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Usagi trudged home alone from school.
She didn’t begrudge the girls their absence; they had after school club activities today. If the 'Go Home Club' counted as a real club, then Usagi supposed her walk home could also be seen as a club activity.
Except she didn't feel like going home.
Or to Crown.
Window shopping wasn’t as much fun on her own, not that she felt like dealing with crowds anyway.
She considered Mamoru's apartment, but he was in America giving that study abroad thing another try, and being there by herself only accentuated her loneliness.
None of her usual haunts called to her, their appeal gone.
She felt lost.
Adrift.
A ship lost at sea with its dock millions of kilometers away.
They were surprised when Harvard offered Mamoru a second chance. Those involved with the study abroad program must have accepted his significantly delayed excuse that a mysterious, last minute 'illness' kept him from boarding the plane that day. Someone from Harvard even sent someone to the airport to collect his unaccompanied luggage for safekeeping.
They were even more shocked when Mamoru accepted.
Everyone except Usagi. She had pushed him to go, encouraging him through a trembling smile that he couldn't let this opportunity go to waste, that he should not throw away this second chance.
Everyone seemed to be moving on from Sailor Galaxia.
No one really spoke of it anymore, of Galaxia and her false Sailor Senshi, the Three Star Lights and their princess, and the mysterious Chibi Chibi.
Mamoru struggled with his lost time, of abandoning Usagi when she needed him most.
She tried to reassure him, especially in the darkest hours of the night when those feelings of guilt and the trauma from his death manifested as shadow specters threatening to pull him down into oblivion. So many late nights were spent on his couch or in his bed wrapped tight in each other's arms, and Usagi did her best to drive those specters away with her words, her touches, and her love.
Usagi hoped that the distance from home and the distraction of school in a foreign country would aid in his recovery.
But that isn't why she sent him.
She had watched him die.
She had watched all of them die.
One by one.
Sometimes two by two.
Witnessing Mamoru’s death, watching his body crumble into gold dust before her, broke something within her that still hasn’t been made completely whole. At the time, her brain blocked the scene from her memory lest she, too, crumble away from the pain of her grief.
He had been dead for at least a month before she knew to properly grieve him.
Not until a Sailor Senshi from a completely different part of the galaxy finally forced Usagi to acknowledge that the love of her life was gone.
And when she remembered, she broke all over again.
And then she kept breaking, over and over and over again, until she and Sailor Chibi-Chibi stood alone at the edge of creation in the far reaches of the galaxy as the last two Sailor Senshi in existence. Even the formidable Galaxia was gone, her body destroyed with the removal of her bracelets when Chaos inevitability betrayed her.
Usagi had never felt so alone.
And she had no one to blame but herself.
Sailor Galaxia wrought destruction across the Milky Way in her search for the galaxy’s most powerful Sailor Crystal, and Usagi’s Maboroshi no Ginzuishou drew her to Earth from millions or more kilometers away to claim it for herself.
Mamoru and her senshi had simply been in Galaxia’s way.
During the battle on Sagittarius Zero-Star, so far, far away from Earth, Galaxia reanimated her senshi and beloved prince to break her even further.
Their powers, enhanced by Galaxia’s dark magic, almost ripped her apart, tearing off her wings and shattering her staff in the process. Then Mamoru stood over her broken body and mocked her pain before ordering the senshi to finish her off.
Tears coursed down Usagi’s face in burning streams when she called upon her power and killed them all over again.
When they all woke up within the Galaxy Cauldron at the end of everything, after Usagi leapt in and gave up her power to embrace Chaos dwelling inside and restore the Cauldron to its proper form, they were given a choice:
Throw away their lives into the Cauldron and begin a new history. Or leave as they are and return to their old lives.
Usagi made the choice for them, “We would like to continue living together as we are, for as long as we can.”
And the Cauldron's Guardian made it so, restoring their bodies and returning them all to Earth, where her friends and family were, where Mamoru belonged.
Her friends gradually resumed their normal, precious lives.
Usagi never told them, never told him, what had transpired at Sagittarius Zero-Star nor what Galaxia had forced them all to do. She’d simply shrug and explain that melting into the Cauldron must have made her forget much of what happened after she left home with the Sailor Star Lights and their princess.
She remembered traveling to the Outer Senshis' empty planetary castles, then continuing on to face Sailor Galaxia.
And nothing else.
While Usagi couldn't be certain they believed the lie, at least they seemed willing to accept it.
When Mamoru received that second chance to attend Harvard, he wasn't going to take it. He told her so immediately.
“I can't leave you again.” His voice and hands had trembled, his expression probably the saddest she'd ever seen expressed on his face.
“But you must,” she told him with that trembling smile he no doubt saw right through. “If you don't, you'll regret it.”
It wasn't that she wanted him to go, she explained, it was because he needed to go.
And she didn't relent until he agreed.
Because she knew something he and her senshi did not.
“Conflict and suffering will keep on going!” Sailor Chibi Chibi had cried in her plea to Usagi to destroy the Galaxy Cauldron in order to kill Chaos rather than attempt to save the Cauldron and risk Chaos being reborn. “And it will be your burden to bear, Sailor Moon.”
If that was her burden to bear, then it also would become his.
All of theirs.
How many more wars would this man be forced to fight on her behalf? How many more times would he die for her? How many more times would she be forced to kill him?
And for how long would she continue fighting after he was gone?
She suspected it was going to be a long, long, long time.
Sailor Chibi Chibi had revealed her true form to Usagi right before the end, and though she hadn't told Usagi her name or her title, Usagi knew.
Chibi Chibi was her.
Or, at least, some far distant future version of her.
Glimpses of that future sometimes appeared in her dreams: never-ending, gruesome battles taking place on unrecognizable lands on distant planets; far, far away from Earth.
From home.
If Chibi Chibi spoke true, then Usagi couldn't allow herself any more regrets.
In their short time together, Mamoru had sacrificed so much and been killed by her or their enemies too many times.
And she couldn't take this opportunity away from him.
Nor let him throw it away.
When Mamoru left for Harvard the second time, Haruka and Michiru traveled with him, acting as his escorts tasked with ensuring his safety and providing regular updates during the flight via their communicators. Usagi held her breath for what felt the entire thirteen hour duration, only letting it out when she heard his weary voice on the phone after their safe landing.
Her senshi returned home soon afterwards, and Usagi and Mamoru kept in regular contact through letters, e-mails, and phone or Skype calls.
But he came home regularly just to see her, ignoring the cost, lack of sleep, and major disruption to his schedule. As soon as his eyes found her waiting at the airport, he'd pull her into his arms and kiss her as if he hadn't seen her in years, and he didn't let her go until he left. Each time, right before he went through security, he’d wordlessly cradle her face in his hands and stare into her eyes as if he were committing her features to memory lest he forget what she looked like while he was gone, then capture her lips in a tender kiss and tell her he loved her.
Every time he left, she was certain that he took a small part of her, a piece of home, with him, to make the distance seem shorter and the days more bearable, to only be made whole when he returned for good.
But she wasn't sure she could ever be made completely whole again.
At least, not for a long, long, long time.
When they all returned to Earth, Usagi couldn’t help but feel that a tiny, minuscule part of herself didn't come back, that had been left back at Sagittarius Zero-Star where the final battle took place.
It called to her sometimes, whispering a message - a reminder - of what was to come, of where she would one day go, of what she would one day be forced to leave.
“What's up with Tsukino-san? She's staring off into space again.”
Minako and Makoto looked up from their shared conversation to the concerned classmate before turning their eyes to Usagi. She sat beneath a nearby tree on the school grounds, her eyes looking to the sky through a faraway expression.
“Oh, don't mind her,” Minako teased kindly. “She just misses her Mamo-chan.”
Minako's voice pulled Usagi back to herself, from Zero-Star back to Earth, and she apologized for her inattention.
Usagi kicked a pebble with her shoe as she continued on her walk home alone that afternoon.
Maybe it was because no one else actually traveled to Sagittarius Zero-Star and saw the things she saw or heard the things she heard that they so easily resettled into their old lives.
But Usagi continued to feel lost and out of place, pulled by a duty that was not yet hers to a place she did not yet belong.
Yes, she came back from Sagittarius Zero-Star and its sacred Cauldron, but why did she feel like she hadn't yet come home?