I stared down at the invitation in my hands, surprised at my own blanketed,
unemotional response. When had I become so amazingly impassive, so disinterested, so
uncaring? And how long could I last like this before I found myself completely and totally
on my own, without another human being in my life?
Crumpling the silver-white paper, I lobbed it into the garbage can and moved on to
the next piece of mail in the pile.
Then again, what did it matter?
====================
"Her Ultimate Prize"
A Sailor Moon Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler
====================
Five or six years ago, it was announced that the planet Earth, the only known
life-supporting planet in the entire, endless universe, had reached a landmark of human
population. Six billion individual human beings, each unique in personality and DNA structure,
were wandering around the roughly twenty percent of our globe that was livable land, going
to jobs and raising families, roughing it or making it big, and all in the name of the
one human experience diverse enough to apply to everyone:
Love.
Looking down from the small apartment that I shared with my black, long-haired
tomcat, I watched the ant-like residents of Tokyo bustle about the streets, rushing from
place to place, busying themselves with their everyday activities, making due with things
the way they were. Charon purred contentedly in my lap, a furry hot pad stretched across
my stomach as I watched the humans below, oddly discontent with my normal afternoon
routine of silent, peaceful observing. Somehow, the invitation had ruptured my schedule,
torn my mind's photograph of how my day should be, and left me wrapped up in my thoughts,
very much alone in the ever-silent apartment.
It was not as though I was surprised. It was the sixth invitation of the sort I had
received in the last six years, and I had at least seen this one coming before it'd arrived
at my doorstep. Haruka, in a rather unexpected bolt of human concern, had actually called me
a few weeks earlier, gushing about the young man that her adopted daughter was planning on
marrying. I tried desperately, both then and now, to find some sort of supportive, motherly
joy for the young woman who I still considered a girl... But that feeling of shared elation
never came. I'm completely sure that Haruka had never expected that emotion from me in the
first place, which was the main reason why I didn't feel the least bit guilty for throwing
the wedding invitation away. Just as I hadn't felt guilty about throwing the other five
away.
The hardest had been the first, of course. Not hard because I wasn't happy for the
young couple; if there had ever been a couple I was truly happy for, it was Tsukino
Usagi and Chiba Mamoru. It was more just that I didn't know if I could take all the inherent
sweetness in their lives, the overwhelming adorable joy that just radiated around them. So
I had declined politely and buried myself in my work at the high school, utilizing my long-
standing procrastination in sorting the nursing files that I was supposed to keep tidy as a
perfect excuse to avoid attending. Usagi fought me, as stubborn as ever, but somehow I won.
Michiru's disappointment was perhaps the only thing I really regretted about my actions,
and even then...
Even then, I wasn't really sorry.
Kumada Yuuichiro and Hino Rei were the next happy couple to send me a pretty
invitation to what I can only assume was a beautiful ceremony. Rei-chan had always been a
graceful, intelligent young lady, and it pained me to avoid her phone calls for the weeks
after my regrets card had been "lost in the mail." When I finally did answer her call, I
assured her it was nothing personal, but that my budget was tight and I really couldn't
afford an appropriate outfit for such an occasion. And no, I would not let her - the blushing
bride-to-be - pay for it. It would be tacky, or so I claimed. I never really understood why I
developed such a natural avoidance to attending the wedding of a woman I was perhaps more
fond of than I was of even Usagi, but I rationalized that my budget really was tight, and
that I wouldn't have a particularly good time, anyway.
Besides, wasn't it rude to not bring a date when the invitation was addressed to
yourself and a guest?
I had never met Ryo Urawa when the woman he is now married to, Mizuno Ami, sent out
her wedding invitations. He had been mentioned a few times in the past as Ami's long-time
suitor, a resident of Kyoto who was, as the story told, nearly as bright as his girlfriend.
No one bothered to question me when I never responded to the invitation, though Michiru -
chosen as a bridesmaid over an extremely pregnant Usagi - pressed the matter of my avoidance
of a third wedding over dinner one night. I dodged the subject quietly, arguing that I felt
out of place at such events, and she refused to argue any further. What was the point of
arguing, after all? She did call later to tell me what a beautiful ceremony it had been, and
how delighted she was to have been a part of it. She wondered if I had bothered sending a
card, but I never answered the question.
We both knew the answer was a rather flat-out "no."
At least for Aino Minako's wedding, I had a valid excuse; her extravagant invitation
advertised an enormous ceremony that was to be held in England, where her ex-detective
fiancé was located. I'd just moved out of the small house that Haruka, Michiru, Hotaru, and
I had shared for the last four years, opting for my own warm little apartment in the city.
My reasoning was because I wanted to be closer to work, but both the adults I resided with
gave some indication that they expected it to be because I was tired of living with a couple
when I myself was single. I never bothered to tell them otherwise, though I asked them
kindly to express my regrets to Minako and her beau when they attended the wedding, and to
assure her that my reasoning really was because money was too tight. They assured me they
would, and I recycled the invitation with the morning newspaper the next day.
I never heard from Minako again, but I hadn't expected to, either.
Kino Makoto married Asanuma Itto in a rather bland ceremony, or so I heard tell after
the fact. I had gotten a silver-accented envelope a few months before the news of their
wedding but hadn't bothered opening it. Haruka, who had always been strangely fond of the
brunette in what I will always argue was a girlish crush, bothered me constantly for why I
would throw something like that away, not honestly believing when I told her I had mistaken
it for another pointless piece of junk mail. I hadn't honestly expected her to believe me,
anyway. There was no point in believing a lie of such messy proportions. I stopped trying
to make excuses, to come up with good reasons for why not. I just shrugged it off.
What was the point? Was there ever a point?
And now, the marriage of Tomoe Hotaru to a young man from her university class.
I sighed heavily, and the unexpected motion woke my cat from his blissful, feline slumber.
He glanced up at me through half-opened, yellow-green cat's eyes, yawning languidly.
Then, like a slip of black silk, he slid from my lap and slunk off, through the living room
and into the hallway, no doubt to find a warm - and motionless - bed to lie on.
I frowned as I watched him go, finding myself to be very much alone.
Over six billion people in the world, and I was the only one I knew who was alone.
I'd abandoned my school nurse gig to pick up simple secretarial work after my move into the
city, only to find that all my coworkers were either happily married or contentedly dating.
My boss actually had six children to call his own, the oldest being a first-year high school
student and the youngest still wearing diapers. He loved all of them with a furious passion,
and had long ago declared that each of their birthdays was to be an office holiday.
My withdrawal from society, or at least from the people I had once cared so much
about, seemed almost appropriate. It was peculiar to admit something so isolating, so
painful, so basely depressing, but it really was true. With Charon happily snoozing on my
comforter in my room, I tossed on my jacket and started on a walk, trudging my way through
the throngs of window-shoppers on my uptown street. How could one woman become so isolated
from everyone else? I had never worked to live a life on my own, and yet, here I was. Long
green hair ruffled and mussed by a late-fall wind as I strolled down the sidewalk, hands
in my coat pockets, face drawn into a frown.
How could one person live her whole life alone? And even if it wasn't her whole
life, how could any one person live even part of her life alone? What kind of life was that?
What kind of world was that?
My life had always been defined by battles and wars, by the past as it mingled with
the future, by the threads of time and fate as they wove together into a bright and vibrant
tapestry of life and love. But the battles were over, the wars lost and won, and all the
gods and generals had received their rewards, the spoils from the battle.
And then, there was the one forgotten soldier, left to the darkness around her,
forgotten.
Meiou Setsuna. One of six billion names in the world. Five syllables holding an
entire identity in their grasp. The street light changed to walk and I stepped out onto the
asphalt, my hard-soled shoes clacking against the pavement as I went. A man brushed
shoulders with me on one side, headed toward where I had come, while a school girl, no
doubt hurrying to get home on time, pushed around me in order to get ahead of the rest of
the people from our side of the street.
Is this who I am? A woman walking down the street, brushing shoulders with strangers,
thinking of her tomcat and the typing that she'd taken home in hopes of finishing up? Is this
the person I was meant to be, the person I will always be, the human who had won a war for
the "good guys" only to end up one of six billion, a statistic, another dot on the map?
Is this what I have fought my entire life for? Loneliness? Wedding invitations
coming from people who will never understand my pain? Friends who will never feel the despair
of knowing that they will wake up alone for the rest of their miserably immortal lives?
Is this it? Is this all there is to this world? Have I received all the love I can
have? Will there never be anything more?
Is this it? Is this all? Is this what I get for fighting so hard?
Well?
Is THIS the prize I've waited for?
===
Fin.
Author's note: Just a one-part Setsuna fic idea that came to me very late at night. I
couldn't help but wonder to myself how Setsuna feels about her immortality and the seeming
lack of love she gets from anyone else. It always seems to me that Setsuna is very isolated,
even with the other outers around, and that she's excluded from the on-going bond that
really has defined the rest of the senshi. Especially in the manga continuity, though I have
to admit that I have not read all of the manga yet.
I have combined bits and pieces of the manga and anime to make this fit, however. In the
manga, Yuuichiro and Urawa do not exist, but I needed them in the storyline in order to
make Rei and Ami have male counterparts. The "ex-detective" of Minako's is Alan from the
Sailor V storyline, if you know anything about that; we're pretending that they somehow
met again, okay? I realize this is a continuity issue, but I wanted to make the concept
work. Beyond those three facts, this is a manga story, and is to be considered as such.
This is also a little exercise in seeing if I can write Setsuna. I have a lofty goal of
writing a long, multi-part fic for each of the senshi, and Setsuna's is one of the ones
I'm really starting to put together in my head. Rei's, of course, is finished ("Inori" being
her fic), and I'm currently in progress on the Michiru one. Which leaves me with, you know,
a trillion fics to write, but we're going to overlook my stupidity here.
Special thanks to Yumeko, my ever-wonderful beta reader (not writer). ^^
June 9, 2003.
2:51 a.m.
unemotional response. When had I become so amazingly impassive, so disinterested, so
uncaring? And how long could I last like this before I found myself completely and totally
on my own, without another human being in my life?
Crumpling the silver-white paper, I lobbed it into the garbage can and moved on to
the next piece of mail in the pile.
Then again, what did it matter?
====================
"Her Ultimate Prize"
A Sailor Moon Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler
====================
Five or six years ago, it was announced that the planet Earth, the only known
life-supporting planet in the entire, endless universe, had reached a landmark of human
population. Six billion individual human beings, each unique in personality and DNA structure,
were wandering around the roughly twenty percent of our globe that was livable land, going
to jobs and raising families, roughing it or making it big, and all in the name of the
one human experience diverse enough to apply to everyone:
Love.
Looking down from the small apartment that I shared with my black, long-haired
tomcat, I watched the ant-like residents of Tokyo bustle about the streets, rushing from
place to place, busying themselves with their everyday activities, making due with things
the way they were. Charon purred contentedly in my lap, a furry hot pad stretched across
my stomach as I watched the humans below, oddly discontent with my normal afternoon
routine of silent, peaceful observing. Somehow, the invitation had ruptured my schedule,
torn my mind's photograph of how my day should be, and left me wrapped up in my thoughts,
very much alone in the ever-silent apartment.
It was not as though I was surprised. It was the sixth invitation of the sort I had
received in the last six years, and I had at least seen this one coming before it'd arrived
at my doorstep. Haruka, in a rather unexpected bolt of human concern, had actually called me
a few weeks earlier, gushing about the young man that her adopted daughter was planning on
marrying. I tried desperately, both then and now, to find some sort of supportive, motherly
joy for the young woman who I still considered a girl... But that feeling of shared elation
never came. I'm completely sure that Haruka had never expected that emotion from me in the
first place, which was the main reason why I didn't feel the least bit guilty for throwing
the wedding invitation away. Just as I hadn't felt guilty about throwing the other five
away.
The hardest had been the first, of course. Not hard because I wasn't happy for the
young couple; if there had ever been a couple I was truly happy for, it was Tsukino
Usagi and Chiba Mamoru. It was more just that I didn't know if I could take all the inherent
sweetness in their lives, the overwhelming adorable joy that just radiated around them. So
I had declined politely and buried myself in my work at the high school, utilizing my long-
standing procrastination in sorting the nursing files that I was supposed to keep tidy as a
perfect excuse to avoid attending. Usagi fought me, as stubborn as ever, but somehow I won.
Michiru's disappointment was perhaps the only thing I really regretted about my actions,
and even then...
Even then, I wasn't really sorry.
Kumada Yuuichiro and Hino Rei were the next happy couple to send me a pretty
invitation to what I can only assume was a beautiful ceremony. Rei-chan had always been a
graceful, intelligent young lady, and it pained me to avoid her phone calls for the weeks
after my regrets card had been "lost in the mail." When I finally did answer her call, I
assured her it was nothing personal, but that my budget was tight and I really couldn't
afford an appropriate outfit for such an occasion. And no, I would not let her - the blushing
bride-to-be - pay for it. It would be tacky, or so I claimed. I never really understood why I
developed such a natural avoidance to attending the wedding of a woman I was perhaps more
fond of than I was of even Usagi, but I rationalized that my budget really was tight, and
that I wouldn't have a particularly good time, anyway.
Besides, wasn't it rude to not bring a date when the invitation was addressed to
yourself and a guest?
I had never met Ryo Urawa when the woman he is now married to, Mizuno Ami, sent out
her wedding invitations. He had been mentioned a few times in the past as Ami's long-time
suitor, a resident of Kyoto who was, as the story told, nearly as bright as his girlfriend.
No one bothered to question me when I never responded to the invitation, though Michiru -
chosen as a bridesmaid over an extremely pregnant Usagi - pressed the matter of my avoidance
of a third wedding over dinner one night. I dodged the subject quietly, arguing that I felt
out of place at such events, and she refused to argue any further. What was the point of
arguing, after all? She did call later to tell me what a beautiful ceremony it had been, and
how delighted she was to have been a part of it. She wondered if I had bothered sending a
card, but I never answered the question.
We both knew the answer was a rather flat-out "no."
At least for Aino Minako's wedding, I had a valid excuse; her extravagant invitation
advertised an enormous ceremony that was to be held in England, where her ex-detective
fiancé was located. I'd just moved out of the small house that Haruka, Michiru, Hotaru, and
I had shared for the last four years, opting for my own warm little apartment in the city.
My reasoning was because I wanted to be closer to work, but both the adults I resided with
gave some indication that they expected it to be because I was tired of living with a couple
when I myself was single. I never bothered to tell them otherwise, though I asked them
kindly to express my regrets to Minako and her beau when they attended the wedding, and to
assure her that my reasoning really was because money was too tight. They assured me they
would, and I recycled the invitation with the morning newspaper the next day.
I never heard from Minako again, but I hadn't expected to, either.
Kino Makoto married Asanuma Itto in a rather bland ceremony, or so I heard tell after
the fact. I had gotten a silver-accented envelope a few months before the news of their
wedding but hadn't bothered opening it. Haruka, who had always been strangely fond of the
brunette in what I will always argue was a girlish crush, bothered me constantly for why I
would throw something like that away, not honestly believing when I told her I had mistaken
it for another pointless piece of junk mail. I hadn't honestly expected her to believe me,
anyway. There was no point in believing a lie of such messy proportions. I stopped trying
to make excuses, to come up with good reasons for why not. I just shrugged it off.
What was the point? Was there ever a point?
And now, the marriage of Tomoe Hotaru to a young man from her university class.
I sighed heavily, and the unexpected motion woke my cat from his blissful, feline slumber.
He glanced up at me through half-opened, yellow-green cat's eyes, yawning languidly.
Then, like a slip of black silk, he slid from my lap and slunk off, through the living room
and into the hallway, no doubt to find a warm - and motionless - bed to lie on.
I frowned as I watched him go, finding myself to be very much alone.
Over six billion people in the world, and I was the only one I knew who was alone.
I'd abandoned my school nurse gig to pick up simple secretarial work after my move into the
city, only to find that all my coworkers were either happily married or contentedly dating.
My boss actually had six children to call his own, the oldest being a first-year high school
student and the youngest still wearing diapers. He loved all of them with a furious passion,
and had long ago declared that each of their birthdays was to be an office holiday.
My withdrawal from society, or at least from the people I had once cared so much
about, seemed almost appropriate. It was peculiar to admit something so isolating, so
painful, so basely depressing, but it really was true. With Charon happily snoozing on my
comforter in my room, I tossed on my jacket and started on a walk, trudging my way through
the throngs of window-shoppers on my uptown street. How could one woman become so isolated
from everyone else? I had never worked to live a life on my own, and yet, here I was. Long
green hair ruffled and mussed by a late-fall wind as I strolled down the sidewalk, hands
in my coat pockets, face drawn into a frown.
How could one person live her whole life alone? And even if it wasn't her whole
life, how could any one person live even part of her life alone? What kind of life was that?
What kind of world was that?
My life had always been defined by battles and wars, by the past as it mingled with
the future, by the threads of time and fate as they wove together into a bright and vibrant
tapestry of life and love. But the battles were over, the wars lost and won, and all the
gods and generals had received their rewards, the spoils from the battle.
And then, there was the one forgotten soldier, left to the darkness around her,
forgotten.
Meiou Setsuna. One of six billion names in the world. Five syllables holding an
entire identity in their grasp. The street light changed to walk and I stepped out onto the
asphalt, my hard-soled shoes clacking against the pavement as I went. A man brushed
shoulders with me on one side, headed toward where I had come, while a school girl, no
doubt hurrying to get home on time, pushed around me in order to get ahead of the rest of
the people from our side of the street.
Is this who I am? A woman walking down the street, brushing shoulders with strangers,
thinking of her tomcat and the typing that she'd taken home in hopes of finishing up? Is this
the person I was meant to be, the person I will always be, the human who had won a war for
the "good guys" only to end up one of six billion, a statistic, another dot on the map?
Is this what I have fought my entire life for? Loneliness? Wedding invitations
coming from people who will never understand my pain? Friends who will never feel the despair
of knowing that they will wake up alone for the rest of their miserably immortal lives?
Is this it? Is this all there is to this world? Have I received all the love I can
have? Will there never be anything more?
Is this it? Is this all? Is this what I get for fighting so hard?
Well?
Is THIS the prize I've waited for?
===
Fin.
Author's note: Just a one-part Setsuna fic idea that came to me very late at night. I
couldn't help but wonder to myself how Setsuna feels about her immortality and the seeming
lack of love she gets from anyone else. It always seems to me that Setsuna is very isolated,
even with the other outers around, and that she's excluded from the on-going bond that
really has defined the rest of the senshi. Especially in the manga continuity, though I have
to admit that I have not read all of the manga yet.
I have combined bits and pieces of the manga and anime to make this fit, however. In the
manga, Yuuichiro and Urawa do not exist, but I needed them in the storyline in order to
make Rei and Ami have male counterparts. The "ex-detective" of Minako's is Alan from the
Sailor V storyline, if you know anything about that; we're pretending that they somehow
met again, okay? I realize this is a continuity issue, but I wanted to make the concept
work. Beyond those three facts, this is a manga story, and is to be considered as such.
This is also a little exercise in seeing if I can write Setsuna. I have a lofty goal of
writing a long, multi-part fic for each of the senshi, and Setsuna's is one of the ones
I'm really starting to put together in my head. Rei's, of course, is finished ("Inori" being
her fic), and I'm currently in progress on the Michiru one. Which leaves me with, you know,
a trillion fics to write, but we're going to overlook my stupidity here.
Special thanks to Yumeko, my ever-wonderful beta reader (not writer). ^^
June 9, 2003.
2:51 a.m.