From a Whisper to a Scream
***
For someone who had always wanted to be a doctor, suddenly finding herself a patient did come as a bit of a surprise.
Ami Mizuno ran the comb through her blue hair over and over again. She hadn't had it cut ever since she had been admitted to this place and now it fell past her shoulders. She had never worn it that long and wasn't sure whether she liked it or not. Her mother did, telling her that it made her look so much more feminine, but she might have just said that to cheer her up. Everyone always wanted to cheer her up these days.
***
The dreams had started sometime after her fourteenth birthday.
Slowly, sleep had become something she dreaded for the images that haunted her had her waking up and screaming in what was too real a pain. The insomnia that developed in the vain hope of avoiding the violent delusions drove the brilliant student into mind-numbing insanity. When she did succumb to what should have been sweet slumber, she sleep-walked instead, travelling her room, the penthouse, the balcony. Her mother found her in the kitchen once, edged into a corner, with a knife in her right hand and her glassy eyes focused on the dark sky behind the windows. No one bothered to check whether the blood on the floor was her own, for numerous scratches and cuts distorted her formerly perfect skin and seemed to answer any question. She clutched a pale green gem in her left hand, insisting that it bled, too. The stone was taken from her, thrown in the bin by her worried mother despite the insistent screams of her daughter.
***
In the sanatorium, Ami had hoped to find peace. She still missed school and the few friends she had had, but the thought of living without these dreams made her bear it all.
But few pills were strong enough to quell whatever it was in her that emerged in the hours of the night. The psychiatrists put it down to paranoid schizophrenia, but Ami feared that it couldn't be further from the truth.
Putting the brush aside, she looked in the mirror one last time before walking out into the hallway, steering towards the gardens. The nurse would later wonder where the large puddle of cold water under the table came from and ask Ami about it. The girl would scream and shudder, demanding to know where the mirror went to, why had they taken it away?
Years passed in a blur of false memories (after all, little Ami Mizuno had never been a soldier and never been in love) and real pain (her father died, not having visited her once), ablating parts of herself until she was stripped down to the core.
***
It was then that the new doctor came along.
He was too pretty, too understanding, too familiar.
She fell for him too hard.
He was always very professional, never straying from the beaten path of their medical relationship, but she felt that there was more to him than met the eye. Had she told him about it, he would have agreed.
In one of their countless sessions, he asked her to draw people she had met in the course of her young and wasted life, especially those that she felt a deep affection for. The pen outlined the shapes of her parents, her deceased grandmother, her favourite playmate as a child and funny Usagi Tsukino, whom she had always admired for the sweet simplicity that made everyone her friend. It was the picture of the girl with the strange hairstyle he seemed most interested in. She was eager to please, so she told him the few snippets of actual facts she still remembered, and the reward came in the form of his most dazzling smile.
A week later, Usagi Tsukino was abducted, taken to a place so far away that mankind had no name for it.
The handsome doctor disappeared at the same time, but since Ami was never told about Usagi Tsukino's cruel fate, the remnants of her brilliant mind couldn't connect the dots. Missing the gentle man became a new part of her life, but she wondered once why it was that it felt so normal. Then night fell and ice and water enveloped her again, coating her with an icy fog that hurt and protected her at the same time. Finally, she knew she had lost her mind.
***
She couldn't tell how much time passed, but soon a new doctor came along, his hair just as white as his starched coat. He didn't smile as much as the pretty one had (why couldn't she remember his name?) and his questions seemed more forward, he dug deeper and didn't care whether or not he tore her mind to shreds in the process. She once whispered to the nurse that she didn't trust the man with the cold green eyes, but earned a blank look in return. The matronly woman didn't seem to know who she was talking about, which was strange, for he wasn't a man that one could confuse with another. He disappeared the day Mamoru Chiba came in to examine her.
Chiba was medicine's new wunderkind and his kind probing helped her to slowly piece herself back together. One day she confided in him and told him about the dreams that felt like distant memories, memories of a silver kingdom on the Moon, memories of a queen that could have saved them all, memories of the gentle doctor, only that back then, she wasn't his patient and he wasn't her psychiatrist. Chiba paled and took her hand, pain etched into his features. She suddenly saw him on a battlefield, dressed in heavy armour and with Usagi beside him, the shadows of four men opposite the grim pair. Only Usagi wasn't Usagi, but someone more powerful, more beautiful, more unhappy.
Chiba yanked his hand away; it was blue, as if all the blood in it had frozen. She didn't see him again.
***
The last man that came to her came in the night, and he always asked the same question.
"Where is Jupiter?"
Ami recalled the position on the firmament and pointed it out to him, but it wasn't the answer he wanted. Maybe she didn't know the planet's position any more and it was like school, punishment for the stupid ones.
He banged her head against the sterile wall, and soon the nurses took to strapping her to the bed so that she couldn't hurt herself (making it so much easier for him because now she couldn't even run). And yet, they found injuries on her every morning, some minor like a scratch on her forehead, some major like the arm he had snapped like a dry twig. The sound of herself being broken haunted her for days, replaying over and over in her mind.
***
One day, it all ended. The twisted version of the world disappeared.
She woke up and was fourteen again, no cracked gems, no mysterious doctors, no monster in the shape of a beautiful man in her life. She was a normal schoolgirl, one among many. At least until she learned that Usagi was Sailor Moon.
The strange dream of her time in the asylum suddenly made sense when she met Sailor Saturn. The look of understanding in the silent one's shadowed eyes made no sense, it just shouldn't have been there. After all, they didn't have anything in common, did they?
***
The End