Author's Note: Thank you all for reading and reviewing! I'm so glad you are enjoying my story. As usual, I do not now, nor have I ever owned Sailor Moon or her friends or their world.

Uranus paced the length of her living room. Zoicite hadn't been precisely cooperative, but he also hadn't been stupid enough as to make a scene. Of course, there might have been some incentive on that matter in the form of a threat to take him to Uranus and see how well he fared the journey. She paused in her pacing to smirk, enjoying the memory of his face when presented with the offer to see her home.

Zoicite, or Satoshi, as Mercury insisted on calling him, had paled and while he wasn't any more free with his information, he seemed to understand the benefits of not aggravating the wind soldier further.

It had been hours since they'd brought him in and Venus was currently attempting to interrogate him. After refusing to allow the younger soldier any authority over the rest of the operation, Uranus had conceded this task. She glanced toward her room where the captured general and the leader of the Guardian Senshi were. She couldn't hear anything, though that in itself didn't surprise her. What would surprise her was if the other soldier actually managed to get any information out of the stubborn man.

She shook her head. Things would have been much simpler if she could have just taken him to the roof and beaten the answers out of him. Messier, but simpler. Why she'd agreed to bringing him to the one place she hadn't wanted him was beyond her. She didn't care for the Terrans. They'd never been anything to her in her past life until the end and she would have been quite happy never running into them in this one.

Running a gloved hand through her hair, she wondered where Pluto was. How long did it take to escort the princess back home? Why hadn't she come back?

Just as Uranus was trying not to worry about what had gone wrong, there was a loud rapping on the balcony door. She spun around to see Pluto standing there with Mercury. Mercury was tapping furiously on her computer and Pluto wore a tired expression on her face. Uranus nodded at the pair. The door wasn't locked. They were too high up to worry about the usual concerns.

"Took you long enough."

"There was a complication."

Pluto now had Uranus's full attention. She stopped pacing and glanced meaningfully toward the door to her room. "What kind of complication?" She didn't like the expressions that passed between the other two soldiers before Mercury slipped past her, mumbling about helping Venus. She would have said something about the blue-haired soldier being too biased in that situation, but her entire attention was focused on Pluto.

The woman was playing with her staff, rotating it but not actually paying attention to the way the light reflected off the orb at the top. Instead, Pluto watched Mercury, keeping her lips pressed tightly together. Once the door was closed and the two Outer Senshi were alone, she bowed her head briefly.

"They have Neptune."

Uranus remained standing from will alone. She nodded once, setting her jaw. "By her choice?"

Pluto nodded and Uranus watched as the woman gripped her staff more tightly. She couldn't see the white knuckles but she didn't need to. "Voluntary hostage. There was no fighting."

Uranus arched her eyebrow. "That's oddly specific."

The green haired soldier bowed her head, "Luna."

Her sword appeared in her hand. She would kill those cats. There was only one way in her mind that Luna could have known those details. She watched her. The damned cat stood by and watched one of Serenity's own march herself to the enemy's camp.

"Uranus, stop. It won't help."

"It'll help if I kill him." She motioned toward her bedroom.

"And remove their incentive for keeping her alive?"

She narrowed her eyes. "For someone so eager to see me act as a soldier not as a lover, you are focusing on the wrong things. We all know that we're expendable. We are the last resort. If it falls to us, and we fall, we fall. Neptune will either do what she went in there to do or not, but she knows we're not coming for her."

"Uranus!"

She shook her head once. "No. No rescue mission." She held her head upright, every muscle tense as she willed herself not to show how close she was to crying. Neptune was with the enemy. She was a sacrifice. They had to respect her choice. The litany of reason was only marginally successful. The blonde soldier was grateful when her colleague bowed her head in acquiescence.

The situation left her with a dilemma. She had one of Endymion's generals, a far more valuable hostage in truth than Neptune was, so long as the princess wasn't awake. However, she wasn't sure what to do about the general. They needed information. Information Neptune could now get but how was she going to relay that?

Sitting down, sword on her lap, Uranus motioned for Pluto to join her. "So how's the other half of the evil duo doing?"

Pluto chuckled, "A little bitter there?"

"You're not?"

She felt more than saw the other woman shrug. "You have a point. She seems self-righteous as usual. There really isn't much to say. Apparently, Neptune threatened her."

Uranus laughed, "Good for her."

"Yes, but now Luna's furious. She told me that all of us have disobeyed our direct orders and she'll be insisting the princess demand our resignations." The tone of the older woman betrayed how little she thought of Luna's position, even if the threats weren't as easily dismissed.

Uranus scoffed loudly. "I'd love to see her try." Though for all her bravado, the blonde knew very well that the princess had always been malleable. If Luna gained her confidence, the advisor could very well push her own agenda.

The conversation was put on hold, however, as Venus came out shaking her head and throwing up her hands.

"Having fun in there?" Venus only responded by glaring at the blonde soldier. Uranus nodded, "Is it my turn yet?"

"No. Mercury insists she can get him to talk if it's just the two of them."

"And you let her?" This time it was Pluto who asked.

Venus shrugged. "He said he'd cooperate with her."

"She has twenty minutes," Uranus ground out, grabbing her sword polishing kit and heading into the kitchen.

Venus watched her roommate leave and turned to Pluto. "What's her problem?"

Pluto stood up and glanced toward the woman now caring diligently, meditatively, for her sword. She hoped the meditation would work for the other soldier. For herself, she needed to do her own form of meditation. Many would find the clinging fog of the Time Gate oppressive, but for her, the shapes and shadows it cast on itself were comforting. They told her stories of what would happen as well as what had happened. Perhaps she needed to look back into the Prince's past now. "The Terrans have taken Neptune hostage. You know how to contact me should you need me."

Venus's jaw dropped but she apparently couldn't think of anything to say before Pluto shrugged and left via the balcony.

##

"Why do you insist on remaining loyal to her? You know she won't let us be together."

Mercury bowed her head, clasping her hands together tightly. "I know," she shook her head, "I hope she'll change things. You haven't met her. Not here. She-"

"The Moon Kingdom has never cared for its soldiers. I know," Zoicite held up his hand. "I checked, Mercury. In that life, I found every book, looked for every loophole. That law has been there for as long as anyone had records."

Mercury sighed, staring into her lap. "None of that matters. You would have attacked her. You would have kidnapped her."

"So you allow them to kidnap me?"

Blue eyes glared at him. "If you had left, you wouldn't be here. You insisted on trying to get to her."

"I had my orders."

"As do I!"

"So is that what it is to be then?" his voice was soft, resigned and the lack of will behind it broke her heart. "Are we to be enemies?"

Being enemies had never been what Mercury wanted. Either before or now. She wanted them to be together, and she had always believed Serenity when she'd said she would change things. That they should be allowed to love whomever they chose.

None of that changed the fact that he was stalling. He was hoping to get her so distracted in trying to avoid her feelings that she'd forget why he was trussed up. She stood up and pulled out her computer.

"Don't hide behind that screen, Mercury."

The equations she was typing out were wholly unrelated to the matter at hand. She didn't care about basic physics right now, but she still typed in every equation she could come up with, in the order she'd learned them in. It was therapeutic.

"Who gave you the order?"

"Kunzite."

Mercury stopped mid-equation. They'd been asking him that question for hours. First Venus, then the pair of them. He'd never answered before now. When she looked up, attempting to not look too interested and failing, she saw that he'd reverted back to Satoshi.

"What is the prince's relationship with Beryl?"

Pain flickered through his eyes before he shook his head. "Before he met your princess, he was engaged to her. Here, in this life, he hasn't found her."

"Does he love her?"

"No," he scoffed. "It was an arranged marriage."

So Beryl really wasn't in the picture. Usagi would be thrilled to hear that, if she would still hear it. By the end of their conversation, the normally bubbly blonde had been despondent and didn't want to hear anyone else talk about "Mamo-chan" even though she continually sobbed his name. Still, Mercury wasn't sure it was an improvement over believing he'd cheated on her.

"Does Mamoru-san know he was Endymion?"

She watched his gaze falter. Her heart sank as she waited, knowing what was coming, but watching him struggle with the final betrayal to his prince. He opened his mouth then closed it without saying anything. After several more attempts to say something, he closed his eyes, hung his head and nodded.

The prince was awake but something was holding Endymion back from Serenity. Mercury couldn't understand it. She had seen them, frequently, in their previous lives, and even now, the love they had radiated from them, blinding everyone in their presence. She only had one more question she could ask. There were plenty of answers she wanted, but at the moment, there was only one she couldn't leave the room without.

"Was the attack on the princess in accordance with the prince's wishes?"

Satoshi was quiet for a long minute. If his hands had been free, Mercury was sure he'd have been fiddling with something. As it was, he twisted uncomfortably in his bonds. It wasn't the kind of twisting that came with trying to escape; it was the kind spawned from nervous energy that had nowhere else to go. As the clock ticked past a few more minutes, Mercury began to worry he wasn't going to answer anymore questions.

"Satoshi-san?"

Eyes met hers with an intensity that took her breath away. "As I understand things, the prince considers the engagement between he and the Moon Princess as null and void."

He'd no sooner finished talking than the door burst open and a very battle-hungry Uranus stood in the doorway. Mercury glanced once more at him before turning to the other soldier, walking up to her with more courage than she thought she possessed.

"I have your answers."

Uranus arched an eyebrow as she looked down at her but Mercury stood her ground. He'd cooperated. Now they had other things to worry about.