if you search the recesses of your mind you might have a fuzzy memory of this fic from a long time ago
so
here it is what?
what
ok
It had been over a thousand years since Neo-Queen Serenity, then called Tsukino Usagi, had been chastised by a teacher. But standing before Sailor Pluto's stately form, the queen could practically feel the starched fabric of her school uniform cool against her skin, and smell the musty chalk of the classroom, hear her teacher's dangerously angry voice in her head.
Serenity resisted the long-ago forfeited schoolgirl habit of biting her lower lip and instead raised her chin to meet Pluto's stoic gaze.
"I have done nothing wrong," Serenity said, firmly. Behind her, she could feel her senshi shift. It was almost silent, but she could sense more than hear: a fist clench, a heel fall, the defensive stance. She raised her hand slightly, signaling them it was fine.
Sailor Pluto was her deeply trusted adviser, and Small Lady's best friend. But the dark-haired senshi's loyalties lied with the Time Gate first and always.
And what she was saying was serious.
Sailor Pluto's eyes softened, and her whole face softened from deadly to gorgeous once again. "I know, my queen."
Serenity allowed herself a moment of relief behind closed eyelids, before Pluto's next words made them fly open again.
"But that doesn't change that the time disturbance is because of you."
It was Sailor Mars who charged forward, demanding an explanation. It was Jupiter who remained tensely coiled behind Serenity's back, ready to defend her queen and friend. Venus and Mercury came and tried to wrap their gloved arms around Serenity's shoulders, to calm her, whisper words of comfort, but to the queen it was like they weren't there.
Serenity's blue eyes remained locked on Pluto's ruby-colored ones as if in a trance. The Senshi of Time continued with gentle purpose. "Neo-Queen Serenity, you are the cause - if indirectly - of the disturbance. And so it is you who must repair it."
"It is not your imagination that the time rifts appear to be attracted to you," Sailor Pluto said later, her fingers expertly brushing over crystals and glass screens as diagrams and numbers floated in the air before the gathered group of senshi. It wasn't as impressive or natural a display as the orbs and glittering universes of air she could create at the time door, but it served it's purpose.
"What do they want from her?" Jupiter asked.
Pluto shook her head, light shimmering on waves of olive black hair. "They are not sentient. They seek nothing from our queen. The rifts are merely drawn to her as they sense the source of the time disturbance."
Serenity swallowed, cold fingers intertwining with the ends of her hair. Another nervous habit she hadn't succumbed to since her teen years.
"An attraction like magnets?" Mercury was suggesting, "or positive and negative charges?"
Pluto was silent for a while, the light from the display flickering green and gold across her beautiful, expressionless face. Finally she spoke. "Think of it more like water spiraling around a drain."
Serenity lifted her chin, raised blue eyes bravely. "How do I fix it?"
"You go," Pluto said, turning. "Down that drain."
"Back in time?" The senshi all spoke at once, but it was Mercury who's question rose above the din. "I thought we were trying to heal the rifts. Why would we want to rip the wound wider?"
"Or is it like drilling a cavity? You have to open it wider to fix it?" Venus wondered aloud, sending Serenity a wink - she knew her beloved friend and her fear of dental work that stretched far back into the 20th century.
Serenity shuddered. Cavities. Wounds. "I am not liking any of these metaphors," she forced levity into her tone, and the senshi gave false, tight smiles in return. But the dark mood refused to be lifted, especially when Pluto opened her mouth again.
Her expression was sorrowful, sad, and apologetic as the next words echoed through the room. "In order to send you where I need you, we'll have to do to you what we did to the king. We have to put you under."
It was like a bomb went off: the protests, the outcry and the outright refusals from the senshi. Serenity barely felt the hands on her shoulders, her arms, caressing her palms and lacing fingers through hers as her beloved friends and guardians surrounded her as if they could protect her from Pluto's words, from her necessary actions.
From losing her to sleep again.
"I'll do it," the queen said. She allowed herself a small, sardonic smile. "I've been feeling a little tired lately anyway."
It was after the room cleared that Venus walked up to Pluto, her eyes like blue flame. "I don't like this."
"Noted," Pluto said. "It cannot be helped."
"Fine," Venus spat. "But you have to tell Endymion."
And then she was gone in a flash of golden hair and the lingering tension of anger and fear.
Pluto cast a dispassionate look at the papers and broken glass strewn over the marble floor. The setting sun sparkled through the crystal walls of the palace, refracting into rainbows that winked cheerfully in stark contradiction to the mess before her.
"Well, that was quite uncharacteristic," she said calmly.
Endymion clenched his fists. "You know the reason for the rifts," he managed to say, keeping his breath even. He focused his gaze on the grain of the wood of his desk, now emptied of all his belongings as they lay scattered and broken on the floor.
"Yes," she answered calmly.
"And then you know this is my fault, Pluto," he lifted his gaze to hers, leveled her with a panicked, desperate expression. "Send me to fix it! Not her!"
"I cannot very well send you into your own psyche."
"This is dangerous and foolish at best. Doing to her what you did to me? With that machine? What if she never comes back? Dammit, I will not watch her be like that - again-" He ran an agitated hand through his hair, shut his eyes against the memories. Both sets of memories, from the hologram and the sleeping consciousness, the hollowness and the longing and the loss.
The machine took his logical, sane half and molded it into a ghostly human form - to do what? Wait. Wait behind in the war-torn remnants of his home for a miracle that might never come. And the part of him the hologram had left behind - the memories still lingered behind his eyelids when he slept at night, the side of him he had spent years burying: angry, desperate and blindly lashing out at the only thing that could counteract the obliteration of everything he loved: to prevent it in the first place.
The senshi of time just shook her head. "It won't be the same, King. This is only sleep. This is only time travel. We are only repairing what you could not know you were doing."
He was still standing there, one hand curled into his hair, lips pressed tightly together against the onslaught in his mind.
"I am the guardian of the time gate," she said softly. "Many times I've watched helplessly, unable to aid those I've loved while they were in dire need. I believe I can imagine how you all felt when Serenity was... gone." A sigh shook her body, down to her fingers, through her uniformed ribs and the soles of her feet, she felt it. A melancholy ache settled over the room, and even the sun seemed to dim in response to the soldier's words. "Indeed I felt it too. I am a senshi and love her as well. Although now you look at me like you doubt my words."
There were few who would have noticed Endymion's hands shaking slightly, the desperation in his voice and the knitting of his eyebrows, the ache radiating from his eyes when he next spoke. They may have only seen a confident royal issuing an order. But Pluto saw his fraying edges and breaking veneer as clear as if he had been on his knees.
"You will not take her from me again," he said. "If you attempt to do what you say you have planned, I will have you removed forcefully from palace grounds and remanded to the gate forever once again."
The door to his office slammed but Pluto didn't even flinch. She had Neo-Queen Serenity's permission, and that was enough. If they did this right, no one even need live with the consequences. She knelt and picked up a piece of broken glass from the floor, held it up to the last rays of sunlight casting the city in one last embrace.
The shard flashed brightly.
If they failed, an alternate time-stream would open anyway and Pluto could only hope for the best.
She was standing by the window, looking out over her bustling city with clasped hands. A small smile played on her face as Crystal Tokyo sparkled to life in the growing twilight, each winking city light a symbol of rebirth and victory. Endymion watched her for a second and then spoke, only two words:
"Please don't."
Serenity turned and regarded him with a sad look. "You know I have to. I always have to." Sailor Moon or not, she was the first line of defense and the last hope for the city, the planet, the entire cosmos. It was always her, thrown into the pit, and always her who returned victorious, a shining light and winning smile and a promise whispered in his ear: we did it - it's over.
But that was a lie. It would never be over.
"But this time- this time it's me," he said. "This is my fault."
"Oh I didn't realize you attacked Crystal Tokyo, I thought it was Nemesis," she said smartly, turning back to the window.
"You know what I mean," he answered, agitated by her calm exterior. "The time rifts, the dreams, the shift in time and everything being destroyed! It was me and it is me you are going to confront! Pluto told you, didn't she? You'd have to stop the dreams at their source? Are you even listening?" At her lack of response, he finally grasped her arm, pulled her around to face him. "Serenity -"
"I'm not afraid," she answered softly. "Endymion - I'm not afraid."
He just looked her desperately, searching her eyes.
"You said it yourself." she said, her eyes still sad, accepting, "It's you. You will not hurt me."
He gave a slight shake of his head, and pulled her into his arms. He starred out over her head, buried in his shoulder, and looked out over at the sparkling city and the darkening bruised sky.
It was silent in the room, as all the inner senshi and Endymion gathered to watch Serenity nervously awaiting the second use ever of the machine that had previously turned her husband into a walking ghost while she slumbered as if dead under layers of crystal.
It was Mars who pushed the switch and several things happened at once.
Serenity's limp body fell onto the bed beside the machine.
Her translucent image flickered and appeared in the mists beside the time door, next to Pluto who nodded at her silently.
And on the crowded streets of 1993 Tokyo, fourteen year old Tsukino Usagi fell unconscious to the sidewalk, to the surprise of Mizuno Ami and Kino Makoto and the concerned and curious knot of people forming around them as the schoolgirl remained unresponsive to her friends' increasingly panicked cries.
Black Moon occupied Crystal Tokyo was a graveyard. Dark, cold, and desolate. Serenity couldn't bare to glance at familiar landmarks and beloved places that had become burnt and broken ruins.
She ran with silent footsteps through streets that seared at her heart, golden hair streaming behind her in the mist, dress pooling around her legs in transparent waves.
"Pluto," Serenity asked, reaching for her companion's arm and shuddering as her hand passed right through the taller woman's gloved elbow. "Pluto -"
The senshi turned, dark hair in a waterfall around her, eyes soft as she looked on the ghost of her sovereign. "My queen?"
Serenity swallowed. Or would have, if she had a real throat. "When Endymion was split, he told me," she shut her eyes. Or would have, if she had real eyes. "He told me, when he was a hologram everything was muted, dulled. And only when he awoke, he remembered being unconscious. And remembered what was there when they pulled his mind into the hologram. The entire time, a part of him that-" She stopped and looked again at Pluto, unsure whether to continue. Unsure if she even could. "Something he couldn't explain."
"That's what we are going to find out. And try to stop."
A part of him that must not want me, Serenity wondered. A part of him that wanted Crystal Tokyo destroyed. Small Lady never born. Her heart would be pounding if she had a real heart. Did she want to face the part of Endymion that ... that didn't love her?
"Is anything left behind of me?" she asked, to keep Pluto talking, to keep her mind from drifting down the dark pathways it was going. "Back in Crystal Tokyo, I mean."
Pluto walked purposely in front of her, not turning as she answered.
"No," she said. "If anything of you is 'left behind', it is somewhere else." Her tone made it clear she would not answer where, even if Serenity did ask.
It didn't take long to find the king's body, laying warm and still on a marble pallet. Serenity cringed inwardly. She had been entombed with curtains and lace and engraving, and her husband lay in a make-shift hospital room, injured and alone. Medical appliances nearby beeped constantly, crystal displays showed vital signs and brain wave activity.
"Are you ready?" Pluto asked, and her garnet rod swung low and steady. She had done it before, with the senshi of the past, into the mind of the sick and suffering Small Lady. She did it again, this time with Neo-Queen Serenity, into what was left of the mind of King Endymion.
"How -" Serenity began to ask, but because she was a hologram, only a beam of information, only a program, only light, only thought, the machine was manipulated and she was thrown into blackness before she could finish her sentence.
It was absolute.
Blackness.
Serenity felt blind, she couldn't even see her hand before her face.
This was familiar in it's own way, being tossed into new environments and expected to fight alone.
But she usually had her crystal.
Almost as if she willed it into being, a small glow erupted from her hands and suddenly the ginzuishou was there. Or a hologram ginzuishou, created from her mind. But it was enough to surround her a small halo of light, to comfort her for a second.
She had just lifted pale blue eyes to glance around when a sharp and oh-so-familiar voice pierced the silence.
"Why are you here?"
She cried out in surprise and the ginzuishou went out, darkness falling around her like a wall.
tbc
really this time!
i hope you liked it but if not that's okay you can say you hated it in the review
sorry
but!
i promise i'll finish it even if it's bad so
there's that