Chapter 9 – Relief and Regret
"The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone."
- Milan Kundera
The sun's warmth is lost on their grief. They keep to the shadows for fear of the light illuminating their loss, both in battle and in their ranks. They are not ready to face the daylight, not ready to let go.
The young sailors have said nothing to each other since the news of Usagi's demise. Hours have passed in deafening silence. And nowhere is it louder than within the confines of their own frail minds. The incessant pleas and reeling events, looped and lengthy, never stop. Stampeding memories and regrets and wishes and strings of "if onlys", cannot change the truth. And no matter how hard any of them try to find themselves in the wreckage of their failure, they remain lost.
Sailor Pallas cried herself to sleep in Sailor Ceres' arms a little while ago. Tera, huddled against a large redwood, is locked in her cage of guilt and shame. That cage is filling with water, with tears, and she battles the tendrils of guilt that erupt from the surface and lash her wrists to drag her down, to pull her under, and drown her in her sorrow. Though the bars are invisible, they are no less strong, and they are shrinking inward.
Anguish bores down around her. She is suffocating under its weight. Usagi was not only her princess, but her best friend. Her dearest companion. And that fraction of the second that Usagi needed her most, depended on a decision that should have been simple, Tera let her down and paid the ultimate price.
She clutches her hands over her ears to block out the sounds of the elevator plummeting down the shaft. The screeching breaks and the shrieking of the hinges against the tethers grates on her memory. Down and down it goes. She stands once again on the edge of the shaft, surrounded in a shade brighter than blackness, and watches the elevator fall, frozen in place. Stuck. Submerged.
But how can she ask for help, when she could not give it?
Any loss would wound the Sailors. But to lose their leader, the lifeblood of their union, is to lose the very heart of the team… That is crippling and insurmountable. It is a hurtle that cannot be cleared.
This has to be a nightmare. It cannot possibly be real!
Usagi's smile could brighten the bleakest times. Her jokes and giggles, blind faith and optimism, sorely lacking in the rest of them, kept them afloat. Dread looms above and around them. How will they tell her parents – their King and Queen – that their only daughter is… is…
They are so immersed in their grief that they do not notice a rustling in the brush. It grows closer, slinking towards them, steadily eating up the distance. The sun's rays pierce the canopy, obscuring the forest from view. A twig snaps.
Sailors Vesta and Juno surge to their feet, baring their teeth in feral sneers when a silhouette slinks over a massive tree root and ducks under another. Is it another wolf? Anger roars through them, washing their blood in heat and hatred. Whatever it is will bear the brunt of their hurt. The Sailors are not murderous at heart, but the loss of Usagi has warped them – plunged them into a darkness they will never fully emerge from.
The thing, the object of their rage, coughs. A few more steps reveal a slender figure, hunched against a pain in its gut. Sailor Juno's eyes widen. She is the closest. The color gradually spills out of her cheeks and down into her neck. Sailor Vesta gasps. The figure steps into a patch of sunlight.
"Usagi?" Sailor Ceres exclaims, rousing Sailor Pallas instantly. Tera slowly lets her hands drop from her ears, convinced her mind is playing tricks on her. She will not turn to face their visitor. She cannot weather the letdown that would follow a joke so cruel.
Another cough. A pained smile. An attempted wink. "Hi girls. Why the long faces?"
Tera's eyes snap open. She knows that voice. The girls, previously rooted to the floor, rush towards the princess. Sailor Juno is the first to reach her. She embraces Usagi without hesitation, plucking her feet clean off the forest floor. And being that Sailor Juno hugs about as often as Usagi does her schoolwork, it comes as a surprise to them all.
Usagi smiles fondly and hugs her, patting her back. The shock, coupled with a reaction this powerful, tells her exactly what they thought she was. They embrace her, laughing through the tears of relief. They all rejoice, except for Tera who lingers out of reach with wide round eyes, like a doe about to bolt, and stares at Usagi as though she is seeing a ghost.
When Usagi manages to wade out of the tangle of arms, she stares back at her friend. They meet eyes.
"Tera," Usagi says softly. She opens her arms.
Recognition and resignation melts Tera's resolve. Usagi is alive. No thanks to her… But Usagi is alive. Tera staggers forward. Usagi meets her halfway with an embrace only half the strength of her normal iron-hide hugs. She is weak and wounded, but alive. Tera's knees all but buckle beneath her. She shakes, holding back the sobs that threaten her. She cannot speak due to the lump lodged in her throat.
Usagi is alive. No matter how many times Tera repeats that to herself, or how solid the body in her arms feels, she struggles to believe it. Usagi is alive!
Norman Osborn struts back into the room containing the Sailor's nine power dampening tubes. The Sailor warriors watch him closely. He hits a button on the control panel and Hybrid's tube begins to sink back into the floor. He is still unconscious.
"Wait!" Sailor Jupiter screams, pressing her hands against the glass. "Where are you taking him?"
"He'll be waking up soon. We need to have a chat." Norman smiles his oiliest smile. "No girls allowed."
"Doesn't that rule you out?" Sailor Uranus growls, balling up her fists as though she means to try and put one through the tube's wall.
"What are you going to do to him?" Sailor Mars demands.
Norman drums his heavily ringed fingers against his chin thoughtfully. "I think a better question would be what won't I do to him."
"Please don't hurt him!" Sailor Jupiter begs. "Take me instead! Don't hurt him!"
"My dear young lady, you've cut me to the quick," Norman mocks, pressing a hand over his heart, "I only hurt those who deserve it."
"Hybrid hasn't done anything!" Sailor Jupiter counters, on the verge of tears.
"Granted. Fine," Norman concedes. "Maybe he hasn't. But Carnage has. And I aim to make him pay for it, that red devil, down to the last grimy little detail." He turns on his heel and starts to stride out of the room.
"Just tell me what you want!" Sailor Jupiter exclaims after him.
Norman Osborn pauses. "Justice," he hisses venomously. "For the murder of my son." He faces her. "Shall I tell you how he died, my beloved Harry? Shall I tell you how your husband slaughtered my boy?"
Sailor Jupiter blanches, taking a step back in her tube away from the fanatical gleam in his eyes. Surely, he would be the first to fly the banner of insanity.
"It was mid-November. Manhattan in mid-November is a madhouse. Holiday shopping. All the commercial districts are dressing up their stores in lights. Wrapping the lanterns and the streetlights in tinsel... All glitter and garlands and nonsense."
Sailor Mars and Sailor Mercury exchanges wary looks.
Norman continues, "my Harry was working for the government, doing some important, top secret project." Norman flits his hands through the air. "He was always doing things like that. His mother and I never really took it that seriously. We were business people. For all we knew, top secret government initiative was code for "I'm going to meet my girlfriend in Monte Carlo for the weekend." I was a busy man. My wife was a good mother to him. I don't know if that's as solid of an excuse as I'd like it to be for not being more involved in his life."
"That's not our problem," Sailor Uranus sneers.
Norman ignores her. "So, while I was in my office, surrounded by miserable holiday trappings, Harry boarded a plane to Morocco. And he never got off. Not alive, anyway. He liked to drink, my Harry. Not excessively. But he did. Ordering a cocktail on a flight was nothing unusual for him. But somewhere between filling the cup and taking it to his seat, he was poisoned." A vicious smile blooms onto his face. "Bleach and trans-acid, plus a catalyst to hide the smell."
Norman raises his hand and draws invisible circles on his neck to demonstrate.
"Burned clean through his esophagus. You could see his spine through the hole in his throat. Between the scalding flesh and blood, puss and foam, he suffocated. Gurgling. Gasping. The pain must have been unbearable. Excruciating, even. Would you like to know who was on that flight with my Harry?" He approaches Jupiter's tube. "That's right, dear. Your husband."
"Leave her alone!" Sailor Neptune defends.
"And the slaughter didn't stop there." He shakes his head and his smirk begins to grow, "when they landed, Harry's waiting security team was dismembered, ripped apart piece by piece by what one witness could only describe as a red devil. A monstrous demon. Unholy. With big blank eyes, pale as death. He said that it saw those men as nothing but prey. Jagged black jaws. A skulking, dripping thing, bent on murder and destruction. Tell me. Does that sound familiar?"
Sailor Jupiter presses her back against the rounded wall of her glass coffin, straining to get as far from Norman as she can. She cannot hear this right now. The transparent material provides no reassurance that there is still something separating them.
Sailor Mercury's eyes dart frantically between the tycoon and her teammate. "Stop it," she pleads.
But Norman is not through, he walks up to her glass cage. The look in his eyes, the facial expression that intensifies it and the predatory gait of which he is walking make him look like some sort of predatory animal.
"After that thing had lapped up the last of the blood from its kills, it leapt into the shadows and vanished. So I've spent the past three hundred years scouring worlds for that fiend, to kindly repay him for his services. Now I have him, and I will do as I please. And I will be damned if some blithering wench of a wife is going to convince me otherwise!"
Norman pounds his fist against the glass of Sailor Jupiter's tube, rattling her to her very foundations. Her legs turn to jelly. Sailor Jupiter slides down to sit in a crevice and hug her knees. The other Sailors gawk, speechless, as he leaves. They have all seen what Hybrid is capable of. But is he truly capable of something so cold, so utterly diabolical. The vision of a young man clawing at his scalding, steaming, throat burns itself into Sailor Jupiter's mind. She trembles.
Does Hybrid actually deserve Norman Osborn's wrath?
Hybrid groans, stirring in his sleep. His eyes flutter open. The darkness makes it impossible to glean his location, but he has the strangest sensation that he is floating. No sooner does he realize that he is floating that whatever suspends him vanishes, dropping his feet to the floor. The cylinder under his boots starts to glow, illuminating his surroundings. He struggles to maintain his balance. The more he looks around, the less he recognizes. It takes him another moment to realize he is encased in some sort of man-sized tube.
He remembers the battle in Crystal Tokyo. His next thought is on Sailor Jupiter. He looks around. Where is she? Where are the other sailors? Is he in some sort of healing facility at Sailor Mercury's hospital? Did they win the fight? No... He remembers the lot of them being corralled into the town square and his body being pitched headlong into the cluster of women after facing off against... against…
Hybrid shudders.
"Bad dream?" says a voice rich with cynicism. He recognizes the tone behind it, but not the face it belongs to. "I didn't know demons could have those."
"Where am I?" Hybrid asks, his brows knitting together skeptically. "Who are you?"
The man in question steps into the dim light, casting sinister shadows across his face. Still, he looks relatively harmless in comparison to the beast Hybrid dealt with recently.
"This, Red Devil, is Judgment Day. And I am God." His voice drops an octave, losing all sense of sincerity. Hybrid knows he is no longer looking at a benevolent man, but a malicious predator. Hatred burns in his eyes. Hybrid musters his strength and mirrors the same unbridled heat.
"Where is Sailor Jupiter?" he snarls.
"Don't you mean your wife?" The man bites back. He starts to circle Hybrid's tube. Hybrid's stomach curdles at the way wife rolls off the man's tongue. He readies his symbiote for transformation and battle. No one is going to stand between him and Sailor Jupiter.
"I wouldn't do that," the man warns. But Hybrid is too beset with rage and worry to pay his warning any mind. His transformation is stopped by a splitting pain in his skin and a hellish ringing in his ears. His body jolts as the energy reserved for his transformation reverses and funnels back into him. Hybrid grits his teeth together, groaning, as he kneels to the pain. He covers his ears. Electric waves roll across the glass of the container around him.
"I warned you," the man says, dismissing Hybrid's discomfort with a wave of his hands.
"Who the hell are you?" Hybrid growls, forcing his bloodshot eyes open.
The man merely smiles at him, his eyes trolling up and down his figure in a diminutive way that makes Hybrid's stomach storm. He eyes him like a possession, like a collector's piece, like some child's toy to use and abuse however he sees fit. It is the first time that Hybrid can remember feeling as though he was not in control of his own destiny, or his own life, for that matter. He swallows hard and words to keep his face expressionless.
"I told you, demon. I am God."
Hybrid grimaces. His mind races back to the long forgotten time. He has not been referred to as a red devil, or anything demonic, for hundreds of years. That tells him enough to assume this man originates from before the Great Sleep.
An old enemy of Sailor Moon's? A disgruntled villain he put in jail?
Oh, but this man is dressed much too sharply to be a common criminal. This is a man who knows how to carry himself – someone practiced in the art of intimidation.
Hybrid is going to have to play his game, at least long enough to get the information he wants. "Have we met before?"
"No," the man says, "but you've met my son."
Following the religious threads weaving their interaction together, Hybrid's lips twist into a contemptuous smirk. "Jesus?"
The man chuckles wryly and shakes a finger at him. "That was good. You're funny."
"You should see me in costume. I'm a real clown," Hybrid sneers.
"Think, red devil. Think back, long ago, before the Great Sleep. Think back to a time of undercover missions and unfortunate casualties." Hybrid barely recalls his time before the Great Sleep. Since it was hundreds of years ago, and factions of it are things he would rather forget, his mind has purposely blotted out a great deal. For the life of him, he has no idea what his captor is referring to… until:
"Remember an airport, a plane, and a drink."
Hybrid freezes, feeling bile rise in the back of his throat. It comes back to him in a series of violent flashes that leave him paralyzed.
His one botched mission. The one time he miscalculated. The one time he had not counted on being detained, or discovered for that matter, after slipping the drugs into Harry Osborn's drink. It was a political assassination, and necessary by all government standards. Harry was young and a part of things young people should stay away from.
Innocent people could have been hurt. Harry Osborn could have been responsible for a slew of horrors too unthinkable to ramble off. The drugs he used were scentless and painless, meant to put the victim to sleep and still their heart in the process. It was peaceful and humane, not unlike the serum delivered to pets when it is time to put them down. For any curious eyes, it would appear he was merely sleeping.
He had to do it in the air, in an enclosed environment far enough away from medical facilities and trained personnel with the power to reverse the drugs.
All went relatively smoothly. All would have been fine if one of the flight attendants had not gone to rouse Harry about a hiccup with his credit card. They had to make an emergency landing due to his condition. No sooner had the wheels touched the ground when the area was swarming with Harry's security team, who had been alerted in flight.
Sean left the flight attendants, pilots, and handful of other passengers alone. He stayed behind for one last glance at Harry's body, just to ensure the job was done properly and his death was irreversible.
FIRE! Echoes the squad captain's call in his memory as the men in uniform filed onto the plane.
They engaged him. They cornered him in the airplane. He had to retaliate them for his own safety. After he returned, he heard rumors that one of the security men had survived and was in a hospital somewhere. But Alistair, would neither confirm nor deny those whispers. Hybrid shudders a little as he thinks about how the Illuminati Council might have cleaned up that potential loose end. If only they had gotten to him first and not Norman; knowing what he now knew about them and their former leader, Edward Ashford.
Clearly, he made a mistake. He made so many mistakes that day. Now that he thinks about it, technically all the innocent people present were witnesses. Would the Illuminati Council have disposed of them too?
His kills were clean, done only at crucial points to limit suffering. The men were armed, dangerous, and intent on killing him. But, by all accounts, Harry's father is right. It was a massacre.
It is a massacre that has haunted his nightmares for a long time. And the worst of it was the way he justified it to himself, because who would miss some snotty little rich kid who spent his time with terrorists, burning jet fuel, and being an international playboy.
No matter how many times Sean told himself he had to do it after the incident, that the safety of the world's innocent citizens was in jeopardy, it still did not expunge him of the guilt.
Hybrid falters at the man, filling in the missing pieces about his wife and the suffering endured by himself – alone - thereafter. His name is Norman Osborn, and he ran the majority of the western hemisphere before the Great Sleep and the creation of Crystal Tokyo. Norman also fills Hybrid in about the black symbiote he fought and how they were able to synthesize one using his DNA. The creature is a walking monster, an alien devoid of a human soul or host.
The last phrase the man utters before leaving Hybrid alone with his regret and shame chills him to the bone.
"You're going to answer for what you've done, Sean, down to the most insignificant detail. I'm going to rip away everything you love. Starting with that precious little girl of yours."
Norman Osborn hears Hybrid's No! as nothing more than a muffled shout behind the reinforced steel of the closing door.
End of Chapter 9