Author's Important Note: Crystal's going to kill off Demande this Saturday. And it's not going to be like in the 90's, where he dies in Sailor Moon's arms after trying to protect her. I am not prepared. My poor heart will never be prepared.
Author's Actually Important Note: This fanfiction is based upon a blend of lore from Sailor Moon R and the Black Moon arc of the manga/Sailor Moon Crystal, in addition to some personal headcanon. Demande and Saphir are descendants of criminals and are dubious of Neo-Queen Serenity's rule, believing that longevity and eternal youth are blasphemous. They rejected purification by the Ginzuishou, which was required for all adults (to justify why there's kids bullying Chibiusa in the 30th century). They were sought out by Wiseman, who led them in a minor rebellion in Crystal Tokyo, and they chose to leave Earth as consequence. Beyond that, everything should line up with the manga.
I never saw her face the day she sent me to die.
Of course, it wasn't worded like that. The queen's proclamation was littered with niceties such as "mass murder", "atrocities against the human race", and lastly "a great act of mercy". When I heard the last one, a part of me felt like laughing. As if a life doomed to shame and solitude could ever be considered a mercy. My friends would have laughed too, had they not already been escorted away. I had been the only one who wanted to bear one last witness to the world of people I was leaving behind.
I knew they lay below, just beyond the balcony window. I could hear their cheers coalescing into a unified roar, like that of a wave preparing to crash down upon a lone figure huddled in the dark black robes of a prisoner. I could imagine them beyond the walls of impenetrable crystal, surrounding the castle in an attempt to catch a mere glimpse of their beloved queen.
I would have gladly changed my view for theirs. No matter where I turned my head, my eyes somehow always gravitated towards her. Glimpses of hair like fine-spun threads of silver cascading down her back, or of a flowing silk dress of starlight in the midday. Her entire body was illuminated by the noon sun glittering off the walls of the palace; the light blurred every edge of her. For a while, I entertained the notion that she didn't, couldn't exist. That I could stick my hand through her waist, and she would explode into nothingness.
I felt my hands shaking, but couldn't trace the emotion behind it. She was so, incredibly close. Mere days ago, if I had ever gotten the chance to stand this close to her, it would not have been a hand through her waist, but a sword. But life enjoys its karma. Standing to the side of the most powerful woman in the solar system, I was nothing.
Here was something that the adoring citizens of Crystal Tokyo would never notice: her shadow. It pooled like a dark train of her dress onto the balcony, cascaded down the short flight of steps, and raced to crash into me head on. I could feel it seep into my shoes. Pushing me. Even when there was no need. I already wanted to leave.
I could hear her continue to speak, but the words meant nothing to me. I only knew the gentle, lulling cadence of her voice as it hit all the right notes without a second's hesitation. Perfection.
The audience seemed to think so, too. When the queen finished, there was a great, fearsome roar of cheers and applause that would have instantly gobbled up her soft, demure voice. She was like a lamb, with a lion on her leash.
Then the lamb turned her terrifying face on me.
At least, I assumed she had. I had closed my eyes on instinct, for when the queen descended from the balcony, a torrent of blinding sunlight crashed upon my face. At once, I yearned for her shadow again.
I could hear the soft click of her heels in the empty antechamber of the balcony. No guards were present, not even her four Senshi. The Queen of Crystal Tokyo, alone with a man condemned.
Her footsteps stopped. I opened my eyes.
My gaze was snagged onto her silver hair fluttering at my right hand side. I followed its winding path, higher and higher, until I was able to register her full form, really and wholly present, as she stood beside me. She was perfectly motionless, hands folded in prayer, as she faced the opposite direction. My face to the sun, hers to the castle of crystal. There was hardly half a meter between us.
I couldn't see her eyes beneath the shadow of her bangs. "Take this," she said, her voice like the first drops of rainfall. She spoke out of the corner of her mouth, as if the words had to physically pry themselves from her lips.
I don't know how she did it; not for the slightest instant did I see her folded hands move towards me. Yet without so much as brushing against my shoulder, she had dropped a cold, tiny object in my hands. I could see the tip peeking out from my black robe. Crystal. Curious, I rolled the crystal prism in my hands, the way that one would roll a piece of clay to form a coil. Its edges were sharp, not blurred by the sunlight at all. After a short while, my palms stung with pain.
"It's a dream crystal," she said. I felt her breath make the nerve endings in my right cheek tingle. "Place the tip to your lips, and you will immediately fall unconscious for seven hours." Then, as if to clarify: "I'll be expecting a full report when you arrive on Nemesis."
The scent of dying lilies clung to her skin, flushed a rosy pink. I felt my lips curl. She was nervous. Afraid. So close she was, yet so afraid to touch me. And I'd be a fool to not know why.
As her prayerful hands fell to her sides, I took my chance. As I lifted my right hand to brush a lock of white hair from my eyes, I let my ring finger trail up the side of her arm. A second short enough to make the action seem accidental; a second long enough to make my intent undeniable:
What you've done today is on your head.
In a flurry of sunlight and silk, she was gone.
In her place came a pair of white-clad guards who weren't worth noting, not after the queen. They each placed a hand on my arm, as I did my best not to wince at the vice-like grip. Like a petal plucked from a flower, I knew at once that my freedom on this planet had been snatched up with a racing current.
With my head held high, I went to find freedom on a new one.
I waited three days to use the dream crystal.
During those long, long days, it served as a constant weight in my breast pocket. At times, I could swear that it was burning a hole over my heart, a punishment for not doing as she had instructed. But that was precisely the point. I hadn't given up my beloved home planet just to be dictated by her once again. So I forced down my curiosity, and I waited. What I was waiting for exactly, I couldn't quite say.
Only long afterwards would I understand: I was waiting to see her face.
With the doors to my chambers safely locked behind me, I took out the dream crystal. How bright it was, even in the perpetual shadows of Nemesis. The way its radiance spread seemed to fill the room somehow. After three days of aimlessly wandering a cold and empty citadel, I found myself grateful.
Taking a sip from a ornate crystal wineglass, I peered into the dream crystal, but instead of finding the face of Neo-Queen Serenity, my own violet eyes stared back at me. Violet eyes surrounded dark crescent moons and framed by locks of white hair. White, which would only turn whiter, not by the power of the Ginzuishou, but by a far greater power – age.
As easy as snuffing out a candle, I closed my shaking fist around my reflection. Then, without any further ceremony, I placed the crystal to my lips.
The queen hadn't been exaggerating about its immediate effects: all too soon, I became dimly aware of crimson wine spilling onto crimson bedsheets, a whiteness clouding my vision, and a gentle darkness lifting me up and under a current of racing water.
When I opened my eyes again, the crimson, the white, the black, and many other colors were already pooling back into the empty void floating around me. The featureless mist of a dream half-dreamt gave way to violet tapestries with gold embroidery, a long blue carpet the color of a sky I ached for, and a throne of purest crystalline white.
There was no disorientation on my part. The moment I felt my heart begin to race, I knew where I was: the throne room of Neo-Queen Serenity. The place where my brothers and sisters of the clan had been condemned.
At once, my eyes turned to the throne at the opposite end of the hall, but its occupant had abandoned it. Instead, I saw her off to the side, staring out a high-vaulted window overlooking Crystal Tokyo. Even then, I marveled, her face was still turned away from me.
I took a step forward, then another, but it made no sound in the dream. I wondered if she knew I was there. Most likely she did, for none could fool the goddess of the Silver Millennium. A lesson I had learned all too well.
However, if she was going to pretend to be oblivious, I saw no reason to deter her. Pausing about halfway across the throne room, I resigned myself to simply taking in the sight of Earth's sovereign queen. Away from the cheers of the crowds and the shadow of my looming banishment and the entire mutated planet, I found that I could see her more clearly. Her hair was two rivers of molten silver spilling over tiny gossamer wings, resting on the backdrop of a gown as pure white as newly fallen snow.
Of course, this was nothing new to me. I had seen the queen many times before; the artistic renderings of her beauty were as countless as the stars themselves. But seeing her in person, even in a dream, cast her loveliness in a whole new light – quite literally. Mere portraits couldn't capture the way that light didn't bounce off her, but gravitated towards her. It clung to individual strands of her hair and turned them silver, melted into her silken gown, sprinkled stardust onto her skin.
In that moment, I could never have imagined killing her.
"Welcome, Demande."
Then she turned her smiling face towards me, at it was all I could do to not collapse onto the unfeeling crystal beneath me.
Where her eyes should have been, only two smooth patches of skin remained, as if she had never had eyes to begin with.
"Demande?" Somewhere, over the screaming bells crashing onto the inside of my spinning head, I heard her voice. "Is everything all right?"
My trembling hand crawled up my face, combed through my hair, and I felt that the blood had drained from my already fair complexion. I must have looked close to fainting. "Your eyes…." I somehow managed to say.
She placed a hand to her face, just below the eyebrows raised in bewilderment, then sighed. "You must forgive me," she said. "I neglected to explain the finer details before you left Crystal Tokyo. Presently, we're in your dream, your head, filled with your memories. You must not know what my eyes look like, so you can't see them."
"And what about you?" I asked. "What can you see?"
"Everything. The dream crystal is merely a way for me to focus the Ginzuishou on you, so that I may project my consciousness into your mind, your world comprised of your memories. Of course, I'm not truly present, but…" She glanced—at least, I assumed her unseen eyes were glancing—down at my hand, still holding the wineglass. She waved her hand, and the wine turned to water. "…you shouldn't underestimate my power here."
My eyes narrowed. Translation: Don't try anything funny.
I looked around at the dreamscape, filled with distant walls and vaulted ceilings and all the empty space I hated. "Why did you bring me here?" I asked of her. As the words echoed off the crystal walls, I internally winced. I sounded like a complaining child.
Her blank face, like a waxen canvas, still unnerved me. "Like I said before," she answered simply, clasping her delicate hands together, "I wanted to know how things are on Nemesis." She sounded like a mother asking if something was wrong when she knew damn well that everything was wrong. Condescending. Now that the initial impact of her beauty had faded, the desire to kill her rose again.
"And yet I'm not required to tell you anything, Neo-Queen Serenity." I had meant to say her name with scorn, but the melody of the words was too beautiful.
A second's thoughtful pause, then: "Would you like to sit down?"
My eyebrows disappeared behind my bangs. "What?"
She said it again: "Would you like to sit down?"
After a few seconds of me wearing an expression most likely akin to a stupefied toad, she raised her hands, and a divan appeared in the center of the throne room. It was a relatively simplistic thing, compared to the extravagance of the crystal surrounding it. The crème-colored cushions and purple throw pillows seemed to pale next to the Queen's silver hair and soft white skin. Yet I couldn't help but notice one tiny detail: the tassels on the corners of the pillows were fixed in place by diamonds.
"This isn't going to be easy," she said as she took a seat on the divan, "nor would I expect it to be easy. You're right; I don't expect you to tell me anything. But"—The cold, biting ferocity in that little word was an all too stark reminder that I was speaking with the ruler of the world—"if you believe for one second that I sent you to the most distant planet in the solar system just to let you have free reign to plot against Earth, you're a fool."
Her frown flipped into a smile so jarringly that I could hardly say which one I preferred. She patted the cushion next to her and said, voice dripping with honey, "Sit beside me, Demande."
God had made sure that I was far from being a fool, and I obeyed.
"So, this is how the lovely Neo-Queen Serenity spends her resting hours: making housecalls to the damned," I said, more to myself than to her as I gazed up at the impossibly tall ceiling with the irrational hope of seeing the sky. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised – a goddess would never let a trivial thing like sleeping deter her from ensuring the safety of the ones she loves."
The queen shrugged. "It doesn't make much difference to me." I couldn't understand how her hardened tone of warning had waned into something more… thoughtful? Fragile? Sad? "I'd dream of you anyway. I might as well change those dreams into something useful."
"So you are going to interrogate me."
She stared down at the hands folded in her lap, refusing to meet my eyes. "In a sense, but I wouldn't like you to think of it that way." She shook her head, revealing to me for a split second the sad little smile of a much younger woman. "My, that's so diplomatic of me to say. But no, I'm not trying to be a diplomat to you, Demande. Consider this me trying to convince you to return home. Because despite your past actions, I still consider you one of my subjects, and I know you still consider Planet Earth your home."
Not if it's yours, I thought, immediately struck by the bitterness of the words resounding in my head. "But I'm not one of your subjects," I chose to say instead. "You hold no power over me, Neo-Queen Serenity." I allowed myself a quiet smile at the snide in my voice. Yes, that was more like it.
"You're right, Demande. I don't. I can't tell you what to do. In fact, I was surprised that you didn't wait more than three days to contact me. For one who has defied me so undeniably, I would have expected you to take the crystal, shatter it, and have nothing to do with me ever again. And I wouldn't be able to stop you. You are within your right to sever all ties with my kingdom." She lifted her face, still bearing that sad little smile. "But I can still hope. I can still give you a chance. That's what I'm here to do, Demande."
For the strangest, strangest reason, the writhing in my stomach made me feel, for the very first time, like a guilt-stricken terrorist tried for crimes against humanity and banished to the ends of the universe.
I started as the queen stood up in a single fluid movement of silk and grace. "But not tonight."
"Wait – that means you're going?"
She nodded once, amidst the encroaching fog spilling from cracks in the crystal. "I think I've given you – no, both of us – enough to think about for the time being."
As I leapt from the divan, terror also leapt in my heart as I saw the queen melt into stardust before my eyes. She looked like she was dying. And I could never allow that.
"Oh, one more thing," she said, her voice floating above the mist that swirled around me as I ran through nothingness. "It's quite all right to hate me, you know. You wouldn't be alone."
When I threw up on the bedsheets, my head spun with the rancid stench of wine.
"I want to see it."
The single-minded resolve of my request was so fervent that I only vaguely registered that tonight's dreamscape had departed from the throne room in favor of the Lunarium. A kind of domed antechamber to the Crystal Palace, it displayed towering stained glass windows, each depicting a Sailor Senshi in battle stances made all the more fierce when blown up to twenty times their size. Their expressions of pride were as overbearing as the heat of summer's sun. The last two windows, the pair of windows farthest away from me, bore the image of King Endymion and Neo-Queen Serenity. No matter what happened that night, I vowed, I would never turn my eyes on them.
The afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows, turning the floor beneath me into a sea of hazy watercolors, yet the sun did not diminish the sight above my head. There, painted on a backdrop of deep indigo, were hundreds of constellations spinning around the moon, a pinprick of silver light at the dome's peak.
The queen, standing directly under that light, didn't need any further clarification. With the same eerily blank expression as last night, she folded her hands in prayer. When she opened them, like petals falling or lips parting, there lay the Ginzuishou cradled in her cupped hands.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said while staring into its crystalline depths. I felt like she wasn't truly present, when she peered into the Ginzuishou and saw echoed back the heritage of a hundred thousand kingdoms, raised and razed, that etched themselves onto every single petal. I felt like I had lost her.
When she spoke to me again, her voice was like that of one still caught in a dream. "I imagine you remember it well."
How could I not? I'd remember it the same way I'd remember the last expression of a dead man. "Reasonably," I answered with a shrug. "I only saw it once."
"The day I came to stop Crystal Tokyo from burning."
"Yes. The one day I'll never forget."
It would be impossible for me to forget that day, the day that fires of earth finally conquered the blinding moonlight hanging over our heads. No matter where I stood, there could always be heard the sound of people crying loudly. I couldn't tell if they were the queen's subjects, or my brothers and sisters of the clan. Terror and madness, they blended together.
Marching through that fire, I felt untouchable. The road tore itself apart, and I walked upon it. A creature of shadow – there were no such things as humans that night – shattered a crystal statue of the queen, and I smiled at it. Chaos lived, and I liked it.
Those were the defining two hours of my life.
The untouchable goddess who dwelt in the castle, she didn't even need to walk amongst the flames. The highest spire of the Crystal Palace opened, and the Ginzuishou rose like a newly fashioned star into the sky. It didn't matter where you were in the city; its presence was unmistakable. I could only look upon it once, just seconds before wave after wave of searing light washed over the city. But the image had already been sealed onto the inside of my eyelids long after I ran for cover from its radiance. But there's no running from her.
I've read people's accounts of their purification by the Ginzuishou. Thousands upon thousands, yet they all seemed to use variations of the same words: Awe. Bliss. Peace. Tranquility. Serenity.
As I fell to my knees in the dirt, the only word I knew was fear.
"This is the crystal that saved me," said the queen, her words a soft, whispering wind in the Lunarium. "When the Dark Kingdom attacked the Moon Kingdom all those years ago, there was no hope for us except for this crystal. My mother sacrificed her life so that we could all be reincarnated. What destiny so cruelly tore away, the Ginzuishou gave me a chance to find again."
She raised her head to meet my eyes. "And yet you rejected it." An incredible sadness flowed from her, the kind of sadness that makes stars turn away from the earth and walk away with heads hung low. "Why?"
"Humans aren't meant to live forever. It's a blasphemy against God." It was the exact same testimony she had heard at my trial.
Her voice was as gentle and chilling as ever. "Says the man convicted of murder."
I had no answer for her.
"May I?" she asked after a long, unbroken silence.
I looked at her in confusion.
"The Jakokusuishou," she said, holding out a delicate white hand. "I'd like to see it, if that's all right."
I nodded; no use in refusing her. I unclasped an earring, fashioned from a shard of that dark, dark crystal, and dropped it into her outstretched hand. She closed her hand around it and withdrew as if she were seconds from touching a flame. She had learned from last time.
Unlike with the Ginzuishou, there was no awe-inspired admiration. Instead, she brushed the tip of her index finger along each edge of the Jakokusuishou, searching for any faults in the crystal. Finding none, she gave it back to me.
"How do you know about the Jakokusuishou?" I asked. "I didn't use its power during the attack on Crystal Tokyo."
Sadness fell over her like a cloud's shadow replacing the sun. And still, how lovely she was, with her slightly parted lips and bowed head hiding the missing eyes. "You'll find out soon enough. However," she said, raising her eyes and sending silver hair fluttering over her arms like bands of starlight, "I know you got the Jakokusuishou from the Death Phantom."
It took me a moment's pause to understand her. "Wiseman," I said, more to clarify for myself than for her.
"Death Phantom," she insisted. I was startled by the venom in her words. "That's his name. The name he taunted me with before I banished him to Nemesis. Do you trust him, Demande?"
A bark of laughter shot straight to the top of the dome and bounced off the stained-glass windows. "Trust a twisted old man like him? Don't take me as a fool, Neo-Queen Serenity. I'd never trust him." As the echoes of laughter dissipated, I turned away so that my face would be engulfed by shadow. "In truth," I told her, and was surprised at how coarse I sounded, trying to lift those words to the surface, "I'll never trust anyone."
She pitied me then, I knew. Dammit, why… why did I tell her that?
I blinked, and she was suddenly close, so impossibly close. The wide, open space of the Lunarium had shrunk and collapsed onto itself so that if she took two steps backward, she would hit the wall. The smell of dying lilies returned.
I recoiled at seeing her unseeing face in full view, but that only made her stretch out her hand even further. She brushed aside my hair with the back of her hand, then ever so carefully traced the black crescent moon insignia with her thumb. Her skin was young and soft and stolen.
"Oh, kami-sama…." Again, she sounded like a mother. "Demande…" Her brow was creased in worry, causing the mark of the Silver Millennium to take the appearance of a white circle. A full moon. "Do you think there could come a time when you could trust me?" Then she shook her head. "Oh, nevermind, it doesn't matter." She turned around in a whirlwind of skirts, and it was my turn to blindly, unthinkingly, stretch out my hand towards her. Only with her, she couldn't see me. My hand fell through empty space.
"I'll never forgive myself," she said, hugging her chest and gripping her shoulders so tightly that her knuckles turned white. "I know that there must always be incarnations of Chaos in the world, but you… you and your clan are human. You have no place in the clutches of the Death Phantom."
Silver hair swirled around her head as she looked over her shoulder at me. "If you listen to anything I say, anything at all, never trust that man. Every night before you come here, I hope you place a knife under your pillow. I hope you check under the bed for the monsters that are all too real on Nemesis. I hope you say a goodnight prayer to your God, any God, even ones who will condone murder, as long as they never condone that man. I hope and pray with all my heart."
She tilted back her head to stare at the constellations upon the dome. I thought I could hear a faint sound of a music box's lullaby descending from the rafters. "I should go; it's very nearly morning," she said before I could even get a word in. "I hope… I hope that when the Death Phantom shows you who he truly is, you'll come to see that I was right, and that you can trust me. Maybe one day you can tell me why you choose to defy the Ginzuishou. Why you hate me as you do."
"Wait!" I shouted as the stars from the dome of the Lunarium fell to the ground, their streaks of light leaving the nothingness of undone dreams in their wake. "I never said I hated you!"
"Oh?" said Neo-Queen Serenity, high-pitched and girlish and far too old to be eternally young. "Don't worry, you will. Trust me."
"A rose's allure is powerful, but its beauty is just to hide its thorns. Oh yes, I remember well the mind games of the White Moon Queen. She is infuriating, isn't she, young prince?"
I nearly hit my head against a bedpost when I awoke and saw Wiseman hovering in the corner of my bedchamber. He was shrouded in a cloak of shadow as usual, yet I could swear that beneath the hood of swirling darkness, he was laughing. Seconds later, I knew why:
He was holding Neo-Queen Serenity's dream crystal in his decayed and rotting hands.
"I should have expected it," he said while caressing the crystal facets with his gnarled, scaly fingers. "Of course she would want to monitor your actions on Nemesis. At heart, she's afraid, afraid of losing her power over you."
Thankfully, there was an unfinished glass of wine waiting patiently on the nightstand. Pushing away the bedsheets, I stood up and drained the glass so quickly that my head spun for minutes afterwards. However, it was better to be drunk than afraid. And in that moment, despite the exhaustion and the alcohol, that fear still pushed itself into the forefront of my mind: I couldn't let Wiseman shatter the crystal.
Then Wiseman spoke again. I heard the words, but couldn't grasp the meaning. I asked him to say it again, a gnawing dread pulsing through me all the while. He did, and I was so close to letting the wineglass slip through my numb fingers.
"How wise of the young prince to turn that power against her."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded, drawing myself up to full height.
"You know how the White Moon Queen wishes to control the Black Moon Clan," said Wiseman, "and you know she possesses the power to do so. Any lesser man would shatter the crystal out of fear. Yet you held onto it, bought into the White Moon Queen's charade, and used it to establish a fake trust with her. Aren't I correct, young prince?"
I nodded without thinking, though my head throbbed as my mind struggled to keep up. "Once again, your keen mind shows once again, Wiseman," I replied, letting the smooth, silky words flow from my mouth without so much as registering the taste. "I knew that the others in the clan would object to maintaining contact with Neo-Queen Serenity, so I kept it hidden from them. I am gladdened, however, to find you of a more tactical mind than them."
I winced at the sound of his knuckles cracking around the dream crystal. "And have you been able to win her trust yet, young prince?"
"I… I'll admit that hasn't been easy to convince her of a terrorist's change of heart, nor would I expect it to be. However, I am confident that the Queen will be won over before we launch the attack on Earth."
I was amazed that despite all his power, Wiseman failed to hear my heart thrashing in my chest. "Excellent, young prince, because understanding the mind of the White Moon Queen will be the key to destroying her." A shudder that had nothing to do with the harsh cold nights of Nemesis passed through me like a ghost. "As you know, I won't be satisfied with her death alone, not after all she has done against me. Just as she has taken away our beloved planet, so too must we must first take away all that is dear to her heart. Her friends, her husband, her daughter, her planet, everything. You, young prince, will be the key to breaking her." Though his eyes were hidden, I could feel his gaze settle on me with the intensity of fire. "I trust that you will figure out what to do. Do not disappoint me."
"If you listen to anything I say, anything at all, never trust that man."
"In truth, I'll never trust anyone."
Not even you, I finished.
Now that the wineglass was empty, I could see my distorted reflection staring back at me, with my forehead widened so that the insignia of the Black Moon Clan took up a third of my face. There was black, I realized, and there was darkness. And how dark, how dark this would be next to the pure white mark of the Silver Millennium.
I raised my eyes to face the phantom haunting the citadel. "Of course not, Wiseman. But before such a victory can be achieved, I believe I must defer to your unique knowledge and experience."
"Oh?" He was laughing at me again. The inside of my skin crawled as I stared into the faceless face of the Death Phantom. Faceless, just like the Queen.
Long ago, in books that have long since rotted away in the forgetfulness of humanity, there was an expression that when you stand on the edge of a cliff and stare into the bottomless abyss below, the abyss also stares into you. Facing off against Wiseman, I stared into the abyss, and saw only a mirror.
"Tell me about the day you were banished to Nemesis by Neo-Queen Serenity."