"The Carpathians are beautiful at night."
Michiru did not think the best of herself, assuming that Haruka would not have known what mountain range it was, thinking she might barely realize to which country Transylvania even belonged. It was an unkind thought, wasn't it, to think that strange?
But it wasn't just that. Things rarely were simply what they were. It was the faraway manner which she said it, the way her voice flowed like silk and shadow, and did not pop and rumble the way her voice normally did, an earthquake breaking the calm of the dirt. The way her eyes were calm and misty, lacking the thunderstorm that rolled in them.
Haruka caught her looking and smiled, a smile which might have passed muster with many people but which Michiru took for a clown's face painted on porcelain.
"I guess." The imposter shrugged, even that more slow and delicate than Haruka's quick motion, as if Haruka were slipping in and out of herself.
Michiru was deeply and keenly observant, as a human being, and while many people might have found this a gift, she found it, sometimes, to be a particular curse all its own, and this moment was among those times. Haruka was not herself. She was becoming, what it was Michiru was unsure-this trip had called into question many things that Michiru was sure she did not believe in-but obviously and truly something else. Something not Haruka.
Perhaps she is running a fever, that quiet desperate candle of hope inside her rang out, but Michiru snuffed it quickly, leaving only the smoke of her own painful realization scenting the air.
Michiru was the one who had decided they would come here, or rather, her agent, and Haruka had followed, as Hauka always followed her into hell. She was responsible for so much of Haruka's undoing. She thought Haruka would enjoy it-a place she had never been, a private suite in a castle, and Michiru had even deigned to bring the girls along, for Haruka's entertainment, of course, but it was hard to not to smile when she saw how excited the girls had been.
But there were darker things here, as there is no heaven, and the senshi life had once more taken something precious from her. Haruka was turned.
She had suspected, since she and Rei stumbled up from the basement, claiming to have been victorious once more, but standing too closely, too chummily.
Rei. It would be in her, too. Some might have thought all her work at the temple would protect her. But Michiru knew better. There were no gods, no incantations, and magic was just a curse by another name.
She looked over at Haruka, who stared at the mountains as if they were home, and felt the traitorous sea in her eyes.
Rei quietly picked up her things and put them into a bag, her eyes lingering with a rising anxiety and thrill at the stake held in her hand. She was not entirely sure what her plan was, entirely, but she knew it was to save the other senshi. To avenge herself.
They may have killed her, but she would leave her mark. She would make them pay. Before this took her and she was nothing else at all. They couldn't make her a weapon.
She slid out of the room quietly, and hated herself for the sleekness of it, how she knew it was the vampire blood rising in her, changing even her most subtle motions. Down the stairs, where shadows crawled across the stones like the groaning souls of the damned, she found her way to the rose garden.
It surprised her to see Haruka there, standing by the candles at the door in her leather jacket, eyebrows knitted in worry as she looked up at the moon and twirled her wedding ring nervously. It shouldn't have surprised her. The darkness inside them was their bond now.
She walked over to Haruka, adjusting the bag on her shoulder, unsure of what to say. Unsure Haruka knew what she intended.
"It's happening, isn't it?" Haruka leaned close to Rei in the candlelight, close enough to see the flecks of gold like embers in her eyes. "Even I can feel it."
Rei looked at her for a moment, angry about everything, simmering like a tiny volcano, ready to turn everything to ash. Angry that she had been bitten. Angry that the flashes of red were coming over more often. Angry that no purification she had tried seemed to have any effect at all. Angry that she now thought of killing Usagi.
Angry that she knew this creature inside her, inside Haruka, would. That it was an unstoppable predator.
Haruka ran a hand through her hair, sticking it up and making her look like no sort of vessel for a deadly enemy. "What do we do, Rei? Do you-"
Rei shook her head, unable to form the words 'I can't.'
People often thought Haruka simple, but there were some things she did not need spelled out to her. She simply nodded, and looked off past the garden where she had wandered just today with Michiru, where she had wondered how quickly she could suck the blood from her veins, into the forest, where it was dark, where dark things like her belonged.
"There." Haruka indicated with her chin. "It's not safe to talk here."
Haruka and Rei walked quietly alongside each other, along a path more likely taken by the animals they felt like than the people they currently were, unsure of where they were going, but knowing they would know the course when they had reached the end of it.
"So there's nothing?" Haruka offered into the air, crisper than it should be in summer.
"It's getting worse," answered Rei, the only way she knew how, "for you too?"
Haruka kicked at the dirt on the slight path and nodded, knowing Rei would see it somehow, even in the dark.
They walked deeper into the forest, human tongues cutting on inhuman fangs, tasting their own blood as long as they could, before it was replaced by the taste of a stranger's.
Or worse.
It was the most terrifying smile in the course of recorded history.
Bright, wide, friendly. Aimed at Mina with a wink. It told her all she needed to know.
Evil had seeped inbetween the bars of Rei's careful fences.
Rei had been standing over Usagi, with a look lean and hungry, and she had smiled that smile at Mina and told her it was nothing at all, she thought Usagi might have been having a bad dream, and it was her personal responsibility to protect her, wasn't it? She had put her hands on her hips and scowled like Rei might have, but it was too late.
Mina had seen.
Mina had never watched Rei with Usagi, had never worried that any harm would come to the princess while she still lived, to say nothing of the actual concept of Rei being the one to do the damage. But that fact was simply academic now, as Rei became herself less and less every day, slipping into the dark of the faint marks left on her neck.
None of the other girls seemed to notice, which, she supposed, made a reasonable amount of sense. The creature, the thing, was not altogether stupid, and mimicked Rei well enough for most. Usagi simply thought Rei was irritated with her for her crybaby travel style, and though she pouted a bit, and even seemed a bit hurt when Rei rejected her embraces with a scowl (too much, demon, too hard, you don't play the part that well), she did not seem to think for a moment that the vampires that had scourged them in the quiet and shadowy places here of late might have infiltrated their ranks.
Rei and Haruka had gone off on their own, like the bullheaded idiots they were. They had killed the vampires in the basement, they said. They even seemed to believe it. The battle had been tough, but they had won. They were heros, Rei and Haruka.
Haruka too. The world was sometimes cruel to Minako.
"Rei and Haruka." She said it to the open air, in the candle-lit stone hallway, the book that said nothing but ways to kill at her side, giving no hope of healing. "Haruka and Rei."
It wasn't the two she would have chosen from a strategic sense, and she told her heart that was all it was, a poor strategic loss, that the deep sorrow she felt had nothing to do with loving them any more or less than any of her soldiers. Now was not the time to bring emotions into it. Now was the time to draw her sword, to protect her princess. Rei had disappeared into the night, and fate only knew where she had gone or what she was up to now. How soon it would be until she took Usagi, while Usagi smiled and said it was fine. No one had to die.
She hated her job sometimes. She envied Usagi's freedom from sacrifice.
But it did no good to think on that now. There would be time later, to think. And to mourn, her mind whispered on the wind. Rei and Haruka. Haruka and Rei.
Michiru would know how. Together they were difficult to outwit, whether Mina cared for her personally or not.
Shame when you needed Michiru.
She got to her feet, and walked down the hall to Michiru's room, the wind still calling their names like a prayer.
The path ended at the river near the castle, the black and blue and purple of night punctuated only by the occasional call of something from the wet and cool mists of the forest. Haruka and Rei looked at each other quietly, and then back at the dark and deep river in front of them, the moonlight gently streaming over them like ribbons of silver through the leaves of the trees.
Rei put her hands on her hips. "Well, we have to do something. We can't just become vampires. We might kill-"
"I know." Haruka looked down at the river, its burbling and whirring the only sign of life in its blackness. She sighed heavily and began to remove her coat, setting it under the tree.
"What are you doing?" All of Rei's irritation at the hopelessness of the situation found a home in Haruka.
She looked back at the water nervously. "I'm going to jump in. Vampires can't cross water, I think, and I'll just-I never learned how to-I won't be dangerous anymore."
Haruka could hardly see Rei's face, and yet her furrowed eyebrows were visible. "I can swim."
"Well, that's your problem and not mine." She looked down at her hand, a glow of gold on her hand where it was struck by the moonlight. She gently twisted her wedding ring off her finger, and placed it on top of her coat.
Rei looked up at the confetti-lit trees, hoping an answer would come on the wind. But the wind lay quiet, and still, and Rei was left with ways of killing a vampire, the grim specter that she might not be able to accomplish any of them.
She never thought she'd be envying Haruka's ability to drown herself with ease, but this was a strange vacation.
Haruka wrote a quick note on the back of an old McDonald's receipt, and tucked it in the pocket of her jacket under the tree. She patted the pocket, as if she could entrust the safety of the message simply by faith, and stood back up, walking to the edge of the river.
"I hope it doesn't take too long," Haruka swallowed and nodded, "River's cold. That'll help."
"It'll be fast," Rei reassured her, "It's cold, and it's deep, and with the undertow you'll probably hit your head on a rock before you know what's happening."
It was a strange friendship, cobbled out in these last moments of their lives.
Haruka gave a weak laugh. "Did you think it was going to end this way?"
"The vampires are a surprise." Rei deadpanned, and smiled in return.
Haruka dashed away from the bank, back to her McDonald's receipt, and wrote something else, stuffing it back in the pocket and walking back to the edge of the river.
"Yeah." She jutted out her chin, puffed out her chest, and took a deep breath, as an owl hooted somewhere deep in the forest. "Okay. I'm ready."
"Haruka?" Rei asked softly, "Would you do me a favor first?"
It was so unlike Rei that for a moment, Haruka thought the vampire had risen in her again, but when she looked back, she saw Rei's fierce eyes trained on the darkness of the forest, searching.
"What is it?" Haruka tried to see what she was seeing, but sensed nothing, and Rei herself shook her head as if she had only imagined it.
"I'm not strong enough to stake myself," she spit it out as if the concept offended her, "but I have one in my bag. I don't want to hurt Usagi. And we will. If we live."
Haruka looked down at her hands for a moment, and then rubbed them on her jeans. "Of course I will. Heh," she chuckled, "it'll make jumping in easier, anyway, so, thanks."
Rei laid down on the ground as Haruka took the stake in her hand, lining it up carefully with Rei's heart. She only wanted to do this once. She wouldn't have to remember it. She leaned back, ready to bring her full force down, biting her lip with the intensity of it, when dark hands grabbed her from behind, and before she could cry out, the rest-misted impulse took her mind, blotting out the girl whose ring lay under the cypress tree at the edge of a river.
"I am not going to preemptively kill my wife."
Michiru, as always, was being unreasonable.
Mina whipped back around, already transformed in preparation for the ambush. "I hate this. I hate this just as much as you hate this." She looked off the balcony in Michiru's suite. "But you know-"
Michiru turned away from the balcony and walked back inside, to where Haruka did not sleep, taken away by the moonlight and dark, the same as it had been several nights before. Her eyes changed more often, now, her grin more toothsome, her movements more liquid and more sly. It was growing. Mina was right.
"It matters little what I know, Mina, only what I will do, and what I won't do." She sat down at the small table where they had just that evening shared a glass of wine, and Haruka had a few brief hours of herself.
Mina sat across from her, and traced her finger around the woodgrain. "I caught Rei standing over Usagi the other night."
Michiru's head snapped over to where Mina was sitting. "I would hope you are not dramatizing that detail."
"You think I want to kill Rei and Haruka? Like that's my greatest dream?" She shook her head angrily. "Rei and Haruka re already dead, Michiru. Whatever this thing is, is just using their bodies." she huffed. "I think you of all people would rather destroy something than let someone else have it."
"Ah yes, precisely what this situation would benefit by, you and I sniping unkindly at each other." Michiru took the cork out of the half-empty bottle and took a pull out of it.
"Usagi's gonna fight us on this, Michiru. I need someone to back me."
Michiru looked at the empty bed, where the creature who was less and less Haruka would lie by the morning's first light, and lie about being her Haruka, her love. She thought of the long and loving nights she had spent next to her, how she smiled sleepily in the morning, her blonde hair fanning over her eyes.
She extended the bottle to Mina, who took it gratefully and swallowed a large gulp.
"Haruka'd be the first to tell you to do this."
Michiru looked at her with the look of resigned sorrow that had marred so much of her life and shook her head, but she recited the words all the same, and the teal light filled the room.
The laughter was what they heard first as the descended into the graveyard, deep and low and hungry, the two senshi, who had been girls they loved, presented in front of the assembled vampires.
Mina drew her sword, staring them both down, as Michiru drew the stake from her hip.
The battle began with speed, Haruka gliding quickly by them both, faster than she had ever been, cutting a line into Mina's shoulder.
"Nice technique." Mina grabbed at the wound. "Wish you could have done that earlier."
The low, booming laugh came again. "All the power of a vampire, and all the power of a senshi. Don't you see? I have my perfect soldiers, and very soon, you will be joining them."
"Technique's not that good," Mina adjusted her sword and pointed it, as Michiru deflected one of Rei's arrows narrowly, "Come on."
Every commander has these dark moments of panic, when one knows they are outdone. Rei and Haruka were too swift, too furious, too accurate, and soon it would be too late. Michiru and Mina would join them in this army of the undead. A cruel twisting of everything being a senshi had meant, here in one final battle.
She would go down fighting.
Suddenly, a lightning bolt crashed the tree next to Rei, sending her flying to the floor, and Mina whipped her head around to see the assembled senshi standing behind her, in whatever pidgen formation they could figure out without Mina's guidance, but welcomed all the same.
The battle turned in that moment-no matter the strength of Rei and Haruka's vampire forms, they could not outdo 6 other girls, as Usagi watched on, asking them just to subdue, not to kill, that she could heal them.
Mako considered this briefly, and then drove a stake into one of the vampire's hearts. There were shrieks, and fleeing, and soon it was simply Haruka and Rei, or whoever they might have been now, standing there, surrounded by the senshi.
Rei let out a high hiss, and Mina drew out her stake, her eyes focused on Rei, and lunged.
"No!" Usagi screamed and dove in front of her, and Mina barely had time to stay her hand, narrowly missing Usagi's shoulder. "Not Rei! I can heal her!"
"Get. Out. Of My. Way." Minako bared her teeth, the words a growl against her teeth.
"It's true, Sailor Moon, what she says," Michiru walked toward Haruka, "they are what they are now, and, there is no changing it. Sometimes, sacrifice is all we have. "
"Exactly." Mina nodded aggressively. "You don't have to watch, Usagi, but you have to get the fuck out of the way." She shook her head, and tried to be kind. 'We saw Rei's notes. It won't work."
Usagi bit her lip and stood up, looking back at Rei. "I'll save you, Rei. I'll do it." she lifted her rod to the sky, and called out with all her might. "MOON HEALING ESCALATION!"
Her pink glow filled the room, the light touching every corner of the dark stone gallery, flowing through and over everyone, the force of the beam straight at Rei, who curled into a ball against the magnificent force of her light of love. Usagi held tight as the rod wobbled in her hands, but she kept it trained, focusing all her energy on Rei.
The light dropped, and so did Rei, but when she looked up, the glimmer of anger and passion was back in her eyes.
"Rei!" She wrapped her arms tightly around Rei's body and held her close, still trembling from the fear of it all. "You're okay!"
Rei seemed not to know herself whether she should feel relief or anger or shame, or maybe all of those things, but simply stood and allowed herself to be hugged, the dawning humanity over body bringing a furious light back to it, and Mina felt herself draw a sigh of ultimate relief.
Haruka stood stock still, her nose twitching as if the girl and the vampire inside her were having a battle and she herself was the ring.
A strange look came over Michiru's face, which might have been joy, and even more terrifyingly, hope.
Mina ran over shook Usagi's shoulder desperately. "Haruka!"
Usagi nodded her approval, a smile of satisfaction already playing on her face, as she stood and drew the moon rod into the air in an arc almost too graceful for Usagi and somehow already half Serenity, and yelled out the words, aiming them directly at Haruka.
The light glowed and beat like Usagi's own heart, surrounding Haruka as it had Rei. The girls all watched Haruka was bathed in the glow, the sparkle of it surrounding her.
The cloud of light dispersed, and Haruka stood her place, looked up at the girls, and gave a sharp, evil grin.
There was a small gasp from a few of the Senshi, but Michiru simply gave a weak chuff of humorless laughter.
"Why didn't it work?" Usagi's voice trembled and wavered like moonlight on the water.
Michiru gave a weak smile. "You don't love her course." She advanced toward Haruka, "and I am no healer."
"I'll kill you." Haruka growled.
"Of this I have no doubt. I am weak, and will not fight you. I decided that." Michiru slipped the stake back into the loop at her hip, "You have always been strong, and fast. Much more than me, I would say. At least in the ways people notice. But, if you will permit me a moment of sentimentality, that was never my favorite thing about you. Or, I suppose, the body you inhabit."
Haruka regarded her cautiously.
"She was very dear, you know," Michiru paced about the room, all eyes locked on every movement, every ear tuned to the words she said, "Brave. She had the warmth of a gentle person who has spent most of her life trying to beat it out of herself." She looked up at the creature, who was Haruka, and who was a monster, "She was not beautiful to herself, but she was beautiful to me. She was beloved of these girls, though suppose in our current situation it could be argued not enough. I don't know if she knew that. But she loved them. She would protect them as the sisters the world never saw fit to give her."
The vampire took a step back, Haruka's eyebrows knitted in confusion, flipping back and forth between the mist and her own deep grey as Michiru drew closer. She gritted her teeth and held her sword tighter.
"This is the only saving I know." Michiru slipped into the steel embrace of her sword, and it hissed sickeningly as it slid into her belly. If it bothered her, you'd be forgiven for not knowing. She simply smiled and brought her hand to Haruka's cheek, and gazed up at her lovingly. "I know you would not want this, my love. I will not let them have what is most precious to you."
In a flash, like the wind Haruka used to be, Michiru plunged the end of the stake through her chest. " Your heart. They can't have that. It is mine, and I will reclaim it."
Haruka gave something between a shriek and gasp, and the mist fell away from her eyes, the rolling low clouds of the thunderstorm filling them once more, and she collapsed to the floor, Michiru sitting gracefully beside her, blood still seeping from her wound . Haruka moved her lips to try to speak, but nothing came.
"I love you too, my darling. Rest now."
Haruka's transformation fluttered off her like a flock of birds scattered by a small child, and she lay still.
Hotaru paused a moment, and then hurried over to Michiru's side. "I could-"
"Please don't. It is a fool's errand." She closed her eyes and nestled against Haruka's shoulder, pressing her forehead to Haruka's cold lips. "I am sorry this was all I could do."
It would be strange tableau, painted: Usagi crying, on her knees, Haruka, already gone, Michiru, going. Rei, with the question in her eyes of why fate had seen fit to save her. Mina, biting back a pain she felt no one would understand. Mako, unsure of who to comfort. Ami, unsure anyone could be comforted at all.
Pluto, wondering how she could have seen so many losses, in time, and still feel this one so fresh.
Michiru gave a sigh, and her transformation alighted, and the room was left quiet and still.
"I didn't love her enough." Usagi said, the smoke of her own snuffed candle carried away on the wind.
Haruka and Michiru, it whispered to Mina now. You had it wrong. Michiru and Haruka.
A sob, as Rei drew her arms back around Usagi, but her sorrow could not be touched.
"I didn't love Haruka enough."