2. By Moonlight
Of all the Souls that stands create –
I have elected - One –
When Sense from Spirit – files away –
And Subterfuge – is done –
When that which is – and that wich was –
Apart – intrinsic – stand –
And this brief Drama in the flesh –
Is shifted – like a Sand –
When Figures show their royal Front – And Mists – are carved away,
Behold the Atom – I preferred –
To all the lists of Clay!
---Emily Dickinson, poem # 664.---
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She let the wind ruffle her hair, lift the hem of her skirt.
Swirling sakura blossom like patterns to her heart's desire.
The wind was leading her to where he is, again.
This day she could stay longer with him, and she felt near to bursting with joy.
Her hummed tune mixing in the air with floating petals, she hurried her pace, the park around her soon fading into a kaleidoscope of colors, a blurring tunnel for him to clear.
There he stood, ready to lift her and spin her around, their bodies joining their minds' flight.
They walked and talked quietly, until she started reporting –and singing – to him her latest music discoveries. The lyrics from 'You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman' filled the air.
"Oh, Mamo-chan, I listened to your cd yesterday and it was sugoi! Such a supple, powerful voice! Ah, Aretha Freaking -"
He nearly choked on his ice cream "Aretha NANI?".
She smiled sheepishly, the shame colouring her cheeks fading as she saw his mouth quirking. "Ehr... tricky English names...". Two fluttered eyelashes later, she has not gained a clue from him yet but an expecting stare.
"Come on tell me." Another flutter of eyelashes " Please?".
He leaned his forehead on hers.
She blinked. "You must catch me first." She squealed and started running after him, rubbing the ribs he has just poked her in.
She was chasing him and he knew by experience she could run fast. So he braced hinself for her bear-catch and their consequent tumble on the grass.
"Gotcha!".
He surrendered, laughing hard. But as soon as they were on the ground, he rolled on top of her still panting body.
"Strange way of surrender, mister." She poked him in the ribs. "Now spill."
Ouch. He dropped, grimacing, on his back.
"Mamo-chan?" No answer. He laid still. When he sensed her breath on his nose, he opened his eyes while imprisoning her in his arms. She squealed again, before his kiss put her willingly to silence.
After a last peck on the tip of her nose, he accomplished her previous request: "Aretha Franklin."
They laid among the grass and flowers, ground and sky wrappping them with the warmth of the day.
Embraced by Nature and by his now dozing beloved, he was aware like never before – before knowing the girl in his arms - of Spring flowing: of every life's patterns pulsing through his hands into his being. He tightened his hug, careful not to wake her up, not yet.
Mamoru
It's because of you. Of the way you always affect me, allowing me to let myself go. Don't ever stop affecting me, transforming me, Usako. Chase me until I surrender, until all my walls crumble, my defenses and doubts and fears and secrets melt away.
You know about my childhood. But there are other things I'm hiding from you...
Like that I can love this world because you're part of it. I don't know how and why this planet is so peculiarly connected to me, I only feel that it works this way. What I missed was feeling the other way round. Untill I first met you. In you, this contradictory, once distant universe, turns to harmony. You're the key keeping everything in tune. Such is the power you hold on me. Let it be this way forever. Love me, Usako. To the eternity and beyond.
Even if you see me pretending to ignore it, to save appearences to the world. But I can't deny this love, nor survive without it. This feeling that makes me sleep in anticipation of a new day instead of wishing this day to be the last for me.
This feeling that makes me almost drown with joy and cry and bleed and fight my battles, both as Mamoru and as Tuxedo Kamen, and keeps me alive.
This gift of you I don't deserve. I lie to you, I keep you at distance. It's for your own good, for your safety, I keep chanting in my mind. Yet selfishly I keep claiming you and yearning for you. To be with you, inside you...
The rhythm of her breath changed. Her limbs stretched against his frame, conscience awakening.
Mamoru
Now you're touching my face, stroking my hair. Touch me, look at me, until your radiance drenches every fiber of my being. Turn me into someone worth of everlasting affection.
Let those twin cloudless skies of yours look at me, shining with so much hope I could even feel long forgotten wings springing in my soul: my own hope and belief to tell you the truth eventually. Because even if you knew about my dreams and secret life you'll be able to trust I'll be strong enough to come back to you: how can Death still claim me when I'm already yours?
Will you trust me Usako? Will you still want me?
She drove him to their favourite bench, the one in the rose garden facing the pond, all the while chatting happily, savouring their extra time together.
"Mamo-chan?"
Her questions took him away from his thoughts :"Mmh?"
"Come here." she sat on one end of the bench and patted her legs.
"Are you sure? I have a big heavy brain"
"A further reason to ease your frail neck from such a burden," she taunted affectionately.
"You've provided me a very nice comfortable nap over there. Now it's your turn. Suit yourself."
She pulled him nearer. "Come to me."
Come to me…
He couldn't leave her call unanswered. He didn't wish to.
His head in her lap, she lulled him to sleep, afterglow and her soothing touch caressing him.
Usagi
You seem so frail now in your sleep. Sleep at peace, my love. I'll be the one protecting you, watching your sleep, for once.
Let me protect you, now, from the evil and shadows surrounding us. Let me heal the scars of your past. Kami-sama, I don't know if I can, if I'm worthy. I can moondust youmas. But our own inner demons... I can't even rely on my powers. She even doubted she was worth to be a Senshi. But I'm trying, I'm trying...
She cast her eyes to the rising moon as if asking for advice, one first salty droplet rolling silently down her cheeks before she quickly wiped it away. The Moon...
Luna and Ami had told her about every Moon related myth and tale they had found, even the western ones.
Usagi
Serenity. Endymion. A goddess from the moon and a terran prince, unearthly beautiful and sleeping eternally.
The man in her dreams had the same name. The man in her lap stirs the same feelings in her.
She caught her breath. Why am I thinking about this now?
She glanced downwards as she felt Mamoru 's head shifting slightly aside in her lap. Her heart ached bittersweetly. The same feelings...
Usagi
Ebony hair and eyelashes framed in silvery glow, unearthly beautiful and asleep.
You're my Endymion, the prince of my heart. We're so close, yet so apart. We know each other like nobody else does, we both have secrets left.
Now you're even more withdrawn in your own world, in this cocoon of dreams I can't fathom. Even if tonight the moon is full, and my powers reach the climax .
She smiles briefly: as if her dreams, her senses, weren't already heightened to an almost hallucinatory level when Mamoru was concerned.
Usagi
You're everywhere my gaze lies, in every thing I touch, taste, hear, smell. Children's laughter, clouds' language, falling leaves, whispering winds, a heron's song, midnight skies: all tugging my heart with joy, melancholy, longing, persistance and ephemerality.
Strong and high-aiming as the mountains, cold and at the same time comforting as snow and water. Ami. Blinding me with your lights as well as with your shadows like lightning in a nightstorm, though to me not fearsome. And holding and nurturing all of me like vine branches of unbreakable strength and delicacy. Makoto. Both warming and burning me, solemnly calm or passionately showing me the way – or pushing me towards it -. Fire. Rei.
Reassuring and cheering me like a gentle evercoming sun and dancing butterflies. Minako.
Everything reminds me of you, Mamoru. As if the whole Earth is mirroring you. Again, so close and so alien at the same time. So elusive yet fulfilling.
I close my eyes and every time you're here, engraved inside my eyelids.
You're haunting me. And I want to be haunted.
I'm ashamed of myself, but I even wish I am haunting you as much as you haunt me. I know we're acting to everyone as nothing happened between us, to keep our secret.
But it's so maddeningly, frighteningly much more easy for you to do so, to mock me or to ignore me when we meet with our friends around: as if i wasn't there, as if I didn't affect you in the least. As if we had never been tied in flesh and soul.
I'm not sure anymore I can tell between truth and lie. What truly is and what is pretended to be.
Also because there are things I didn' t tell you.
For how unlikely and laughable it may seem, I'm a warrior, a fighter, a protector. All of us are. I'm the moon Senshi, supposed-to-be champion of Love and Justice.
My friends and I have been protecting this city, and possibly – according to Luna – the future of mankind, for months. But even if we trust one another for life and death, I've been lying to them. And to my family – my FAMILY!...-. And to you... to you...
This net of lies has been poisoning my life, tainting everything I hold dear. And me.
Her emotions gurgled and swirled untill her inner tide turned in accord with the Earth's, and her decision was made.
Mamoru
My last image of you between heaving eyelids is, from below, of you crowned with light by the falling sun rays behind you.
Your features swallowed by sunset, you look like the golden counterpart of the princess of my dreams.
But you're now the one and only. This is all I need to have. The place where I belong.
Yet when I enter my dream I'm there again, climbing her balcony like a lovestruck, second-hand Romeo.
Once on top, I see her back first : this creature of ivory and silver, so ethereal... ghostly. Like most of my memories.
She turns her head at my whispered calling . She's different now. Her face... Kami-sama... this is not a ghost's face.
I'm entranced. Unable to move anymore.
She comes to me smiling among tears.
While I watch her, her looks and even form are shifting at every step she takes, as well as every time she crosses the lights and shadows at intervals in the room. At first she's my silvery glowing princess wearing a white pearl-encrusted gown; a moment later, in a glimpse of red and blue, she's a blonde teenager wearing a Sailor Senshi fuku.
I hear my knees hit the floor.
One step later, she emerges from a pillar of shadow next to me and she's a little child from my past holding a bouquet of crimson roses. Another shadow, the last –and deepest- next to me, engulfes her, and when I focus on her form emerging into light, I see an unmistakable pair of Mary Janes and perfect shaped ankles, the blue folds of her long skirt enhancing even more the silver-highlighted gold of her ponytailed hair.
Before I can speak her name, her fingertips press on my lips. I feel her lowering her head, her hair like a feathery soft cascade from her shoulders to mine, and I close my eyes.
A drop falls on my cheek. And it's for real.
He opened his eyes, and what he saw were beloved features chiseled in ivory skin, a shiny pattern of tears from moist luminescent orbs, now slowly lowering to meet his from the Moon above. Her corals hesitantly smiled at him before her face turned to lie her cheek in his upraised palm.
"Usagi..."
She slowly rose, inviting him to a sitting position before standing up in front of him. She took one step backwards. Bathed in moonlight, she was silver on silver.
Eyes closed, she began to move.
He watched her while she gestured smoothly and without hesitation in the trademark Sailor Moon pose.
Then she opened her eyes again, keeping herself utterly still. Waiting for his reaction.
Silence.
She seemed to glow, but he knew the pouring moonlight was not the only reason. With the memory of the dream still lingering and melding with their present reality, he was not as surprised as he could have been just few hours before.
She was still, uncertain, remorse crawling in her heart while looking into his gaze, now shifting to her chest, his eyes unfathomable, shadowed by his long, thick eyelashes.
"Don't you think I look a lot like her?" she asked, wishing to sound playful enough to mask her nervousness and creeping self-guilt. She could mend everything saying it was a joke, she thought.
But he had felt the underlying tension in her voice.
He raised one hand to touch her brooch. So similar to hers. It could have seemed so crazy, but it felt so right now. And he remembered suddenly that day on the bus, sitting side by side, when he had heard her speaking to her cat Luna: a talking dark-furred cat was a constant companion to Sailormoon's first appereances.
"A lot indeed" he answered at last, in a murmur.
How could he have been unable to notice, before? How could she trust in him so much to tell him - while she did know so little about him -?
Will you trust me Usako? Will you still want me?
He had not dared to ask her before. And here she was, offering him the answer nonetheless.
She had trusted him since the very beginning, welcoming him with all of herself in another, far away life and world.
And in this present one, showing him freely her best qualities as well as her flaws even when they were supposed to be enemies. Letting him catch her and hold her in his arms without real resistance on the way to school in the morning. In more recent times, allowing him to visit her at night when his need to touch her, to breathe her in, to talk to her, was too overwhelming.
And now, this.
She was always giving him so much more than he could return.
But he could give her back something, finally.
She gasped at the contact with her brooch, and at the sound of his voice, much lower than usual, so oddly familiar and different at the same time. She couldn't pinpoint why, not yet. Near-recognition pounding at her from inside, through her pulsating temples, and from the outside light that surrounded them both, pervading her eyes.
His fingers lingered on the brooch, tracing the half-moon lines in the centre, the four tiny gems on the border. She lowered her gaze, following the movements of his hand, unable to speak again.
Something soft and velvety brushed on her forehead, startling her.
Their eyes met again, the red spot between them now recognizable. His head was tilted on one side, the rose – rose?- he held in the other hand was now softly pressing on her lips. He spoke.
"Thank you. For trusting in me. For trusting in what we are, whoever who we are".
A deep crimson rose, apparently coming out from nowhere, with a scent like... Tuxedo Kamen's. Mamoru's scent.
She was tracing his features now, his jaw line, his lips, his nose, his eyebrows, his eyelids.
His blue, grey-sparkled depths went alight with his own faint golden glow below the blinding moonbeams whiteness.
Her eyebrows furrowed briefly, her fingers dug into his hair, while she tried to compare, and she remembered at last, her body and mind's eye opening.
This man, her saviour, enemy, lover, friend, her greatest weakness and her greatest strength, prince and ruler of her very being and of a lost, forgotten kingdom.
This present, as well as once and future, rose garden. And moonlight and existence and world.
Passing instants stretched to eternity, and time went full circle.
Mutual realization in their irises, awe and joy. What the heart already knew beyond words and memories of two lifetimes could finally blossom through their lips "It's you...".
They embraced, with the gesture crossing and connecting time and space, renewing their bonds of memories and feelings, of other people and beings, each one carrying a cosmos inside. Everyone and everything. Everyone in everything.
And in that moment of full realization and fulfillment, they knew that whatever challenge they would meet, and although Death was always just one step away, everything would be all right.
ANs: Finished! ---sigh with relief---. I think I'm better – FASTER for sure- at drawing than at writing ( ---hint, hint--- please click the link on my bio page to have a look at my drawings. I'm uploading both SM-related and not SM-related works. Hope you like them!)
Thanks to Nimbirosa, aka Arashinobara, I realised my 'anonymous reviews' option was disabled. I've changed it, so you can drop a line (or just a word) now, if you wish. I'd really appreciate that. ---endearing smile---
Just a note about #1 and some answers:
Dear Alicia, if and when you read this story, know that the quotation from your fic title was utterly - and fondly - intentional.
For people who didn't read it, the title is 'Catch Me If I Fall', by Alicia Blade. Such a good fic; I highly recommend it: one of the best examples I know of the heigths you can achieve starting from a very simple and thin plot. You must be skilled to do that. And she does.
Neo-Diji: of course you can bother me. It's only fair: I've been bothering you a lot ---winks---. And, yes, when Usagi says: " I have to go" the meaning is "I've got to go". The 'have to' form should be right for BE. But I'm not sure.
Nimbi-chan: I hope this second chapter did meet your expectations. And thank you again for putting my fic in your C2.
---for people not knowing her works, just look after either her pen-name 'Nimbirosa' or 'Arashinobara Jikkankakyoku'. You won't regret it ---hints&nods fiercely--- ---.