This is a bit of a different fanfic than I'm used to writing. I thought it was an interesting premise, so I decided to write it. Here go the disclaimers: I don't own Sailor Moon, so don't sue me, yada yada yada…
Anyway, if you want to email me, it's at Guardian4@atlantic.net. However, PLEASE put Fanfiction or something like that in the subject line. I get a lot of junk mail and I may just delete it without reading it otherwise, though I won't mean to.
Onto the story…
Angelic Embrace
Part 9
Makoto knocked on the door to the house on the address and Michiru answered promptly. "Hello," she greeted with a smile. Makoto smiled back at her and entered as Michiru moved to allow her to pass.
"Is everyone here?"
Michiru nodded and led her to a large parlor, a white piano near a bay window. There were sofas strategically placed around the room so the people there could look at each person without having to strain their necks or eyes.
"Where's Setsuna?" Makoto asked, seeing the one Soldier besides Saturn missing.
"We don't know," Haruka answered, standing up from a dark blue couch.
"Right now, where she is, is the least of our problems." They looked at Minako's grim face. "She's probably at the Time Gate. At this moment, we have to find a way to reach Serenity. She's been away from us far too long—"
"Kisama!" Makoto slapped a hand on her forehead and they all looked at her. "I met with Usagi's parents and promised to tell them where she was if I found out when I first went to the park to meet Setsuna."
"Mako-chan," Rei said, scandalized. "You can't tell them we're Senshi!" she hissed.
"I didn't know I was one or remembered," Makoto replied hotly.
Minako cut in before an argument ensued. "Calm down. First we have to contact the princess if we can, break her out if it is possible. Then we'll deal with her family."
"They have a right to know where she is," Ami said quietly but firmly.
"I'm not saying we won't bring Usagi back to her parents," Minako soothed, "but not until we get her out. They won't believe us anyway at this point with no evidence to show them besides our henshins and that'd have to be dire for us to use in front of them."
They all agreed reluctantly that what she said was true.
"Now, we only see the princess when we're sleeping. We should all hold hands when we fall asleep and see if we can't get together at the same time and figure this all out."
"But sleeping in the daylight?" asked Rei skeptically.
"It may take us hours to do anything and we want the whole day to try other things if this doesn't work.
"Besides, if one of us can't get to sleep, then Ami brought some sleeping stuff to put us under." She looked at Ami and the doctor nodded.
They sat in a circle on the floor, Keagan sitting next to Minako, Jace next to Rei, Zale next to Ami, Nick next to Makoto, and Haruka next to Michiru. They clasped hands and stared at each other.
"Should we use the tranquilizers anyway?" Zale questioned, but almost as soon as he asked, they were all yawning and within minutes, they were all slumped and asleep.
When Makoto opened her eyes, she immediately recognized the place she was in. Slowly forms materialized next to her. The first was Venus, on her left Mars. Mercury appeared next to her and further down Uranus and Neptune. Despite putting the men between each Senshi, the Shitennou appeared in a group by themselves, next to Venus.
As they watched the bubbles that shifted wildly, another form materialized and they all stiffened. Makoto let out a breath as she recognized him, Endymion, the Prince of Earth.
"Endymion!" Jadeite cried and ran forward to grasp the man.
The prince looked startled at seeing his Kings, but a wide smile stretched his lips as he looked at them all. Kunzite and the others moved forward as Jadeite released the dark-haired man.
"We've come to help the princess," Nephrite told him as the five men calmed down.
Endymion suddenly lost his smile. "You can't save her here. You must defeat the man who did this and then she will be free. You can do nothing here."
"Well we're going to try," Uranus said staunchly, glaring at Endymion for his pessimism.
He simply shook his head as the Senshi approached the barrier. After a moment of study and Mercury's computer and visor, Venus decided, "We'll use our most powerful attacks at it and try to destroy it."
"Silver Dragon!"
"Diamond Dust!"
"Final Burst!"
"Thunder God!"
"Grand Stream!"
"Meteor Strike!"
All the five Senshi's attacks spiraled around Venus's gold dragon as it dived toward the barrier, giving the flying creature substance of all elements except death and time.
It gave a shriek of anger, feeding off Venus's emotions, and shattered against the churning bubbles with a spectacular explosion of light, leaving after-effects of flashes on everyone's eyes.
When Jupiter looked again, she gasped. There was no break in the barrier at all! It didn't look as if they'd ever attacked it. Venus swooned and Jupiter caught her, admonishing the woman for using such a draining attack as that when they hadn't been sure it would have worked anyway.
Suddenly light was drawn from the bubbles that had been hit by the magical dragon. It formed into an image that the Senshi impressed upon their mind so they would remember when they woke.
Princess Serenity looked down at them with her deep, loving blue eyes and smiled. "I thank you for trying to rescue me, but you cannot here. The man who holds me capture…his power is strong, stronger here than in the mortal realm. That is where he is weak. This is his own element; he is invincible here."
"Who is he, Serenity?" Mars gasped out.
"I do not know, but Pluto does. Ask her."
"She will tell us nothing, Princess," Neptune said with a bow.
"She will when you call her." Serenity turned from the Senshi and her eyes fastened on the man with royal blue eyes and dark armor.
"Endymion," she whispered.
"Serenity," he murmured back, their eyes drinking in their unending fill for each other.
A jerking on her body brought Jupiter back to the parlor in Haruka and Michiru's home. She found herself lying on Nick's chest, having collapsed there when sleep had overtaken her. She slowly sat up, groggily, and looked out the window. It was just turning dark, something she had not expected. She had arrived at noon and they had just sat down at 12:30. She had been asleep for hours! No wonder she was so sore!
There was a collective groan all around as the Senshi and men picked themselves up and rubbed their gritty eyes.
"How did we fall asleep so fast?" Ami pondered. "And why did it take so long there when it felt like only a few minutes."
"I can answer both those questions."
They whipped their attention to a sofa where Setsuna sat calmly, drinking some tea. At their looks, she sat down her cup and folded her hands in her lap, gazing at them evenly.
"Well?" Minako prompted as everyone, Makoto with quite a few grumbles, picked themselves up off the floor.
"I put you to sleep with a spell. As for the time, well, in that place, everything is skewed compared to here. It is the way he set it up."
"Who is he?" Haruka demanded, putting an arm around Michiru's shoulders.
Setsuna sighed. "His name is Daray. It means 'dark', which is rather appropriate, considering who and what he is. He is the last of a race of creatures that looked like humans, yet were anything but. The race, called the Tehee, was a most violent race and loved to dominate. Most of them destroyed themselves in silly wars amongst themselves and with petty squabbles. Daray was smarter than that. He didn't involve himself with his species. Instead, he found his amusement in torturing helpless denizens in his universe.
"But soon the few left of the Tehee bonded together and managed to make a breach in the fabric of his universe that paralleled our own. Once the discovery was made, however, they began to fight again over who would control and walk between realms. Daray let them fight. When only one of his race was left standing, he approached and backstabbed the man. He was then the last of the Tehee. Daray became the one and only of his race to travel through realms."
Setsuna took a sip of her drink and continued.
"In spite of this, he panicked when he went through the portal that gave him this ability, embedding the portal inside of him as it passed through him. This is why his race fought over who would go. Once someone stepped through the portal, the portal would no longer be there, but inside the person so he or she could go anywhere they wanted to at any time. But it was a one person deal. When Daray turned and saw the portal that led to his universe gone, he panicked. He didn't know this would happen since between all the fighting, no one had outright mentioned that it would happen like this.
"He ran from the four corners of this universe to the next, trying to find a way to get home. He didn't realize the way home lay inside of himself the whole time. On the way, he had a run in with Metallia in the Silver Millennium, changing the fact that Metallia might have come back in the present. Metallia was utterly destroyed, Beryl with her, at the end of the Silver Millennium. The White Queen knew her world was destroyed and you all dead, so she sent you all into the future to try again.
"Anyway, when Daray found himself in the Dark Kingdom it was under lock and chain. He grew angry when they tried all sorts of spells against him to try and figure out why he was so powerful. He easily snapped his chains and confronted Beryl in her own throne room. He didn't know how to get out of there, so he made a deal with her. He would give her a way to defeat the White Moon if she would allow him to leave. She knew he was evil and had no fear that he would run to her enemies and tell them of her attack beforehand.
"It was an offer too sweet for Beryl to resist. He taught her some of the torturous methods used against the people of the Moon that would not only demoralize them, but kill slowly or quickly as she chose. During this process, Daray found the portal inside himself. When the Dark Kingdom attacked the Moon, Daray stayed and watched, amused at the struggle. All he saw was tormenting and that was what amused him, all that had ever amused him.
"When the Dark Kingdom fell, he stayed long enough to see Queen Serenity send the Senshi and the rest to the future. Daray amused himself for several thousand years going from realm to realm, his own holding no more amusement for him because the people there knew the pain and were no longer terrified but resigned when he tormented them."
Setsuna coughed and Ami refilled her drink. The older woman gave her a smile and took a long sip before returning to her story.
"Eventually Daray wanted to come back to this realm, but he worried about the Senshi. He had seen them in action and they were very powerful, perhaps more powerful than himself. But he consoled himself, thinking he had more things on his side than mere power. He had learned the art of making and summoning youma from observing Beryl and Metallia. He had plenty of things he could summon otherwise, such as that fire demon you fought recently. It was simply that summoning such creatures, such demons and things, took a lot of magic, time, and concentration. He knew he could not win that way, but youmas were ridiculously easy to create.
"So he came back the day that Luna would have found the dormant princess inside of a Tsukino Usagi and created Sailor Moon. But I was too late," she snapped out bitterly. "The possibility that happened now was so remote that I didn't even entertain its likelihood. When I saw Daray through the Time Gate, I entered the Stream of Time and ran as fast as I could to protect the princess. I was too late. She was already sealed away when I reached him, but a scant few seconds behind. But I left him with a deeply embedded fear of the Senshi before he was gone." A vicious smile lifted her lips before she wiped all expression off her face. Makoto and Rei exchanged a look and turned back to her.
"I saw Luna then and told her what happened, didn't I, Luna?"
Luna and Artemis crawled out from under the sofa. Makoto started and looked at them. She had realized that they had been there at all, so wrapped up with the story Setsuna had wrought.
"Yes you did."
"I trusted Luna to wake the Senshi and left back to the Time Gate. But when Usagi disappeared, Time altered. By the time Luna found out where you all lived, you were all gone. Makoto had gone on, traveling to fight in street fighting tournaments. Ami had gone to study abroad and Luna couldn't find out where. Rei was shuttered off to a school in the States by her father when her mother died. She only came back seven years ago, living only two with her grandfather who died five years ago.
"Luna managed to contact Artemis in England, but by the time they got together in person or even talked, Minako was gone, to where they did not know. I had told Luna and Artemis not to contact Haruka and Michiru who had just begun to become Soldiers again. Their part in the Time Stream was clear and they were fighting the Death Busters. I told them to not look for Saturn, for reasons I will not divulge.
"It was ten years before I forced myself to act." Her bitter words and self-hatred were obvious in that one moment that Setsuna let her guard down and let them in. Her mask didn't come up, letting them see the real person inside the Time Guardian. Her hands clenched into fists in her lap.
"I was too scared to act, afraid for myself when I should have been more concerned about the Princess. The day that Usagi had been locked away, the Prince collapsed. After a year, I knew that the doctors were going to give him an injection that would kill him. They saw no hope for him. I could not allow that to happen. Instead I used the funds that I have built up over the millenniums to keep him alive. But I couldn't do it all the time, so I set up an account that had access to mine and put Kunzite's name on it for Keagan. I knew he would try to find a way to help his liege.
"After ten years, I had finally built up the courage to do something about the princess. Once I got started though, I was like a wrecking ball. First I contacted Ami and Minako. They'd been friends for a long time and I could count on them to be there. Haruka and Michiru were easy; all I had to do was show up as the Time Guardian and tell them they were needed. Even if I hadn't, they would have known she was in danger and that time was drawing near to break her out. Rei was a little harder, but after I left, she meditated in front of her fire and that decided her.
"The person I was most concerned about was you, Makoto."
Makoto gazed at her in surprise. "Why?"
"You're stubbornness and also I could barely find you. You were always moving. I knew her disappearance had hit you the hardest, I just didn't know that you would take to street fighting. When I talked with you and you made to leave, I panicked. I had to find a way to make you come to Japan and meet with me. I knew if I mentioned the reason you were fighting you would come so I used that. I set up the first class because I knew you would be tired and had never ridden first class in your entire life."
"Did you also arrange it because you knew the Shitennou would be on there as well?" she asked, a little belligerently.
"No, that was a surprise on my part though an unexpected bonus. All this time I had been thinking of the Princess, not the Prince. When I began to act, the Princess knew it and the Prince reacted to it. That is why they came, for their liege."
"Why did he choose to capture the princess? Did he know the future too?" Keagan asked.
Setsuna shook her head. "No, he didn't know the future. He just thought that if he took the princess that it would demoralize the Senshi and he would have better terms in which to barter. But no Senshi appeared for ten years and he grew complacent. He finally realized that he had changed the future. However, he was cautious and he knew that at least one Senshi was still there. He was nervous about confronting me again and he stayed away. Only when I acted, did Daray appear again."
"If he wants a bargaining chip, then why doesn't he bargain now?" Jace questioned.
"Because he did his history. He knows that no Senshi would agree to his terms because he would just torture and torment the princess anyway and they'd fight because they would have no reason not to."
"How do we defeat him? And where is Usagi?" Haruka asked.
"Usagi is in his realm; in the safest place he can put her: his own castle in his own realm. He is terrified of the Senshi and the second any one of us hurts him he will run straight back to his safe place."
"Then how does that help us?" Makoto whined.
"If we can stoke his pride in such a way that he will stay and fight us, then we can defeat him that way."
"We?" Zale repeated cautiously.
"Yes, 'we'," Setsuna replied grimly. "I will not be late again."
"But even if we defeat him, how will that return Usagi to us?" Michiru wanted to know.
"She is sleeping in a containment bubble inside his realm. Because it is his magic that is sustaining it, it will break when we defeat him. She will immediately come back to us because she is not born of his realm and the only way for her to remain there was if she had the same thing Daray does inside of him: his realm-portal. Because she does not, she cannot stay there and will be transported back to her own realm, supposing it still exists."
"Just out of curiosity," Minako began, "but what would happen if our realm didn't exist?"
"She would simply fade away when he died."
There was silence after this announcement. It was a rather depressing subject to think about.
"Could it really go that far?" Nick wondered aloud.
"It could," Setsuna told them grimly.
"We have to defeat him for the princess's sake," Minako said emphatically with a gleam of anger and hope in her eyes.
They all nodded in agreement.
End Part 9
Yes, a lot of talking, but at least you know who 'he' is, right? Again I don't own the attacks that are in here, those are part of Legend of Dragoon, whose rights are Playstation's. Daray and the Tehee are mind though.