A/N: Don't worry, I still love Darien. But I had to write this story. HAD to. For several reasons.
Because in all the Mooniverse, Darien is without doubt the most psychologically damaged, stunted, and twisted character.
Because Serena's relationship with Seiya would only make that damage worse.
Because Darien showed in the first episode of Stars and the last one that he does not understand his love for Serena. And does not deserve her. (We're talking anime Darien.)
Because Serena is not stupid. Rather, she is so emotionally fluent that she would realize Darien's feelings – or lack thereof – for her.
And because on YouTube there are two SM AMVs that gripped handfuls of my cerebrum and squeezed this one-shot out. One is set to the Veronicas' "This Is How It Feels" and the other to Barlowgirl's "Never Alone."
That said, you're definitely not going to fully understand this one-shot if you haven't seen the Stars anime, at the very least Episode 200. It's a tortuous episode, I know, but you can't call yourself a Moonie if you haven't seen it. Watch it. Watch it and dream of a more jealous Darien.
For the sake of what's left of Darien's sanity, Seiya will be referred to as "he" or "him."
Disclaimer: I don't own Sailor Moon.
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A Man He Will Never Forgive
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There is a man Darien Shields will never forgive.
"I'm sorry," she says when he catches her crying. It is late at night when she thinks that he is in Elysion that she turns her face into the pillow and buries her tears there. It is on rainy days when rain streaks down the balcony's glass doors that she falls quiet and avoids his eyes.
"I didn't want to – " She falters because she does not like lying to him. But she will lie – for him. It seems as though there is nothing that she will not do for him. "I didn't mean to love him."
He knows the confession even before she voices it, knows it as intimately as he knows the feeling of blades in his stomach and intruders in his mind. How can he not know it, with the Golden Crystal and their shared past and their chained souls screaming her thoughts at him as loudly as if she had sobbed them?
"You weren't there," they tell him. "She didn't have anyone else to give all her love for you. What else was she supposed to do with it?"
'Give it to Rini,' he wants to reply. To Rini, to Chibi-Chibi, to Lita or her friends or even fucking Asanuma for Christ's sake! Give it to fucking anyone, anyone but –
– anyone.
His muscles tense and his teeth clench because he can see his hypocrisy in the mirror, foul and obvious like spinach in his teeth, but he refuses to remove it. He can hear his own thoughts as loudly as he can hear hers, and they mix like spoiled nectar and poison, filling his skull with fumes, unabashed admissions that he cannot trust her anymore, enraged curses when he sees her crying over him again, ravening snarls that he should track that gender-confused, Serena-confusing bastard across the galaxy and yank his intestines out through his throat.
"You weren't there."
He knows. He knows, okay?! He knows that he wasn't there, he knows that he should have been – and even worse, he knows that she knows now the real reason he went to America.
"To learn how to save more people's lives," he'd told her was his motivation, like he was a goddamned saint, like it wasn't his choice to go, like it was his destiny.
And she'd believed it – or pretended to him that she had – because if she didn't believe in destiny, then how could she believe in them? She couldn't. Because he couldn't. Or hadn't. Or wouldn't?
A year in America, he'd thought. A year to myself. Alone. A year without having to listen to how hard geometry was, what kind of dresses the girls were wearing to the dance, how annoying Rini had been the day before. A year without Serena, he had thought with relief and then eagerness. I've never had that before.
But he had. He had had years and years without Serena. A thousand in oblivion and seventeen in a bleak reality. And what had it given him? Misanthropy. Paranoia. Voices in his head.
He tried to remember the times that he had thought, I love her. The memories that floated to mind were those of post-planet-saving, in the heady, almost hallucinogenic aftereffects of the Silver Crystal.
And he would think, Love? I don't know what love is.
He had no experiences to which to compare his feelings for Serena. He had never been loved, had never loved, before her. How could he identify his feelings for her when he had no standard from which to measure; how could he identify a color when he only knew the white of a sterile hospital room? For a man like himself to think that he loved Serena was like conducting a science experiment without a control. For a man like himself to think that he loved Serena was impossible. Because a man like himself knew that love was only a heady cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters, sometimes catalyzed by a magical crystal.
But surely Serena knew what love was. And she loves me. She says so.
But did she? he would wonder sometimes, as they sat on the park bench before the setting sun, the weight of her head on his shoulder crushing the feeling from his nerves. If he was a white hospital room then Serena so experienced with love that she was a paint palette with too much paint; the pigments mixed and swirled and darkened and confused, and certainly it would be easy for her to mistake one color for another. She was experienced in all types of love except this one: she had never had a boyfriend before him, had never kissed a boy before him; her only experience came, as his did, from the galactic royal of whom she was a shadow.
Endymion probably didn't love Serenity, the voice in his mind would reflect as the sun slipped down below the horizon, and Serena's head slipped down his shoulder to his collarbone, leaving a swath of pins and needles to swell icy-hot in its place. When he died Endymion had been younger than Darien was. How could an immature adolescent know true, actual, worthwhile love? All he had probably seen was a pretty face and pretty legs and pretty everything. The chances of him actually having loved Serenity were slim, thinner than Serena was now. And yet there Darien was, Endymion's shadow, Serena's pillow, chained by a long-dead prince's prideful sacrifice to mimic his actions down to the last possessive caress. You'll never know if you love her.
His own poisonous thoughts. His own mind's voice. That was all they were. Nothing as violent or malicious as brainwashing by dark energy or a crystal shard in his eyeball. He couldn't even blame them on a future self's machinations. How easy it was now to realize that the venom has seeped through him only on those occasions when he was pissed from a long day at school, from being yelled at by a doctor during his residency, from nearly losing Serena to a routine youma attack because he was too weak, too weak to do anything.
You're not weak, Darien," she would tell him. "You've got so much strength that you even have enough to share. You give it to me and make me stronger."
How?
How had he been able to forget that she could do that? How had he forgotten that she could read his worries off his mind like math problems from a board and solve them? How had he felt so uncertainly toward her that he had left to discover what a life without her would be like?
How had he been so stupid!
"You had to leave," she told him when he came back.
As though she still believed the lie that he had fed to her. As though she didn't know now that destiny could crack and shatter and lie there on the floor as razor-sharp shards for them to stop on because even when it was broken it would make them suffer. As though she hadn't fallen in love with him and he hadn't left her, and as if the air that he exhaled wasn't black with sin that settled on her white wings.
"It wasn't your fault," she said. "I'm sorry."
He hates so much. He hates Galaxia for killing them. He hates Seiya for seducing her. He hates her for letting him. He hates their friends for not interfering. He hates Harvard for offering him the chance to leave. He hates Serena for forgiving him. Hates her even more for not making him ask for that forgiveness. Hates her most for asking him for his instead.
He wishes that she had grown hateful and cold, that she had turned into a bitch without him, because then at least he would have known that, in cold hard inarguable dictionary denotation, she loved him.
But she didn't. She didn't transform into a Beryl or a Black Lady or a Fiore or a Nehelenia. She stayed Serena. Laughing, smiling, loving Serena.
"It's because of you." He remembers the exact degree to which her head tilted, the exact curvature of the smile as she looked at the bastard. He remembers because he knows that she wears that smile to hide tears. "It's because of you that I could hang in there, Seiya."
Darien will always hate him for preventing that transformation. He will always hate him being the safety net that gave him the second chance with Serena because with that second chance there are other seconds.
The second glances. When it is dark in the apartment and she glimpses him the corner of her eye, black hair and pale face, her intake of breath and double-take.
The second-guessing. The doubt when she meets his lips with her own – is she thinking about him? The suspicion when she sifts her fingers through his hair – maybe she's thinking about him. The conviction when she whispers "I love you" – she's thinking about him.
The seconds of hesitation. The pauses that she never used to make before she kisses him, before she smiles at him, before she says his name.
"I tried not to love him," she told him when he found the taped-up shoebox full of her dozens-odd letters to him with Return to Sender stamped on them, and at first it made him sad.
Now it makes him angry that she is still trying.
"You weren't there."
(
The clouds have been hanging over the sky since morning, and as he walks with Serena in the park, Darien thinks that the oppression he feels may have caused it. He still lacks control over his powers, and with no youma attacks in the past two years, he has lacked too the desire and necessity to transform and learn how to control them. These powers, he thinks, have not helped him pull Serena back to him.
No. You just don't want to transform and feel how she feels.
How she feels for him.
As this through drips through his mind, rain begins to fall. Serena glances over at him and offers up a smile with eyes that are already distancing from him like a camera lens panning away. She twists her hand, and from her sleeves falls an umbrella.
It is pink and frilly, and he remembers it from the D-Land ball an eternity ago. She clutched onto him that night like he was her only chance at life, like he was her life, and suddenly he hears himself asking,
"Do you love me?"
He has never regretted any action so much as he regrets this one. Unless it is the years-long action of not realizing that I love her. Because her eyes snap up to him then skitter away, and she entwines her arm through his and presses her face to his shoulder, but horror is welling up in him because he recognizes these movements, he recognizes them, they are the same ones that he used to avoid answering her question with words because words can be called lies but answers cannot.
"Never – never mind," he hears himself saying, and there is no room in him for embarrassment, because it is all filled by this horror, this horror, what has he done, and the rain is pouring now, slamming on the umbrella in buckets.
"Darien."
She is looking up at him, and he thinks at first that she is crying, there is so much water in her eyes, and for a second that stabs him with happiness, because maybe if she is crying she loves him. But then he realizes that the umbrella has fallen to the sidewalk and without it to hold the rain away, the water is rushing down his face to drip off his chin into her face.
He has never been able to protect her, not from anything, not from youma, not from rain, not from himself. His question has forced her to lie, and she hates lying. But she will lie – for him. It seems as though there is nothing she will not do for him. How could I not have seen that? And he hates it, he can feel her rallying all her courage like the thunderclouds above rallying all their electrons to hurl lightning down at the ground and stop this confession. He wants her to stop protecting him!
Her eyes fly wide suddenly; she shoves him. "Get down!"
Immediately he rolls, his body absorbing his impact on the ground and using it to keep rolling, back to his feet. Looking up, he sees her grappling with what can only be a youma, palm to palm, limbs trembling. On the youma's forehead he can see a black star; it is a leftover, then, long-forgotten, from Tomoe's experiments.
Half-bidden, a rose appears in his hand. The half-forgotten sensation of transformation submerges him. For a second, he is in Serena's mind, and filling it is the memory of a dark night sky eclipsed by a vast full moon eclipsed by his own face, eyes averted, as the echo of her question fades in the night air. "Do you love me?" And he hears, and their thoughts are mixed so that he does not know if it is her thinking or him that she shouldn't have had to ask. I should have been able to kno –
Then their minds are apart, he is in a tuxedo and shoes that are looser than he remembers, and he is hurling a single, razor-sharp red rose through the gray rain at the youma's spinal cord.
In a burst of ash the youma explodes and crumbles. The rose continues its trajectory through the shower of gray ash to stab deep into the ground. It quivers there like an arrow, stuck fast.
He stares at it.
There is a thump. A splash.
He lifts his eyes from the rose to see Serena on her knees. She is staring at it, too, her fists are clenched and her golden hair is in the mud and her mouth is shaping a name that is not his and she is staring at the rose with eyes that shake with tears.
Not rain.
He hates Galaxia for killing him.
He hates Seiya for seducing Serena.
He hates her for letting him.
Hates her for forgiving him.
Hates her even more for asking him for his forgiveness instead.
But who he hates most of all –
"You weren't there."
– is himself.
There is a man Darien Shields will never forgive.