A/N: I think I took the easy way out of this vignette. It was originally going to be very different and I meant to post it before the "Future" vignette but at that point, I didn't know if I would ever be able to finish this one.

I've taken some liberties with the timeline and incorporated (vaguely and briefly) events from the manga, movies, and anime. So it's not necessarily STC-ish in terms of their powers or backgrounds the way most of the vignettes have been.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

L

It is a Tuesday, which means it is Darien's turn to cook.

But he is late by half an hour. Serena studies the clock, wondering if she ought just to go ahead and start making dinner herself.

The problem is that she has been craving fried fish all day, ever since the ocean-themed photo shoot from hell ran over its time slot by two hours. Serena can't fry fish to save her life; they always came out blackened and dripping with grease as though they have just flopped out of an oily ocean. Darien, however, has a knack of getting them golden-brown on the outside and snow-white inside and perfectly, perfectly dry.

Just thinking about it makes her stomach gurgle with longing.

She resolves to give him fifteen more minutes. Flopping down across the loveseat, she dangles her socked feet in front of her as the opening montage of that show about promiscuous housewives fills the TV screen.

A commercial break later, she hears a key scraping in the lock. She cranes her neck to peer toward the door, a smile on her face. There will be fish tonight after all!

But as the door slides open, she sees that Darien is still wearing his scrubs. He almost never does this; he always likes to change back into his normal clothing before coming home. Furthermore, his black hair has the disheveled look it often gets after he has repeatedly run his hands through it.

Serena slides off the loveseat.

"Bad?" she asks.

"Yeah." His voice is tired. He slouches onto the arm of the armchair, rubbing his forehead. His hair falls over his eyes in a way that makes him look much younger, like the child Darien that she never knew.

She waits for him to talk.

"We didn't get a patient to OR fast enough," Darien says at last. "He's in a coma on life support."

Serena winces. After Darien began working in trauma surgery a year ago, she had begun to see a trend. She can always tell when he has lost a patient: tension stiffens the skin around his eyes. But in cases like this one, when the patients slide into comas or paralyses or vegetative states, seem to affect him more deeply, putting a tremble in his fingers.

She wonders sometimes if this is an empathetic response. If he projects his own experiences of being brainwashed, controlled, trapped inside his own mind, onto what he sees happen to his patients.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. She encloses his hand, still slightly chalky from the latex gloves he must have worn during the surgery, in both of hers. She feels so bad now for waiting for him to make dinner. He has had a rough day, and there isn't anything on the table waiting for him.

She lets go of his hand. "I'll go make – "

"No." He catches her wrist with the same hand she had grasped and pulls himself to his feet. "It's my turn, right? Just let me change."

L

The fish are done, though they don't taste as good to Serena when she feels so bad, and she is serving the salad, when Darien stops abruptly in the middle of sitting down.

"Oh," he says and reaches into his Subspace pocket for his wallet. "I forgot."

He pulls a folded-up white card from his wallet and pushes it across the table to her. "From Dr. Enoto." He frowns, picking up his fork. "Or his wife, I guess."

Serena examines the gold script swirling across the card. It looks more like an invitation to a wedding than an invitation to an afternoon of golf and conversation at the country club, which is what it is. She says as much to Darien.

A smile touches the corner of his lips. "From what I've heard, Dr. Enoto's wife has what can charitably be called dramatic flair."

Serena looks down at the card again. "Which is why she calls us the newest members of the 'Surgeon Society?'"

He looks at her. The smile on his lips is broadening to a grin. "You're impressed by the alliteration, admit it."

"Of course not!" she scoffs, although that was exactly what she was thinking. If someone is going to be eccentric enough to make up a name for their group of acquaintances, it might as well be memorable and fun to say.

"I thought so," says Darien, spearing a cherry tomato straight from the salad bowl on his fork.

Serena spears her own tomato and swirls it in ranch dressing. "Who all is it made of, this Surgeon Society?"

"Let's see." Darien stops cutting his fish into neat pieces and begins ticking off on his fingers. "There's Dr. Enoto, who's the head trauma surgeon, and his wife. I think they must have been together before Serenity and Endymion even met, they're so old. Then there's Dr. Kitamura, who specializes in cardiothoracic surgery. I know he has a wife, but that's about it. Dr. Sawara does maxillofacial, Dr. Goh does GI, and Dr. Nakahara is a neurosurgeon."

"Wow," says Serena, blinking. "I didn't realize there were so many surgeons working with you. You've never talked about them."

"There's not much time to socialize," Darien says dryly. "The imminent deaths get in the way, you see."

Serena kicks him under the table. "It seems like the OTHER doctors find time to socialize enough, if they have their own society."

"It seems more like their wives all know each other and arrange these little get-togethers," Darien says, waving his fork carelessly.

Then he grins and leans forward conspiratorially. "Although from what I've seen of these doctors, play dates arranged by their wives are probably their only form of socialization."

Serena points her fork at him teasingly. "Like you're one to make fun of people for being socially awkward."

His grin curves into a smirk. "I'll have you know that if I hadn't spent all my free time in a tux chasing around a certain klutzy Senshi, my social calendar would have been booked solid."

Relieved that he seems to be out of his funk, Serena directs a pointed glance at one of the framed pictures sitting on top of the stereo. It depicts them posing at the park, her in her high school uniform and him in the dreadful olive-colored jacket he used to wear. "Your wardrobe choices say otherwise."

Darien laughs and pulls the invitation back toward him with his fork. He reaches to toss it in the garbage can.

"Hey, wait! I didn't say we shouldn't go!"

His dark blue eyes glance up at her, his forehead creased. "Why would we?"

"They're the guys you WORK with. Knowing the people you work with is always a good thing." She winks. "Besides, if they're such nerds, you should get along with them pretty well, right?"

L

On the day after their dinner conversation comes the first time that Darien forgets something at home and needs Serena to drop it off at the hospital for him.

He is usually quite diligent and seems embarrassed by his slip-up. He swears that he wouldn't call her and ask her to do it except that it's his badge, which he needs in order to access the surgical equipment to prep for a surgery scheduled for twenty-five minutes from now, and he doesn't have time to get home and back –

A laughing Serena cuts off his ramblings, assuring him that it's okay and she'll be there in fifteen minutes. Her boss owes her for that over-time photo shoot the other day anyway.

As she hangs up the phone, adoration for Darien fills her from her fingertips to her toes, loving that he considers her job to be important enough that he doesn't just automatically assume that she is able to run back and get his badge. Strange as it is, she loves that he feels so upset about interfering with her schedule. Although at least half of that upsetness, she is sure, comes from his own aggravation with himself for being forgetful. For all that he insists it isn't true when she calls him a perfectionist, she knows it's true: he is, after all, a Leo.

Twelve minutes later, she trots into the ER triage room in her work heels, rummaging for Darien's badge in the designer bag that the Luna Pen gave her that morning.

Sick people are slumped in seats all around the triage lobby. Red-faced, white-faced, green-faced. Coughing, panting for breath, retching.

She cannot stand it, and she knows that Darien would give her a smack upside the ego for risking a drain of all her power. But she touches a hand to the brooch in her bag and sends a wave of energy billowing like faintly glittering dust across the room.

Immediately, the room becomes quieter, calmer. The old woman in the wheelchair begins to breathe more easily. The fevered little boy in his mother's lap stops whimpering with a little sigh and drifts peacefully to sleep.

Serena smiles brightly at the old woman and trips, her distraction and sudden drain of energy making her a little unsteady on the ridiculously high Luna Pen heels. She stumbles to a stop in front of the triage nurse's desk.

"Excuse me," she says.

"There's a line," the tired-looking nurse says.

"I'm very sorry," Serena says, ducking a quick bow to the old man leaning on a cane just behind her. He is too distracted, looking with wonder at his suddenly steady legs, to notice her. "I just need to drop something off for my husband. He's a trauma surgeon here."

The nurse gives her a double-take, eyebrows digging into her eyes. Some emotion, one that Serena knows is familiar but cannot quite place, filters into them. "Dr. Enoto?"

Serena's eyes widen, a little. But the nurse looks very tired; maybe her vision is a little blurry. That would explain why she thinks Serena is old enough to be the elderly Dr. Enoto's wife.

"No," Serena says. "Dr. Shields."

"Dr. Shields?" repeats the nurse. Her eyes widen instead of narrow.

But Serena does not notice, for she is too distracted by two things.

First, by how very funny it feels to be calling her husband 'Dr. Shields.'

Second, by the sight, at that very moment, of one of the automatic doors with the warnings on it swinging open behind the nurse's desk and Darien striding out of them, his white doctor's coat flaring out behind him.

Serena has always found this coat of his rather attractive, possibly even more so than his Tuxedo Mask cape, and she grins at him.

"Serena!" He sounds relieved, which makes her think that he must have been too distracted to notice her slight use of power, which makes her relieved.

Then shocked, because he plants a kiss on her lips. He is not usually one for such behavior in public.

"You're a lifesaver," he tells her in a low voice as he presses his forehead to hers for one swift second.

"Which flavor?" Serena teases, clipping his badge to his white lapel. As he pulls away with a laugh, she gives his collar a tug. "Kick surgery butt!"

He flashes her one wry look, and a dry "I hardly think the patient would appreciate that," before he disappears, as quickly as he appeared, back behind the warning-plastered doors.

Serena is left standing in front of the triage nurse, who wears an expression like disbelief.

Serena beams at her. "Thank you!"

Her cell phone rings, then, and as she gives the old man behind her another smile and steps away, toward the door, she answers it. "Hello?"

It is the photographer of that day's shoot. "Tsukino-san, I'm looking at the schedule. It says Rumiko's going to be wearing the Chanel gown?"

"The Chanel?" Serena's brow knits. "No, not the Chanel, I got that one yesterday. I want the Yves Saint Laurent ensemble."

"What? The debutante?"

"The Saint Laurent," Serena repeats, more loudly. "I got the Chanel yesterday."

Wincing at her own volume, she shoots an apologetic look at the patients.

She catches, then, the eye of the triage nurse. The woman is staring at her, her face set in a hard mask of disapproval, and Serena grimaces. She has forgotten that one isn't supposed to use cell phones in a hospital.

The photographer hears her this time, though. He thanks her and hangs up, and Serena gets to work and finishes the shoot, and by the end of that day, Serena has forgotten all about that morning.

L

A few days after her visit to the hospital, she sits at a table with the rest of the Surgeon Society wives on a veranda that overlooks the golf course where their husbands are playing.

Serena would have liked to watch, since she has never seen Darien play golf and honestly, she cannot quite imagine him swinging him a golf club and yelling "Fore!" but she has been placed by Dr. Enoto's wife, who seems to be the leader of the group, at the end of the table furthest from the veranda railing.

"Mine is too big to wear every day." Nakahara-san, who implored Serena to call her Naoko, stretches out her hand to show the rest of them the ring on her fourth finger. "I had Ichiro buy me a smaller one to wear every day."

Serena cannot fail to notice that the "smaller one" still has three fat red rubies glinting on its silver band.

"I did the same thing," says Dr. Sawara's wife, who did not invite Serena to call her Brittany. Her features are sharp and prominent, Western; she is the closest to Serena in age and the only one at the table besides Serena whose blonde hair could possibly be natural. Neither of these similarities, though, seem to have made her feel any sort of kinship with Serena.

Sawara-san flashes her fingers the same way that Rei does when she flings out five ofuda at a time. A platinum wedding band encrusted with diamonds glitters on her ring finger.

"And you, Serena dear?'

Serena looks up from her raspberry lemonade so abruptly that some sloshes out of her glass. "Um…?"

Enoto Saena, the oldest of the group although her nearly wrinkle-less face and carefully frosted dark blondish hair make her look much younger than Darien's description of her and Dr. Enoto had made Serena expect, smiles at her. "Might we see your wedding ring, Serena dear?"

Serena's fingers curve reflexively around the delicate ring on her fourth finger. It is the same one that Darien gave her at the airport years ago.

After the battle with Galaxia, he had tried to give her an engagement ring, and then a wedding ring, but she hadn't wanted them. She didn't want sparkling jewels that would remind her of Galaxia's golden bracelets to replace the warm, worn golden heart that her fingers had traced so many times as she wondered and wished and waited for him. Nothing could be more precious to her than the ring that had hugged her finger as she gripped the sword to fight Galaxia, the only object that had remained on her body when everything but her wings disappeared.

Eventually Darien had given in to her refusals of a new ring. His only stipulation had been that Serena would give the ring to him for a fresh coat of gold to be applied to the heart before he returned it to her finger on their wedding day.

"Methinks she's being modest," says Risa Kitamura, smiling at Serena. Her nails are lacquered red, loosely holding a margarita that drips condensation onto the designer purse in her lap. "Darien's been quite the success, after all. Come, Serena darling, let's see it."

Serena is flushing now, but she knows there is no way to avoid it. From long acquaintance with Lita and Mina, she can recognize when curiosity can be evaded and when it cannot.

She lifts her hand from beneath the white tablecloth and holds it up, willing her fingers not to tremble.

A collective silence grips the table as they all blink well-mascaraed eyes.

"Well," says Risa. Her disappointment is little disguised, or maybe that is the sound of surprise mingling with superior satisfaction.

Brittany Sawara makes a sound rather like a snort.

Serena flushes darker. "Darien gave it to me in high school," she begins. Then she stops abruptly, ashamed of herself for trying to defend her ring to those women.

"So you knew each other before university?" Naoko leans forward curiously.

"Um – yes," Serena says, uncertain where this is going.

"Oh, my, you sneaky girl! You must be pretty creative to have kept him this long!" Laughing delightedly, Naoko winks at her, and Risa joins in. "I imagine he knew then that he wanted to be a doctor?"

"They always do," Risa says as Serena nods. "These single-minded doctor men. So you've been together all this time?"

Serena nods again, taking a sip of her lemonade to try to head them off from asking her any more questions.

Her attempt is in vain.

"How interesting!" Naoko exclaims. "I thought the two of you only got married a few months ago!"

"In June," Serena says.

"Brave girl," says Saena, and her eyes, too, seem wide with surprise. "Waiting until after his residency to marry him… I'm quite sure I shouldn't have had the courage."

"Me neither! What if he had changed his mind once he was licensed?" Naoko shivers as though cold beneath her filmy blouse. "I made Ichiro marry me before he went to med school. I worked to put him through it because I was afraid once he was making money he'd realize he could have anyone he wanted and forget about me."

"Indeed," murmurs Saena.

Brittany Sawara raises her shaped eyebrows and deigns to join their conversation for the first time. "It doesn't always make a difference. Chiharu worked to put Tsuna through grad school, but he's divorcing her for that Keio resident at Tokyo General."

A rippled of disgusted noises go around the table.

"Fool," says Saena. The venom in her voice surprises Serena. "It'll never work. These doctor men go through phases where they think they want the intellectual type. Tsuna will be in for a nice surprise when he realizes that what he wants when he comes home from a frustrating day at work isn't stimulating conversation, it's a good stimulating lay."

Tittering laughter erupts from the women. Serena tries to smile, can't, and takes a sip of her lemonade instead. Her eyes, shifting so that they wouldn't meet any of the other wives', meet a waiter's gaze a few tables away. Although she has never seen him before, he looks familiar.

Suddenly she realizes why. His face wears the same expression that the triage nurse a few days ago did. A tint of pity overshadowed by contempt.

She had realized almost from the first moment of her introduction with these women that they are self-concerned, lazy, and, for lack of a better word, gold-diggers.

But only now does she realize that the world must see her as one of them.

L

By the time the men return, Serena has chewed her straw into two tongues of plastic. When she sees them coming up the stairs to the veranda, she begins laughing with the other women, even though she does not know what they are discussing, so that Darien won't think anything is wrong.

"Oh, stay back, Ichiro, you're all sweaty!" Naoko leans away from Dr. Nakahara as he leans in to kiss her cheek. He has gray in his hair and looks flabby and coarsely dark next to his flawlessly-complexioned wife, like a peasant leaning over a geisha.

Serena looks up at her own husband, careful to maintain a bright smile. He looks more out of place among the doctors than she does among the wives with their slender figures and blond hair (dyed or otherwise). Dark-haired among their white and graying heads, lean among their rounded stomachs, Darien barely even has a glistening forehead, while the other surgeons are wet with sweat.

The other women have noticed this, if their surreptitious glances are any indication. She wonders if they are thinking about the sorts of things she must have done to nab a husband who is not only high-earning but good-looking, and she feels her stomach twist again.

The nausea makes her more determined to act normal. She leans back, taking in his unrumpled appearance, and murmurs to him, "What did you do, just sit back and watch them play?"

"I might as well have been," he murmurs back. "We've fought slug youma that move faster than these guys."

Serena smiles. But that upset-stomach feeling, the feeling with which the waiter's contemptuous glance and the other women's sly teasing has filled her, does not leave.

If anything, it worms deeper.

"Well?" Saena's voice rises over everyone else's, commanding their attention. She is tracing her manicured nails in faint circles on her white-haired husband's arm. "Is it time for us to order lunch?"

"We thought a bit of tennis might be in order first," says her husband. He looks over at Serena, smiling. "After all, Mrs. Shields is dressed for it!"

Serena blushes, then blanches. The blush is because she is the only one of the women dressed in an athletic skort and top instead of a ruffly sundress, for she had expected that they would be playing golf, too, not sitting and talking the whole time. The blanche is because she has never been a fan of tennis since the time one of Nephrite's youma turned her into a human tennis ball.

"I think probably we'd better not," says Darien. His hand rests lightly on her shoulder, his thumb brushing the back of her neck. "We don't have the best memories of tennis. What about Frisbee?"

"Frisbee?" says Dr. Sawara wonderingly. The most uncertain-looking of the surgeons, and the youngest after Darien, he hovers above Brittany looking almost as though he is afraid to come close lest he deprive her of a single ray of sunlight. "I haven't played Frisbee since… I can't even remember when."

"That's a lot of running, isn't it?" Dr. Kitamura pulls at his sweaty shirt.

"I think Serena would rather sit here in the shade with us," says Saena. "You men just go have fun."

"Serena's great at Frisbee," Darien says. "You could say she blows away the competition." He winks at her.

Serena musters a smile in return.

They head back down the stairs, Serena accompanying this time, to play Frisbee in the well-manicured lawn adjacent to the golf course.

But the game does not last long. The surgeons peel off even more quickly than Darien had predicted to Serena in a whisper that they would. Panting and sweaty, they retreat to the shade of the veranda.

Wondering if they should follow, Serena glances at them when the last straggler, Dr. Sawara, bids them adieu. But Darien, yards away, shakes his head.

She aims the Frisbee again.

It is an absolutely beautiful throw. Had Darien been a youma and the Frisbee her tiara, it would have bisected him.

But a wind gusts out of nowhere, flinging the plastic discus toward the trees.

Then she sees a tree branch that seems actually to snatch out, catch the Frisbee in its leaves.

Hands on her hips, she directs an accusing look at Darien.

He only smiles and beckons at her to follow him as he heads beneath the tree for the Frisbee.

Underneath the branches' shade, the grass is dappled with light. Serena blinks, pushing her sweaty bangs from her forehead as she lets her eyes adjust to the sun's glare.

Darien stands beside the tree's trunk. He is watching her with a wary, concerned expression, as though she has been brainwashed by the Negaverse and he is waiting to see what she will do.

When she is quiet and only watches him back, he speaks.

"I'm really too mature to be saying this," he says, "but as usual, you have a way of bringing out the five-year-old in me, so I'm going to say it. I told you so."

She wraps her arms around her churning stomach. "Told me what?"

"That we shouldn't have come to this." He takes a step toward her. The Frisbee in the tree branches above him casts a faint vague reddish shadow on the ground that bounces as a breeze shakes the branches. It flickers across his face.

"What, because it's boring?" She smiles, trying to make light of it.

He smiles back, uncertainly. "That too." The red shadow crosses his face again. "What happened?"

She clasps her hands behind her back. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your straw was chewed in half. I know what that means, Odango."

"That I'm hungry?"

He moves toward her to close the distance between them but stops a step away. "You really don't want to talk about it?"

"I really don't," she says stubbornly.

Because what is there to talk about? That people think she married him because he's rich, and he married her because she's pretty, and neither of them could possibly love the other? She doesn't need to tell him because she already knows what he would say if she did tell him. You and I both know that's not true, and the people we love know it's not true, and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.

It's true. It shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks.

Except it does.

She feels so… She doesn't know what, exactly. Just that the feeling is so strong that her lips and fists are trembling with it. She has fought half of her life, spent half of her life killing and being killed and neglecting her homework and her family and crying herself to sleep. Done all that, for this? To be smirked at, and looked down on, and seen as a – a –

Darien has his hands on her shoulders. They are tightening, his lips are coming down to brush her ear, and abruptly she is blurting out, "They all think I'm some trophy wife who only married you for your money!"

Darien jerks away. Serena stares at her shoes, trying to glare, but her eyes too full of tears to manage it. Humiliation has joined the anger. Why did she say that?

"I'm being stupid," she says thickly and quickly. She swipes a hand across her eyes, trying to calm herself down. It shouldn't be hard – after all, she has faced youma and corpses and death with more composure than this – but it is. She had though that after Chaos's last vestiges faded, it would be easy and painless to settle into a normal life, but hurt lurks in normalcy, too. The hurts aren't big enough to kill her, but they are enough to sting and humiliate, and those are feelings that she has not felt since her earliest days as Sailor Moon, before there were worries about death and torture and the end of the world to numb her to them.

"Stupid," she mumbles at herself again, staring at her shoelaces.

Darien's shadow falls over them. "You're not being stupid."

Serena looks up at him. She feels her face trying to muster a smile, to look as though she is brushing off her embarrassing outburst.

But Darien's hand goes to her face, cupping her jaw. His thumb goes to her lips, smoothing the false smile away. "You're never stupid."

Serena turns her face, away from his hand, before the hot tears from her eyes can trickle onto his fingers. She forces a joking tone. "I'll remind you that you said that the next time I wash your white coat with my red socks."

"Like you ever do laundry." His sarcasm comforts her even more than the hand he reaches out to pull her face back up, both of them cupped around her jaw now, forcing her eyes to meet his. "Serena. You are not like those women."

"I'm just so…mad," she breathes out, her teeth coming down on her lip. Her hands come up and grip his wrists, not hard, but tightly. "How can they… how can… I love you."

Darien strokes his thumbs down the sides of her face. "I know."

Serena closes her eyes and inhales, her skin brushing against his palms. She lets the understanding she senses from him through the rope settle over her and calm her like a serene blanket of snow.

After a minute, she opens her eyes. "I know? What kind of unromantic answer is that?"

There is a limpness to his gentle smile, but he laughs. "You don't recognize a Han Solo quote when you hear it? That's it, we're going home right now and watching Star Wars."

Serena grabs his wrists again. The idea of getting away from this place, and the Surgeon Society wives, is like the promise of ice cream at the end of a doctor's appointment. "Can we?"

He grins at her as though he can tell that she is thinking about food. "Of course. Let's get out of here."

They tramp back up to the club's veranda, where the doctors and their wives are conversing over the clinks of the ice in their glasses.

"There you are!" says Saena when she sees them. "The rest of us have already ordered, we'll call the waiter back for you." She lifted her hand to motion for him.

"No, that's fine," says Darien. "Thank you, but we're going to head out."

"What?" Saena's eyes flick from him to Serena. "Why?"

Serena opens her mouth to say that she isn't feeling well, but Darien beats her to it.

"Serena just got a call from one of her editors," he says. "They need her for an emergency photo shoot." He glances at her as though urging her to play along. "We hate to leave early, but I'm sure everyone here understands how it is to be on call."

Dr. Enoto and Dr. Nakahara chuckle.

"We do," says Dr. Sawara with a tentative smile. "Good luck, Serena."

Serena smiles warmly at him, bows politely to everyone else at the table, and heads toward the exit with Darien.

"You're such a liar," she murmurs out of the corner of her mouth as the hostess bids them goodbye.

"Yes, but did you see the looks on their faces?" he mutters back.

Heat radiates from the asphalt as they walk across the parking lot toward the car. Serena squints against the bright sunlight, feeling tremendously lighter than she had in the cool shade of the veranda. She even begins to skip as the red Mustang comes into view, wondering if she could trick Darien into frying fish even though it is her turn to cook that night.

"You know," comes Darien's voice, light and conversational, from behind her, "you're not the only one who's had to deal with being a trophy wife. Remember all the super villains who came after me because I was your good-looking boy-toy?"

Serena's good mood dissipates into guilt and horror. For the first time she sees their adolescence as it must look through his eyes, not just as a teenager repeatedly forced to fight ugly monsters, but as one repeatedly kidnapped and brainwashed and imprisoned and killed, all because a super-being was trying to get to her.

He reads her thoughts through the horror traveling across her face. But he does not mirror her expression. He is grinning a little instead. He elbows her and says, "So now you know how I felt all those years, hmm? To everyone else in the universe, I'm just your trophy wife.

Serena stares at him, huge-eyed, lower lip trembling. How can he joke about this?

"Don't give me that face," Darien says, putting his arm back around her shoulders and squeezing him to her. "We're fine now. Dr. Sawara's wife may be a little worse than Queen Beryl, but she's not as bad as Nehelenia, and we handled her fine."

"This isn't…" Serena sputters. "It's not funny!" But it is, a little. Swallowing the giggle tickling her throat, she allows herself to be pulled closer.

"Look, Odango." He talks against her temple, tickling her ear. "I'm speaking from experience. Realizing what other people think about you…you can't worry about it. You've just got to let it go."

Her husband lets out a warm laugh that sends shivers radiating from where his warm breath hits her temple and nudges her with his cheek. "And if I can do it, you definitely can. It's a lot harder for me than it is for you. I'm a Leo, and we're very proud creatures."

Slowly, Serena cranes her head back to look up at him. Her eyes are very wide. Darien tenses a little, as though prepared for her to burst into tears, but instead, a delighted grin splits her face. "Ha! You DO believe in astrology!"

Darien sets off across the asphalt. "In basic zodiac signs, maybe. But not in those daily horoscopes of yours."

"Why not?" she demands, tripping after him. "They're always right!"

Darien smirks over his shoulder at her. "Give me one example."

Serena grins mischievously back as she catches up to him, and his hands catches her, automatically entwining their fingers. "Well, mine today said that somebody would be making me fried fish for dinner."

"Did it now," he drawls.

"Ye-e-s," she draws out, blinking up at him in the sunlight.

He stares at her for a moment, his smirk becoming a warm smile. He lifts a hand to her cheek, stroking back a tendril of hair.

"Fine," he says affectionately. "I imagine you'll want me to make some sort of dessert, too?"

Serena's face lights up with delight all over again. "Yes!" She seizes his arm and hugs it to her as they walk, chattering about how they don't have batter or cake mix, so they'll need to stop at the store on the way home, and oh, Darien?

"Hmm?" he says absently. He has been paying less attention to her actual words than to the happy tone of her voice, so different from the taut emotion that strained it before.

Looking up at him with her serious blue eyes, she says, "You're not a trophy wife."

He smiles down at her before tilting his head to put his cheek against her hair. "Thanks."

"You're a housewife."

There is a pause. Then the sound of a growl rumbling up through Darien's chest. "Odango…"

Giggling madly, Serena takes off for the car.