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[moontwilightflashfic-blog]

Hotaru Was, Is, Will Be

As the reborn Hotaru’s powers re-awaken, so do memories of her tragic past at the hands of the Outer Senshi.

WAS

Hotaru was four when she first held the galaxy's heart in her hands. It was not the real heart, just an image of it, but even as a child she knew that to destroy the image was to destroy the thing itself. It bristled in the cup of her sandy palms, like it recognized her, like it understood that beneath her thin, new skin lay a void that hummed with hunger.

"A child does not understand destruction; a child only understands how to destroy."

That's what Michiru had said that day, at the edge of the playground, ignoring Hotaru's hot cheeks and snotty tears. Hotaru's hands still stung from where she'd been pushed down, but worse was the pain of Michiru's grip, heavy and irresistible, a whole undertow trapped in the narrow woman kneeling before her.

"It doesn't matter what anyone else does. Never reach for that power. Hotaru," her voice stank of the coffee she'd be sipping with the other mothers. "Do you understand me? Never. You don't understand—" Michiru hugged her then, whispering the rest into Hotaru's scalp. "I hope you never understand it. What you are. Now go, grab your coat. We're leaving."

Hotaru didn't understand it. What she was. She didn't understand why she couldn't go to school. Why she needed three mothers. Why none of them would touch her. All she knew was that the more she found she could not understand, the closer she felt to understanding it all at once.

IS

Hotaru's body is five years old. Her mind is beginning to remember that she is much older. She cannot remember the shape of her former body; she can only remember its pain. The scars and the burns and scrapes. They form a pinprick constellation through which she glimpses her former life. She knows she was killed, once. She begins to wonder about the people who killed her, and why she feels there were three of them. She is not surprised when, through tears of frustration, her only friend Chibiusa finally tells her the truth.

"They are my mothers." Hotaru protests automatically. She's five.

"They are your murderers."

Hotaru is sure Chibiusa will say no more. Hotaru is used to the amputation of silence, and the resulting half-truths. She is surprised when Chibiusa decides to give her the rest of it.

"You will never how hard Sailor Moon fought for your life. How hard I fought to save you from the witches, from Master Pharaoh, from them." Chibiusa glares at the house. "But it wasn't enough."

Hotaru is a child of five for a few more days after that, until the precise moment when she understands that Chibiusa has not lied to her. Her childhood ends in violent illumination. After that, Hotaru is something else. Something that sits in its room at night, summoning forth the heart of the galaxy, staring into its drifting and drowsy core, flexing against it. Testing it. Teasing it.

WILL BE

Hotaru will be this way for a few months longer – desolate, void-eyed and petulant – until finally one of her mothers comes to her room. She thought it would be Haruka, or Michiru, who are quick to punish. Instead, it will be Setsuna. Hotaru will realize that Setsuna, who knows every future, must know what Hotaru plans to do, and Hotaru will interpret this as confirmation that she can in fact do it. She will feel dark pride.

And dread. As Setsuna leads her out of the house in the early hours of the morning, Hotaru will think about plunging her power deep into the world, a scythe of oblivion aimed at the galaxy's heart. She will be so distracted by this that she will not notice the doors appearing in the yard – the double doors of time that Sailor Pluto spent an eternity guarding – until they open with a hiss.

Two women will stand in the luminous void of the future.

Hotaru will not recognize the taller one until she sees the elegant Glaive. Hotaru will recognize it as her own. Hotaru will also recognize Chibiusa too, though this version is older. It will feel terrible to Hotaru to realize she will end Chibiusa when she ends the world. It will be even worse to see the way the two women hold each other, to recognize their tender, graceful affection, and to know that this future will never come to be.

Hotaru will reach for her power then, and will find that the Glaive does not budge from Sailor Saturn's grip. Sailor Saturn, feeling the tug, will smile.

"Someday," Sailor Saturn will say to her, "You will understand the devastation you feel, and you will understand the grand beauty of the second chance you represent. You live within that second chance now. We all do."

Hotaru will not want to hear this. She will be stiff as Sailor Saturn kneels before her and takes her small hand.

"Someday you will understand how people come to change. How slow it can be, but also how complete. You will understand metamorphosis better than anyone. And you will forgive your mothers for what they did. You will forgive them, because you will find a reason to fight for this world as hard as they fought for theirs."

Behind Sailor Saturn, Chibiusa will be watching, her arms cradling herself. Her scout uniform will be pale pinks and creamy whites, like a sunrise refracted through hovering mist and birdsong. She will become Hotaru's world.

Here, Sailor Saturn will hand Hotaru the Glaive, and Hotaru will realize that for the duration of this conversation she has been clutching the heart of the galaxy. She will realize that Sailor Saturn is entrusting her with not just the power to destroy everything, but permission, and Hotaru will realize she wants neither. She will take the Glaive anyways.

Hotaru will watch Sailor Saturn take Chibiusa's hand and vanish through the doors. She will hear Setsuna return to the house. She will be alone as the sun rises, sliding its rosy light through the hovering mist and birdsong.

White hands cradling her black weapon, Hotaru will let go of the galaxy's heart for the last time.

#sailor moon #sailor moon fanfiction #Moon Twilight Flash #moon twilight flash fiction #hotaru tomoe #Sailor Saturn #Super Sailor Saturn #naoko takeuchi

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The Shapes of Water

Eudial, fire-wielder of the Witches 5, faces an unlikely opponent years after fleeing Tokyo

“How did you find me?” Eudial screamed it now, tearing against the frost that bound her to the metal chair. The pain peaked and she slouched back, flakes of her own freeze-dried skin grating her back and re-freezing to her. She was delirious. Exhausted. The torture had finally coaxed her temper to the surface but she stuffed it back down. She needed her temper within her, warming her, keeping her alive in this cold, concrete room. “How did you find me?” she asked again, a whisper.

There was no answer. Only the twinkling of the ice crystals as they grew over her ravaged skin, knitting lattices of cooled gore. She balled her fist, willing her blood to keep flowing to her hands. She needed her hands.

“Tell me!” Eudial spat the words at her captor’s boots, misting them in blood. Good. Those boots were so stupid. Tragically sensible, Mimete would have called them. “Just fucking tell me.”

Still, Sailor Mercury would not respond.

Eudial didn’t know why she kept asking. The answer of how she was found did not matter. What mattered was that she had been found at all. It felt like something past unfair. It felt absurd.

Eudial had faked her own death three years ago, snuffing herself out in a fireball car crash at the edge of Tokyo, leaving just enough evidence unsinged to frame it as a murder. Finding a body to take her place in the twisted, molten car had been the easiest part. Harder was the flight across the world under a new name, then renting a car, then securing a condo in the outskirts of Tallahassee under an even newer name.

Harder than all that was staying hidden. She could not live as the Eudial of before. The Unburnable Witch, Mistress of dark flames and high society. That Eudial became a sacred fiction hidden behind a built, impenetrable plainness. She took a job as a dental hygienist. She purchased Groupons for massages. She collected coasters. She went on like this, carefully layering the details of this unremarkable existence one twig at a time, weaving a brittle wreath of kindling around her smoldering, true self. She burned low and red and angry, never feeding off any of it. She willed herself to burn lower. Slower. Slower yet, until she was just a dotted ring of neon, smoldering somewhere deep within herself, gnawing at the stumpy hope that one day this would end.

Three years passed.

And then she showed up. A girl in a plastic coat, standing in the rain as Eudial dashed from her office to her car one evening. Eudial hadn’t even recognized her as a Sailor Scout until it was too late, and even then Eudial didn’t recognize the danger of it all. She thought that if they ever came her for, they’d send their strongest water wielder: Neptune. Instead they’d sent their weakest.

It wasn’t just absurd. It was funny. In the cold, concrete room, Eudial smiled. Warm blood carved down her chin. It was time to end this.

“You’ll burn. All of you will burn. Master Pharaoh will return, and when he does there will be nothing but ash and ruin in this world. He will start with the weak, Sailor Mercury. He will start with you.”

And now Eudial willed the violent heat of her heart to spread back through her veins, so hot that the jagged ice binding her went knobby with melt. The temperature of the room began to rise.

Sailor Mercury watched Eudial, new interest in her eyes. Fear would come in a minute, Eudial knew. Mercury, for all her smarts, had been stupid enough to seal the door. There were no windows. Things began to drip. The room became sauna-hot.

“It’s a curious thing,” Mercury said, “The relationship between you and I, between those born of fire and those born of water. We are always seen as in conflict. The comparison never resolves, as though it can’t. As though we are equal.”

Mercury stepped forward, kneeling in the blood at Eudial’s feet. Eudial stiffened, but took courage from the sweat on Mercury’s upper lip. Just a few more minutes and this girl would be a crackling, parched husk.

“It’s a curious thing,” Mercury said. “Your power. You have expert control over the radiation you give out. Perhaps you could bring this whole room up to a sweltering temperature in a blink. But you must not want to, because you haven’t. And you haven’t, probably because you know that heat alone is not enough to kill me. You, Eudial, need fire.”

Eudial blanched.

Mercury leaned forward, her face shining with sweat. “It’s a curious thing, the power of fire. To burn. To brighten. To breach the chemical constitution of even the hardest substances. It is unlike the power of water, which has no innate force. No shape. Just depth. Fire drives back the darkness; water deepens it.”

All around them mist drifted in lazy, unraveling curls. The metal chair was hot against Eudial’s frostbitten back now. Thick and pungent, the stench of blood and sweat buoyed upon swells of humidity as the room went steamy. Eudial had not accounted for the steam.

“But fire requires a spark, doesn’t it? And so do you, Eudial. Am I right?

Eudial’s heart was suddenly beating in the flesh between her eyes, fluttering and black-edged. She had raised the temperature without considering the ice. She could not lower it. She blinked through sweat as is dripped down her brow, her neck, settling into the creases of her elbows and pooling beneath her thighs. She was singularly aware of how vulnerable she had become—a quivering body—beneath a net of pent, tremulous droplets squeezed from her skin. The sweat that covered Eudial, like all water, belonged to Sailor Mercury now.

Mercury picked up Eudial’s white fist, and uncurled it. Inside was a crushed book of matches Eudial had snutck out of her pocket, right before Mercury had disabled her. It was Eudial’s spark, her only hope of summoning her fire magic. Mercury peeled apart the book like petals, soft and useless.

“When people fear me, if they even bother, they tend to fear my power over ice. My treacherous frigidity. But the true treachery of water is not its crystallized form. It is its shapeless neutrality. Its fluidity.” Mercury said this like she recited the formula on a flashcard. Quick, without inflection. “Water is everywhere, is everything. It shapes itself passively, without intention, becoming the blood in your veins and the empty space of your brain. In this way, we all live in the caress of water’s ambivalence. Ours is an existence borne of water’s bored mercy.” Sailor Mercury flicked the soggy matches into the drifting steam. “I don’t bore so easily.”

Mercury drifted over to Eudial, a bruise clarifying upon the thick, lovely steam. She placed her palms upon the tender flesh of Eudial’s knees.

“To answer your question, I’ll ask you my own question.”

Where Mercury touched, Eudial’s shining skin instantly frosted over in beads of pale, barbed frost. This cold was unlike the cold of before, unlike any pain Eudial knew. This cold was bone deep and burning. It was burning Eudial from the inside out.

“Where are the remaining witches?”

#sailor moon fanfiction #moon twilight flash fiction #moon twilight flash #sailor mercury #ami mizuno

[moontwilightflashfic-blog]

Elements

Sailor Moon urges Sailor Mars to investigate an imposter among their ranks

In battle, there were no pauses. In battle, there were moments of brittle, frigid tension strung between stakes of blistering terror. There were moments of delay and of agonizing anticipation, moments of brittle, frigid tension strung between stakes of blistering terror, but there were no pauses. The battle was the punch, yes, but it was also the reeling. It was the flame--

“Mars! Helllooooooo, Mars. MARS?”

Sailor Mars blinked, her concentration snuffed out. The twin trails of fire she’d been weaving into her attack dissipated, leaving cinders to dance between her and Sailor Moon.

“Usagi, I was about to attack.”

“Attack the monster?”

“Yes. Attack the monster. What else would I attack, Usagi?”

Usagi batted an ember away, irritated, as though a beast the size of a goliath was not tearing apart the abandoned shipyard before them. The others had just about immobilized the beast with their magics—presently it jerked atop one leg, Sailor Mercury having frozen the other to the pavement. Jupiter and Venus rounded its back, a knot of lightning already in Jupiter’s drawn-back fist. The final blow.  

Mars was going to deliver that blow.

Sailor Moon poked Mars. “You said you were going to ask her. Did you??”

Mars crossed her arms. “What? No. I didn’t ask her. I was busy. And besides, what does it even matter?”

Sailor Moon inched closer. An explosion lit her from the side, digging conspiratorial shadows across her face. Thunder tore across the yard, and it all felt very dire and ominous. Mars recoiled from Moon.

“You control fire. Mercury controls water. Jupiter controls lightning.”

Mars tapped drew back further, knowing what was next.

“What does Venus control?”

“We’ve been over this, Usagi, not every Sailor Scout has an elemental—“

“Is it light? Is it metal? Her attacks make no sense!”

Another explosion. Mars made to rejoin the battle but Sailor Moon was not giving up this time.

“She just shows up, and she’s all ‘I’m the moon princess!’ until suddenly it’s revealed that I’m the actual moon princess, and she’s actually part of my guardians, but all my guardians control some sort of element….”

Mars blinked at her.

“What does she control?? WHAT?? What does Sailor Venus do?”

In a moment of terrible timing, Sailor Venus’ voice rose above the thunder as she intoned her own attack:

“VENUS! LOVE-ME! CHAIN!”

Sailor Moon’s eyes went owl-wide, as though this alone proved her point.

“See? Love-me Chain? What the hell is a Love-me Chain?”

Mars tried to push her off but the girl’s grip was tight. Her irises were pinholes in the wide, manic expanse of her stare, as though she could open her eyes wide enough to make Mars see what she saw.

“She’s trying to be me, Rae,” Sailor Moon deadpanned. “She’s using ‘Love’ in her attacks.”

“Relax Usagi, maybe her element is like…I don’t know, metal? That chain is solid. It’s probably iron or something. And besides, we need a tether attack. Mercury can only immobilize using Shine Aqua Illusion, but that’s a wide and slow maneuver, and besides you know how bad Mercury’s aim—“

“No,” Sailor Moon was so close that Mars could see her own grimace in the jewel of Sailor Moon’s tiara. “No, she’s after my spot. She wants to be me. Iron is not an element.”

“Actually, Iron is absolutely an ele—“

“Mars you’re not listening. She’s after my spot. She even brought her own fucking cat!”

Cries from below drew them both back to the battle. The monster lay in a slack coil of chain, quickly wriggling free as Mercury fought to summon another deluge of icy water. Jupiter lay in a scorched heap, Venus at her side.

“Help us, Sailor Moon!” the girls called in unison.

How Sailor Moon produced that scepter from nowhere, Mars was never sure, but in a blink that glittering weapon was in that white glove. Sailor Moon began to shimmer.

“I’m sending YOU back to the Negaverse,” Sailor Moon called across the shipyard, and the monster cried in terror as rainbow light soaked through the night. The beast roared louder, scrabbling forward. It was so close that Mars could see the scorched edges of its oversized teeth.

Then, privately to Mars, Sailor Moon whispered, “You promised you’d ask her, so ask her. If she can’t answer what element she owns, we need to steal her transformation pen. Put her on probation.”

“You can’t put Sailor Venus on probation.”

“I can do whatever I want. I’m the moon princess.”

The monster’s ghastly roar was pierced by metal renting apart as it broke free. Mercury was ready and let loose her Shine Aqua Illusion. Mercury missed.

“SAILOR MOON! NOW!”

“Promise,” Sailor Moon hissed at Mars as the beast galloped towards them. “Promise you will ask her.”

“Jesus, Usagi, I promise! Just kill it!”

Sailor Moon’s intense glare resolved into an abrupt, girlish smile, and for an agonizing moment Mars thought this was how she would die—staring at a face of unmoored, bratty cheerfulness; the true monster among them. Then, without turning to the beast, Sailor Moon release a pent surge of dazzling magic from her scepter. The beast was vaporized, the poor woman it had possessed slumping to the ground in steamed exhaustion.

“I am your fucking moon princess,” she said to only Mars. “And it’s going to stay that way.”

#Sailor moon fan fiction #sailor moon fanfiction #moon twilight flash fiction #flash fiction #sailor moon x sailor mars #sailor moon

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Moon! Prism! Power!

Getting ready~