Note: Written for cxxhey's Tumblr Halloween Fic Party.
There's a place she goes to sometimes.
It's dark, except for when it isn't - but she prefers not to think about those times. Those times hurt.
It's the dark of a great undersea trench, where not even the most persistent rays of sunlight can reach. She can never tell if her eyes are open or if she's closed them in a futile attempt to shut out everything that surrounds her. There is always movement, something circling her and brushing against her, cold but feather-light, sending shivers down her spine.
It's quiet, too, except for when it isn't – but those are her favourite times. It starts out so deep she can't hear it as much as feel the tremor in her belly, but slowly and surely other tones, other voices join in, until the noise is overwhelming. When she opens her mouth – to scream, or to join in, or both, she is never quite sure – water rushes in, but she doesn't choke or drown. She knows, without knowing how she does, that the sea would never let her go.
And always, always, there are eyes on her, a thousand gazes boring holes in her that feel as if they can see through her and into her, no matter how she tries to hide. She doesn't know what they want with her, why they keep calling her back there, and why they sometimes stay with her during her waking hours, whispering incomprehensible things in the back of her mind while she glides effortlessly through school assignments and violin practice and etiquette lessons.
Eventually, she always snaps out of it and back into what is presumably reality, but which feels a lot like a blurry image seen through a foot or two of clear water, a second-hand, muffled experience. She yearns for the clarity of the darkness those first few minutes afterwards, but she doesn't know how to go back.
"Michiru, dear, why don't you go fetch your violin and play us all your newest piece?"
"Yes, mother."
She plays, and the guests are enthralled and eager to offer fake smiles and meaningless praise to her parents – they always are, of course, but with all the profound depth of a sidewalk puddle on a rainy day they are her least challenging audience.
She likes to think, sometimes, while she plays for them, how easily she could lead them out into the surf to drown, how blindly they would follow her if she but wished.
She puts the thought away.
—
Then, years later, the dreams abruptly change, and she sees the City for the first time in her life. She wants to turn away from the hulking, towering sight of it, and run back into the sea from which it rose, but her legs refuse to obey, and instead carry her forwards. Her bare feet slip over the slimy green stone jutting out at impossible angles that hurt to look at, and she wants to close her eyes to escape the sheer ancient wrongness of everything around her - but she can't, and her scream is stuck in her throat, and she wishes she could will herself to die. She feels like she is being drained and hollowed out, bit by bit, but still going forwards, ever-moving, until a sudden wave rushes through her, ending in head-splitting pain that causes her to lose consciousness.
When she wakes up, there is a symbol flaring brightly on her forehead - so brightly it feels like it's searing into her skull, while eerily illuminating her entire bedroom with pale aquamarine light – no small feat, considering its generous size. She clamps a hand over it, leaving tiny ribbons of light slipping out between her clenched fingers, and struggles out of bed, stumbling to her private bathroom like a drunk.
The light is somewhat faded by the time she reaches the mirror cabinet, but the symbol is still clearly there – a strange, three-pronged thing she doesn't recognise. Faced with her reflection, she notices with some surprise the blood dripping from her nose and ruining her pale blue nightgown. In its confused, overloaded, and half-awake state her mind decides to cling to what it knows, so she grabs a tissue to dab at the blood with, and manages to wonder briefly about concealing the glowing thing on her forehead with make-up and how well that would hold up under the heat of stage lighting. Just as she is about to start rummaging around her collection of cosmetics, the symbol blinks out of existence, and she is left wondering if she will ever manage to convince herself it had never been there in the first place.
There's some hours left till dawn, but going back to sleep is the furthest thing from her mind. She tries to paint, then, to get the images out of her head, but she cannot possibly convey on canvass the sheer incomprehensibility of what she's seen. What little she does manage is such a swirling mess of hideous and disturbing, she quickly splatters paint over hours of dedicated work just to be rid of it. She wonders what would happen if someone saw – what they would do with her, the vaunted painting prodigy, if confronted with what haunts her - and a gallery showing seems very, very unlikely to be the answer.
That very evening, after what was to be the first of her many concerts with an orchestra, a creature that belongs more to that other world than this one rips through everything she thought she knew of reality, and her life is changed forever in a burst of aquamarine light and seawater.
—
It isn't stopping.
It always stopped, before. Defeat the monster, or whatever it was, and the seas would quiet down again, like her own private alarm system, finally turned off. An always too brief moment of rest before another threat came along – but now, it seems, she is to be denied even that scrap of comfort.
It's been days since the last attack – the victim, a middle-aged baker, seemingly well on his way to recovery – but the merciless hammering in her head refuses to cease. It's directionless, and pointless, and she knows with a certainty she can't readily justify that there is something out there, something large, and looming, and evil, but it is no monster she could ever fight.
The pool doesn't help – not even diving under and holding her breath until she feels dizzy, submerged in her favourite sanctuary. A trip to the beach only makes it worse, the waves outside clashing with the waves in her, making her fear she's about to collapse.
She locks herself in her room and tries transforming, hoping it would somehow bring relief, but the only effect it has is to make her feel wrong – like an intruder in her own life. In a dainty bedroom, surrounded by the accoutrements of a young girl's life – this is not where Neptune belongs. Neptune is something else - a weapon, perhaps, or some other part of herself she'd rather not be so regularly confronted with. She catches sight of herself in the reflective top of her jewellery box and drops the transformation immediately, like she'd been burned.
The waves rush on, seeming to drown out her own breathing, and she doesn't know how to fight back.
She feels like the strings of her violin when she tunes it wrong, wound too tightly, tremoring wildly at the slightest touch, just about to snap.
The feeling abruptly changes one day after weeks of what feels like torture, and now instead of crushing her it seems to be about to burst out of her - whatever it is, and whatever it is it wants. She grits her teeth and keeps it confined behind a dam built out of her own resolve. She knows she cannot allow it to escape and get its grip on her, just as surely as she knows that there is no dam in the world that can hold back the ocean for long.
It slithers out, sometimes, bits of it – a cold, damp caress of something ancient and dead against her consciousness. She beats it back with ever-increasing effort and feels like crying as her stomach roils in sick disgust.
The dam is weakening daily, the final confrontation inevitable. A battle she knows she cannot possibly win, small and alone against something so unspeakably immense.
Until…
There is a girl. She is beautiful, and fast, and free, and seems to have a radiance about her that feels almost holy, with how it melts away the dark mires in Michiru's mind, carried on a fresh, healthy breeze.
She gazes at the runners on the school track, clutching her sketchbook in nervous, trembling hands, and her head suddenly feels lighter than it has in years.
It is finally quiet, and the dam holds.
—
It is dark, and cold, and deep, but the pressure doesn't crush her and the water doesn't choke her.
There are eyes on her, but she is used to that – all her life she's been gazed at and marvelled at and showcased, and this, she insists to herself, feels no different than an unfriendly crowd before a concert. She's always won them over, before.
The movement slithers endlessly around her and the rumbling starts up, and it is all familiar - but this time she doesn't much feel like staying to see what they have in store for her next.
She wakes up in the warm circle of loving arms, and knows that her time has finally run out.
There was the Calamity, and the Great Freeze, and then there was Crystal Tokyo and the long-promised peace. She's died and returned from death, faced things that terrify her far more than her own destruction, and emerged victorious, but most of all she's loved and been loved in return.
Getting up quietly, she grabs her Mirror, and places a gentle kiss on Haruka's forehead before heading outside to the shore. She will tear down the dam herself and set the stage for the long-postponed but ultimately inevitable final conflict.
She faces a thing that is terrifying, and vast, and unknowable - but she herself is much bigger now.