The Other Side
by Goz

Disclaimer: I don't own Sailor Moon. If I did, I would've made them wear more clothes.

Warning: This is a Sailor Moon fanfic concerning various new Sailor Scouts of my own creation. It also contains liberal mixing of the Japanese version with the dub. Caveat emptor.

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Part 18

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Andrea had been sitting on the park bench for a while now, she wasn't sure exactly how long. She felt very calm now, but she thought she remembered sitting here and waiting nervously for someone. But then she had remembered that they weren't coming, and she had just smiled. And that was when she looked up and wondered how long she had been there.

The air was very clear now - the leaves, the stars that were starting to come out, the city lights, were all cleaner and sharper than they'd been last time she'd seen them, whenever that was. She plucked a waxy leaf off of the bush next to her bench and smelled it, and touched the strange yellow dress that she didn't like much - she had always thought metallic fabrics were tacky - and decided that everything seemed much quieter. Was that it? No, the big change was that the air was cool.

Oh. She didn't have a fever anymore. Why? Because she had had a dream. She remembered it.

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The iron platform had a few traitors waiting to die on it. On the small silver balcony above, someone had just fallen.

Ket was old as both a cat and a human, and deceptively clumsy when made the latter, but she was always so quick and so sharp-witted and she had killed so many people that it was impossible to think of her that way. She was Ket, and she was invincible. But someone who didn't know that had a gun.

Sailor Hydra was bending over the human body of someone who wouldn't have gotten hurt if she'd just stayed a cat for the silly, inconsequential, normal sort of ceremony. *Stupid, stupid, stupid -* "Ket, Ket, Ket," she heard herself whispering tearfully. "Don't leave me now." She felt the eyes of her subjects burning into her back, but she didn't care. Not many things were more important than her power.

"Kitten," said Ket. Her voice was a lot gentler than Andrea had thought was possible for her. "I'm going. Turn your back and finish the execution. It'll be the perfect show of strength -"

"Yes," said Sailor Hydra suddenly, standing up suddenly. "There is."

"What will you do?" asked Ket - she wasn't being gentle, she was just dying.

*Ket is hurt too badly to save, even if I had any grasp of Sailor Cassiopeia's healing power,* Andrea heard herself thinking with an icy certainty. Time did not slow, as some people thought it did when someone died in front of you - her mind simply made the connections faster than the world could move. *Sailor Ursa Minor has a technique that can remove the soul briefly, a technique which I understand sufficiently to alter for a permanent transfer.*

Sailor Hydra briefly raised her wand to her heart, then shoved it down to cover Ket's. "Hydra Inner Fire Absorb," she said in a monotone, as her thoughts shuddered to a halt.

Ket's body trembled a little, like someone had poked her in the small of the back. Sailor Hydra saw black for a moment, and then a fiery silhouette of Ket rising to meet her imprinted on the inside of her eyelids. Then Sailor Hydra watched over Ket's shoulder, even as Andrea watched over hers, as Ket stood in Sailor Hydra's body and shoved down the lever that electrocuted the seventeen Hydrans.

"*Let this be a lesson to you!*" Ket roared to the stunned crowd, her sharp intonation and glowing cat-green eyes making the change obvious. "The Negaverse is death's *master*, and death takes those that *we* bid it!" Ket would have died after just a few more seconds, and she was shivering like a cold little girl, and Sailor Hydra remembered that two years ago she had proudly told her aunt that she had personally killed four hundred seventy-two Hydran rebels, and then their families.

Around then, Sailor Hydra had started feeling a little sick. It had stayed with her for the rest of her life, then fourteen more years.

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Sailor Hydra was yelling in the Landscape. "Queen Beryl! Are you here?" The air was clear and dark, and no one answered. She smiled.

It was a funny thing to remember - like reading her own suicide note -

But that would have to wait. She had had a dream. She remembered it. And now she had to go fight.