They had been at this for months. Much less the past six days had been going nonstop with fighting the youma. The closer they seemed to be getting to putting an end to it all, the worse life seemed to become. It was bad enough to be up at five in the morning to get ready and do chores about the shrine before a shower and then heading to class. Then it was suffering through her classes and the stares some of her classmates still gave her to this day. After that, it was more shrine work, followed by a night of fighting youma, and, if she was lucky, five hours of sleep.
So by day seven of this treatment, Hino Rei was done with it all. She had never asked for any of this to be bestowed upon her. She was never asked or given a choice if she wanted to take this path. Why did it all have to be so dictated? Was she so bound by this damned destiny that she couldn't determine the way her own life was meant to go?
Her eyes traced over to the girls sitting a bit away from her in the park. It was getting later into the day and they were all ready to go fight another battle this day, except for Rei. She had plans to sit right where she was or maybe go home and get her homework done early for once since this catastrophe started. They were all acting like nothing was wrong in the world, laughing it up. Were they not even taking the fights seriously when the world was supposed to be at risk?
Then she focused on Usagi and her eyes narrowed just the slightest bit. What right did she have to be this stupid princess that Rei was supposed to give her life for? She had already done it once at D-point and that had been so painful and awful. Rei would never admit to it, but she had visions reliving it and could feel the actual pain. And then she had been spared after that incident to live as a normal girl but Usagi had brought her back as Sailor Mars. She resented her for it. Her life had been hell enough growing up. She had enough death in her life.
Then right on cue, here came Luna and Artemis running up, dropping some spiel about how there's danger and they needed to move stat. The girls all got up and transformed, except for Rei. When they moved to leave, the realized Rei hadn't so much as stood up.
"Rei? What's wrong?" Ami was, of course, concerned that there was something wrong with her. She was perhaps the most innocent of the group.
"Nothing."
"Well c'mon. You heard the news, there's a youma a few blocks down." Makoto was trying to encourage her, but it wasn't going to work. Not today.
"I'm not going."
"Excuse me." This time it was Minako and that tone came across pretty harsh.
"Pretty sure I didn't fucking stutter." Rei turned her glare to Minako, getting one back in return.
"…You guys can handle this." Minako turned to look at the others, trying to send them on their way.
"But…" Usagi looked between the two, clearly uncomfortable and aware it was going to be ugly. Rei had already had an issue with Minako being the leader despite being the last one to show up.
"Just go." Rei waved her hand and with some coaxing from Ami and Makoto, they left with Usagi.
"So just what the hell is your problem? What stick is up your ass that you're too high and mighty to help out the team?"
"What's the entire point of it all? We're all going to die one day, one way or another. That's clearly already happened. Outside of that, why should I go and die for someone so stupid that they can't take two steps out of the way of danger." Rei stood up, refusing to let Minako stand above her like she was in control of the conversation.
"Because that's your job. That was your job back in the Silver Millennium, and that's your damn job today. And you're going to do that job, whether you like it or not."
"I don't get PAID for this job. I didn't get asked if I even wanted this stupid job! My life is hectic enough without the need of constant fighting which mind you, can take us HOURS because none of you are coordinated enough to—"
"None of US? How about none of you! Do you realize how many times you've almost set someone else on fire? Or a building? Or how about a whole fucking forest!" Minako stepped forward, right into Rei's personal space, letting her transformation go. "None of you have the coordination you should have by this point! And you being a total dick like this is never going to get anyone there!"
"What the fuck do you know!? What makes you so righteous and know it all? As I recall it, I'm always the one having to step up and try and stop Usagi from dying! I did it at D-point TWICE! I did it back then too!" Rei shoved Minako back, her patience far beyond its limits.
"What do I know?" Minako grabbed Rei by her shirt and shoved her hard against a tree, earning a grunt as a responding sound. "I know what it's like to have to fight on your own. I know what it's like when thousands of lives are the ones at stake. I fought long before any of you even knew what the hell was going on in our world. I was around fighting these creatures by myself, in a foreign country, with no fucking help and a cat with bad advice guiding me. Lying to me."
"Good fucking job. You saved some lives just like we do. It doesn't matter if it's one person, or five in that case. You're down one so you can still do it with just four of you. I'm sick and tired of the fighting. My life is hellish enough without the constant worries of when I'll be home, how hurt someone is, or someone else dying. I've had enough death." Rei tried to shove Minako off, but lacked the strength to even fight that and had to grind her teeth. "Now let me go."
"No. You think YOU had enough death? Yes, I understand you lost your mother. I can respect that even. I feel for you. But you don't know anything about actual death."
"I was at her bed side when she died, you bitch!" That was enough to push Rei over the edge. She raised her fist and slammed it right into Minako's mouth, which made her let go and take two steps back. There was a small amount of guilt when Rei saw how she had split her lip open and the blood slide down her chin.
However, Minako raised her head just fine, returning her look with one that held so much pain. So much so that Rei had never seen it before. "I agreed that you lost her and that it was hard. But there's a distinct difference in the death you faced and the death I faced." She stepped forward right back into Rei's face and let her get a good look at her eyes. "The difference? Mine was murder."
Rei flinched at that and her brain had trouble processing the words. "What?"
"No one else seems to realize it, but Usagi is the ONLY one with the ability and power to heal people from youma back to normal beings. It's one thing when we're facing a fully-fledged, created youma. I didn't have Usagi in London, now did I?"
It takes a few minutes for two and two to come together and Rei's eyes widen. That had meant that Minako was…
"You killed them."
"What choice did I have? It was kill one person and save thousands…or kill every single one of them. I didn't know it at first. I saw the missing posters at school sometimes. Or the news reports with the families begging for their husband, wife, child, whoever to come home. It was much later I made the connection right before I came back to Japan as Sailor V. So yes, even here, I was having to remove people in order to make the world a safer place. So don't sit here…" Rei watched as Minako's eyes began to water up. "Don't sit here and tell me you know a fucking thing about death! About why you don't want to protect someone who can prevent anyone else from getting blood on their fucking hands and be expected to live a normal teenage life!"
Everything in Rei's world was suddenly tilted sideways. She thought she knew Minako, they had always been fairly close since the team came together, but this? This was unexpected. How many times had Minako made some randomly dumb joke or one liner to laugh when an uncomfortable situation came up? How much of a burden was she carrying that Rei didn't know about?
It was then Rei realized she had only really been thinking of herself. She wasn't the only one out fighting the youma every day. She wasn't the only one who had died at D-point and brought back. Usagi had tried to fight on her own before bringing them all back to fight with her. Then the other girls had lives too.
Ami was trying to become a doctor and was even managing a cram school alongside fighting the monsters. Makoto was living on her own, both her parents gone, but continued to fight on her own time when she wasn't with Ami. Even Usagi didn't seem to be complaining nearly as much about the fighting that had been occurring, just that she was tired. Then Minako…What did she actually know about her? She knew nothing of her parents, really. Minako never talked about her family. She never actually talked about London.
"Mina…"
"Just…don't. I don't need your stupid sympathy." Finally, Minako stepped back, wiping the blood off her mouth and her sleeve at her eyes to stop the tears from falling. "Pretend you didn't hear any of that. Forget it entirely."
"You expect me to just forget all of that?"
"Yes. That's an order."
Rei sagged against the tree, wincing a little. She had been entirely selfish and in the back of her mind she could almost hear her mother scolding her and had to shut her eyes to fight back the vision trying to force its way into her head. She was so tired of them. The more exhausted she was, the more they seemed to appear given she lacked a serious mental stability to keep a barrier up. It was getting hard to tell which were actual dangers and which were visions of past or present.
"Rei?"
Rei blinked, opening her eyes. When did she get on the ground?
"Thank god, you scared the hell out of me. One moment you're leaned against the tree and then you suddenly went down without warning. You were out for like ten solid minutes."
"What?" Rei blinked a few more times, trying to ignore the stars in her vision. Had she seriously blacked out?
"I managed to catch you before you cracked your head open on anything. What happened?" Minako appeared to be very concerned for her, which felt nice.
"I…I don't know." Rei brought her arm up over to cover her eyes for a minute. Suddenly Minako was yanking her arm away and pushing her sleeve up.
"What the fuck?"
Rei looked over and spotted the cut she had gotten in a fight two days ago on her upper arm that her sleeve had been able to hide until now and she cut her eyes away.
"What the hell happened? This should have healed over by now." Minako paused when she registered something else occurring. "Your back!" She fought with Rei before getting her moved enough to see a giant bruise on her back and god she'd just slammed her into a tree.
"Can you let me go now? This feels weird as hell…" Rei muttered, pulling herself free and her shirt back down.
"Why didn't you say something!? This is serious Rei!"
"Because I already knew what was causing it and it was stupid to say anything because it was going to create a whole situation I didn't want to deal with."
"So what happened?"
"…I didn't want to be a senshi anymore, so my body adapted to that train of thought. When your body adapts, well, you lose those healing powers too." Rei couldn't make eye contact at this point. She'd just admitted she had quit being a senshi at least three days ago.
"Rei…" Minako's voice was so sad and that made it harder to not look at her. "Why..why couldn't you just talk to me about this instead of letting it escalate to what it did today?"
"Yeah. That would have gone just as well. 'By the way, I'm done being a senshi by have a nice life.' C'mon Mina. It already sounds stupid as is. I expected you to ditch me here after I gave up my duties and to never speak to me again."
"You..You think I'd stop talking to you?"
"Well yeah. Disregarding duty pretty much bans me—" Suddenly Minako's hand was over her mouth and she looked up at her finally.
"That doesn't make you not a friend, Rei. Sure. I'd still call you a traitor for betraying the Princess and your duty, but you're still a friend. None of us deserve the lives we had before we met. I'm not stupid, I watched you all for a while. I watched people make fun of you at school and the temple and everything."
"You fucking stalked me!?" Rei turned red in the face from embarrassment at that. What else did she know? "What else do you know about me you shouldn't know?"
"Nothing I haven't learned since I grouped up with you guys. I was only watching for a few short minutes over a few days. That's it. Then it was onto the next person. I had to know what I was dealing with as a person, not just a scout, before we worked together. What connected us all."
Sighing, Rei finally sat up, wincing at the pain in her back. Damn, how hard had Mina slammed her into the tree. "Don't you have a fight to be at?"
"They finished while you were blacked out. They swung by, but I told them you were just exhausted and fell asleep is all. They don't know anything. I'm not…" There was a pause as she searched for the proper words. "I don't like to spill secrets…"
Rei was silent for several long moments, mulling over what she had learned for the day. "Because of Sailor V."
"Partially. And if you tell anyone that, I swear to god I will make your life an actual living hell. I have enough guilt with it I don't need others looking at me different like you will."
"Excuse me?" Rei snapped her head to look at Minako. She knew she had murdered all those people that were youma, but it was as Minako had said. It was one or it was all. Then she thought on it a touch longer. Most people would have seen that as a different person and distanced themselves from the so-called murderer.
"Just…forget it." Minako sighed and stood up, looking away. "If…If you don't want to be a scout, then fine. I'm not going to ban you or anything like that or take your transformation stick or your communicator. I can't deny you what you want. We won't be able to tell you anything from here on out about any missions, any dangers, anything. I don't expect you to tell me about any visions you have either."
"Just like that?"
"Yeah. Congratulations, you're now just Hino Rei. Priestess as the Hikawa Shrine and school girl at the TA all-girls school Christian Private Academy." The words lacked any luster. It was cut clear that Minako didn't like how they tasted in her mouth.
Rei didn't like how they tasted either when she mulled them over in her head. She would remain friends, but they would have to act differently around her. Move their meetings somewhere else that wasn't the shrine. Less study sessions. Rei would continue to have her visions regardless. She looked down at her hands and frowned. Deep down, Mars was an actual part of her. Not just in a way that she fought as Mars, but in a way, that made them one in the same person with two different personalities. She had flash backs of the Silver Millennium and had seen how much harsher that Mars had been. Cold. Calculated. Unless she was around…
Ah fuck. Any time she was around Minako it was what always changed plans. Then and now. She was the right-hand man, the second in command should something happen. No one else on the team could really fill that role properly. Perhaps Ami at most, but she was their tactician. Makoto believed too much in going in with the guns blazing. And Usagi was the Princess herself.
"Mina."
"Hm?"
"…I'm rather selfish, aren't I?"
"No. I don't think so. Why do you say that?" Minako moved to sit back down next to her. She could tell Rei was having a struggle with having this kind of personal conversation. Attachment was very hard for Rei after her Mother's death.
"…You actually killed people and still kept going. Ami finds time to fit in a cram school with everything else. Makoto manages on her own which has to be lonely at times. Usagi deals with being this princess that's a fix it all."
"Yeah so? Rei, you have your own fit too, that doesn't make you selfish, wanting to quit. Stupid yeah. But I know what your schedule is like, and I know this has been really pushing you into your limits. I realized it three days again when you fell asleep at an actual study session."
"You noticed that!?" Rei was mortified. She never fell asleep at a session, but had succeeded in doing it with what she thought was no one noticing.
"Yeah. But you didn't realize that for the past three days, your morning chores were less. I got up SUPER early to go to the shrine to sweep the stairs and clean the stuff up from over night."
To say Rei was dumbfounded would be the understatement of the century. Minako didn't do early mornings. And if she was up before Rei…now that she mentioned it, she did remark yesterday about how few leaves were out and she had gained an extra thirty minutes of sleeping in over it.
"…Why…I don't…"
"Because I notice things and as a leader, it's my duty to help out. God it fucking sucks being up before the sun to do some chores, but it helps. Then Usually after the fights I convince Ami to go with Makoto for buddy time and so Makoto can get in extra studying while Ami also studies. Usagi just goes with Mamoru out for food most times."
"But that doesn't do anything for you…"
"It doesn't have to. Just helping my team out is enough. But that also means I need you guys to talk to me when something is wrong or bothering you. I want situations fixed before they reach a level like today did. I'd have told you to take a day or two off from the fights and catch back up with no problem. If it was a serious issue, we would have contacted you."
Guilt was an emotion Rei was quickly becoming acquainted with today and she was not enjoying it. Speaking to others was something very hard for her with how closed off she was with everyone in her life up until this point.
"At D-point."
"D-Point?" Minako raised her eye brows at Rei with the sudden topic change.
"Mm. I was the last one left standing to protect Usagi. We all sort of knew we were going to die that day, just not how. Every time one of you went down, it was harder for me to go on too. Especially after you went down so quickly. So when it came to knowing two of the DD girls were still alive, I knew I was going to have to fight with everything I had and more." Rei leaned back against the tree, looking down at her shoes. "The second fire soul I did took more than what I had and it was painful. I could actually uhm…I could feel everything in my body dying and failing. I don't really remember what I said to Usagi. I don't remember closing my eyes. Just all the pain."
"Christ, Rei…"
"So I thought, was it worth feeling that intense pain again for Usagi? Some dimwit idiot who can't get a grasp on you can't fix everything by talking. Because that's what she always tries to do and it never works. I always try to count how long this life has left. I wonder will I be brought back this next time. Usagi had to reset the entire world backwards for us to come back. And even then we weren't spared. It makes me wonder if I even quit, would it stop anything from happening."
"You mean destiny, don't you?" Minako frowned. She knew it was a word Rei had hated for a long time.
"Yeah. How predetermined are our own lives? What choices do we make that are our own and not one dictated by this path we're set to follow? If destiny determined we were all due to die with these battles, would I still die too? Would it be the same way? Would it be as Mars or as Rei? Would I even come back if I ignored it all?"
"Hey…Rei."
"Hm?" Rei tilted her head to look at Minako. They both were apparently pretty tired.
"I'd be sad if you didn't come back…I uh…" Suddenly Minako was red in the face and that served to confuse Rei. "I really like you."
"I mean, I like you too Mina."
"No I uhm…I REALLY like you. Like like you."
After the two seconds it took for the words to register, Rei was redder than Minako was. "I'm sorry, what?"
"So if you quit, I'd have to stop doing that because I can't be with someone that doesn't understand my disappearing all the time or coming home beat up. Or just being gone one day and back the next week, you know?"
Rei chocked on her words. "Are you asking me out!?"
"Yeah." Minako shrugged and gave her a thousand watt smile.
Immediately, Rei smacked her on the shoulder and stood up. "Can you try again when we AREN'T discussing life and death as senshi!?"
"So that's not a no!" Minako grinned up at her.
"I didn't say yes either. God, go home Minako! It's late." Turning, Rei took off towards the Shrine, her heart hammering in her chest. She knew she liked Minako, had feelings that were more than friendship there, but god Minako was returning them? Suddenly the girl was beside her. "I said go home."
"Except it's supposed to be a sleepover at the shrine tonight with the girls! They're already there." Minako linked her arms with Rei, who groaned. "Don't worry, you don't have to answer now or today or this century. Or you can say no, Rei. Nothing dictates your choice in this one but you."
"Can you at least give me a week here? I'm hella tired, I'm hungry, and I hurt."
"One of those is on you. But sure. Now, to the shrine!"
With that, Minako pulled Rei towards it, rambling on about anything and everything. Rei realized she never officially said she had rejoined the scouts, but she had never quit either. Only Minako could convince her to stay about like this and she couldn't stop the small smile on her face. Just once, it was nice to feel the need to be around someone because they wanted you there for who you were. Not because you had some sixth sense. Not because you could have visions. And not because you were good at archery. Only Aino Minako could ever make someone feel that way.
One week to answer. One week to determine her own destiny this time. Maybe all of destiny wasn't so bad after all.