Chapter Text
"From the moment I saw you outside OSA-P, I wanted desperately to know you, but I was running late and there wasn't time to meet."
Sailor Moon's eyes went big as she recognized the words that she'd penned only the day before, written to her hopeless missed connection from almost a month ago.
"They're reading my letter!" she whispered to herself, her lips curling up even as she slid along the cabinets of the sound studio, careful to stay low and out of view.
Yes, she rationally knew that this was all a front for some evil, energy-stealing operation, but the fact that Midnight Zero had picked her letter out of all the ones they'd received made her a little giddy. Plus, this meant that they wouldn't be sending an evil broach to anyone else tomorrow, so this was a total win-win, right?
She was going to call it a win.
"I want to see you again. I want to know if you noticed me, too. I hope that you want to meet me. Yours always."
Her cheeks burned pink hearing the baldness of her confession out loud. She couldn't decide if she hoped Green Jacket was the kind of person who listened to this sap or not – after all, she had no better ideas for finding the guy, but did she really want to meet him with him already knowing how intensely she felt for him?
She blew out a breath of air – plenty of time to worry about that later – before reaching up to grab a microphone, pulling it down to her level and jamming a button on the switchboard with a gloved finger.
"Hello, I am sorry to interrupt this broadcast!" she said into the mic in her most grown-up voice. "We have recently received notice that the broaches this program is giving away actually contain harmful chemicals and are being recalled by the manufacturer. If you receive one, please throw it away without opening it. Thank you and please enjoy the rest of your evening!"
She reached up to unjam the switchboard and found herself instead looking up through the transparent glass casing of the sound booth into the crimson eyes of an elegant and rather pissed-off looking woman in a poison-green suit jacket.
Shit.
"Crazy news about those broaches, huh?" She forced a laugh, and then shrieked as the woman smashed through the window with a powerful strike, sending sharp shards splintering in every direction. Sailor Moon's block wasn't fast enough, and flying glass shredded into the skin of her arms and face, leaving jagged lacerations in their wake.
When she lowered her arms, there was a monster with a misshapen mouth and a star-splotch on her forehead standing before her, arms braced in preparation to attack.
Sailor Moon rose to a stand, red blood dripping onto the white of her fuku. A blond man, the one who had just been reading letters on the program, winked from his place in the sound booth to stand next to the woman-turned-monster.
"So, Sailor Moon," he said in a low, mocking tone. "I should have known you'd come poking around here."
Sailor Moon, outnumbered and injured, did the most sensible thing she could think of – she hightailed it.
Clutching the railing as she ran up the studio stairs, puffing out little breaths of air and promising herself that this week she was gonna actually make it to the gym, dammit, Sailor Moon looked back to make sure she wasn't being followed before kicking open the roof access door.
It couldn't be that hard to scaffold down a building, right? I mean, she was a superhero for crying out loud.
As she leaned over the side of FM.10, trying to gauge how intense her hospitalization would likely be if she fell, the monster burst through the station's skylight and tore into the sky, making Sailor Moon shriek and pinwheel her blood-spattered arms to keep herself from teetering off the edge.
Nearly hyperventilating, Sailor Moon managed to find her balance on wobbly knees and stared in horror at the advancing monster. What was she supposed to do?!
As the youma lunged, sharp nails poised to rip her to pieces, Sailor Moon wailed – until a red rose pierced the concrete of the station's roof between them.
Her eyes went big and her head swiveled to a neighboring rooftop. The dashing man in eveningwear was a welcome sight, his cape billowing in the breeze as he watched the confrontation impassively. Tuxedo Mask.
Luna said she didn't remember this particular masked man from their past life, but so far he'd shown up every time Sailor Moon needed him, and that was good enough for her.
"Calm down, Sailor Moon, you have the skills to fight this. Use your tiara."
Sailor Moon blew out a breath as the youma regrouped, preparing to rush again. His reminder brought reassurance with it, and as she pulled the golden band from her forehead she felt a surge of confidence.
Spinning the tiara in her fingers, she charged her attack. She then let it fly with all her might. The sparkling weapon flew true, bisecting the enemy who screamed and faded to nothing but dust.
Looking to the other roof with a shaky but triumphant grin, Sailor Moon missed the blond man advancing on her. He had emerged from the roof access while she'd been dispatching his minion, and now charged a ball of sickly malevolent energy in his hand.
But he didn't escape Tuxedo Mask's notice – with an impressive leap, the masked man sprung from his roof, sweeping Sailor Moon into his arms and out of harm's way with another forceful jump. The ball of black force shot past them, splitting against the concrete and harmlessly dissolving into nothing.
Tuxedo Mask landed half a block away, atop the roof of another building – just near enough that they could still hear the blond man's curses trailing ineffectually after them.
Sailor Moon's boots settled on firm concrete, but then she stumbled as soon as Tuxedo Mask tried to release his hold on her. Her body trembled, and he smoothed a hand over her cheek, his gloved hand coming away stained with red.
"You're hurt," he said, and she shrugged.
"It happens," was her reply, and his mouth pulled into a taut frown.
"You look like you're going to go into shock."
"I've been in shock since I found out I was Sailor Moon, actually," she replied, and his frown lessened as he suppressed a smile at her cheek.
"Not that kind," he said, keeping his voice gentle. "Medical shock. Some of these cuts are bad, Sailor Moon. You might need stitches."
She shook her head, but her eyes were going woozy. "I can't go to a hospital, too many questions."
Both his jaw and one fist clenched. "...I can help you."
"What?" she said, attempting to step away from him and stumbling again. His hand on her lower back tightened, providing support.
"I'm a doctor. Well, a resident, but either way. I can help you. C'mon, you can barely stand."
Luna would be absolutely furious, but the strange semi-floaty feeling seeping into her limbs was making it difficult to worry about what Luna would say. Looking up to meet deep blue eyes behind a Domino mask, Sailor Moon nodded.
Tuxedo Mask landed on a balcony in the Azabujuban district, looking around a bit furtively. He kept one hand supporting Sailor Moon as he slid the sliding glass panel open, then guided her inside and deposited her on the cream-colored couch. She'd become a little loopy in the few minutes of their journey, and her skin had taken on the slightest grey tinge, but she allowed him to steer her without protest.
He pulled the comforter from his bed and wrapped it around her shoulders, pausing only to pop the kettle on before disappearing into the bathroom to gather his first aid supplies.
Medical kit in hand, he emerged a minute later and stepped into the kitchenette to pour Sailor Moon a cup of hot tea. Taking a seat next to her on the couch, he arranged her trembling fingers around the warm cup before pressing a hand to her forehead.
She still felt clammy to the touch, but less so than she had.
"Okay," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Sailor Moon, I'm gonna take the blanket off of you now and start looking at your cuts. Is that okay?"
She nodded, and he carefully unwrapped her. His blanket would need to be washed, splotched now with her blood, but he would worry about that later. She was still bleeding quite a bit, her fuku and his suit both tinged red.
"Sailor Moon?" he said, and her unfocused eyes snapped to attention again at the sound of her name.
"Yeah?"
"Drink your tea," he said with a shake of his head. He climbed off the couch and padded to his fridge, relieved that the combination of his new life as a medical resident and moonlighting as Tuxedo Mask had forced him to start buying pre-prepared food or else risk forgetting to eat entirely and collapsing on the job. He couldn't both cook and take care of her right now.
He exhaled with relief as he returned to find her taking a long sip of her tea, the skin of her face starting to return to its normal peach shade under the scarlet stains of her blood.
He thrust the opened bento of finger-friendly foods – onigiri and kamaboko and sushi – into her lap with a curt "Eat."
She blinked, then looked down at her blood-sticky gloves with confusion.
Tuxedo Mask's exhale was long and slow. "You already know where I live," he said, words carefully measured. "So maybe you'll trust me to see who you really are? I can take better care of you that way."
She looked up at him, a semblance of alertness returning to her eyes. "If you get to know who I am, you have to show me who you are," she said, her voice slower than normal, as if thinking through his proposal required substantial effort, and he nodded.
"Fair's fair," he said, dropping his transformation.
The transition was near instantaneous, the Keio sweatshirt flickering back into reality as the tuxedo vanished, but it was long enough for her dazed eyes to grow wide and her gaze to unmistakably sharpen. She gasped, clapping her dirty glove over her mouth. "Oh my god! You're Green Jacket!"
Mamoru blinked at her. "Excuse me?"
"You're, you're…" she rotated her hand next to her ear, as though she was having trouble thinking of the words, before clicking her fingers and pointing at him. "You're that cute guy from outside OSA-P!"
His mouth quirked up despite himself. "Thank you, I think?" he said, opening his first aid kit and snapping on a pair of sterile gloves. "Now, if you could return the favor, please?"
She nodded, eyebrows furrowing, before she pressed a hand to her chest and her glamour melted away to reveal the girl from outside OSA-P, the one he'd been unable to stop thinking about, the woman who had nearly supplanted the princess of his dreams over the course of the last month.
Years of emotional suppression allowed him to keep his face still, or else his eyes might have grown as big as hers.
"You're…" His mouth went dry, and he shook his head as he picked up a set of forceps, suddenly glad to have something to do with his hands. "...The buns. I probably should have been able to make that connection on my own."
Her face flushed under the blood, much to his relief. Blushing was good, blushing meant her circulation was returning to normal. Now he needed to keep her alert and talking – he just wished they had a better topic.
"What's wrong with my buns?!" she asked, popping a piece of sushi into her mouth with a frown.
He paused, steadying his emotions as he picked up a cotton ball with the forceps and doused it in antiseptic. His heart still pounded overtime from the revelation, but at least his hands didn't shake.
"Nothing, Odango Atama. They're just distinctive." And adorable.
He'd been oddly relieved, in the weeks that had followed his entire world quaking beneath him just from seeing her run past him outside the jewelry store, that he hadn't been able to find her again. If he couldn't find her, after all, nothing would ruin the fantasy of what she might have meant to him, in another life where he was… well, a different man, with different obligations.
And now, not only had he found her again, but she turned out to be Sailor-freaking-Moon, because the universe had no empathy for Chiba Mamoru.
She arched an eyebrow at him as he began to dab antiseptic on her cheek. "If there's nothing wrong with them, why call me 'Odango Atama?'"
His gaze flicked from where he tended her wounds to meet her eyes. Because 'pretty girl who ran past me once outside a jewelry store' doesn't have the same ring to it.
"You called me 'Green Jacket,'" he said instead, returning his attention to the task of patching her up. He managed to school the quaver out of his voice as he asked: "Is there something you would prefer I call you instead?"
Little spots of pink appeared on her cheekbones, the blood that had been caking them mostly removed. "Usagi," she said, then yelped as he moved to the worst of her cuts, one of the ones that jagged across her upper arm.
"Shh, I know. I'm sorry," he said, in his best soothing-doctor voice, the one he usually reserved exclusively for frightened pediatric cancer patients.
She released a small hiss, then picked up the entire bento in her free hand so she could cross her legs at the shins. She tried to suck on her ungashed cheek but noticeably winced when the act pulled in her wounded cheek as well. Scrunching one eye shut against her discomfort, she centered her attention to him like a life raft. "So you're a doctor?" she asked, and he shrugged.
"Technically. I've completed medical school, but I'm not done with my professional training quite yet."
She rebalanced the bento on her thighs, plucked out an onigiri and took a large bite. "So, what, that means you just… help people? All the time?"
He snorted, gesturing at himself with the antiseptic-soaked cotton ball. "Mamoru, at your service," he said, and she laughed a wonderful deep-belly laugh that reached down to her toes and twisted Mamoru's insides into knots.
"You're kidding," she said, and he shook his head.
"Nope. I figure at least it's not 'Reiki,' so I can pretend I have some semblance of control over my life."
Her smile was a stutter, but her eyes were soft. "You didn't want to be a doctor?"
"No, I love being a doctor. I just… Sorry, it was a bad joke," he trailed off as his words faded into a mutter, training his eyes back on his first aid kit and away from the blue of hers.
His career was one of the few aspects of his life that he felt completely at peace with; even if his desire to study neurology had come from something that had been done to him, he loved the subject matter, was glad to be pursuing it. It felt like it was his.
Nighttime vigilante, chasing some misplaced mystical bauble for a mysterious princess while assisting a reluctant superhero, on the other hand, felt like it had been thrust upon him without his consent. His lifelong dreams of said mysterious princess, even more so.
The fact that the vibrant woman sitting on his couch, covered in her own blood after rescuing Tokyo from a nefarious plot, was untouchable for him because of some nonsensical obligation he hadn't asked for was a particularly hard bit of destiny to stomach.
But what else was he, but practiced at swallowing bitter pills?
He cleared his throat as he used his forceps to toss the bloodied cotton ball into his wastebasket. "So, Usagi, what about you?"
"What about me?" She shoved another piece of sushi into her mouth; the food appeared to be restoring her.
"I assume you have a day job, in addition to the superhero gig?" he asked as he leaned in close to critically evaluate the cut on her arm. It wasn't shallow, but he wasn't sure if it was deep enough to warrant stitches, either. Hell, he wasn't sure if he was prepared to give her stitches in his living room, even if it was currently serving as a makeshift triage center.
"Oh. Kind of? It's really not that exciting, you probably wouldn't be interested."
He made the executive decision that she'd be alright without stitches, and began using medical tape instead to delicately rejoin each wound, taking particular care to make sure the ones on her face were lined up perfectly. As he did, he pressed her gently: "Why wouldn't I be interested?"
He'd already felt like a hopeless crush when he'd just been the cute boy she'd run past outside the jewelry store, suave and together in a way she never would be, even in that puke-green blazer. Now? Not only was he Tuxedo-freaking-Mask, the guy who consistently saved her butt in the middle of battle, but he was also a doctor, and he smelled this good?
No, this was life throwing her yet another unfair curveball.
She tried to restrain herself from taking a deep lungful of his scent when he leaned in to bandage her arm, compromising with a sharp inhale instead that would hopefully be mistaken for pain.
How was she supposed to tell a guy like this that she'd barely graduated high school and now worked a series of odd part-time jobs to pay the bills while hoping to magically stumble into a career that actually suited her? Preferably something that permitted lots of snacks and naps? He'd think she was a child.
Though, she thought halfheartedly as she crammed the last of the onigiri into her mouth, he'd already seen her eat. If that hadn't killed any interest he might ever have had in her, then he would have to be her freaking soulmate or something. And that seemed unlikely.
Pouting slightly, she looked up at him. "I just meant I'm not... I don't save lives or do anything important, like you do." She shrugged, picking at one of the pieces of kamaboko.
"You're Sailor Moon," he said, like it was the most stupidly obvious thing in the world. "Of course what you do is important."
"I know, I meant… aside from that." She popped the roll into her mouth and looked down at her lap, studiously avoiding his eyes.
There was a long pause, in which he smoothed a wide bandage along her face, covering most of the skin of her cheek.
"Your tea is getting cold," he finally said, and she pulled a small grimace. "What?"
"You didn't put any honey or milk or anything in it. Who just drinks plain tea?"
He snorted. "Superheroes who are on the verge of going into shock, need to warm up quickly, and don't have time to worry about things like flavor," he rebutted, picking up the mug from where she'd left it on his coffee table. "Should I make you a fresh cup?"
She ran her hands through her pigtails, smoothing them out. "...I should probably get home, honestly," she said. "My roommate got that sleeping sickness thing from the broaches, which was how we figured out what was going on in the first place. She was awake when I left, after we chucked the broach out the window, but I should still probably check on her."
He sighed and nodded, pulling off his latex gloves and tossing them into the wastebasket as well. "Let me at least check your vitals first," he said, holding out a hand for hers.
She put her hand in his, and he carefully turned it over and pressed two fingers to the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist. She tried not to shiver into the warm contact, digging her nails into her palm instead.
"Your pulse is a little fast," he said after a moment, "But it feels strong. Do you want me to walk you home? In case of a recurrence or complications?"
She shook her head, knowing full well her pulse was only fast because of his hands on her. "I'll be okay," she promised as he pulled a digital thermometer out of his kit and wiped it down with a sanitizing wipe.
"Open," he said, and she opened her mouth automatically for the thermometer.
As she sat patiently holding the little device under her tongue, she noticed that Mamoru seemed to be staring at her chest awfully intently, and her cheeks began to burn.
The thermometer beeped, and when he made no move to take it from her, she removed it herself instead. Then, she hugged her arms over her breasts. "What are you looking at?" she asked defensively.
"I was counting your respirations," he replied without a trace of embarrassment, looking up to meet her eyes. "Which are normal, ten in forty-five seconds." He reached out and took the thermometer from her hand, holding it up to read it. "And your temperature is a healthy 37C."
Usagi's face burned. She wasn't sure if she was more humiliated that now he knew she'd thought he was checking her out, or because it had turned out he actually hadn't been. Either way, she was ready to go home, climb into bed, and hide under her bunnies-and-moons comforter for the foreseeable future. Let someone else fight evil for a change.
"Oh. Okay, then," she said, standing and brushing her hands over her denim shorts and looking up and out his floor-to-ceiling windows. "I should go, then. Um. Which way is Mita?"
Alone once again in his apartment, Mamoru dumped the empty bento carton into his trash can and tried really hard not to replay the last hour in his mind.
He'd pointed Usagi in the direction of Mita, and then she'd turned back into Sailor Moon, uniform once again pristine, and with a smile had vaulted off into the night, leaving him with a mass of emotions he didn't want to unpack.
Sailor Moon was Odango Atama, which meant that the blonde stranger who had so thoroughly captured his imagination was somehow even more amazing than he'd thought – and even more off-limits.
And yet… she drew him like a magnet. Years of clinical training had barely saved him from the flub of admitting that he hadn't only been counting her breaths earlier when he'd forgotten to take the thermometer back from her.
But they were clearly meant to be teammates, some kind of predestined partnership in the fight against evil. Why else would her terror split his head, her screams call him like a homing beacon, so he could rush to her side? She wasn't meant for him, though – there was a dream-princess to think of, after all, and besides that, it was a well-known rule that doctors weren't supposed to take care of close friends or family members, since such close ties impeded the ability to be objective.
He blew out a breath of air and tamped down on his fluttering feelings as he gathered his blanket, now carrying the faintest scent of vanilla, and carried it into his bathroom, shoving it haphazardly into his small washing machine.
Half an hour later, he stepped out on the balcony to drape it over the railing, glad that the warm evening would make sleeping without a blanket more tolerable.
He looked up at the skyline, and for a fraction of a second, he thought he saw her shadow cross the waxing gibbous, a streamer of golden hair bisecting the glow of the moonlight. He curled fingers into his damp blanket as a shaky breath caught in his chest, leaving his throat dry.
Shit, how am I supposed to work with her when I'm this attracted to her?