Sailor Moon 1. Beneath the Lunar Willow

**Disclaimer:** I don't own these characters.

**Note:** Part of **_the feel of her name_** universe. This is more like a prequel or perlude to it than anything else.

**Version:** Manga/Fantasy

* * *

**Beneath the Lunar Willow**

_Blue Jeans_

**

* * *

  
**Mars loved Lord Jadeite's hands.

She had caught him in the garden alcove one late afternoon, beneath the ancient Lunar Willow - a lush, white-barked tree with deep red leaves. She did not sneak up on him, suspected it to be an impossible task at that, and speculated that he knew she was approaching before she stepped away from the pillar. He had not cared to put away his tools as she walked up to him. He might not have deemed her presence threatening. It was a good sign for the negotiations proceeding in the Great Hall of Ancients, but Jupiter had not taken it well that they had been called "decoration" by the bluntly candid Lord Nephrite. The meetings for trade negotiations had been postponed temporarily due to troubling security problems they had been experiencing, and for a few hours, they were allowed to leave the enclosure of the halls. She found him, on her wanderings to locate Venus, but surprised herself for the curiosity he inspired.

He had found the willow, quite on his own. It was a rather deserted area of the palace. His hands were bare. The white gloves she had seen him always wear were laid carefully beside him. In his hands was a long piece of pale wood that he carefully worked on, shaping with skilled knife strokes. She thought perhaps it was because it had reminded her of home, of bone carvings and red sand that made her go to him that day. She saw the ease with which he worked and knew those hands was calloused not just from weapons training but from day-to-day wear.

The ornamental swords the Kings of Earth wore did not belie the fact that they walked like men who fought. She had been raised by warriors, and though the Moon and the Alliance had long cast off the ancient rituals of war, Mars had not forgotten that once her people were infamously known as the People of War. Their Gods were no longer sated by only blood and fire, but it still rang through their veins, that not unfamiliar pang and admiration for champions and heroes that were only spoken of or sung about from poets in ancient ballads.

"What is it you are making there, my Lord?" Mars asked, hoping her voice did not sound to him so curious and childish as it did to her own ears. He had not risen at her approach, so she did not feel the need to greet him as court customarily dictated all beginnings.

Lord Jadeite paused only for a small moment before answering. "I do not know yet," he answered. His voice was gentle, as if he was talking to a child and for a brief moment she resented him.

"Do not know yet?" Mars inquired again when he did not elaborate and her impatience got the best of her. She sighed at the sharpness of her tone and looked away to gather her composure. Her eyes came upon the tree looming over them and when she was sure she was in control of herself again, she looked back to his bent head. "If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by that, my Lord?"

His hands stopped again momentarily, causing her to frown. She suspected he was thinking he did mind but was too polite to say it. "Martians," he said instead. "Your minds are strange."

She tilted her head at him, sure that he had not meant to give himself away like that. "Were you trying to read my mind?" she asked, this time she did not try to hide her curiosity. She had been briefed already on the main abilities of their Earthian ambassadors, though she was sure there were still much they did not know.

He did stop this time, and it was because of surprise. She could tell, because though Mars could not read minds she had long learned to read people, and she always had a good instinct about these things. "What do you mean?" he asked her instead of answering. She felt he had chosen his words very carefully, as if he was about to startle a scared animal or as if a secret was close to being spilt unexpectedly.

"You have the gift," she answered. Word games were not her strong point. Mars only knew to be honest or to stay absolutely silent, which sometimes was more telling. This at least was what Venus told her often about the art of deception and her lack of skill in deceiving anyone who knew her well. It was a good thing not many did then, she had retorted, but Venus had only laughed at her gaily for saying so. "I don't mind," she told Lord Jadeite with a smile on her lips. She met his eyes when he looked up at her and his expression was blank and seemed chiseled from the yellowing bones of dragons. He did not answer her implicit question but Venus never lied to her either, no matter how good her friend was at it, and silence was sometimes more telling then words. Even if his face was blank she was not afraid to look into it or afraid of what he could see on her own face. She didn't feel a need to explain herself, but his impassive features made her speak because he seemed to need to hear her say it. "Martians are prophets," she said softly and stopped, hesitating on how much she was allowed to tell him and was sad that there were still such secrets lying in wait. "May I sit beside you?" she asked him. "It's perhaps going to become a long story," she explained, though she did not need to.

"Please, Lady Mars," he finally said and rose, indicating the empty space on the other side of him. His manners were no better than hers, she mused and sensed he was a bit amused with her in turn.

"Thank you," she bowed only slightly. When she was comfortable, she set a hand on the Lunar Willow. It was once her father's favorite tree, even though they would not grow in the harsh environments of Mars without the aid of a lot magick and care. "My father's favorite," she told him before she could stop herself. Then she thought it rather strange she was checking herself around someone who could hear her thoughts, even if it only came to him in scraps. "Sometimes you won't hear me think," she said as she looked to him, knowing that he was possibly thinking that himself. He did not hide his surprise this time. "It's only true for some Martians, not all," she told him. "You must have noticed that you can't read Venus at all but that the others are... easy to hear." She smiled at him, "Venus learned it on her own, she learned many things on her own. Mine, it is a gift of our Gods. My father often told me that it's to show I have lived more than one interesting life, but the priests tell me that it is the sign of the Gods in my blood."

"You must be wise then," Jadeite said, speaking in the same gentleness as one did to frightened animals in her silence. She was not irritated this time with him for treating her so delicately. That was, at least, what she told herself.

"No," she answered. "I think, if what he said is true, then I only had the chance to live many opportunities. I don't remember them, but maybe there are gifts I have yet to learn I possess because of them. It is more believable, you must think, then having blood from the Gods."

"You are not afraid of the pieces of your thoughts that I do read?" He asked instead when she was silent for a long time again. It was the question that must have been there since he first found her thoughts so broken to his mind's ears. Since he first discovered she knew he could listen even if she did not want him to hear.

"You think I will be afraid, that I will give myself away somehow in ways I do not wish you to know? You think that I should be afraid, that you could easily use what you learn from me against me some day?" She half asked and half stated, elaborating on what he did not wish to say. "I am a subject of her Lady, Queen Selenity, I would be a fool not to worry about it. But, I cannot be angry at you for something you are born with or fear you because of the thoughts I think to myself." She gathered her legs to her and looked at him with her cheek pillowed against her knees. She wondered why she felt so comfortable with him there, maybe it was the tree or the garden or how easy it was for her to read him with such clarity at times that he did not feel like the stranger that he was. She didn't know why, but she caught herself in the midst of acting like she was only spending time with an old friend and not an ambassador of Earth. Maybe that was also another of his powers or from one of the lives she never remembers living before this one, and despite hating how he spoke so kindly and so softly to her, as if she were fragile and easy to scare, in its own way it was irritatingly charming. "I do not fear my thoughts. I do not fear what you glean from them either. Your Lord Nephrite was not wrong to call us... decorations. He meant us... figure-heads, wasn't it his meaning?" she stumbled a bit on their Earthian language. Tutors and Mercury could only make a language less foreign by degrees. It was still too recent that she had the chance to use it for the first time with natives of the planet. "We are what we are, symbols of peace. At times, when it was needed, we were also symbols of strength, of wars that could be won in the name of the Light. Is that not what you are also searching for, Lord Jadeite? Peace."

He had returned to carving his little figurine. He did not answer her right away, as if he was giving her question some thought. "We are searching not just for one thing," he finally answered. "All answers cannot be found on the Moon." Mars smiled at this. "Now you are thinking I have passed a test," he told her without emotion in his voice.

"You have passed one," she replied with a serious nod. "I am not wrong though, in saying you are also looking for peace," she added with a small smile. It might have started as a question but it changed into a statement. She sensed him change beside her too, an imperceptible change.

"We won't succeed, as the prophecy foretells," he finally said. "Lord Nephrite," he said this with some degree of mockery in his voice. "He says the stars are ominous about this whole attempt and our people are restless. It is never good when all of us come to the Moon and leave our armies without leaders."

"I have seen it, too," she agreed. "To have the blood of the Gods is to be able to see what is to come," she explained, even though he had not asked. She thought of her visions then but they were no less gruesome than her dreams. Despite all that she had been taught about the truth and about the future, she could not help but shudder a little and turn from the memories. She wasn't always brave enough. Sometimes she thought the Gods asked too much from her, that they gave her too much and that she would break from bearing all the expectations put upon her.

"You are thinking that I am a... murderer," he said at last, a little hesitant at the end.

She blinked, surprised. Then, relief washed over her at what thoughts he had heard, reassuring her that it was not what she thought he had heard at all. "I am thinking you are a warrior," she answered. Martians did not disdain or fear death, and perhaps that was what made them cruel sometimes in the eyes of races more gentle than their own. "Perhaps in your language it is easiest to translate it into murderer?" she stumbled a little at this particular word that she was not all that familiar with but knew vaguely the meaning to be more criminal than what she was thinking. "Warriors kill people, yes? In peace times, we sometimes call them other names because we do not need to kill anymore and they do not always know how to live in such a world."

"Earth, it is not a part of that us or a part of the we when it comes to peace or the Alliance," he said. She did not reply to that, he was not wrong. She felt her jaw clench but forced herself to relax.

"Not yet," she answered softly. She watched him work when he did not reply to her murmurred words. Despite the discomfort, she was easily distracted by his long fingers and the sureness of his movements. She knew those hands could make the weapons sing, and it was something she had admired in all the Kings and Princes of Earth, the thing that she feared and admired were one and the same. War sat comfortably upon the shoulders of these foreign men, like cloaks thrown carelessly over their shoulders, and she knew it well even if she had never experienced one herself. The people of Mars, no matter how tame they are now, had once lived and died by that hunger for power and the glory that came with it on the battle-field. "On Mars," she began again, the story she knew he wanted to hear from her lips since the start. "We use bones. It does not decide what it wants to be, we decide for it what it will become. Men, women, children, animals, weapons, and all manner of things, we force it to be what we want it to be. The dragons, it is their gift to us in their passing. We would dishonor them not to know what we make of their remains. Yet, you say that you do not know what you shape with your hands from the limbs of something that once lived?"

"On Earth," Jadeite answered her. "We do not ask it to be anything more or less than what it was born to become. You cannot ask wood to become metal or a bear to become a lion, they are different but it does not make them weaker or stronger."

"You think peace is a weakness, don't you?" she asked him, a slight proud tilt in her chin. "Even though you desire it, do you think that's how it will turn out? There are those who do not fear to trail after the threads of fate only to find the path cut off."

"Even the people of Mars, your people, have forgotten the ways of war. You have seen it, haven't you? What Lord Nephrite sees in the stars, you must have seen it too," Jadeite spoke. He said it with such certainty, even in his questions, even in her broken thoughts, that she knew he too could read people and not just minds. They were both, rather stubborn. She thought of the blackness that was impenetrable, the part of her mind he could not access even if she asked him in. She thought of how dangerous this man was, not just on the battle-field, but at court and before ambassadors.

It was a disquieting thought, but she was more than intrigued. Here was a hero. She could sense it off of his skin. Men like him were men her ancestors were, and what she had long strived to become since she had been a child weaned on tales and histories. Here was the type of man who ancient ballads sung about. She was a Senshi, but what ran in her blood has become no more than a symbol, a memory of power. Yet, Earth has not forgotten that power, and perhaps that was the danger they were in. Perhaps it was the eternal struggle between forgetfulness and remembering that brought tragedies about.

This man, she thought sadly then, he would one day be an enemy if they, the Moon and the Earth, could not meet in the middle.

"On Mars," she told him instead. "Our world is very red. My tutors, my father and my mother, they tell me stories. The bards, they have travelled to our doorsteps to sing of our land, when it had been lush and green, blue and brown, like your world is now. We only have dragons there now. Have you heard of them for more than the tales of terror I hear of when they talk of Earth's stories? We have magick and priests that can read the past and priestesses that can see the future. At home, I am not so special."

"Except that you are also a Sailor Senshi," Jadeite pointed out, though without a hint of mockery in his voice.

"We are only symbols, your Lord Nephrite did not need to so blatantly point out what we have known since we took our posts," she said with a wistful smile. "As a woman of Mars, I have always wanted to be a hero. Martians are born with the desire to save the world and be bigger than what we were born to be. The people of Earth are not so different from us, are they, my Lord? Even if you do not wish to change the elements you were born as, do you not also desire to change into a greatness that a title alone cannot offer?"

"No," he said grimly. "We are not so different." He paused to study the small figurine in his hand before turning it over to continue. His work was a steady progress towards an unknown destination. She wondered why he was so afraid to look at her, but dismissed such thoughts of vanity when she was started at the realization of having them at all.

Still, even as she watched him work, she could smell the fires in the approaching distance. She could almost faintly hear the cold clashing of swords and the dreams of the ancients crumbling. She could see the ashes on the winds and feel it in her lungs and in her hair, the pieces of the dead and dying clung to her with their phantom fingers. She did not know whether to dread it or to be exhilarated by what was to come, like a hawk hovering at the open door of the cage it had known all its life, she was unsure how to proceed.

She was also a warrior, with the blood of ancient warriors in her veins. Yet, she could not help but wonder, was a tamed hunter still a hunter in the wild? Or will it become like the hunted, as all the weak are to those who are stronger? She felt a sudden, inexplicable fear and held back the questions that seemed to scald her mouth.

Mars watched and Jadeite worked in the silence that came upon them. Beneath the great and ancient tree her father loved, in a garden that seemed in another world. She wondered in the muteness, beneath the shadows of the crimson leaves, at the desire she had of telling this man her name.

_End._

* * *

Review!


	2. Phlegethon

_solemque suum, sua sidera norunt_ (_Aeneid,_ 6.541)

* * *

**Title:** Phlegethon  
**Theme:** **sm_monthly**'s December Shitennou: _Destruction_  
**Genre:** Drama  
**Version:** Manga  
**Rating:** PG

* * *

He would remember her singing. The low, octave voice with that soft and husky lull. He would recall how she had sung him to wakefulness, pulling him from the nightmares that haunted his dreaming footsteps. He would remember that forever, the dream of a demon-woman with blood colored hair and the roar of demons as she summoned them in ritualistic sacrifice. He would remember the promise that Red Queen made to them, the sinister plan falling into action, into place.

He would remember his discovery and the voice that woke him from that memory as he lay dying.

Her blonde hair, short and scraggly, curled wildly around her neck and framed her face. It fell into her eyes as she had looked down at him with surprise that first morning. "You're awake," she observed and her voice did not give away the start in her expression. If he had not cracked one groggy eye opened to look at her, he would not have known how surprised she was.

"I am not dead," he remembered croaking. It was not a question, and if he had had more energy, _he_might have been the one who sounded surprised. He had not wanted to die, but as he was wrecked with pain now, a small, cowardly part of him thought it was an option that he should consider, even in passing. Death was easier than living, it was a sleep without dreams or nightmares or memories that would drive him mad.

"No," she had smiled at him, grinned at him really and pulled him out of his dark thoughts. Her hand reached for a ladel and she craddled the back of his skull, half heaved him up to drink from it before he could even ask. Or think to ask, not that thinking was easy with so much pain spasming through his body.

Water dribbed down his chin despite his thirst, his gulps were weak. If Nephrite were there, he would never hear the end of this. He was glad none of the others were there to see these small weaknesses that he never would have thought himself in possession of. His momentary helplessness passed as the liquid ran through his body. "I have to go," he finally said, despite being unable to move.

She looked at him with pity in her eyes. "Yes," she agreed but her face was turned away. "Sleep now," she finally said in the silence. He was already drifting, despite all the thousand, million things that he knew he must do. His body was having a disagreement with his mind, his will, and his body, for once, was winning spectacularly. He thought, faintly, he heard someone murmur to him in his sleep, "_Live,_" but he did not know who would say such a thing at such a time to him. He did not recognize the voice or had a name for the person who said it to him.

All he could do was sleep.

* * *

"What is your name?" He asked on the third day as she finished dabbing the water drops from his chin and neck.

"Names hold power," she answered. "I would not ask for yours."

"How do you know I'm not an enemy?" He questioned.

"How do you know _I'm_not an enemy?" she replied.

"I'm still alive." He said.

"So you are," she mused.

* * *

"The wards, I will unbind you from them." There was a dark light in her eyes as she stood before him, hands already moving. She had bound him to the bed when he had tried to leave the first time, there were no second chances or promises she would rely on. She wasn't the type to not take action, right away. She reminded him of Nephrite, a lot. It was a bitter-sweet nostalgia, though he still wondered at times if he would be able to see his friend alive, again.

Then, suddenly, he was free from the binds that she had put upon him. "You must follow the river, but not for too long or for too far. They would search for you there if you stay past midday. Change course towards the north when dawn starts to come through and lose them in the woods. Your enemies, they do not like the light. Light will save you. But too much openness and you will leave yourself open to their human aids." And despite the fact that he knew they were a clan of women - he had not seen a single male attend to him or heard one from the outside - he knew also they could fight.

There was also the distinctive sounds of fighting far away, at least it seemed that way. "I can help," he offered as she half dragged him in the direction of the river she had spoke of. He was still very weak to not be able to fight off her will. He was the larger, lankier one, after all. Her grip, it was strong and firm, like her commands and the shine in her eyes.

"You are who you are. Whatever you have seen, whatever you have faced, you must tell it to those who have the power to change it, to stop this evil from spreading. That is your duty, is it not?" She asked.

"It is also not your duty to help me," he pointed out, too tired to wonder what she knew of his duties.

"That was true." Her eyes were clear and green and strong, so brave and yet so young. "But I found you and I decided to not allow you to die," she revealed, "so long as you are under my protection, I have a duty over your safety. Even if that duty is one that I have chosen, it is not in your hands now. My sisters also made that choice when I brought you here." She studied him as she said all of this, but whatever she found made her face seem a little sad. "This, it is not your fault." She told him bluntly, tired of him not accepting.

"I can fight," he offered again, feeling some of his old self returning. The self that was brave and strong, who had not seen what he had seen and was not as hollow as he felt now.

"This is not your fate, at least, not yet." She told him. And he paused at this because of the fierceness with which she spoke the truth, the truth that in his moment of weakness, he had shamefully forgotten (chosen to forget). "You think you owe me a life, and you do." Her voice still held a song-like quality, soft but no longer a lull. It had power, her voice, but it was not the power that had called him from the edge of death and back into the world of the living. "Live that life, as you owe me it. Live it with honor, as you had once been."

_As I remember you being._ He did not know why he thought that was what she was trying to tell him without telling him. _Who was this woman?_But there was not enough time to find out. Not enough time to learn the name and remember her, remember her name as her face was eaten by the darkness, barely visible in the moonlight.

In the distance the fire started, he could smell the burning of flesh and the spread of dread. Soon, he thought with resignation, even the water that ran beside them may catch aflame with the hatred he smelt on the air. "They are coming," she stated but did not look back the way they came. Instead, she pulled his hand towards hers and thrust a thin, light blade into his palm, letting go only when his fingers wrapped around the hilt. "Run, Zoisite." And he was a coward and he was a fool, but his legs were moving in the direction she told him of without his consent, before he could even comprehend what she had done. She was right then too, whatever small bit of magick she had worked, there was power in knowing a person's name.

But he never did learn hers, the woman who saved him and woke him from despair with the sound of her voice.

* * *

**End**

* * *

**Note:** This was originally planned as a 3-parter that I never got to. It's funny that I remember this after all this time.


	3. The Stars are Silent

_**The Stars Are Silent**_

* * *

"Let's run away," Beryl told him out of the blue, her voice hushed and quiet, too serious for him to laugh off. Her lips were red and gleaming that day, and though she had always been beautiful, she was different from the girl he had known since boyhood. "I want to get away from here. Will you come with me?" Her white mare had nudged Beryl then, the motion made her turn her head as the sun made her hair gold and crimson, fire and blood and the color of passion.

There had been a time, even if he would later forget, when she had loved animals and flowers and sunlit meadows.

Nephrite paused, hands cupping the cool waters as the birds chirped overhead. "No," he finally said and watched her held breath escape her in a gasp of disappointed surprise. "I cannot run from my duties."

Beryl, green eyes troubled and sad looked away from him then, her pale profile all the more beautiful due to her sadness. "I can't stay here," she whispered. "It's not safe to stay here."

"Idiot," Nephrite scolded her as he sat beside her. "I promised to protect you didn't I? Have you forgotten?" And her eyes, troubled and shy had risen to meet his own. "Do you not trust me?" He asked, nailing the coffin to her grave.

"Yes!" She answered, loud and quick and instinctive. He had laughed at her that bright day, beside blue waters and beneath the shadow of great trees. Perhaps, in some ways, that had been the last day they had been together as they had always been since childhood, innocent.

Now, there was only rain. Rain that would not stop falling as Beryl's tears continued to fall. Her dress was ripped and the bruises on her body dark against her pale skin. Those long fingers that loved to comb through his hair and run along the strings of the harp, they clutched at her shoulders in a bruising manner. The digits were desperately working to hold the left-over pieces of her old-self together, clinging onto something... anything.

"Did you know this would happen?" her voice was soft and empty, despite the accusation in the words themselves. Nephrite's heart felt like it too was falling apart, helpless against the anguish radiating off of her skin. "Why did you not protect me?" Those green eyes turned black then. Despite Beryl having always been a cry-baby since she was a girl, her eyes had been dry in the rain, as if there were no more tears to cry. Sometimes, when he thought back, he wondered if he had simply not been able to distinguish between her tears and that of the heaven's own. "I called for you, Nephrite. Why didn't you come to protect me like you promised? Why didn't you come?" Her voice was subdued but filled with echoes of desperation, as if she was recalling a scream in a nightmare.

At that moment, Nephrite thought back to the bright day by the lake. He wondered what would have happened if he had said _yes_, or who they would be now if he had been able to keep his promise. "Will you protect me now, Nephrite?" Beryl's gentle voice was now cruel and mocking, as black as her once bright eyes. "What can you possibly do for me now? Did the stars tell you nothing, or was everything you have ever said to me, a lie?"

Years and years later, he still hadn't an answer to the questions she asked him that day. And when the Empire crumbled beneath her unending rage, black and vengeful and filled with a need for the power had she lost long ago, he wondered what he could have said to have changed these things that marked them for who they were and who they would become. He wondered, beneath the dark, starless night, why the stars never told him anything that could change anything...

There were, apparently, no answers for the things that mattered and those that could never be altered.

* * *

**Theme:** **sm_monthly**'s December Shitennou: _Running Away_  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Version:** Manga


	4. Happiness in an instant, not yet gone

_**Happiness In an instant, not yet gone**_

* * *

Mars was the first one to approach Mercury when she arrived on the training grounds. Though their elements countered each others, she liked the gentle look in the red-haired woman's eyes immediately, despite their unnatural colorings. There was a certain type of compassion there, a gentle kind of acceptance that made Mercury immediately feel welcomed.

When she met Venus next, she was immediately intimidated by the power the woman seemed to emit. Right away Mercury could see why the blonde with her golden eyes was the head of Selenity's armies and the leader of the Senshi as well. Venus was beautiful, cold and had an unnerving gaze that seem to penetrate her to the core of her being. Mercury was shaken when Venus smiled at her, a smile that changed her entire expression and enchanted her in an instant.

Mars was the first one to teach her to hold a sword. "My mastery is in the bow," the red-haired woman told her with an apologetic smile. "But I have heard that battles are not your specialty."

"No, not particularly," she admitted a bit shakily since Venus was observing them from afar.

"Don't mind her," Mars assured her, correcting her stance with precision that belied her earlier words. "She just wants to know how to plan your training schedule."

"How long have you been training?" Mercury asked cautiously.

Mars smiled slowly at this. "How long have you been learning science and strategy?" Mercury blinked. The words were surprising because, up until then, she had not been thinking of her worth as much when she had compared herself to what Mars and Venus could do, or at least she heard a lot more than she has seen but from what she has seen none has failed to astound her.

"You'll learn it," Mars assured her when she was out of breath and feeling weak. "Because you must and because you can."

Later, Mars taught her to meditate in a room full of strange purple flowers, cupped in vibrant green.

"What is this place?" Mercury had asked with fascination written plainly on her face. "What are these plants?"

"Violets, a flower from Earth," Mars said with a smile at Mercury's excitement over the discovery. "We have put magick in the room to help them grow and to make sure the scent is not too overpowering. It helps, I've discovered, to surround people with living things when they are in need to get in touch with themselves."

"The color of royalty," Mercury murmured in awe as she caressed a blossom and cradled it in her hands.

"That you are," Mars answered with a sad little smile as she watched the other innocently touch one flower and then another. "Now, let us concentrate."

Years later, Mercury would remember the day and hate herself for loving those two women so easily in the beginning, more than she would ever admit. That flower and that color left a stain in her mind, a symbol of her youth and naivety. But like blossoms that were left in the cold reality, it quickly faded and broke apart - an illusion that fell to pieces over the things that should never have been mixed.

* * *

Theme: Purple


	5. Rituals (R)

_**Rituals**_

* * *

Warning: Dark content ahead.

* * *

Senshi Jupiter pressed her knee down onto the girl's shoulder to stop the reflexive twitching that always came. She doesn't like this job, but she has to do it. Everyone does it, and it just happened to be her turn this time around. The teleportation had not been pleasant but teleportation was more a Venusian magic (which the Moon had little trouble adopting) than the one she was used to. As a Jovian, and they'd laugh if they knew she teleported, she was more used to the perils of physical travels (not magical ones). After all, that was what the Jovian's long legs are for, or if they didn't feel like walking, they hopped about on the limbs of their great trees, since Jupiter - in their ancient underground domes - had monstrous trees that spanned for miles, living off of the pure energy that gets sucked up from the surface due to the storms.

Jupiter swallowed the bile in her stomach as she grasped the katana in her sweaty hands, glad of the gloves that made sure her grip would not slip. The katana is special, the Empress had told her, the first time she was handed the tool. It has sealing magick, at least that was how Mars had explained it to her. Jovians had no sense for insubstantial magick. They were master manipulators of the body and could maximize the strength and sureness of their limbs unlike any other species in the System. They could sense - barely - magick outside of living things, but they could still smell it in the air and off of the objects that strong magick lingered on. Jupiter always equated the smell of the katana to blood, which meant it was dark magick, binding magick, and magick that was the type Jovians never dealt with - it was the magick of Death.

_"You must first cut open the chest"_ Venus had told her when she was brought for the first time to the ritual. _"The heart, you see, is never there. But that is where all that energy manifests itself."_The black hole of the empty chest cavity always made Jupiter jumpy, the whole damn place made her jumpy.

_"Where is the heart then?"_she remembered asking, her chin raised to show that she was not afraid though she could not keep the disgust out of her eyes.

Nonetheless, Venus had still managed to read her like a book. Their commander was disturbingly good at pin-pointing exactly what was not said and had smiled at her, a bit indulgently, as if she were a naive little child. This had irked her, but Venus was the commander and she was the youngest soldier of the inner court of Selenity. _"That's top secret."_Venus had said with an empty little grin.

"The heart," she echoed, her sword plunging down. She winced as she felt the sword eat at the power gathered there. She winced all the more when the limb beneath her legs began to shake and the fingers flexed. What she hated most was when the child-like body, death-white skin stretched over pale muscles that never seem to deteriorate, would shake as if it were alive and it was going into shock. What she hated most was...

The eyes of Sailor Saturn opening and looking straight at her, mouth opened slightly with a grey tongue flopping inside as if the corpse wanted to say something. But nothing ever comes out except that smell of blood and death and decay - the scent of the katana in her hands. She hated when the corpse just looks at her, as if saying: _"Murder! Murder! I know you're killing me!" _Never quite a dead-fish's gaze.

For a second, Jupiter has to fight the impulse to pull the sword out and continuously stab and cut and destroy what's left of Sailor Saturn, until her body stills and its contents are ripped to pieces, like that missing heart that is no more. Then maybe, maybe those eyes would stop burning itself into Jupiter's memories. A gaze that scorched, passing through her skull and eating into her soul. Jupiter wished she could pull out the sword and let the energy create a new pumping heart, so that she wouldn't feel that the silent accusations were true. She wished she could cut open her throat and apologize in death...

The moments of madness slipped away like ebbing waves as Jupiter's fingers clutched at the handle of the katana. _"Don't ever look away when you do this, Jupiter,"_ Venus had warned her, golden eyes trained onto Saturn's face. _"Dear Saturn's madness is a bit catching if you're not careful. She likes to play games with your mind, if she could."_There was a history there that Jupiter dared not ask Venus about. She had seen how the blonde had looked at Mars when they had returned to the palace and she knows, when that taste in the air meets her skin and her lips, that she wouldn't be seeing those two for awhile - especially when Mars looks back calmly, knowingly. Even though Jovians did not like such relations between females - did _not _condone it - Jupiter often finds herself staring after Venus and Mars with a fascination she knows she should keep to herself.

_"They're disgusting, aren't they?"_ Mercury had stated the question once when she caught Jupiter forcing herself to look away. _"I heard a rumor that Sailor Neptune and Uranus are equally disgusting like that, but I have never met them in person."_Mercury, despite her cold eyes and harsh words, were younger than her two commanding officers and closer to Jupiter's age. Sometimes, Mercury looked after the two with equal longing and hatred. Jupiter doesn't know what to make of it, but there were a lot of secrets in the palace that she had yet to learn about - some, she knows none of the others will ever tell her, even if she asked.

The past faded, at last, even though Jupiter clung to them to escape the stark emptiness in Saturn's gaze. _"Why do we do this?"_she had asked a quiet Mars, hands on the katana that was so cold it burned her.

Mars had looked at her kindly and then at the sword in her hands. _"There is a madness in us all,"_ she said. _"The Sailor Senshi carries darkness in their souls as all living beings do. That child had offered, in her goodness and her ignorance, to be the vessel to house such grave darkness, to absorb such madness and sorrows. We feed her, with our sins and our powers and our thoughts."_ The beautiful older woman had risen and touched the horrified expression etched onto Jupiter's face. _"One day, that darkness will destroy us, Jupiter. Until it does, every year that passes, we too must rise and plunge this sword that feeds upon that darkness to lessen a small piece of her burden. We too must acknowledge and dispel what not even she has been able to..."_

_"Why this sword?" _Jupiter had asked her.

_"The blade will one day break,"_ Mars finally said, after a thoughtful silence. Her gaze lingered on the sword and for the first time Jupiter saw the disgust she felt for the weapon on Mars' usually serene face. _"The pieces will be reforged. And with this blade, she will cut us down and rebuild us again, from our beginnings. In the end, we are only bidding our time living as she bids hers in death."_

Jupiter looked down at the face of the seemingly sleeping child and hated that expression. Since she had been Senshi, she had never known peace like that, not the peace she remembered from her cherished childhood. "I hate you," she hissed venomously.

Yet, somehow, every time she pulled away the blade when the ritual ends, she always felt the trails of tears that had escaped her notice in the ordeal, evident only by the chilly trails remaining. She does not know why she cries, but sometimes she thinks they are not her tears, but the tears of the dead girl at her feet. And if she could look passed her fears, she might have been able to sympathize with this ghost and this corpse, for a salvation and a torment of another year.

* * *

Theme: Madness/Insanity

Honestly, this is one of my favorite shorts I've ever written for the silver millennium. It is dark and intense and full of imagery. This shorts dump began with my desire to dig this particular short out of obscurity.


	6. In her shadows

**Crossover** - n. [def 2] _"A short connecting track by which a train can be transferred from one line to another."_

* * *

The spiraling towers were burning, crumbling and falling from the skies. Below the armies came as Venus looked on impassively. Overhead, her castle floated, a speck in the sky as the soldiers trudged on in the gleaming armors of Mercury. She was the only one to bear the Royal Moon insignia - silver and gold - upon her left breast. There were bodies littering the grounds, though it must be far worse up the tiered island overhead where many of the rebels have gathered. Venus narrowed her stinging eyes, the warm, familiar wind filtered through her armor and teased her hair.

A memory came...

"Darling little sister," Venus blinked at the sound of a ghost's voice. She found herself suddenly twelve years-old again. The beautiful white-gold hair, a shade paler than her own, of the woman at her feet was tinted red from the flames of long ago...

That and blood.

"Older sister?" she breathed out, falling to her knees in that long ago dream. "Older sister! What is going on?" she sobbed. She had never cried like this again.

"Do you remember our promise, darling little sister?" the woman asked. Those cool, wet fingers traced her features before the other turned away to cough, choking on blood. She remembered the silvery smashed pieces of the broken blade and her sister's broken armor, a ghastly picture that she tried hard not to study as she glued her eyes to her sister's untouched and still beautiful face. Not far away lay the piled up bodies of tens of soldiers, all dead and still as stone, seemingly a baracade between them and the rest of her broken world.

"You- you promised we'd always be together, Sister! You promised... that you'd always protect me!" her youthful cried large, unstoppable tears. Her youthful voice quavered, weak and helpless.

"You remember what the teachers told you, darling? You mustn't cry like that when it hurts so in your chest," her sister gently chidded her. "You will encounter many enemies from now on, and you must never show them your weaknesses."

"But, sister... won't you protect me anymore?" She had demanded, wishing and hoping that the tantrums that always got her everything she had always wanted will work now, this time, when it _mattered_.

Her sister gave a gurgling, pain-filled chuckle, eyes misting but never tearing. "I will always watch over you, darling, even if you cannot see me. But... I cannot protect you as I have before. That is now impossible..."

"Sister?" Golden eyes met golden eyes as she crawled closer into the bloody embrace of her beloved sister. "I will be strong for you, Sister. I promise. So, please, please, don't leave me! I promise I will get stronger from now on!"

She felt her sister shudder in her arms. She felt the skin against her cheek cooling. The other breathed ragged breath, trying to gather her strength to speak.

"Someone will come for you, beloved. Mars... she will come for you." She remembered tensing at that name, feeling the flood of intense jealousy at the woman who had been occupying her sister's mind for the last decade of training. "She will look after you now, and when the time comes... she will tell you a secret."

"A secret?" Venus remembered asking, excited, momentarily distracted. "She won't cheat and forget, will she?"

Her older sister smiled wanly, though clearly it pained her, her sister's bright eyes lightened at her words nonetheless. "No... she won't-" One cool hand stroked her hair went slightly limp and the body beneath her began to shake.

"Sister!" she had cried out in alarm.

"Venus!" she turned and felt in her arm her beloved sister finally tremble to stillness. She saw then the tall, statuesque woman with hair like fire and eyes like bronze mirrors, tense and full of sparks.

"Mars," her older sister whispered with her remaining strength. "You came... does she want to hurt you that much?" Her older sister's teeth clanked together, the poison working through her veins and spreading fast.

"She wants me to remember the fate of those who betrays her," Mars answered, her voice as cool as winter. The other carefully knelt next to her younger form, reaching to brush away the frazzled hair on her sister's damp forhead, as a firm hand pressed down and held itself against her sister's gapping wound, until her older sister stopped her shaking. Ruby eyes looked distant and unreadable, but the chill of this woman's presence did not match the words she spoke. "I was not given a doctor," Mars said with a fierce type of agony that even she, her young self, could hear, despite the other's composure never faltering.

"It was unforgivable, darling, what I did..." Mars touched her older sister's face with so much tenderness that she felt the instinct to push the other away. There were tears now trailing down her sister's checks, but Mars only watched with a face that seemed encased by the frost of Winter.

"I'm a failure," her older sister said with an ironic smirk, hands clutching at her comrade's wrist. "Can't hide genuine emotion... like I used to."

"Idiot," Mars murmured but never turned away.

"Sister!" she cried out alarmed when the blood trailed down the side of her sister's mouth. "Stop it! Stop hurting her more!" She begged and hit Mars' shoulder as the other woman reacted without blinking or flinching or moving, not minding her blows.

"Don't, darling," her sister ordered weakly and she stopped to cry harder as Mars was once again at the receiving end of all her sister's attentions. "Remember your promise to me, Mars," those hands had grasped at those long red strands desperately. "I- I-" and then her sister died with an agonized pleading on her face at the words she never got to finish.

"Sister!"

Venus remembered crying out in shock and fear. "You killed her!" she turned to accuse Mars when no one else was there to blame for her agonizing loss. Her small fists struck against the other's armor, hitting the Lunarian Mark on Mars' breast when the other turned to her. "You killed her! You killed her! You killed her!" she raged in her grief. "Why couldn't you save her? Why couldn't you help her?" And those warm arms that Venus would later seek salvation and comfort from, years down the road, closed around her for the first time, that time, holding her struggling, crying form with the same forgiveness she would crave until her dying days.

"I'm sorry," that calm voice she loved was distant and chilly, filled with a grief she could not understand at the time. "I'm sorry..."

And behind Mars, her sister's body melted into light and wrapped their warmth around her small form.

* * *

"-Venus."

She blinked. Overhead, the empire of Venus crumbled and her people died. It had been forty years since that day. Forty years that changed everything, though one thing remained the same. Her planet had held to the ways that her sister had died for protecting, and Serenity wanted to make sure Venus knew what was at stake if ever she should stray, not just with her own position but with Mars' burden as well. Funny, at the time, she had not realized how deep the poison had spread...

"I'm sorry, Venus," Mars said once she came up next to her on the battlefield. This planet, Mars had loved as well, as it was the land of her beloved.

"No," Venus said coldly, no longer the child of long ago. "There's nothing to forgive. At that time, there was nothing you could have done."

Mars had neither tensed nor looked relieved, instead she only turned back to the field of bodies before them. "I asked that they leave your castle untouched," the red-haired Senshi finally said. "Come, there's something of a promise that I must keep."

Venus nodded after Mars and followed the other effortlessly up the tiers of island. She noted it took longer to get there, but the lack of bodies meant Mars was careful to chose their path. Despite everything, the older woman always looked out for her, like she had promised her older sister. Now, thinking back, Venus had an entirely different reason to be jealous of that time...

"Are we not going in?" Venus asked. Mars did not answer her, instead she walked around the edge of the last tier and then put her hand up. The ancient words were a mix of Martian and Venitian. Apparantly the seal was set by both her sister and Mars when they had been younger. "Let's go," Mars said when she was done.

"I didn't know you spoke my tongue," Venus said with a raised brow of amusement.

Mars gave her a look before leading her deeper into her own palace. "I didn't know you knew this place so well, either." She muttered, more to herself this time.

"I only know what was needed, no more. In the end, this place will always be more yours and your sister's than mine," Mars answered, distant and a little too coolly. She lies, Venus thinks to herself. This was the place her sister and Mars came together long ago. A shared secret that not even she had been privy too until now.

They reached an alcove that Venus remembered hiding in often. Mars touched the surface in different places before muttering words again. A small space opened and the other reached in and brought out a small box. "Here," Mars turned and gave it to Venus. "She wanted you to have this when you got older."

But she did not reach for that long awaited box. Instead, Venus stepped in and kissed Mars fiercely on the lips. She gave the other a long, smoldering look before taking the box out of the other's hands. "Who do you love more?" She asked as she rattled the box by her ear, a little too irreverently.

Mars stared at her in silence before her face seemed to purposefully relax into neutrality. "I might have died for her," Mars answered at last. "But the same is now true for you."

Venus was not satisfied with that answer but that wall that Mars erected told her that she wasn't going to get much else out of her lover. "We must go back," Mars said and turned away. The hole in the alcove remained opened, but it was no longer a secret that needed to be hidden. "They will be looking for us soon if we don't return..."

Venus reached out for the other but Mars deftly evaded her touch. She gave her companion, walking away, a thoughtful look before turning her gaze to her sister's gift. "Once upon a time, you were my whole world," she said to the box before pocketing it.

But the dead can only occupy so much of one's heart, and the world has changed...


End file.
