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She leaned her head into his shoulder, nuzzling him to get comfortable in her new resting spot and then adjusting slightly so her earring didn’t press painfully into the soft tissue behind her jaw. His large arm, always so firm and strong, wrapped around her waist and pulled her in closer to his side. “Death is the mother of beauty,” he said out loud. His voice was naturally deep and with her head so close to his throat she could feel the reverberations rolling from up his chest through to his mouth.
She needed no explanation as they sat together on the smooth, crystalline floor, leaning their backs against the foot of the bed and staring out of the window which made up the entire outer wall of their quarters. The sun was setting, for its very final time, and it was blazing in a shimmering orange hue. It was drenching the world in the intensity of its colour, tinting everyone and everything in a warm palette. Anything clear or bright sparkled gold: windows, the reflective walls of the crystalline buildings, the street bots who patrolled and cleaned the city… but anything of colour was tinted: the greens of the foliage which lined the city streets and decorated parks were muted into deep purples and browns, the hoveroads - already semi-opaque layers of charcoal grey glass stacked on top of one another - were practically black. “Who said that?” she inquired, idly curious.
He shrugged the shoulder unencumbered by the weight of her head. “Some poet, from back in the day, I suppose.” That could have meant any time period between a decade ago and the last three hundred thousand years - even from before the formation of Crystal Tokyo, let alone Crystal Earth - but Nephrite was almost always vague when it came to trivial points. It was difficult enough for him to keep track of what was part of the present and what was the near future without mixing up the past as well. It was a wonder that neither he nor Rei had gone stark raving mad considering the sheer number of séances, divination sessions and meditation trances they had performed during their excessively long lives.
“Do you think this will make people less afraid?” There were no vehicles floating along the roads that evening; all were parked in the correct zones, even though their owners had abandoned them forever. It amazed her, in spite of it being the end of the world, people had been orderly when they stopped living their daily routines and sought out those they wanted to spend their final moments alive with. This was exactly what the world was supposed to have become, what the Senshi had strived to achieve from the moment they had seen their Crystal Tokyo future, but despite all of their successes, no matter how far they had evolved into the utopian vision Serenity had dreamt up, it clearly had not been nearly enough. The Earth, it seemed, was intent on making this point. It was reminding humanity that with all its unpredictability, violence and despair, chaos was even more powerful than the tranquillity and harmony man had achieved. Serenity may have won the battle, but in a few tiny hours, she was going to lose the war.
“I doubt there’s anyone who’ll manage to forget their impending annihilation because of an impressive sunset, but there is something calming about it. You have to admire our Earth, it’s a fitting way to go: a brief scintillation in orange and gold before lights out. She's going out in a blaze of glory.”
Makoto smiled at his use of woefully outdated sayings. They were rare since the Senshi and Shitennou tended to pick up and adapt their language and accents based on current trends, but every so often Nephrite would revert to older versions, preferring the feel of them on his tongue. “I wouldn't give Earth all of the credit," she replied, "technically this is the Sun’s doing.” Their star was dying and there was nothing to be done, a seemingly innocuous meteor had apparently travelled a little too close one day and had found itself pulled into the Sun's gravitational field; it was absorbed quickly enough, but that was where the trouble had begun. Scientists of all kinds had hypothesised that there must have been an unprecedentedly powerful element or alloy or something which initiated the chain reaction - Makoto hadn’t really understood the complicated hypothesis put forward by Zoisite (despite her years at study, and being a foremost expert in biochemistry, irritatingly, Zoisite’s scientific mind still left hers trailing in its wake), but all that she had really needed to know was that what should have taken billions of years to happen was only going to take a few thousand. And now that time had come. In less than a few hours the Sun was going to unleash the apocalypse, completely engulfing the Solar System in a supernova explosion before shrinking itself into a black hole. Space travel had not evolved far enough to avoid the devastating reach of the blast or its ensuing gravitational pull, so quite simply there was nowhere to go, no place to run. Even the mighty Twin Crystals of Gold and Silver were useless.
“I’d like to think that the Earth has some input in how she dies. It’s been a rather magnificent planet.” Nephrite had always been more art than science, more easily susceptible to the whimsical than to cold, hard facts. It was a trait she shared with him; it was why they got along so very well. Unable to resist, Makoto intertwined her long fingers into those on his much larger hand. He took in a deep breath, and after so many years she knew it was not done because he loved the smell of her hair, but because of the intimacy of doing so. Her response, however – an intake of breath of her own - was purely to catch the deep, earthy undertones of the spice he wore, and had always worn. Nephrite smelt a little like a forest in autumn, it reminded her of an old tree and comforting tisanes, pine and cinnamon and a hint of clove, of earth and maple leaves sodden in morning dew. How he had managed to maintain the scent in the tens of thousands of years they had been alive, she never knew. If she had to guess, he had probably asked Zoisite or Ami to replicate his cologne, although that one scent was not complex enough to be responsible for what she could sense and feel and smell when she breathed him in. It wasn't his de-odorizer or clothing sanitizer or soap, she was his wife, she knew when those things changed and how often they did... It was so strange that no matter what, he always smelt the same to her. She’d never actually asked him how it was possible; she’d never wanted him to unveil the mystery.
“I pity them,” she said. “They must be terrified.” Like her fellow soldiers, Makoto had had time to accept the news that their lives now had a deadline; she had faced death more times than she cared to remember and it had long lost its ability to frighten her, but for those who had not been privileged enough to have survived for hundreds of millennia, she could only imagine the fear they were facing. Humanity as a whole had had thousands of years to prepare, but true to their nature, they had fought against it at first, desperately seeking solutions that did not exist and then, for a while, acting as if the apocalypse would never come. Many had not even believed the truth of it, after a few hundred years it had been easy for them to dismiss their impending doom as ridiculous predictions of the supposedly-prophetic. Unfortunately, as more time had passed and the Sun darkened and swelled, their little bubbles of denial began to burst and they turned to Serenity, treating her like a living god and begging her for a salvation she could not give. It was only in their very last moments that they finally accepted their fate.
Makoto sighed. The life cycles of earthly creatures were so inconsequentially short to the Senshi and Shitennou, but she did her very best to never lose sight of their value, every human, every mammal, even the insects which seemed to last no longer than a blink of her eyes held a place in her heart. They grew, they evolved, they died. They were the children she never had, and now they were about to be snuffed out by the very thing which had given them life in the first place. It hardly seemed fair. “Do you have any regrets?” she asked him, always the one to prompt conversation in silences.
He pushed her away slightly, a gentle movement which made her look up at him, to meet his eyes. “More than anything on this Earth, I would have given you children if I could have.”
Her heart swelled at the selflessness of his answer. She lifted her hand, long fingers and pristinely polished pearl nails cupping his rough face. He had grown a dark beard for the past few years which he barely kept from becoming unruly, figuring shaving would have been a waste of time. He had nick-named it his ‘apocalypse beard’, offending Ami at the insensitivity of it (which meant that naturally, he’d bring it up at any opportunity). “I know you would have,” she replied.
Except for a small phase when he had first realised that the true consequences of being a Shitennou included never being a father, Nephrite had not really had any desire to sire offspring. He was a ridiculously practical man, sometimes to the point where people believed him cold, arrogant, even uncaring, but he was the very opposite to those criticisms. What people misinterpreted was his ability to avoid worrying about things which were beyond his control, a result, most likely, of his powers as a star-seer which had forced him, time and again, to accept destiny’s plans without any say in the matter. For Nephrite, when a door was shut permanently in his face, he gave himself a very small amount of time to sulk and then he moved on and never thought about it again - where the other Shitennou had spent an inordinate amount of time drowning themselves in the guilt of their past crimes, Nephrite had accepted Endymion’s forgiveness and promptly started chasing after Makoto. There had only been one exception to this aspect of his personality, and that was his desire to provide his wife with the things she had wanted most but could never hope to have had, her biggest wish, of course, being children of her own.
To keep their moods from creeping towards a path he didn’t want to follow, he dismissed their topic of discussion. “There’s little point in talking about regrets now since it’s a little too late to do anything about it.”
“It’s still not too late to fix the bedside table, or the e-shelf, or the puriphore in the temp-pipe in the cleanse-room.”
He laughed, hearty and loud, at the list of things he had promised to repair in their quarters but had never gotten round to doing. “Really? You want me to do those things now? I can think of infinitely better ways for us to spend our final moments.”
The underlying suggestion was not lost on her, but she was having none of it. She sat up straight and raised an eyebrow. “Yes I do. You’re the one who insisted that you’d do it yourself instead of calling in the maintenance staff.”
He stopped finding it funny when he noticed that her full lips were not smiling with him. “You’re serious?” Her lack of response confirmed it. “Makoto, we’re going to die in,” he flicked his gaze down to the bottom left, activating his e-neuromitter and drawing up a quick image of the time across his eyes, “less than five hours and you want me to use up these last, precious moments repairing an e-shelf?”
“Don’t be silly,” she leaned up suddenly and kissed him, catching his mouth with hers and pressing him into the foot of the bed, “it shouldn’t take you nearly that long to get it all done,” she said when she pulled away.
“Your need for orderliness borders on obsession, woman,” he said, pulling her back to him and kissing her again. “You understand that there will be no tomorrow and no one to care about the fact that the books are not sitting on a perfectly level surface?”
“Indulge me,” she asked, moving so that she sat astride him, “I like watching you fix things. It reminds me of… before.”
He grunted, partly with lust but mostly with irritation. “You don’t play fair.”
She poked him in the chest. “I didn’t say a damn word when you and the other Shitennou disappeared off with Endymion for that five-year ‘exploratory natural science trip of the inner planets’ last decade.”
He frowned. “So?”
Her mouth tightened. “Don’t pretend you men did any actual work.”
Of course she knew, all of the Senshi knew, it wasn’t like the Shitennou had tried too hard to hide the fact that by ‘natural science trip’ they had actually meant the top twenty most notorious leisure cities of the Solar System. “Life is ending, I needed some bonding time with my brothers.”
“I know that, but you got to have your fun, now I get to have mine.” With her comment his hand slipped under her shirt and travelled up the smooth expanse of her back. He pushed on the space between her shoulder blades so that he could access her neck with his lips.
“By subjecting me to manual labour?” he asked.
“Drama queen,” she said as her fingers wound their way into his curly, chocolate hair. She tugged him away so he could make eye contact with her. “Night stand first, sex after.”
He ginned slyly. “Sex now, then we’ll see about the DIY.” His free hand dipped under her waistband and elicited a soft, involuntary moan from her.
“Fine, sex now, but you’re fixing the puriphore and the slight wobble of the breakfast table.”
He kissed her before she could add anything else to the list.
She couldn’t help the light laugh which escaped as she watched Nephrite and all of his naked parts jiggle as he tried to force the e-shelf into place. “Satisfied now?” he asked when he heard a loud click.
She stretched in the bed and patted the space next to her, inviting him under the sheets. “Extremely.”
He sat on top of them with his back resting against the headboard, his body too warm to be comfortable under the covers. She sat up as well once he put his arm around her shoulders, bringing her closer. They remained in companionable silence for some time but as the sun blazed on, too large and too close now to dip below the horizon, Nephrite had a sudden urge to ask Makoto something. “When you said that you liked to watch me fix things, that it reminded you of before…” He left the rest of the question unsaid, knowing that she would understand what he was asking.
She looked up at him. “I don’t have a lot of memories of our past, the establishment of CT was so very long ago, but there are a few things that stand out.”
“Like what?”
She smiled, more than willing to indulge in a walk down very faded memories. “Like the first birthday party we ever had for Ami… I don’t know why that one stuck, but it did. I remember a few things about our wedding day, what you wore to Endymion’s coronation, that time we had sex in the rain-”
He grinned. “There were a few of those. Hundreds, actually,” he paused as he thought, “more like thousands, really.”
“I meant the first time.”
“Ah, yes,” he kissed the top of her head at the memory, “I remember that one too.” He stopped suddenly and did a quick calculation in his head. The grin from before morphed into an altogether different beast. To call it a smile would have been a heavy understatement. The glee that was pouring out from him was like radiation from the Sun, it was so strong it was almost tangible.
“What?” Makoto asked, suspicious.
He said nothing, his smile still plastered on his face, eyes mischievous.
“What?” she asked again, eager to know what he was thinking.
“Do you realise,” he said, unable to hold it in any longer, “that we have had sex-” she rolled her eyes and reached for her pillow so she could hit him with it, knowing exactly where he was heading. “-literally millions of times. Millions.” He started chuckling but was cut off as the incoming pillow caught him straight in the face. It did little to deter his inflating ego. “I am a sex king!” he said excitedly, pulling the pillow away. “And you are my sex queen!”
She smirked. It seemed that time had proven that there was no cure for immaturity.
“There should really have been some award for this, with a ceremony or something.” He took her hand and shook it, his face suddenly very serious. “Congratulations, Makoto, Senshi of Jupiter. You’ve blown your husband’s…” he paused deliberately, teasing her, “…mind millions of times. Very well done, very, very well done indeed. Here is an impressively heavy medal which says you are the best and hottest wife the world has ever known.”
A burst of laughter escaped her lips, a mix of embarrassment and delight. “You’re too kind.” She sought his large hands and interweaved them with hers. “And here is your huge medal,” she said, deciding that since it was her last night on Earth she could give in to silliness and juvenile innuendo, “for being the only man to have made me want him millions,” she kissed him, “and millions,” she said as she kissed him again, “of times.” She stared at him, immobile, re-visiting every familiar detail of his face. “I love you, Nephrite.”
He touched his forehead to hers. “I know.” He sighed, eyes closed. “We’ve had a good run, haven’t we? We’ve suffered a good deal, but there were some great high points too that were worth it.”
She pulled away and traced her finger along his bearded jawline, enjoying the scratching sound it produced. “That’s the advantage of extended life, all the terrible things of the past have melted away. I have nothing but my recent memories to draw on and by that point we’d already been together for so long time you had pretty much infused yourself into my soul.” She shook her head, amazed. “Just think of all the time we’ve forgotten.”
“We replaced them with new memories.”
“Not always good,” she said, looking pointedly at him.
“No, but they must have been better than those in our very first lives.”
She removed her hand and frowned as she turned away, thinking. “I remember nothing of that time. Sometimes I wonder if the Silver Millennium even existed,” she admitted.
“I have one memory,” he said. “It’s not much, there’s no context to it and everything is obscure, but it’s there.”
Makoto looked surprised. This was something she did not know. In the past she may have been upset by his not having shared it with her, but now she treated it as an exceptional gem. An exciting and new wonder. “You’ve never mentioned it before,” she said, eyes suddenly bright.
“For a long time I thought it was just a memory of a dream, or an image I’d seen flashed in the sky at some point. It was only recently, when Zoisite was telling me of his own hazy recollections that I understood its significance.”
“Tell me about it.”
He smiled indulgently. “You were there. We were in a field, camping for the night. Your head was resting in my lap and we were listening to Jadeite and Minako sing to a tune that Zoisite was playing on his flute. But then Minako stopped, insisting that Rei sing instead since she had the stronger voice.”
Makoto tilted her head in contemplation, her lips softly upturned as she tried to imagine it for herself.
“It’s a fleeting moment, but I remember everything about it… the way the firelight danced in Endymion’s dark eyes, the look of peace on Kunzite’s face, Ami’s finger, lightly keeping pace with the beat and your hair… warm and soft, spilling itself all over my lap. It was perfect.”
“It sounds it.” She looked away and sighed softly, “I don’t think we must have had many opportunities to be together like that during the Silver Millennium.”
“I’m glad I don’t remember more. Past pain is best forgotten, especially if it involved betraying those we loved so dearly.”
He was right, of course, the Silver Millennium had ended in ruin, bloodshed and hatred. Prejudices must have run deep, anger and fear must have been the dominant forces of war. It was for the best that the lesson had remained but the experience had been forgotten. In that sense, time was truly a healer. But there were other memories that Makoto regretted losing. “I cannot recall a single moment from my childhood, my earliest memory was transforming into Sailor Jupiter and even then it skips to a foggy recollection of meeting the others, and then you.” Makoto frowned slightly. “I must have felt so alone until I met Serenity.”
“At least you had a childhood to forget. We just appeared, apparently; revived out of rocks.”
“Do you remember that happening?”
“Going from ghost to fully-formed adult?” He shook his head in the negative. “I suspect it would have been unpleasant, possibly even a little creepy.”
“You must have been so bored as a crystal.”
“Mamoru once told me that he used to find me in odd places in his bedroom. He thought it was my way of trying to warn him of something but he could never interpret my messages.”
A knowing glint appeared in her grass-green eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
“No, more than likely I was doing it on purpose to tease and infuriate him, but it’s cute that he still has his moments of ridiculous naivety.”
She smiled suddenly as she was struck by an idea. “Let’s make up memories.”
“Make them up?”
“As if we were regular humans, no powers, ordinary life span, back in… what did we call it, the pre-CT calendar? The eighteen hundreds.”
Nephrite snickered.
“What?”
“I’m pretty sure you’re making yourself a hundred years older than you are.”
“I am?” She looked down to her right and activated a research database. After a few moments she lifted her eyes to his again, green sparkling with amusement. “So I am. Well, it doesn’t matter. Late nineteen hundreds. We were childhood sweethearts.”
“Were we?”
“Yes,” she said, brimming with excitement. “You were…hmm…”
“Two years your senior in school,” Nephrite added, willing to play her game if it made her happy, “but we were next door neighbours, so we’d known each other our entire lives.”
The apples of Makoto’s cheeks rounded as she smiled. “I like that, except, we lived on neighbouring farms.”
“The outdoors… country air; that would have been nice,” Nephrite said, considering it. “Your family had an apple orchard and I used to sneak across and steal apples with friends.”
“Ah, but one day you...” Makoto squinted one keen eye, “you were in a tree but accidentally knocked a beehive and you had to run away as fast as you could.”
“Did I get stung?”
“No, because I saved you by pulling you into a haystack to hide.”
“Very noble of you.”
“It was,” she said, smugly. “I was only six, nearly seven, and you were a nine year old boy who used to avoid me because you thought I was a girly baby.”
“I see, was I a terror of a child, then?”
“Oh you used to get into all sorts of mischief. You,” she said, thinking it was highly amusing, “used to cow-tip.”
“Well, your parents loved me. They thought I was a great kid.”
She snorted at the idea. “Up until we started dating.”
“At six and nine years old?” he asked, incredulous.
She laughed. “They kept trying to tell me that you were too old for me.”
“When did we really start dating?”
She folded her arms and leaned back onto the headboard. “Your turn to decide.”
He slid up with her. “When you were sixteen. By that point I had had a whole slew of young ladies to make my way through.”
“I bet you did,” she said, her lips twisted in playful sourness.
“Ah, but while I was the cleverest boy in school-”
“Even more so than Zoisite?” she said, interrupting.
He raised his eyebrows. “Zoisite is present in our little fictitious town?”
“Oh, everyone is,” she answered, as if it were obvious.
“Fine, then I was even cleverer than Zoisite – he had a mechanical mind, you see-”
“I don’t think they had cerebral enhancement technology pre-Crystal Tokyo.”
He shook his head to correct her. “I meant that he was more suited to mechanical activities. Fixing, repairing, building…”
“Oh, so he worked in the town’s hovmobile garage.”
“Indeed, although I’m not sure they had hovmobiles pre-CT, either.”
“So you performed better in school, but he was an excellent engineer?”
“Exactly.” He stopped and wondered what had been the point of his conversation.
Makoto recognised the look easily. “You were saying that while you were the cleverest boy in school… and I interrupted.”
Regaining his train of thought he smiled. “While I was the cleverest boy in school, it took me a very long time to understand my feelings for you and I had to go through all of those lovely young ladies to realise who my true soul mate was. Once I had established this fact, however, we wasted no time and got married.”
She touched her head to his lightly. “Trust you to twist your philandering into something romantic.”
They were quiet for a moment as they contemplated their alternate universe. “I would have liked to have lived on a farm, with parents and siblings. I would have had to have shared a room with, umm... two brothers…” Nephrite looked at Makoto, his eyes slightly wistful, “and I would have hated it. No privacy. But I would have grown up happy. We would have had a dog-”
“Did we ever have one?” Makoto asked, trying to remember if they had owned pets in reality.
Nephrite took in a deep breath. “We might have, definitely not in the most recent age, but perhaps during the Time of Awakening? I’m sure we-” he paused, wondering – not nearly for the first time – whether his memories had been real or skewered through visions. He gave up soon enough. “Well, someone had a dog…” he shook his head, “but that was about one hundred and eighty thousand years ago, so I have no real idea.”
“I seem to remember there being…” Makoto’s niggling feeling wouldn’t leave. “Maybe it was Jadeite’s or Serenity’s… never mind. You had a dog,” she said, going back to their little fantasy, “and, you definitely were one of those children with a hover board.”
“I don’t think they had hover boards in the twentieth century.”
“Oh,” Makoto looked disappointed for a second, but then waved it off, “it’s our fantasy, we can have what we want in it.”
“I want a Labrador.”
“Done. What was his name?”
“Granite.”
Makoto tried to place the name. “After the revolutionary mayor on Io?”
Nephrite’s lip curled with distaste. “I’d completely forgotten about him.”
“I never will,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I had been thinking about my e-ssistant.”
“Oh,” she nodded, “he did look a little like a Labrador.”
“And we would have had nice long, innocent childhoods together. Fishing by the lake, playing with… I don’t know, sticks and pine cones?”
Makoto clapped her hands together and tilted her head back as laughter spilled out of her. “Sticks and pine cones?” she asked, highly amused.
He smiled back at her. “I don’t really know how they found life fun before the electronic age.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “We had electricity in the nineteen hundreds,” she said, grinning.
“Did we?”
Her surety wavered at his question. “I don’t know…” her forehead crinkled, “did we? I think we did.” When she saw he was looking away to access his e-neuromitter she waved it off. “Don’t bother, I don’t really care, to be honest. I’m more concerned about whether we had children.”
He hugged her close. “Oh, loads. We started young, well, after our long childhood of eating pies and bird-watching and whatnot.”
She laughed again. “How many is loads?”
“Six.”
“Six?”
“At least. But the bare minimum would have to be enough to cover a Syncball team.”
She rolled her eyes. “What if they don’t want to play Syncball? What if they all hate Syncball with all of their hearts?”
He shook his head. “That would never happen.”
“They’d be half me, you know.”
"Well, my love of Syncball would override your completely incomprehensible lack of enthusiasm for the sport and they would all be fanatics."
"This really is a fantasy."
"I have names for them."
She had a sneaking suspicion that she could accurately guess what they would be. "Tell me."
"Kurosaki, Mgwane, Chiyo, Holden, Ogbele-"
"You had better not end that list with Cane. You are not naming our imaginary children after a stupid sports team."
"They were the greatest Syncball players the system has ever known!"
She folded her arms. "Why don't you just go and name yourself after one of them, and leave our poor children alone?"
He frowned. "What's wrong with 'Nephrite'?"
"If you called yourself Nephrite in our fantasy town, the townsfolk would think you were a..." unable to remember the word, she scanned her occular research database for the answer, "a hippie."
"I liked hippies... I think."
"It's your title, not your name," Makoto admitted. "It's so... impersonal."
Nephrite was taken by surprise at that. "But it was for convenience. You remember don't you? How we used to have to change our names every generation or so, to remove suspicion?"
Makoto quirked her lips in a smile. "I'm old, I'm not infirm."
"So, you don't like it?"
Makoto shook her head lightly. "It's not that, I just wish that you'd gone back to your original name when things had settled, like I did."
He nudged her. "It's a bit late to let me know now, just as we're about to perish." He looked away from her and stared into the luminescent red Sun. "Besides, do you even remember what my original name was? Because I don't."
"It must be listed somewhere." She activated the database again and searched.
"Not my first one. That I do remember. Zoisite deleted all of that personal information because they were our identities when Beryl recaptured us. He erased every trace of us when Endymion had found us again and we renewed our vow of servitude."
"Hmm..." Makoto murmured, admitting defeat. "Good point."
"I think my favourite was when I called myself Max, though. I had chosen it when I had been under Beryl's control, but I never got to use it... for obvious reasons." He turned to her for her input. "What do you think?"
She looked up and then shrugged. "I always liked your name Fernando. It even started with an 'N' when you used its short form."
Nephrite pulled a face of disapproval. "I hated that one. You've just confirmed to me that you have awful taste when it comes to names. We're sticking with my choices for the kids."
She snorted. "Well, if that's the case I get to name everybody else." She thought about it for a few moments. "Cory, for Kunzite and Soren for Zoisite. Edward for Jadeite, or Eddie for short."
"Cory? That's a terrible name for him!" Nephrite said, grinning. "He'd hate it."
"Exactly," Makoto said. "It would be hilarious."
"This is why I love you do much." He kissed the crown of her head.
"So," she said, getting back to their story, "we have six children, with dumb names-"
"And by 'dumb' you mean 'great'?"
"-and we lived on farms during our childhoods. What else?"
"We owned a… what were they called? A wayroom but in the old days."
“A diner?” Makoto only remembered the name because she knew of a wayroom which had been named after its ancient counterpart.
“Yes! That was it. Diners. We owned one. I would serve java and you would cook. Our kids would act as servers.”
Makoto was struck with an idea. “Minako too!” she exclaimed. “She was a restless spirit who was eager to leave and seek fame and fortune.”
“But she didn’t find it because she’s now working in our diner?” Nephrite questioned, not understanding.
“Sort of.” She didn’t like the idea of leaving her friend unhappy, even in their fake lives. Minako had suffered more than her fair share of anguish. “She found her true calling as a writer.”
Considering that was the last thing Minako would ever take an interest in, Nephrite raised a dark eyebrow. “A writer, eh?”
“It’s our fantasy. She turns out to be a world-famous author, but she serves for our diner to get out of the house and to listen to peoples’ stories.”
“Fair enough,” he said, accepting her argument.
“And,” Makoto was not done, “she marries her childhood sweetheart, the law enforcer Cory, who had let her go because he knew he could not keep her caged when she wanted to travel the world and see everything, but he welcomed her back wholeheartedly when she returned and they lived happily ever after.”
“If only.” Nephrite had been amused when she had used his humorous name choice for Kunzite, but the scenario sounded a little too familiar. The drama that had been the lives and relationships of the Head Shitennou and Senshi had been disastrous enough to cause scandal after scandal. “What about the others?”
Makoto understood her husband’s desire to move on. Nephrite had been so steady and so supportive through most of Makoto’s difficult times, he had not made the mistakes the others had, he had remained loyal in heart and spirit to her (if not always in body) but because of his strength, of his ability to move on and face his fears, because of his pragmatism and his wonderful compassion, he had also been thrown into the boiling pot of problems the others had stirred. They had forced him to act as confidant, they had used him as a prop for their personal wars, they had given him no choice but to choose sides; it had not been easy. “Well, Ami and Jadeite had been childhood sweethearts-”
He scoffed and moved his shoulder so her head rolled up. “Really?”
“You cannot deny there was something there between them. They certainly proved it.”
“I have had enough of illicit affairs.”
“Well then, let me finish,” she said, settling her head back onto his shoulder.
He smiled. “My apologies. Continue, please. You were saying something about how every single couple in our town were childhood sweethearts…”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
The tip of his nose traced its way along her hairline. “No, I think it’s cute.”
She nudged him playfully and lifted her head to kiss him. “As I was saying,” she said, “Jadeite and Ami were childhood sweethearts, but they moved away to different places. She came back to set up a little healer’s business with Endymion, where she met Zoisite, and Jadeite returned with his pregnant wife.”
“Pregnant wife, you say?” The very idea was odd. “Rei?”
“In my fantasy, I am not only a mother, but an aunty of many nieces and nephews, too.”
“You had Serenity the Second for her unusually long childhood.”
Makoto thought back fondly to when the young new queen had been known simply as Chibi-Usa. “Imagine how much more fun she would have had growing up with more children around her.” If there had been any doubt, the memory of the lonely little pink-haired girl was enough to seal her decision. “They’re all having kids. She needed cousins, as would our own children.”
Nephrite rubbed his hand along her bicep, finding her sweetness even more endearing than he thought possible. “So, what do Rei and Jadeite do for a living, then?”
“Jadeite is an advocate and Rei is a teacher at Serenity’s school.”
“You really have this all figured out, don’t you?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot.”
He took in a deep breath at that. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his eyes clouding with guilt.
She did not need to ask why. “You shouldn’t be. It was not in your power to alter my destiny. And I am happy. Right here, right now, with you.”
“I just wish I could have made it better.”
She sat up straight and faced him, grabbing his head with her hands and forcing him to pay attention. “You did. I hope I did the same for you.”
“More than you will ever know.” His heart began to pound in his chest, a mixed bag of swelling love for the woman in front of him, and of fear – a warning. The end was approaching. “I love you, Makoto,” he said, a desperate need for her to hear it springing up inside of him. “I love you, so very much.” How had the end crept up on them so swiftly? Where had all of the time gone? It had never occurred to him that he might have been afraid.
She felt the tension too, but she didn’t care, not in the way that she saw it was suddenly affecting him. Her life had been long and it had been worth it and she had been happy. “I know. I’m right here, and I’m never leaving.” She leaned in and he met her halfway, kissing her with a fervour they hadn’t shared with each other in a very long time.
The room began to rumble, above and below. The heat from the window seared with blinding intensity as the light blazed through - the fire of a vengeful, angry Sun.
The world cooked away, but neither of them noticed as they met oblivion.