Disclaimer: The "Sailor Moon" setting and characters belong to Naoko Takeuchi, Kodansha, Toei, &c. I'm just borrowing them briefly, please don't sue.
A Brief History of Time: The Beginning
I suppose I should start at the beginning, or as much of a beginning as anything can have.
Once upon a time, long long ago, and so forth, there was Time. Chronos. Not exactly the most well-known of the gods, nor swimming in devotees. But still, someone has to keep an eye on the orderly flow of time, so he exists. Watching time, though, is about as exciting as watching grass grow, so after however long it took, he got bored. And he finally figured he would try a mortal incarnation, just to give himself something to do.
He managed for himself to be born to a human woman, grew up, did the standard kinds of mortal things. One of which, naturally, included falling in love with a pretty girl and getting married. And, in the due course of time, they produced a daughter. (That would be me, for the slow.)
My mother, however, was always a rather fragile woman, and shortly after my birth her health went downhill fast. As mortals tend to do, she died, leaving my father alone with a baby he hardly knew what to do with. And so, he left me there with my mother's family and promptly vanished.
As it turned out, his grief over his wife's death had revived the memories he had carefully buried years before, and he'd gone off to do whatever time-god things needed to be dealt with. I didn't find that out for a very long time, though. All I knew was that I grew up without any parents.
Not to say anything bad about my uncle and aunt who raised me – they were nice enough people, and treated me like one of their own children. However, children can hear the adults talk, and I know what they thought of my father. And so did their children, and the other children in the area, and they made sure I knew that they felt the same way about me as their parents did my father.
I suppose that being isolated from an early age prepared me for what was to come, but it didn't exactly make for a pleasant childhood. Nor did it make me particularly fond of my absent father.
But at any rate, I was identified as the bearer of the Sailor Crystal for my planet in my tenth year, and suddenly found myself elevated from an unwanted deserted half-orphan to princess. It was quite an experience, let me tell you.
And no, I don't care what legend says, I wasn't born to the royalty of Pluto or whatever story has been going around. The Silver Millennium was just barely even getting started – I don't think it could even properly have been called that, at the time, since Serenity had just barely pulled the planets into the alliance to begin with. However, the reigning monarchs of the other planets had produced daughters who bore the Sailor Crystals of their planets, but apparently Persephone of Pluto was barren, so they'd had to go look for me.
Onward.
When I started training as a sailor senshi, I suppose that I'd finally found a place where I belonged. At least, nobody was rubbing my face in the fact that I didn't have a mother and my father didn't want me. I was supposed to protect the planet, so they rather wanted me. Hades and Persephone really did treat me like their own daughter, since they didn't have any children of their own, and I guess I was happy. I wouldn't complain of unhappiness, at least.
But then my father showed up again, out of the blue, and had to spoil everything.
I believe I was in my early twenties around that time, and was settled quite comfortably into my situation. I was going through staff exercises in the yard with the training master when there was suddenly someone standing at the edge of the field. After some fairly unpleasant experiences early in my training, I'd learned not to let things like that distract me, so I just ignored him for the time being, since he wasn't immediately threatening.
When we finished the bout, however, I bowed to the master and started to move to the edge of the field to get a drink. The stranger approached me then, and I was a little startled to realize just how much he looked like me – seriously, if it weren't for the fact that his skin was so pale to be almost translucent and mine was dark as it is (though not as dark as a proper native of Pluto, as my cousins had reminded me often), we could have been twins.
"You're quite good with that staff," he observed, as he paused a few feet away, giving me a searching look.
I frowned inwardly, but let nothing of my feelings touch my expression as I released my hair from its confining braid and shook it loose. Instead of all the questions I wanted to ask of the stranger, I settled for just replying, "I know."
He grimaced a little and stepped closer. "All right, I know this is going to be awkward no matter how I say it. But, Kairos, I'm your father, and I have some things I need to tell you." (Yes, that was the name he gave me when I was born. No, I won't answer to it anymore. Don't try it.)
"I'm sure you do." I finished off my bottle of water, picked up my staff, and after giving him a polite nod just turned away and headed back toward the palace. "It was nice meeting you."
Before I'd taken more than a couple of steps I heard him mutter a particularly unpleasant curse (which, being a member of polite society, I technically wasn't supposed to know), and then suddenly everything around me disappeared. Instead of the practice yard, I was surrounded by swirling grey mists – when I glanced down I couldn't see any kind of ground or floor, just more mist. I was rather proud of the fact that I managed to keep my expression neutral as I turned back and found that he was the only solid object in the mists. "Should I be impressed?" I inquired, lifting one brow slightly. "I've seen magic before, you know." He didn't reply, and I finally sighed in mild exasperation. "If I'm late for dinner, the queen will be highly displeased."
"You won't be late for anything, Kairos," he replied, folding his arms across his chest. "That's one of the things I needed to talk to you about."
I won't try to recall the entire conversation that ensued, because it was entirely too long and boring, because my father has never learned how to summarize anything. (I suppose when you have all the time in the world, you don't have to.) But he informed me that, in addition to my duties as a senshi and whatnot, I also had inherited a certain responsibility toward the orderly flow of time, et cetera. And, for the first time, I saw the Door.
Let's just say that I wasn't terribly thrilled about the idea of having to guard the thing for the rest of eternity and move on from there.
But as he talked to me, I could feel certain...changes going on with the way that I perceived things. It was kind of like my mind was stretching out and expanding, as if it had been curled up in a fetal position for the last couple of decades and was becoming what it should be. And suddenly I could perceive the currents of time as my father does.
No, I didn't suddenly become an expert on manipulating the time/space continuum overnight. Not that our conversation was really "overnight." It took a long time, and had it not been for the fact that he'd pulled the both of us outside of time for our little chat I would've missed dinner that evening and for several evenings to come. But it was a beginning, and learning to actually manipulate what I could now sense took a little longer.
When I returned (or my father returned me, rather), I went to dinner like normal, but when Persephone asked me about my day and I rather casually mentioned that my father had come to visit I could've heard a pin drop in the hall. Then I added that I needed to pay a visit to Queen Serenity, and I think the monarchs about had a collective heart attack.
But, well, I was the guardian senshi of Pluto, and they assumed I knew what I was talking about. (Learning to pretend that I always know what's going on has been immensely valuable over the years, let me tell you.) So the visit was arranged, and I traveled to the moon to pay a visit to the high queen over the alliance, in the seat of her power.
Queen Serenity was more or less what I had expected, from what I'd heard of the stories, and from what my father had said. Except the stories really couldn't convey the sense of power and utter peace that radiated from around her; she really did deserve her name.
I explained my...peculiar situation, so that she would understand my need to be, um, a little reclusive. And she not only understood, she told me that she'd been planning to set up the outer planets to defend the system from outsiders – all four of us were more powerful than the guardians of the inner planets, for various reasons, and all needed a little more isolation. (Or in Saturn's case, nonexistence for most of the time, after she became active.)
While there I also passed on the plans my father had given me for what became the system of Gates connecting the planets of the alliance, which allowed for much easier and faster travel. (Having complete power over time/space makes designing teleportation Gates somewhat simple.) I think that in and of itself was one of the major contributing factors to the solidity of said alliance as time went on; being able to move from planet to planet like stepping through a doorway in your own house makes it a lot easier to get to know and get along with the residents of those other planets.
Not that I did a lot of travel with them, because soon after that I had to take up my post at the Door.
Now, considering that the Door exists outside of time, it's entirely possible for me to go pay visits and whatnot without technicallyleaving – I'd just be in both places at the same time. Or outside of the same time. It's kind of hard to explain it, since most languages don't take into account the rather, ah, fluid nature of time, so take my word for it.
However, I came to realize that as the Door existed out of time, so did I. I couldn't just stand there and guard if I was still keeping track of seconds, minutes, hours as they passed. I had to become as timeless as my father was. I had to cut off contact with the mortal world and only watch as events flowed past.
And so I watched, as civilization grew and advanced. And eventually, as my adoptive parents grew old and died. They were never replaced by a new king and queen, because I technically still lived. I kept my title as princess, and they appointed a regent to keep an eye on things while I was gone. I suspect that eventually I became a legend of sorts on Pluto, and they only acknowledged the "princess" as a distant myth, while the regent was the actual ruler. I didn't care too terribly much by that point.
The other royal families continued on over the centuries, with the queens passing on their duties as the guardian senshi to their daughters, and so on and so forth. (Saturn was a special case – they passed on the Sailor Crystal, but the Saturn senshi never used their powers. Dealing with Princess Saturn was kind of like walking on eggshells, because you didn't want to upset her and awaken her powers on accident, because the gods only knew what they would do then.)
And then, finally, Queen Serenity announced that she was with child. The entirety of the Silver Millennium rejoiced – but deep down inside, I couldn't. Though I knew I would love and respect the princess as much as her mother, I knew what her birth heralded, and I couldn't be happy about that.