Face off.
The physical, first of all.
Of course, if you were here, watching them, goddesses at war, the physical
would not be your concern. You would be afraid, you would have stood in
awe and trembling; you would have wished that you were anywhere but here,
at the battlefield of the fates.
You would not have noticed
that - face to face with nothing save a wide chasm of nothingness - they
were twins.
Not in the physical sense,
for the first was a creature of pure darkness, and like all creatures of
pure darkness she was in her own way, beautiful. Her golden hair fell in
tresses over her shoulders, cascading and ending in the form of a halo
around her head, as locks found their way around her body, wrapping and
unwrapping the slim figure like ribbons. Purity. But a glance into her
eyes (would you even have glanced into her eyes?) would betray her beauty,
for in those depths (windows to the soul, they said) you would have seen
all that made the world despicable. You would have seen ugliness, fear,
and hatred – oh, far above all things, hatred – and in the very same light
of hatred you would have turned to this figure, slim and lovely, the embodiment
of evil, and hated her. There was no sympathy for the goddess of the dark,
and you knew it (she knew it too) that she was the embodiment of the price
of evil, the fruit that evil gave birth to in every heart that housed her:
loneliness.
On one side: the loneliest
creature on earth.
The other one had fairer
hair.
She is good, you would tell
yourself, she is the light that breaks the darkness. There was no mistaking
that, no, you shake your head, rule out all rationalisations, you would
not have been mistaken. She bore some physical similarity to the dark one
(that same slim figure, that same way her hair danced about her), but there
was the way she tied her hair (her light fair hair bright as the sunshine,
gold yet white), twin buns over her head, like a little china-girl, and
there was the way her eyes (clear and blue and crystal) shone and then
there was the face, almost a child's face. An angel against the mother
of demons.
They stood far apart, facing
each other, eyes meeting. They levitated in the air, not as if they were
flying, but rather as if they had found a level of invisible ground to
stand on. Antagonists on equal footings, one against the other. Calm before
storm.
"I have been waiting for
this moment for a long, long time," says the one with the golden hair.
But what was that in the
blue eyes of the one she addressed that you saw?
"I know," she replies, in
a whisper.
She doesn't want to fight,
poor thing, you say to yourself. Her blue eyes, shining like crystal, reflect
something else that she does not want. Windows to her soul, they tell of
something sacrificed when good begins to know what evil meant. Loss. Pain.
Sacrifice.
Loneliness.
She does not want to fight,
for that which is evil will bear its loneliness as a part of itself, with
all its rage and filth, but that which is good walks the path of loneliness
because it is must. She does not want to fight, for she knows that to begin
the battle would be to begin walking a path covered with loss and loneliness.
She has known loss. Goodness is not naïve.
This, then, if you were here,
would be when her eyes turn to you.
You have seen her eyes. There
is nothing new to speak of: should you define them as beautiful, you would
have felt that the sadness in them was a traitor. To look into her eyes
would be to look into the eyes of the polar end of evil; to look into love,
and courage, and then, hope.
Perhaps she saw the same
in you.
She turns her eyes away from
you. The meeting of yours and hers takes only a few seconds at most (if
time can be counted then), but you are aware that there is a change: the
way she stood, the way she faced her opponent and stared straight into
her eyes, all hesitation swept away.
"Shall we begin?" she asks.
"We've already begun from
long ago," replies the other.
"Then we shall continue,"
she says.
And if you were still there,
you would have known why the two goddesses, one of darkness and one of
light, both sharing a loneliness, born to battle each other for evermore,
were twins.
=
End note:
Although I call this a Sailormoon
ficlet, I wasn't writing the story on any siginificant event in the canon.
The characters are Usagi/Sailormoon/Serenity/Cosmos vs. Kaos/Galaxia, but
apart from that there is barely any basis in the actual canon. I can't
even call it an alternate universe piece because I can't key in exactly
what makes it alternate universe.
This piece was written just to keep me going.
19/04/2003