Episode 94
Recap: Unazuki, Motoki's little sister, has a beautiful dream of a first kiss. Yeah, yeah. Cute. So the Daimohn (an elephant vacuum cleaner, in case you were wondering) targets her and runs away with the pure heart, tailed by Uranus and Neptune. The Inner Senshi find Unazuki on the floor and go after her heart, but they split up and only Usagi (who gets a lift from Mamoru's motorcycle) ends up battling the youma (typical). After she kills it, she and Tuxedo Kamen have to fight Uranus and Neptune for the crystal, but luckily it's not a talisman. And then to top it all off, Mamoru evades Usagi's inquiry about a certain topic we discussed previously (oops!)… so starting rather abruptly at the very end of the episode…
He stared her down and saw a blush rising on her cheeks. As he leaned in, she stuttered out,
"H-hey, Mamo-chan?"
He raised his eyebrows in reply.
"Do you remember our first kiss?"
He straightened up and stared at the balcony railing. So much for that kiss. "Um… that's…"
"Mamo-chan?" she prodded him. "You don't remember?"
"I was just saying… well, that's not worth talking about." He watched a car pull out onto the road beneath them, furtively ignoring Usagi's probing eyes.
"No!" cried Usagi, aghast, grabbing his elbow. "A first kiss is really important."
"The moon is really beautiful tonight, Usako," he muttered feebly.
"Mamo-chan!"
"I'm sorry!" he said tersely. "It's just… it wasn't exactly ideal, was it?"
"I thought it was romantic," Usagi pouted.
"Usako, you were drunk!"
"Which is why I thought it was romantic!" she shot back.
He snorted. "You don't realize how that sounds, do you?"
"Why? How does it sound?"
"Never mind." He leaned over the railing with a sigh. "I just don't think it counts."
"Why not?" she screeched.
"BECAUSE YOU WERE DRUNK!"
"We can hear you, you know!" Minako's voice called from inside.
Mamoru groaned and set his face in his palm; Usagi blushed furiously. "You had to yell?"
"Sorry," he said for the second time that minute.
There was a short silence.
"I can't even remember our first real kiss, then," Usagi said. "When we knew who we were. Or when I knew who you were and you knew – well… you know."
"Maybe the day Chibiusa showed up?" Mamoru suggested half-heartedly.
"That recently?" Usagi sighed, brooding. "I miss her, Mamo-chan."
"Me too." He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "It was weird while she was here, and now it's weirder for her to be gone." There was something distinctly unnerving about seeing your five- ... well, technically nine hundred... year-old daughter look up at you with big crimson eyes and tell you things about the future, but he couldn't help missing her charming carefree attitude and her unusual wisdom - her playful whims and her solemn comprehension of all things sinister and threatening.
Usagi chuckled to herself. "I wonder if…" She eyed Mamoru with a look he thought was rather suspicious. "Mamo-chan, you always say history repeats itself, don't you?"
"I might have said it once within the past two weeks, if that's what you mean," he laughed.
"So do you think Chibiusa would come back if… if we repeated history?" She was blushing, but there was much more cheekiness than embarrassment in her expression.
"I see." Mamoru massaged his cheek with one hand. "It's worth a shot, hm?"
Hopefully, Usagi leaned up on her toes, but instead of meeting her halfway, he grabbed her arm and pulled her up onto his back.
"Hey! Mamo-chan, what are you…?"
With a quick jump, he vaulted onto the balcony railing, and measured the two-story fall to the ground. Nothing Tuxedo Kamen couldn't handle. Holding Usagi's arms tight around his neck, he dropped swiftly and silently to the ground, his knees bending just as he touched the pavement. He could feel Usagi's breath hot and fast on his neck, and was relieved she had the common sense not to scream; the other girls had ears like jackals. If jackals even had good ears.
His bike was waiting for them; as soon as he released Usagi's arms, she slipped off his back and jammed the extra helmet on her head. "Where are we going?" she asked, a giggle of excitement in her voice.
"Repeating history." He slid on his own helmet and jumped onto the motorcycle, gunning it to life; it roared quietly and, as soon as Usagi's hands were safely fastened around his waist, they sped off. He might have only imagined Minako yelling, "Hey! Where'd they go?" But he was rather sure he didn't, because Usagi's soft laugh tickled his ear.
The main roads were thick with rush hour traffic, but he dodged impatiently through the jumble of cars and pulled off onto a maze of residential streets that led to a slender dirt path.
"The lake!" Usagi cried when he yanked the key out of the ignition. "But Mamo-chan…"
"Shh." He placed a finger over her lips. "Tuxedo Kamen knows all." He dug into his pocket. "He also happens to have the key to the boathouse."
"How in the world did you get that?" Usagi demanded, slipping off the bike.
"A while back I saved the man who owns it from some gang of idiots. He thanked me and left and then I realized he dropped his key, but I figured it was kind of a nice recompense."
"That's terrible, Mamo-chan!" she cried, but he only laughed and shoved the key in her face.
"See for yourself."
She squinted through the dim light of the streetlamps. "Boathouse copy 2," she read. "Oh. I guess as long as he's got another…" Then she giggled. "Good thing he labels things so neatly."
"Exactly what I always thought. Shall we?" He twisted his fingers around hers, the key secured between their hands, and they set off down the slope to the small shack on the lake.
Ten minutes later, he was rowing them out to the center of the water; the moon splayed white and vibrant, dancing in little rippling gusts, across the black glass that was studded with stars.
"It feels spooky," Usagi whispered, breaking him out of the rhythmic trance of his rowing. "Not in a scary way, but just… like it's all happened before. Like one of those memories."
"I know what you mean," he said. He had that strange aching of déjà-vu at the back of his mind, in that place chock-full of memories that had only been opened a crack. "But there aren't any lakes on the moon, are there? Were there?"
"I don't know," said Usagi in a strangely strained voice. Her head was bowed, her pale hair bleached silver in the moonlight, and the faintest gleam of her eyes protruded from beneath her long lashes. "It's coming… I don't know if I want to remember…"
He pulled the oars out of the water and balanced them across the boat. Tense, uncertain, he waited for a signal from her.
"Oh God," she gasped suddenly, her hands flying to her mouth, a stream of tears spilling over her cheeks. "Oh, God, it was the night before… before it happened, I came down here and we went out on the lake… just like this, oh God… and you even had premonitions back then, and you told me, and I didn't want to believe you, but you were right and the next night everything was…" She barely choked out the last word. "Gone."
He strained his mind to the point where his brain might have exploded out of his ears, but he couldn't remember a thing. "Usako…" he murmured, at a loss for words. Comforting people was her strength, not his.
"Sorry," she muttered through tear-soaked palms. "Sorry, it's stupid, it just caught me off guard…" She inhaled heavily. "It happened," she told herself firmly, "and that's over."
"I'm sorry," he whispered, reaching across the oars and squeezing her wrist.
"I know," she replied. "But it's silly to get all… caught up on that now. I mean, I was having fun." She shot him a watery grin. "Distract me?"
"Erm…" His thoughts flailed for a moment, trying desperately to unearth some way to make her laugh; it didn't come easily to him on command. "Well, when I was fighting Neptune for that damn crystal, she… it's sort of disturbing actually… she kept snarling under her breath, and it wasn't like an I'm-going-to-kick-your-ass kind of snarl, I think she just had a bunch of phlegm in her throat and she was trying to clear it out."
"Mamo-chan!" Well, appalled was a step up from crying.
"Seriously! She must have allergies or something, because it was kind of disgusting."
"Well, now that you mention it, Uranus smelled like cheap men's cologne. Men's cologne. Definitely not the type I'd want to be headlocked against, but…" She sighed dramatically. "The others would come too late."
"And how do you know how to differentiate between men's colognes, Tsukino-san?" he demanded.
She laughed loudly, sarcastically. "Do you think I go out to strip joints every Friday night and analyze them? Yeah, I bring Ami-chan and she gathers up the data and measures the collations between smell and price."
"I think you mean 'correlations,' Usako."
"Oh, whatever."
The boat cracked gently against the dock, and Usagi started. "Oh, you turned back. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you…"
"Forget it," he insisted, interrupting her. "I think we've had enough reminiscing for one day, anyways."
She bit her lower lip and smiled at him gratefully; he shot her a wink before leaping nimbly from boat to dock. Turning, he extended his hand to her, and she grasped it hard, wobbling as she stood in the boat. A conniving spark went off in his brain, and rather rudely, he yanked her straight off the boat, making her stumble and screech before topping into his chest.
"Now what did I say about history repeating itself?" he whispered into her ear, in what he hoped was a mildly seductive manner. He never really could tell, though; he usually just sort of tossed it out there and hoped it worked.
"That's not fair!" she said, attempting to wring her hand from his, but his grip was iron-firm. "You did that on purpose."
"Guess you'll have to deal with the repercussions," he replied wickedly. His free hand slipped behind her neck as he leaned down and kissed her gently; he basked in the warmth that jolted through him like electrified sunlight when her delicate lips massaged his just as softly, with the sweetest little nibble at his lower lip.
He made a show of looking up and searching about the stars. "No Chibiusa," he declared at length.
"Let's go home," she said quietly, reaching out to hold his arm. He nodded and chucked the key into the bottom of the boat, assuming the first person to find it in the morning would be its owner; and on a second thought, he launched a rose in after it, as a signature of sorts.
Usagi was silent as they returned to the motorcycle, but as she reached for her helmet she caught his eye, and he staggered under the weight of her impassioned gaze. It made his heart ache at her optimistic naïveté when she murmured, more to herself than to him, "I really didn't expect her. I really didn't."
So I'm thinking I need a title for this whole story that applies to more than the first chapter... any suggestions?
As always, any and all comments are welcome. (: Thanks for reading!