A/N: Written as a flashfic some time back. Warnings for violence, character death, angst and the usual sort of emo associated with the fall of the SilMil.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Blue hair would never blend in with any crowd. And now she's almost blinding in icy majesty as she stands in his path, ripped blue skirts hanging limp and scanty against blood-splattered legs. Her eyes are hard, flashing ice-blue hatred behind a fringe of distinctive navy-blue hair. All he knows is that he has to get through her to eradicate the threat against the Earth, and he draws his sword without hesitation.
She parries his attack as though she knows him intimately, as though she's sparred with him more than once, and not just on the battlefield, but if that's the case those memories are lost somewhere in a haze of courtesans with blood-red hair and the screams of the dying on his world and hers. He draws first blood and the shallow slash on her cheek somehow enhances her siren beauty and she charges at him, shrieking her witch-spells like nonsensical accusations. He doesn't want to hurt her, not really, but she's in the way and when she raises a thin arm to call down the elements, he grabs it recklessly and hard enough to hear the crack of bones. She grits her teeth against the pain and finishes the spell and the power hits him like an ice storm, razor-sharp ice shards and a rage of water funneling around him and choking him. Enraged, he rushes at where he remembered her to be standing, leading with his sword arm, and is rewarded by the hiss of steel as it sinks into flesh, the metallic scent of blood, and really, alien sorceresses aren't supposed to bleed red like humans.
He withdraws his sword and the momentum sends her falling forward, and without the aid of her black magic and blizzards, she looks nothing at all intimidating. Her body is slim and light and fine-boned as it collapses against his chest, the delicate form of a young woman. Her broken wrist hangs limp at her side, darkening bruises standing out in sharp relief against cold white skin. Her eyes, however, remain unchanged, chipped sapphires with hard edges, and the fixed way she stares at him unnerves him enough to fall back on old standbys.
"I do love an eager woman who tumbles right into my arms," he drawls, words fighting past an unexplainable lump in his throat. He traces the contours of her face with one hand, feeling the chill of her skin through his glove, and he has no idea why her proximity arouses him. It's the heat of the battle, he tells himself. Blood-lust. The fact that this tiny slip of a girl had come closer to killing him than any of the worthless palace guards whose bodies now lay scattered about the grounds. It must be why, as her breaths come slower and slower, he presses his lips to her bloody ones and kisses her like a lover.
It doesn't explain why her mouth feels and tastes familiar.
She hisses and even on her dying breath her magic flares, and the sudden cold causes him to draw back far enough to stare into her eyes again. They're drowning pools, and they're fixed on his when she parts her lips to speak.
"You taught me to love, Zoisite. I never did until I met you, you know." Before he can demand to know how she knew his name, or the meaning behind her whispered words, she laughs a single harsh laugh that sounds like breaking ice. "I never knew what it was to hate, either. Thank you for both."
She whispers her last spell too softly for him to hear and the water rushes at him gently now, still inexorable, but not the harsh death it might have been. His last thoughts are of bafflement over her words, her identity, not of his mission or his vow to Beryl, and at the moment of his death, it doesn't even occur to him that he failed to clear the path to the Lunarian royals like he promised he would.
He wins the battle but not the war. Mercury crawls the few inches towards him, her water washing away the bloodstains and dirt on both of them, and finally allows her eyes to drift shut as her head falls on his chest. She's fallen asleep in just this position plenty of times. There is no lull of harp and flute music now, though, only the increasingly muffled sound of screams.
They have found their peace, and it's more than she might have expected. Happy endings, after all, only existed in fairy tales, and she had always been more of a realist.