside, just for her. Had his flower begun to twist into a bud at the same time as hers, she wondered, that cold night? She wanted to know his dreams.
"There's a girl," he said. "Her face shines – she calls to me. I can't see her."
She felt herself tilting backward, like a weak stem pushed by the wind. This was not what she had expected.
He sensed her confusion but did not see the sting that tinted it dark like a bruise. "Ever since I became Tuxedo Mask," he explained. "I see her when I sleep. I need to give her something – "
She felt herself nodding. "Oh," she was saying, blankly.
He was peering at her from behind his mask, owl-like. "You don't have dreams like that?"
Why did he ask her that? She didn't dream of girls. She dreamed of him. Ever since – "No."
He nodded, slowly, as though he had not really understood her response. Well, she did not understand his question. They have always felt the same before. Suddenly he feels different. Suddenly nothing is the same.
They had passed the need for words. But she had reached the need for more than friendship.
Suddenly nothing is the same.
She feels him behind her, like the black sky embracing the moon. But like the stars, he does not touch her.
"We know who we were now," he says to her hair.
With silver hair whipping around her and the cold feeling of a crystal pulsing beneath her breast, she does not feel as though she knows who she is.
"Who we were," she repeats. She knows that if she turns around, he will be the same as before – different. With eyes that change colors and gold glinting in his skin. "Not who we are."
"You were the princess I dreamed about," he says, logically.
She does not want logic from him. She whirls around. "You didn't know her!"
"I didn't know her," he agrees. He is like she knew he would be: eyes blue, then gold, as she glares into them, except the moonlight makes the gold in his skin shimmer silvery. He looks like a ghost of the him she used to know. Except that she hadn't known him –
"But I knew you." He takes a step closer to her.
Her breath catches. A memory, warmer and cleaner than the flood of bloody ones that spewed into her just hours ago, drifts across her mind like a serene cloud – "I didn't know you then. Now I do."
He knows that she will reach out and grab his arm: his elbow is there, waiting for her. She seizes it in a handful of sleeve. Her eyes search his, and even though they are a dark, bleeding purple instead of blue, she can make out the same landmarks within them, the rocks in the churning sea.
"You knew me."
Patiently, he watches her weave each thread of realization. When she is through, they will make a tapestry, warmer than any cloak and more beautiful than any canvas.
"And I knew you," she says. Her life is so obvious now. "Now I know why I'm here." Her eyes refocus, drawing back from their survey of the past, and look into his. "To make you smile."
She smiles, so brightly, at him. She understands now. "Knowing you made me know me."
His head has bent until his breath kisses her lips. "And do you know what you taught me?"
She knows, but she wants to hear him say it. There must be a loop in the thread to prevent the tapestry from unraveling.
Now it is his lips that are kissing her lips. "Love," he says with his words, and then with his eyes, and then with his touch.
Now I know why I'm here.