Ascension
Three: Discovery
-mentalyoga-

Rei awoke with a scream swinging on the ledge of her lips, but quickly forced her mouth closed, stifling it. Dream armies had invaded her sleep and dropped tiny bombs upon her peace. The mushroom cloud had bloomed above her forehead only briefly in the night, but closed with the dawn. What she had seen had left little hope of a pleasant outcome in her mind. Michiru's pained eyes had haunted her since the meeting, and she dreaded the thought of telling any of them what she had seen. Those eyes—the controlled desperation, the need to maintain whatever threads that had been holding everything uncertainly together—Rei understood those eyes. She knew that what this vision held would ruin everything they had built, could ravage any feelings of normalcy they had slowly allowed themselves to embrace. And that was no easy decision to make, assuming they had any choice at all in the matter. She was well-aware that for her part, she could never be selfish enough to watch the world shatter around her, as she continued acting out some mundane routine her mind was able to cope with. She was blessed with this gift (and this curse, of course), and she intended to use it, if it could make even just some small difference. But the others—would they feel the same way? In any case, the choice seemed unavoidable.

The vision: Tokyo had found itself in the center of a warpath; sky-high buildings lay as rubble along the pavement, corpses lined the sidewalk like limp dolls, and an asphyxiating mixture of dirt and fog hung heavy over every inch in view, which didn't reach very far. Cars were stopped in the middle of the street—drivers sleeping behind the wheel for all of eternity, as though there had simply been no time to park. Crashes filled the roads like thick smoke, choking up the scarce open spaces. The stench had been overpowering (death was no subtle scent, after all), and she had barely managed to keep from gagging as she walked between the haphazardly arranged vehicles. And as she continued her dream journey, day darkened into night (though with the smog that lay over everything, it was difficult to make much distinction between them), and she began to lose her way. Somewhere up ahead in the darkness, though, a red light blinked into and out of view. Rei knew nothing but to follow it, but no matter how far she traveled, the light never came any closer. It was only at the end of the dream that she suddenly found herself within mere yards of the light. And at exactly that point, she was blinded by a flood of crimson, and awoke. A voice, however, had whispered in her ear as she moved towards consciousness over and over again that "the time nears." Whether the voice was male or female, native or foreign, old or young…she couldn't decipher. Either it had been inexplicably ambiguous, or she had simply lost the memory gradually as her eyes sleepily adjusted to the morning.

Her heart ached as she came back into consciousness—an anchor pulling it down into some invisible abyss where many other hearts had gone to die. The question, now, was whether or not she was strong enough to pull it back up from the black hole that held it caged somewhere.

She threw back the covers, now lined with an icy dampness she assumed to be her sweat, and tugged furry slippers onto her chilled feet.

5:04, read the clock. Damn it, she thought, now she would never get back to sleep, and she had only stumbled into bed around midnight. It would be, she told herself with a groan, a very long day.

She splashed her face with cold water and patted it dry, hoping to shake off the fear that buzzed about her like a pesky insect searching for a landing zone.

"Mamo-chan, we need to see the doctor," Usagi said quietly, sitting on the decidedly cold toilet seat, with one knee under her chin to prop her head up. "Right away," she added, timid where she should have been demanding, whiny even.

Mamoru stopped shaving for a moment to turn to the strangely fragile girl. "For what?" he inquired, wondering suddenly if he was prepared to hear some excruciatingly long and predominantly imagined problem she'd come up with.

"I've been having these paralyzing pains in my stomach, Mamoru. When I was at Rei's yesterday, it hit me so badly that I ended up on the floor and…well…I'm scared. I want you to take me, Mamo-chan, please…" she looked up at him, biting her lower lip nervously, "Will you?"

Mamoru placed a shaving cream-covered palm on her knee gently, "Do you even need to ask me that, Usa?" He smiled for her sake, hoping that she would see in him the reassuring façade that she needed right now. Though he wouldn't admit it, he couldn't avoid the innate feeling that this was more serious than it might have seemed. He could not falter. "It's going to be all right," he whispered, pressing his lips to her warm, smooth forehead. She wiped away the trail he left behind, smiling—but her eyes still reflected the cries inside.

The drive was quiet; neither knew exactly what to say to the other as the streetlights were left behind in a blur. Usagi's fear of the doctor's office and all that went along with it consumed her thoughts, and Mamoru was too concerned he would say something stupid—as he had a tendency to do in these situations.

The sterile white of the office was suffocating; flipping through an old copy of some foreign magazine (what was this Vogue thing?) was all Usagi could do to keep herself from panicking. She patted absently at the dampness on her forehead with a tissue from time to time. She didn't want to look unkempt when she strode into the small room where an inevitably creepy doctor waited. They were always inevitably creepy. Usagi couldn't think of a single one she had met that hadn't sent chills through her small frame. Tomoe must have tainted it all for her; his gargantuan glass lenses, the shock of white hair, long skeletal hands…

"Just think," Mamoru said proudly, "One day, I'll be running one of these."

Oh.

Usagi smirked to herself and nodded assent towards him, quickly turning her eyes back to the photo of an unnaturally lean American model. A face painted white with lips a deep crimson—was she meant to be some faux-geisha? But Usagi was not really looking at the model; her mind lingered on the thoughts of the cold stethoscope and the even colder hands. Come to think of it, Mamoru's hands were on most occasions pretty chilled. Well, either way, he didn't freak her out, no matter his vocation. Those cold hands running down her stomach, cupping her breasts…she never minded it all that much.

They had been together almost nine years now, she thought briefly, and wondered how the time had passed them by so quickly, like water weaving its wily way through the cracks in the floor. That was how time worked; you didn't notice its interruption until you slipped in its path and fell hard onto your face. She stopped this thought-train; she was beginning to sound like Setsuna.

"Mrs. Chiba?" a nurse called out gingerly, and the two followed the white-clad woman down a seemingly endless hall. Doors towered ominously on each side, waiting to suck up unwitting patients and shuffle them into fixed categories: healthy…or diseased. Tainted. Unfit for life. The more doors they passed, the more Usagi worried that she would fall prey to the latter of the two. Racking stomach pains, constant nausea, dizzy spells—these weren't signs of any sort of blessed immune system. Maybe it was cancer. Or maybe she had somehow caught consumption and would start coughing up chunks of lung as soon as the doctor diagnosed her. No matter how many options her mind wandered through, it always returned to fancy visions of fatal disease and romanticized death scenes. In them, she would be lying on a white bed beneath a white canopy with a white cloth held up to her mouth as she slowly, excruciatingly hacked up the last of her life force. Mamo-chan would be sitting next to the bed—emaciated (since he would under no circumstances leave her side) and sobbing silently—holding her hand and constantly reminding her that he could never live without her, that he would poison himself as she had poisoned his heart with love. Silly little things like that.

Mamoru, for his part, quietly whistled a tune, while their shuffling steps provided the percussion. He did not put much faith into her overeager waking nightmares. To him it was trivial—probably a stomach flu, at most. He was worried only about her worrying. But still…even he, the professional skeptic, couldn't keep that lingering bad feeling at bay.

They found themselves waiting once more in the next room. Usagi had never understood that sequence of events. Why move from the waiting room only to wait in a different, less comfortable room? She would rather avoid the tissue-paper covered bed in the smaller room as long as possible. Even more sterile and lifeless than the previous room, it seemed filled up with death in each run in the wallpaper, every crevice in between the swabs in the jar, every bent page in the years-old magazines lying in disarray on the footstool. Maybe she was just imagining it all. Imagining all of this eeriness in the office, imagining, indeed, the fairytale disease she thought could be consuming her body. Facing reality was never one of her strong points. She preferred to imagine what might or might not happen; she had been forced to deal with realities far beyond the scope of normalcy, and her imagination was often the only thing holding her up under the weight of that. And in this case, it was the not knowing—the invisible pain crawling through her—that led her to form an imaginary origin.

After a million tiny moments of teetering between boredom and anxiety, the doctor waltzed in and began regurgitating small talk. Social niceties. She made a few noncommittal responses, silently praying to anything and everything that if she were to die, she would do so without looking too hideous, and certainly not in a bland doctor's office decorated with wall paintings of Disney characters.

He ran a few routine tests—reflexes, that stethoscope, bloodwork—while Usagi squeezed onto Mamo-chan's larger, stronger hand. She realized that, unaware, she had been drawing his planetary power out of his hand and into hers to remain calm; had he noticed? She looked to his eyes, but saw only genuine concern and something that looked a lot like…love. She didn't think of it often anymore, but there was always that love there—the sappy, heavy, eternal kind of love that evades most everyone else. The doctor made an unnoticeable exit, and Mamoru pressed his clean-shaven mouth and chin against her forehead, the spot basking in a warm glow for some time after.

"It's going to be fine. I just know it," he whispered, "and would I lie to you?"

Usagi smirked. "Well…"

"Stop it, you," he grinned. "I already told you. It's probably just some sort of stomach virus or something silly like that. He'll throw some meds at you, and off we'll go. Sound good?" He ran his hand through the black mass of hair atop his head, trying to avoid alerting her to the fact that her nervousness had rubbed off on him. This could be something serious. Maybe her fears weren't unchecked. She had a stronger sense of intuition than most, and maybe it was leading her to some accurate conclusion, and here he sat, condescendingly comforting her. But how did that even make sense? They had seen the future; she had no apparent death foretold. They had a few millennia ahead of them—filled with the peace and happiness they had worked so tirelessly for these long years.

Of course, as Setsuna had proven time and again, fates were not set in any sort of stone. They were written instead in something like sand, liable to blow away with a sudden wind or wash and warble beneath the pressures of an errant wave. And there was nothing thus far to lead any of them to believe that Crystal Tokyo would ever come to fruition. Since Chaos, they had done nothing of importance in fulfilling their supposed destinies. Maybe in killing off Chaos, they had upset the balance of something, and their paths weaved themselves away into oblivion. Meanwhile, they went on through daily routines, never realizing they had broken everything down in a single moment now lost in the past.

The doctor entered—interrupting his suddenly dark musings—and he felt Usagi's hand close tightly around his, wringing his knuckles through in order to find some semblance of resolve. He didn't know how much he had left to give her. They took a simultaneous deep breath.

"Well," the doctor began, a serious glint in his eyes, "I've got some news for you. And you'd better stay seated."

Ami led herself down the hall with a hand pressed firmly against the wall. It was a little support system; if she were to let go, she knew she would fall to the cold floor—and from there, she was unsure whether or not she would be able to get back up. It only happened on occasion, this instability that seemed big enough to break her. The problem was this: whatever happened within her wasn't something she could solve with logic, with her intellectual capacity. And she didn't know how to cope with that. She was no good at emotions. Throw a higher level calculus concept at her, ask her to carbon date a fossil or figure out the origin of some extraterrestrial life, and she'd do it without stopping to blink. But this whole concept of…dealing with feelings…it somehow bypassed her.

It wasn't that she hadn't tried. She had charged at it just as she would any other problem she had dealt with; she weighed the equation, plugged in the variables, and double-checked her solutions. But even when she triple-checked, and checked four or five times—just to be sure—the answers never fully solved the questions. And she was exhausted. She was tired of trying. Frustration had overcome perseverance and her left brain could not wrap itself around failure.

She let it all swim past, untouched, because reaching out was too much to try anymore. There had been a series of failed relationships lining the road of her past like broken houses, but now the path she walked was a secluded one, and she hadn't passed a house in many, many miles. It was easier instead to just stop walking, build a tent under the nearest cover, and hope that no storms disturbed her shaky peace.

It worked, mostly, but there were times—like now, as she treaded carefully down her own hallway in her own home in the safety of her own presence—where the solitude grew far beyond its proportion and intimidated her into submission. And so she gripped the wall with every last ounce of strength, determined not to have to pull the splinters from the hardwood out if she fell.

She rested on the couch and flipped on the TV, finding—as usual—nothing of interest. Reality television hadn't, as predicted, overstayed its welcome, and continued the full attack on programming. She was already living some sort of surreality and had no desire to watch preternaturally beautiful people live out a scripted one on the small screen. She turned it back off and laid her head against the pillow, soft and reliable. She had had it for as long as she could remember, and its off-white fabric (it was white, once) was about as close to her childhood as she got, nowadays. When her mother hadn't been around to play headrest for her, she substituted this little pillow. When she found herself crying over the father she never knew—this crying business was so pathetic—she buried her eyes into the pillow and allowed it to bear the burden of her loneliness. They had been through a lot of history together, and tonight was another night she would need its companionship. She laid her head down, and let her eyes fall shut.

The phone rang. She lifted an arm, fully prepared to compose herself and answer just as she always did (a curt "Yes?"), but that feeling overwhelmed her again, and her hand fell limp against the expanse of couch stretching beside her. The answering machine did the job for her, and she preferred it that way. She was no good at confrontations, either.

Beep.

"Ami, I know you're probably sitting on the couch right now listening to this, you bitch," Makoto's voice broke through the barrier, "and I demand that you get up right now and grab the phone…" Pause. "Oh come on. I wanted to go out for drinks. I need it—and hon,' I know you do." Pause. "Fine then. Suit yourself. I'm going to have a fucking blast, and you're going to fall asleep around nine like the boring old spinster you are." Pause. "All right. Well, if you change your mind, I'll be at that place near the sakura gardens. What's the name of it?...oh well, you know where I'm talking about. I'll be there all night, probably drunk out of my mind. Bye."

Beep.

The machine's end note hung stale in the air for a few milliseconds and died away into an already stale silence. Ami sometimes feared—in this oppressive silence—to even sigh too loudly. It might awaken a few ghosts napping throughout the apartment, or if nothing else, might awaken a few ghosts napping inside of her.

She felt badly for not answering Makoto, and she would probably feel badly in the morning about leaving Mako alone in a bar, as she was doing. Damn guilt complexes. She loved Makoto, but the girl knew how to get under your skin. She was too blunt; she asked questions that Ami had no desire to acknowledge within herself, let alone answer to someone else. Makoto had that way about her—she could say a few simple words, and any façade you had built up imploded, leaving behind only the scars it covered.

And Ami couldn't deal with that tonight. She was in one of those moods, and her vulnerability, she knew, was not something she needed to take out for a night on the town. Her vulnerability, after all, was never much of a partier.

The first shafts of moonlight wafted in through the curtains as the breeze parted them. But the rays were broken, and the moonlight seemed aging and forbidden. She supposed anything would seem that way now, but for some reason, it still sent a chill running through her. She wrapped a shawl around her thin frame and pulled the windows closed. She would rather not have to deal with that particular moonlight tonight.

Pressing her head against her trusty off-white pillow, she drifted off into a sleep filled with dreams of desolate roads and empty white houses.

In the bar surrounded by the sakura blossoms, Makoto too rested her head—but hers was pressed against the cold laminated wood of a table already acting as a resting place for numerous empty glasses. She didn't lie when she left the message on Ami's answering machine—the week had taken its toll, and she loaded her liver up with alcohol, knowing that even the morning hangover wouldn't taint the numbed evening at the bar. Despite this, with heavy eyelids and her head desperately swimming upstream, she prayed for a nice trough of water in which to submerge her wobbling face. And if that trough happened to have a couple bottles of diluted aspirin in it, then she'd be that much happier about the whole ordeal.

But no such thing appeared, and she went unnoticed by the bar employees and patrons—she was just another drunk in a metropolis filled with self-medicated fools. Yes, she was using booze as self-medication. And she had taken up smoking, too. But what did it matter? There was no one else to help her out, and helping herself out was too much sometimes. Keeping up this strong goddamn exterior—as cliché as it was—proved too heavy for her by the end of the day. And there was no Mamoru around, no Haruka, no Grandpa, and no computer to hold her up when her balance gave out. There were just her two feet, and by the time she got out of work each day, her feet weren't so sturdy anymore.

"Fuckin' a," she slurred, propping her face up on a weary wrist and glancing around to make sure no one had noticed the line of drool that trailed from the table to her mouth as she came back to semi-consciousness.

It was then that she saw that, indeed, someone had noticed her lying in a pool of her own saliva. Sitting at the bar, looking directly at her was her boss, Akiyama. Fantastic.

She quickly wiped the drool from her lips and tried to smooth her hair as he walked over to her table.

"Makoto, how nice to see you," he said—genuinely—as he turned the chair backwards and straddled it. "You ok?"

Her eyes struggled to focus through the alcohol on his, but she eventually figured that the awkward silence would be even worse than her drunkard's googling eyes and answered him. "Uh…chyeeeaah. I'm greeeeeeeeat," she managed to spit out.

He nodded, a patronizing look (something she didn't notice, of course) coming over his usually cocky grin. "You want me to get you home?"

She couldn't bring herself to do anything but nod. Yeah, so this wasn't how she usually played things. She didn't rely on people. But maybe just this once—it had been so long since she had given up a little of the control she grasped so desperately to. It had been so long, and maybe this was just a blip on the radar. Yeah, that's probably what it was.

He let her sprawl out on his bed, laying a blanket out and setting a bottle of water on the table beside her. He didn't bother tucking her in, imagining that if she had to visit the bathroom later that evening, it would just be a roadblock, and he might end up with vomit-soaked sheets to clean the next day.

Was it appropriate that he brought her back to his house, rather than to her own—where he told her he was taking her? No, probably not. He was in a position of authority over her; this was sexual harassment, this was gender oppression, an abuse of power. Right? But it just didn't feel right to leave her alone tonight, didn't seem like she could hold up the weight of solitude. He was no prince, but he had traces of chivalry left over in him. No white steeds in this day and age, but he respected her and he didn't want her to be in pain. Which, laying in a puddle of drool with no one to wipe her face, he thought she just might have been in at that cheesy bar.

His attention was drawn back to her as something crashed down. The water, which was fortunately closed. He returned it to its former resting place and tugged her hand back so that she wouldn't repeat the offense.

"Youuuu're cute," Makoto laughed at him, her eyes closed and her finger pointed in some ambiguous direction, though he thought it may have been at the tall lamp in the corner. He hoped, of course, that she preferred him to the lamp, but she was in no state to confess her feelings and he wasn't about to take advantage of that.

"Makoto?" he asked hesitantly, receiving in return only a weary murmur of sound. "I'll be in the living room on the couch if you need anything. Bathroom's right through the door over there."

"Mmmm." She rolled over, and he knew he had lost her to the Sandman. He wouldn't want to be her in the morning…

"Good night, sweet Makoto," he whispered and with a small smile, he ran his palm across her cheek and went off to join the couch. He would take on the solitude for her, tonight.

Setsuna gazed out on the wasteland of darkness and fog from her post at the Time Gate. No, she was no longer bound to this lonely spot, but she had come today to break one of the taboos. Again. She had come to look to the immediate future, perhaps to change it, and she knew that if she were caught again, her own fate might shift in a very dangerous direction.

"Pluto Eternal Power," she whispered, "make up…"

And in a vacuum of crimson light, she felt the planetary energies heed her beckoning, filling and changing her; she felt the humanity she had worked so hard for die away in the stead of a nobler, superhuman entity's control. It was a degrading process, she thought quickly, this loss of the Self in order to surrender to the higher power that somehow managed to keep hidden away in a corner of her greater soul. But humanity got in the way of duty too often, and the Keeper of Time was not allowed that luxury. This mission was a duty of hers, to protect the Queen, but she knew still that something of her own desires was caught up in the same web. These thoughts died away promptly in the wake of the power surge that overcame her.

"Show me what I seek, Time," she commanded, and the vision she desired broke out before her.

An unfathomable blackness washed over her, leaving no trace of light in its warpath. She cried out a brief horror-stricken "oh god" before teetering off balance and collapsing against the cold ground. She closed the portal with her remaining strength, eager to rid herself of those images. She let her transformation lapse and tried to regain the breath she had held while she watched. This was not the future she remembered; this was not the path they had followed. Somewhere in their near past, somehow, the path had morphed and warped into something dark, hopeless. This couldn't be right. It just…couldn't be real.

No. Time did not lie. It simply…was. Setsuna knew better than to doubt it. It could be altered, but her duty now was not to do that. It was, instead, to guide them to realign their fates. But how she was going to do that…well, she would worry about that later.

"Mrs. Chiba," the doctor announced, "you're pregnant."