She had her moments:
She had moments when everything that was normal and coltish-legged and doe-eyed and hair-twirling slipped away and something went awry.
They were the moments when she managed something too well, like when her heel slipped off the back of a step and, forced to correct the imbalance of such a precarious situation, she executed a perfect single hand-spring backward, coming to land in Lunar military posture with her wrists rigid and back arched from near-flight, trigger-finger tensing uselessly by her right thigh where the Hypnocta pistol should have been holstered.
(Ms. Haruna had noticed that particular display in stairwell B a few months before high school graduation, and she hadn't heard the end of it until she had physically left the school grounds for good. She couldn't be the unremarkable underachiever student anymore.)
They were the moments when the evening news that should have crackled like static on the living room screen and meant nothing to her reported alarming sightings in the downtown core, abnormalities, energy spikes, disappearances, anything- and she was off down the front hall, through the door and into the night, sneakers thwacking dully against the pavement as she sprinted and her family was left sitting on the couch looking at the empty space she had just occupied.
(Shingo was more difficult to placate than either of her parents; he wouldn't believe her rationalizations or alibis regardless of her thoroughness in providing corroboration through a helpful Ami insisting that she really had just been late for a study-meet at the temple, forcing her to race across town when she suddenly remembered, or something equally porous and flimsy. He curled his lip and looked away from her eyes when she told him those things. She couldn't be the endearing older sister anymore.)
They were the moments when she was forced to wear deep shades of red- crimson tank tops, cranberry sweaters, ruby t-shirts- to hide the worse wounds from Mamoru and the girls. Only ever for a short time, maybe a day or two, before she was able to muster the strength after a particularly rough battle and in the quiet of her bedroom use the silver crystal to heal herself. Stretching too far, running too fast, working too hard all threatened to open up the tenuously healing red lines of injury that marred her abdomen, lower back, ribs, and breasts right after skirmishes, and she wouldn't let anyone know that she was weakened, in pain, cut up. Whole slashes and cuts faded away in an instant of ghostly crystalline light, but until those stolen times when it was just herself and the crystal, she wore red so leaking blood didn't show.
(Mamoru had given her hell one time after she'd accidentally left a bloody stain on his otherwise clean white bed sheets from what he'd thought of as a nap but which had actually been a brief loss of consciousness on her part after making it to his apartment. She'd woken to him demanding to know where she was hurt, why hadn't she told him, and what he could do for her? His doctoring skills had helped her, but she wasn't about to make a regular habit of relying on her boyfriend to patch her up when she could just rest for a day or so and then heal herself; there would be no troubling anyone that way. She couldn't be the dependent girlfriend anymore.)
They were the moments when she really wondered if it had to be this way, if it would continue this way, if there was no way to stop it, if she even wanted to stop it, if this, if that, what then? Those moments. Those moments hurt and stung and itched just so, like the little cuts she acquired and then erased over and over.
She was always waiting for the moment.