SM: Awakening, chapter 2 - Binah

[aegistheia]

Title: Awakening
Author: aegistheia
Relationship(s): Haruka/Michiru, Mamoru/Usagi
Rating: PG-13
Genre: General, Adventure, Drama
Word Count: ~3100
Warnings: Spoilers up to the end of the Sailor Moon S (1994) anime arc. Epileptic tree equivalents of magical theories. Cheerfully irreverent mashups and blatant speculations of manga and anime.
Also Archived On: Livejournal; Archive of Our Own.
Summary: This is how the war ends: with a bang, with a whimper, with a beginning. Only, neither Haruka nor Michiru are prepared for what the aftermath of the end entails, because their solitary war doesn’t ever stop. Doesn’t it?

Binah

The concept of Michiru and me as a unit came to us in a path more meandering than the Milky Way’s shadow over the Earth. We don’t talk about it much, if at all. How to explain?

Consider that art, especially when commercialized, is all about communication. It’s a root of the truth that drives society to consider Michiru a genius, and it’s not a root easily noticed. Why would anybody care, with all the flamboyance and the response and the intrinsic value and the money being generated and exchanged?

In another vein, I speak of our partnership because I am allowed to do so by Michiru’s tolerant grace. Michiru speaks for me for much the same reasons, of course, but in reality she speaks for me far more than I can ever for her. I don’t mind. She perceives much, sometimes too much, and she knows how to use it.

Do you see, now?

It goes the other way, too. For as long as I’ve known her, Michiru has possessed impeccable control of her self-expression. She would, to be the master that she is of the skills she exhibits, at the flourish of her paintbrush, at the jeté of her bow, at the downstroke of her dive. She, more than anyone, knows the messages that her body telegraphs, the signals that different kinds of people can derive. It’s how she has kept nearly everyone blinded to her true nature, despite her public profile and professional fame.

It’s just too bad that none of this is distracting me from the fact that Michiru isn’t saying anything now. Her grip on my hand screams of nothing but terror.

Meiou Setsuna sets the helicopter onto the helipad of my apartment building in the Mugen campus as though she is demonstrating a textbook landing. We haven’t exchanged more than a few dozen words since she’d arrived to unlock the Holy Grail, and already I feel as though we’d grown up together, our relationship forged in a muddle of love and dislike and sheer inimitable familiarity. I’m still somehow wholly unsurprised by the fact that she has yet to release her transformation, the garnet of her gaze echoed at her ears and throat.

But that’s the kick in the teeth, isn’t it, that colour? Sailor Pluto has very frightening eyes. If you look closely enough, you would realize that they have neither a bottom nor an echo. Not even the ghost-orb of her staff is so depthless, though its reach is even deeper, if I let it—

No. No. Denying its beckon feels as though I’m mentally wrenching something out of its socket, but— No. It calls to a part of me that isn’t me, Tenou Haruka, trembling in her seat beside her partner. It’s too much to take after everything tonight—

“I will see you later,” Setsuna says, in the strange, soft way she has for declaring everything, the same satin-matte finish to her eyes that stops questions before they begin to form.

Michiru nods, a brisk dismissal, and drags me out of the aircraft before I can do more than gesture my thanks. The last glimpse I catch of Setsuna’s expression is one utterly devoid of surprise; then I am pulled through the door of the roof and the accelerating whirl of the helicopter’s blades is cut off with the slam.

Michiru releases her transformation midway down the last flight of stairs. The backlash of receding power is enough to trigger mine; the glow of my uniform’s dissolution has barely faded before we hurtle out of the stairwell and into the public hallway. I fumble for my keys as Michiru hauls me forward with unforgiving strength. Should I not be prepared for unlocking my unit when we finally arrive at the door Michiru will plough us straight through the door, so it’s with no small amount of relief that I do manage to have the proper key arranged in the right orientation by the time I’m towed within reach of the keyhole. A twist, a push, and we’re stumbling across the genkan.

Michiru is suddenly flush against me, aqua eyes too deep and too magnetic. I bend down to kiss her, and she shoves me against the door. Her hands are bruisingly, wonderfully tight against my arms, more real than the crash of the door as it closes at my back. She bites at my lips, ferocity overwhelming feelings, inexorable as the tides.

We break apart only when we’re about to drown, maelstrom attraction throwing the last few hours into stark, bloodless focus. We have never been more alive. “Michiru,” I murmur, hoarse, the taste of her amplified by the hurricane pulse beating in my mouth, constricting my throat, “oh, Michiru.”

She puts both hands on my face and laughs so painfully that my heart wrenches. “I thought I’d lost you.” The tears that she aren’t crying are thick in her voice. “I thought I’d finally lost you, and I couldn’t bear the thought of dying after you.”

My grip on her wrists tighten until my fingers protest against the force. I must be hurting her if I’m hurting myself, but her eyes are steady and her hands are still firm against me. “We are so very contrary,” I tell her wearily, “as soldiers of war.”

She laughs again, bitter humour. “I thought I’d led you to choices that had stripped you of all your innocence,” she says very softly. “I thought Eudial had made the worst mistake of her life about the Talismans’ carriers, when I looked up and saw her gun on your chest. I never thought—”

“—that we’d be pure enough to carry them within us,” I finish as she chokes. Between the two of us I’m the one who actually cries more, and I— My killing urge roars to full throttle once more. Never, never, battles were supposed to end with us— not whole, maybe, but not like this.

“No,” she says violently. “You are purer than you think—”

“Stop it.” The viciousness in my voice almost takes me by surprise. The next time I encounter Eudial, I will destroy her. “Stop it, Michiru. I chose my perspective of my own free will. Do not belittle me or yourself about this.”

“And even then, I don’t think I would have regretted it if you didn’t have a Heart Crystal,” she continues like I hadn’t interrupted, and then she’s weeping, weeping harder than I’ve ever seen her, “I thought— if you’ve chosen, if I’m not alone just for a little while, then I can accept what my duty will have me do, I can accept what— what our duty will have you become. Haruka, my dear, oh, I—”

I kiss her as fiercely as I can. Michiru, Michiru, heart of my hearts, I can’t even do anything for you. “I thought the same,” I whisper, the words burning my tongue even as I let them spill out into the scant space between us, “I thought the same, because I’ve met you, and if we had each other for just a fraction of a heartbeat in the history of the universe then it wouldn’t matter if we were the greatest sinners in the world—”

We’re both crying now, tears intermingling as we trade kisses in between gasping words and frantic guilt and love that is too much for our hearts to hold. It’s desperately intimate, the presence of a fellow human being who understands and accepts when all the shields are down and every sin is on display. We are selfish and imperfect and we are alive. We will not apologize for any of it.

“I would have given you up for the world,” I murmur into her hair, sacrosanct and desecrated, “and when my duty was done, I would have followed you.”

It is only almost true, for her as well as for me, but the way her body shivers against mine is answer enough.

We stay like that for uncountable minutes, slumped together against the door, breathing each other in with the only reassurance we can give. “We have to stop,” Michiru finally sighs, reluctance in every flinch of her strength. “Our mission—”

“—Is not yet complete.” I kiss her hair, aching. The Holy Grail’s appearance without the Messiah of Light to wield it means that the war has only just – finally, properly – started. And yet, our fine focus, shattered by one mere attack... “If we ever complete it and come out alive, then...”

Michiru laughs, weaker than starlight on a cloudy night. “Come now, we’ve overindulged already. Let’s not let our imaginations wander any further.”

“They’re not wandering,” I say, soft as the flutter of her lashes against my skin, “and you know it.”

Michiru sighs again. “I know. Let’s go to bed, Haruka, my dear. We could do with some sleep.”

“Sleep,” I echo dully. My body hurts, its compiled list of injuries clawing at my guard to present the bill, but their sum total is nowhere close to the agony in my chest. The cathedral’s intricate rose window is a sacred afterimage carved into my retinas still, the shapes warped and colours defiled, the reverberation of organic music dragging my breath out with its spiritual abandon. “If I wake you tonight, I am sorry.”

Michiru draws away with an equally faded smile. “And I, the same,” she replies, leading me to our blessedly clean bed.

It has not been long, relatively speaking, since we had started to share a bed. I can barely remember the first night Michiru had suggested it, mostly because that day’s battles had so worn me I would have collapsed onto my knees if I had had to stand for five minutes longer. So, like the suave charmer I am, I’d gaped at her like a beached fish until my sleepwalking brain could wake up sufficiently to croak an appropriate inquiry. It just goes to show for something, I think, that the clearest part of my memories for that evening had been her answer, diffident and almost vulnerable: “I would have your back, as you would have mine.”

Michiru had smiled then, tired and beautiful, and oh, winds, it will never be possible for me to possess the strength to resist her.

Still, for the first few months, we’d been unable to fall asleep until well into the dregs of the night. I had felt Michiru’s wakefulness like a physical touch at my side. It hadn’t been until our twenty-third battle together within as many weeks of our partnership when we’d finally discovered the rhythm that pulsed like a living thing between us, in midst of our battle focus and out of it, the trust to let enough go in each other’s company.

Why had we persisted in sleeping beside each other – or trying to do so – despite our miserable failure for so long? I think it came down to simple need. We face our own hells and our own paths alone, but sometimes, it’s not enough. We knew we needed somebody to— to something, anything, and we had no better option. We had no options at all. So, we chose sleeplessness until sleep came. We knew well the consequences; during those long weeks, between our cumulative battle wounds we must have funded three pharmacies through their quarterly sales targets. We chose anyway.

And so we will keep choosing. We know we will not sleep well tonight. But in spite of this, in spite of everything, we will sleep, and we will wake again to fight. I sink down, and—

—Michiru is a solid burn over me, whispering into my neck.

I take a breath. It sounds oddly like a sob.

“You’ve woken up.” She tilts her head up to look at me. “That nightmare again?”

“No.” Not the one where I stand by, a mute slip of screaming conscience, as the world shatters around me to the beat of my pulse. Although that particular dreamscape no longer wields the same sense of foreboding that had haunted me before the Messiah came to power, sometimes my mind revisits it and my body just reacts. “Not that.”

“Then,” she presses close; I have never been more thankful for the offered companionship, “what did you see, that has made your heart thunder so?”

A few seconds of quiet, just to breathe. “A memory.”

Michiru’s body is blood-warm and blood-silent by my side, through the thin silk of her gown.

“A memory of that night, that— that— when we nearly died, as partners—”

“It’s all right,” she interrupts, gentle as the salt on a sea breeze, as if she could hear the way my throat is closing by the clench of my fist over her heart, “it’s all right.”

A breath. Another. “Sometimes, I think I might like to dream normally again.”

“It’s not like you,” she murmurs.

“It’s completely unlike me.” I stare up into the ceiling as if it holds more answers than a bottle of sake. As if Michiru hadn’t woken me up last night with her moans, fear-sweat darkening her hair and sheening the horror in her expression. As if I hadn’t been jerking out of my sleep for the last few weeks, iron on my tongue from the cheek I’d bitten through. As if Michiru hadn’t stared into mirrors since we’d leaned back from the edge of apocalypse with the resignation of a precognitive just aware enough of what has been to touch upon the shape of what could be. As if we hadn’t noticed the disquiet surrounding us like an impending infarction.

As if we hadn’t been wondering the same thing scarce days since we’d won our battle: did we leave the district too soon? Have we damned the victory, overlooked a seed we should have destroyed before it could breathe? Would we find something worse than what Michiru had stopped in that copse of trees of my first awakening?

Did we fail again?

It’s hard to talk about loss, and not just for the reasons you think. Loss takes on uncountable dimensions, because loss itself is a personal relation. Before, I could tell you with high confidence that my inability to find something to assuage my boredom is the biggest wound I cannot heal. I could tell you that I was young and stupid and wholly unsympathetic: I wanted to be with the wind. I wanted to become the wind. Why would I look back? Why would the wind settle for being anything less than whole?

The truth of it is that I’d known, even then, that transcendence of my own humanity would have been the only way to escape a fate I did not want to face, in the same way a slight shift in angular velocity at the approach of a turn can make or break the outcome of a race. The truth of it is that I’d lost long before I’d even reached the starting line. The truth of it is that you need to learn how to lose to win. The truth of it is that every lesson is different.

The truth is that some lessons should never be learned.

Do you see?

The truth that matters right now, the truth in bed with us, is that we the both of us have never handled self-doubt with poise. That said, if there is only one lesson that Michiru can claim to have taught me with any degree of success, it is how to extend my version of grace. “I wonder how that little town is recovering in that wake of destruction.”

She smiles in reply, rueful. “Would you like to observe with your own two eyes? It’s not like we have anything better to do quite yet.”

“Why not? I can do with a change in scenery. This sleepy district is boring.” The race has finished, the prize money paid out, the contracts accepted and declined— We are very good at feigning nonchalance when the occasion calls for it. The wound on the world is still tender; the words beneath our mutual script can pry open the stitches better than sticks and stones ever will. “Meeting the lovely ladies again will be a treat for us poor souls.”

“A balm,” she corrects.

I can only smile. She’s right, after all.

-----

As it is, it takes the better part of the next day to finalize our arrangements for the impromptu trip.

Still, as the familiar horizon of glittering buildings and skeletal skyscrapers loom into focus, I find my hands tightening on the steering wheel. “I honestly didn’t expect to be returning so soon. After everything.”

Michiru makes an acquiescing sound in her throat. “And the gas prices are so high around this area, too.”

“Especially that! I might have to start charging you for the rides.”

“Like I might have to start charging you for residency too? Arranging for proper caretaking of my unoccupied apartments are a very large hidden cost, you realize.”

I make a face at the freeway. “You strike hard deals.”

“Necessities due to the current economy,” she assures breezily. The sliver of her smirk is just visible from the corner of my eye. “Do you know how many apartment buildings in the district maintain access to a private helipad? My financial situation requires that I acquire some extra bedding before my nest egg is comfortably warm.”

“Ah, to think that I would spend my life with a woman who would choose her nest egg over my handsome self,” I lament. “Such epic tragedies are worthy of paeans—”

“Considering how your nest egg is currently larger than mine, I see no grounds upon which you can complain.”

“Larger by the paltry thousand yen of that last bit of winnings, perhaps—”

“Incremental differences that can and will gather momentum when the stock market resumes trading tomorrow morning—”

The setting sun is a hazy presence to our side, the wind in her hair and the sea in my ears as we speed down the asphalt. Soon we’ll find what we’re looking for.

Soon.

I < > III