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They have nothing to talk about at first.
Logically, Michiru knows this isn’t the case. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. She and Haruka could be called eternal partners, after all. Now that they’ve found each other in the modern era, they’re bonded until they’ve completed their mission. That should give them plenty of conversation topics to exhaust, the same way that car exhaust seems to never cease wafting upwards and directly into Michiru’s nose. They should be able to occupy themselves with discussions of the past, what they plan to do now, where the future is taking them.
Even so, goals like saving the world feel intangible, too lofty and far off to hold any real weight. Presently, getting to know each other is a much more concrete mission—which makes it way more awkward to tackle. When you’ve been fated to meet someone, to stay by their side to the ends of the earth… how do you talk to them? When they’re a real person in front of you, not just the idea of your destiny, how can you look them in the eye? How do you even start?
Michiru has no idea.
So every few nights, when Haruka calls on her to go for a drive, Michiru says yes.
Michiru waits outside her apartment tonight, and more than anything she’s grateful that the rain stopped a few hours ago. She fiddles with her closed umbrella, then checks her watch, then stares up at the fat rainclouds crowding the skyline. A storm could break while they’re out driving. She checks her watch again, wrinkling her nose at how slowly the seconds tick by.
Chastising Haruka for being late would be entertaining, no doubt. But the truth is that Haruka isn’t late. When they make plans to go on a drive together, she’s never late.
Michiru is just embarrassingly early.
Like clockwork, Haruka’s nightly invitations have Michiru shutting her apartment door, descending several flights of stairs, and waiting on the sidewalk. She almost recognizes this as half parts impatience and nerves—but impatience and nerves simply don’t suit her, so instead she resolves to just walk down the stairs slower.
A whole lot of good that does her. After years of delighting in being aloof and cryptic, there’s someone who makes Michiru want to wait eagerly on the sidewalk.
It’s driving her absolutely crazy.
Before Michiru can think too long about any of this, a car slows in front of her. A yellow sports car, as expected, with the top down and headlights that could easily blind her, if she looked too closely. It comes to a stop in a no-parking zone, smooth and reckless at the same time. Michiru giggles at the driver’s lack of care for their parking job—because the driver is Haruka Tenoh, and of course she doesn’t care about things like parking. Why would she, when she can drive like the wind flows and bends to her command?
Haruka steps out of her car, cheeks ruddy and hair windblown. She’s in a button-up that isn’t all the way and dark pants. Michiru grapples with the sight—she’s most used to Haruka in her Sailor Guardian form, in her racing gear, even in her school uniform. Casual clothes are new. Just another step in that perplexing mission of getting to know each other.
“You’ll get a ticket,” Michiru teases.
“Not if I leave fast enough.”
“Is that how that works?”
Haruka shrugs. “Do you want to wait and find out?” And Michiru laughs.
“You’re so serious.”
Before she can jab at her companion’s parking any further, Haruka is on the passenger side of the car. She opens the door for Michiru, not particularly grandly or with a flourish. It’s quite a mechanical movement; she doesn’t stick around to close the door behind Michiru. Nevertheless, Michiru feels like she’s been invited into a different world when she gets inside Haruka’s car. High speed, leather seats, the wind snapping in her hair, the low purr of the engine that resonates like butterflies in Michiru’s stomach. Those atmospheric details capture their night drives more than words ever could.
Although Michiru's life has never been ordinary, being with Haruka takes her out of her depth. She’s always lived like she’s comfortably lost at sea, treading water in isolation. Meeting Haruka has been like finding a lighthouse and drowning as she swims towards it.
Michiru buckles up, settling into her seat. Haruka turns off her hazards and eases back onto the dark city street.
“Do you have a license?” Michiru asks.
“Basically,” Haruka says.
A non-answer.
The street lamps perform a light show on the pavement. Haruka drives too fast for Michiru to make out any picturesque images of the night life. Pedestrians still meander on the sidewalks, but they barely register in Michiru’s vision. In Haruka’s car, she gets the sense that they’re the only two people on earth.
It’s a terribly silly thought, but it’s one she needs to get used to if their mission is going to succeed.
“Basically. Meaning?” she presses, and Haruka snorts in response.
“Has anyone ever told you how nosy you can be?”
The wind whips Michiru’s face through the open top of the car—and she blames that for her reddening cheeks. She smirks. “I’m just trying to get to know my partner. Before the apocalypse throws a wrench in our playing twenty questions every night.”
And even though it’s hard to see in dim city lighting, and small, imperceptible movements are overshadowed by the forward motion of the car, and Michiru doesn’t want to turn her head and look —she swears that, out of the corner of her eye, she sees Haruka roll her eyes and smile.
“Fine,” Haruka says, voice not betraying the softness in her face—that Michiru could see more clearly, if she could truly turn and stare at her, “so I have a foreign license. That may or may not coincide with the law.”
“Ah, so does your fake license cover race cars, too?” Michiru teases. She loves to tease Haruka, too much for her own good, she’s noticed. “Or motorcycles?”
“Motorcycles are perfectly legal when you’re sixteen, thank you.”
“I see,” Michiru says, pleased to have chipped away just a bit more at Haruka’s high walls. Even with their frequent drives and ample time spent together, their conversations often meander. They rarely delve beneath the surface of any topic. Night after night, Michiru feels more impatient—to really talk. If they end up the last two people on earth, she’d like to at least know basic information about each other.
For the mission.
Then again, she has delicately painted walls of her own that are just as high.
“You can turn on the radio,” Haruka says, fumbling with buttons and a dial. “Change the station to whatever you like.”
It’s a weak attempt at distraction, at filling the silence. Anything, really.
They’re on the way home from a grim night of fighting monsters. Even after transforming back from their Sailor forms, their clothes still sustain little cuts and scrapes from the worst of their wounds—Michiru is positively fuming at the damage to one of her favorite cardigans, but oh well, a small price to pay for her life. Haruka’s in decent shape, too, considering the strength of their enemy.
The car is still deathly quiet, though. Because they don’t want to discuss how every monster has been increasingly fiercer than the last. How they’re nowhere close to tracking down the Talismans, or even understanding why they need to find them.
They started living together a week or two ago. With how entwined their Sailor Guardian duties keep them, it seemed like a logical choice to Michiru. Haruka didn’t say no. Now, Michiru is keenly aware of Haruka’s nightmares, too, the visions of destruction that haunt Haruka’s sleep and cause her to cry out in the night. Even from down the hallway, Michiru knows they’re the same dreams as hers.
And they certainly don’t want to talk about that either.
So when Haruka suggests they turn on the radio, Michiru takes it for what it is: a chance to not talk. It makes sense to her, and in the moment, it’s like they have a shared language. After several night drives in a row, Michiru is actually starting to make sense of Haruka.
At least, she thinks she is.
Haruka isn’t someone who slams on the gas. And yet, it feels like they always go from still to high speed in the blink of an eye. She controls the car so quietly. It’s like she handles a live wire, with so much care and none at all. After the amount of peril she’s grown accustomed to, Michiru is surprised to feel… safe right now. It’s as though she’s on the verge of a car crash, neither and both of these things, as Haruka merges onto the empty highway and hits full throttle.
The soundscape of the highway is nearly deafening, with the car engine thrumming and whining, the wind beating likewise in Michiru’s ears. She takes Haruka’s suggestion and starts messing with the radio. Regretfully, Haruka doesn’t have any good presets. She doesn’t have any presets at all.
Despite how handsome and charismatic Haruka first came across, Michiru has realized something:
Haruka is… really weird.
Classical orchestra music comes to life as Michiru settles on a radio station. Rich, velvety tones hum through the car speakers. Broadly speaking, the night is loud and alive, but somehow Michiru is keenly aware of the overarching silence in the car. Feet on pedals, the click of Haruka’s turn signal as she passes slower drivers, a change in the gearshift, Haruka’s long fingers tapping against the steering wheel—no, Michiru shouldn’t think about that .
“I’m only a little surprised,” Haruka says.
“Oh?” says Michiru. “By what?”
Haruka taps the radio dial. “For a second, I wondered if you’d be a ‘violin prodigy by day, loud rock music by night’ type of person.”
“Maybe I am,” she flirts. “Maybe I just don’t want you to know that yet.”
“It’ll come up in conversation sooner or later.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am.” Haruka glides into the fast lane, accelerating her speed as her face remains stoic. “We have enough time on our hands.”
That’s the first time on their drive that Michiru thinks to pull her singed sweater tighter around her shoulders, tuck her hair neatly behind her ears, pause in the windswept freedom she’s found in Haruka’s passenger seat. Haruka isn’t wrong. When they’re not busy tracking down Talismans or rushing into battle… they’ve got nothing but time on their hands, don’t they? Ever since she met Haruka, being a Sailor Guardian has been far less world-saving and far more time spent on the highway, next to Haruka, dancing around each other in conversation.
When Michiru really stops and contemplates it, she’s preferred to never reveal much of herself to people she isn’t close to. Subsequently, the less she reveals of herself, the fewer people she finds she is close to. So what does this mean—to be cosmically intertwined with someone like Haruka, a stranger she feels like she’s somehow always known? It was one thing to chase after Haruka, fantasize about seeing the ocean from her fast car, learning every little piece of her. But now Michiru is here. The moonlit coastline is coming into view—Haruka took the long way home, she realizes, driving them along the water. Her seatbelt is too tight around her chest.
The thought of Haruka knowing her, beneath the serene, reflective waves of the ocean, submerged in darker waters… it’s utterly terrifying. So Michiru pivots.
“What do you like to listen to, then?” she asks. “I doubt classical is your genre of choice.”
“I don’t really care.”
“Telling a musician you don’t care about music—and here I thought you weren’t much for humor,” Michiru says—half teasing, half actually incredulous. Even as the breeze has eased its force, she has to raise her voice to be heard over the car engine, not to mention a stray seagull squawking its way down the coastline. Haruka’s voice never strains for volume, even with her low, understated timbre, words warm and distinct like steam off of hot tea.
Night drives and hushed conversations are nothing new to her, Michiru realizes.
“I don’t not care, I like music when it’s your—” Haruka cuts herself off. And it can’t be a flush that Michiru sees rising to her cheeks. No, it must be the shadows, moonlight, windshield factor, something. “I’m—we’re too busy to think about music,” Haruka settles on saying. “But I don’t hate it.”
Michiru pauses, thinks. She shrugs. “That’s what partners are for.”
“And by that, you mean?” Haruka asks.
“Broadening your horizons, of course.”
Haruka’s eyes move briefly from the road to Michiru, and she quirks a strong, arched brow. It makes Michiru feel like she’s gone blind. Thank god, Haruka looks at the road again.
“Let me guess,” she replies, in that disinterested, latently cautious voice that first grabbed Michiru’s attention. “You’re going to make me a mixtape like we’re middle schoolers?”
And that really does make Michiru laugh. Maybe Haruka has jokes after all. More tricks up her sleeve than she originally expected. Then again, she shouldn’t be surprised. People are never so open, so exposed as they are in the dark, sailing down the highway.
Michiru is doing the same thing right now, isn’t she?
“Haruka, that’s only one way to broaden your horizons,” she says. “But a good first step. Provided you actually listen to it.”
“Yeah?” Haruka keeps one hand on the wheel as she runs a hand through her hair. Michiru’s pulse loses its steady, predictable rhythm. This is just how they talk to each other. She doesn’t know what to make of it, and so she leans into it like it doesn’t matter at all. Haruka laughs. “I don’t even turn on the radio unless you’re in the car.”
“Haruka,” and Michiru snorts, a most unattractive sound that only seems to come out in this car, “we have so much to learn. And by ‘we,’ I mean you.”
“So keep coming on drives with me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Haruka smirks.
Michiru doesn’t know what they’re really talking about anymore, and she has a feeling Haruka doesn’t either, but her face is red, and even though Haruka keeps her cool, her cheeks flush pink all the same.
Michiru’s confidence erodes. So much for having her partner figured out.
All she can do is thank the moon for the dim night, and the radio for the filled silence, and every burnt out street lamp for not spotlighting her red-faced shame as they head home.
Michiru feels the need to clarify, to no one except the jury in her head, that she is not a jealous person.
She’s never had a reason to be, in most cases—what could a dazzlingly intelligent music prodigy with a pretty face have to be jealous of? Who would have anything she doesn’t already have? As it turns out, a lot of people. A lot of people have something that Michiru wants badly, easily catching hold of something that she never will. Every female classmate. Every pretty girl on the street. That Usagi girl and each of her friends.
Without lifting so much as a finger, they catch Haruka’s eye. They each garner her attention, receive the most flirtatious and dashing side of her. It would almost be amusing, if Michiru didn’t find it so irritating. After a lifetime spent evading envy, it’s hit her all at once. And she finds jealousy to be maddening, horrible, and most of all embarrassing. She can barely stand herself. It’s sick.
Earlier at school, a mousy brunette passed Haruka a pastel pink note, confessing her adoration. Haruka passed back a scrap of notebook paper with her phone number scrawled on it. Michiru hasn’t stopped thinking about it since.
So everyone has something they get jealous over, she thinks.
“You’re quiet,” Haruka comments.
Haruka isn’t wrong. As they cruise down the same roads they’ve taken for months at this point, Michiru is quiet. The radio plays a sappy pop song, somehow softer than the usual volume. Even the wind seems not to blare as loudly.
“Am I?” Michiru asks, eyes fixed on skyscrapers giving way to beaches.
“Yeah.”
“I must not have noticed.”
It’s a white lie. Michiru did notice—because she did it on purpose. Is giving Haruka the silent treatment petty and counterproductive? Yes. Will that stop Michiru from doing so?
No, it won’t.
Haruka isn’t the most emotive person by nature, but that doesn’t mean her poker face is up to snuff. She won’t come out and say it when she’s hurt, or pissed off, or simply unsettled. Therefore, Michiru has started to learn Haruka’s tells of a deeper feeling. Right now, it’s in the way that she grips the gearshift, knuckles turning pale and veiny. Clues are found in the tension of her jawline, too. Haruka’s chin tilts and lifts, and Michiru follows her partner’s gaze with her own—from road, to rear view, to side mirror, eyes flitting over Michiru and lingering there, snapping back to the road, repeat.
So she knows that Michiru is upset. And in turn, Haruka has been thrown off-kilter herself.
Good.
“Fine,” Haruka snaps.
“Oh, is it?” Michiru asks breezily.
“Sure.”
It makes Michiru feel far too much at once. Guilt, satisfaction, confusion; at her silly mind games, at how thoroughly she’s learned Haruka all while riding in her car, at why her thoughts are this muddled in the first place. She’s like a Venn diagram, composed of jealousy and various redacted feelings—but without any of the neatness of an actual diagram.
Mess , Michiru thinks. I’m behaving like a mess.
While she’s come to covet her nightly drives with Haruka, she knows that they can’t all be perfect. There’s bound to be some awkwardness as they get comfortable with each other. This is by far the most tense of their drives, though; somehow, it feels comparable to one of their earliest meetings, of Haruka’s reluctance to accept their duty, of Michiru throwing herself in death’s face.
At least, in their worst moments, they always seem to end up next to each other.
So Michiru is prepared to ride it out. She’s content to sit in a silent car, think about how picturesque the moonlight is on the water, and ignore everything else. Eventually, Haruka will take them home. Michiru will go up to her room alone, and she’ll let go of her jealousy, and Haruka will call on her tomorrow night like nothing happened.
They’ll forget all about this wordless fight. It’s a speed bump they’ll never have to traverse.
But then Haruka pulls over.
“Is something the matter?” Michiru asks, breath catching in her throat like a paper cut.
“No.”
Of course Haruka chooses to be absolutely unreadable now .
She doesn’t slam on the brakes or stop in any sort of panic. Easing up on the gas, she brings them into the slow lane and exits the highway. They don’t stop there. The car’s headlights act as a guide, and Michiru watches as they veer off the main thoroughfare. Pavement turns to gravel turns to… sand.
“Don’t tell me you’re out of gas, Haruka,” she teases.
Haruka turns on her high beams by way of response. Through the car window, Michiru watches as the night is illuminated. They’re on the beach, a few steps away from the sea. The moon and the car’s headlights reflect on the water’s surface, bouncing off of each other in an endless cycle, two sources of light always coming back to their mirror.
Michiru feels set alight. Like she might stop breathing.
Haruka parks the car, and she inhales and exhales a few times in succession. They aren’t deep breaths, the kind you take as you work up the courage to speak. Why would they be? It’s more the sound of someone passing time, coasting on air until she decides what to say.
Michiru stares out the windshield at the water, her own breath suspended in her chest.
“I like this spot,” Haruka says.
“Why?”
“Quieter than the city, or the speedway. It helps me clear my head.”
Michiru loosens her seatbelt and laughs. “I bet you take all the girls here.”
Simply put, she didn’t need to say that. Her words were disguised as a lighthearted quip, sure, but she’s aware as well as Haruka is of her subtly barbed comment. Haruka’s hands remain on the steering wheel, even though the car no longer propels them forward.
They just… sit there. With each passing second, with each beat of the pop music through the speakers, Michiru feels worse.
She unfastens her seatbelt and climbs out of the car.
“Michiru—”
And she hears Haruka call her name, but she gently shuts the car door behind her like she doesn’t.
The seaside atmosphere envelopes Michiru instantly. At once, she’s nearly overwhelmed by the sting of salt water lilting on the breeze. The sand shifts and slides beneath her heels. She kicks them off, continuing barefoot. There’s no violence to the waves tonight, and Michiru wades up to her ankles in the water. She feels terribly out of sorts, which doesn’t suit a Sailor Guardian with a job to do at all . But she feels at peace, near the water.
Near Haruka’s car, near Haruka.
These truths shouldn’t coexist, but they do.
Behind Michiru, a car door opens and shuts again. Haruka’s footsteps are distinct from her own; even though Haruka moves lightly, like a runner, like the wind, Michiru is sure that her loafers leave imprints in the sand. She’s indignant over being followed out of the car. Then again, she knows that if she didn’t want to be followed, she would’ve just stayed in the car. Better yet, she wouldn’t have gotten in Haruka’s car in the first place.
But she did.
Haruka comes to stand next to her, hands in her pockets. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong, and Michiru is glad that she already knows. They don’t have to have a conversation about it. Michiru doesn’t have to say it.
She stares at the water, listens to Haruka’s breathing and waits.
“I’ve let girls ride in my car before.”
Michiru considers harnessing the power of the tide and submerging Haruka beneath it, but she thinks better of it. She turns to fully look at her instead. In the serene, crystallized silence of the night, she sees the steady rise and fall of Haruka’s chest.
“But I don’t take them down to the coastline,” Haruka says. “I don’t park the car and stand in front of the ocean with them.”
Michiru takes a sharp breath.
“Oh.”
And all she can do is marvel at Haruka’s words. It’s easy to conceal all of her own truths behind layers of a facade, to never say what she means, to evade anyone really knowing her. It’s so natural for Michiru to hide—and so she marvels at Haruka. At her straightforwardness. At her direct, honest words, responding to a question that Michiru never asked.
It makes Michiru want to try, too. She feels emboldened by the beating heart on Haruka’s sleeve, on the hood of her car.
“I feel… more like myself near the water.” Michiru struggles to speak, but she says it anyway. It’s clumsy, unpolished, nowhere near as charming as her usual banter—but she wants to meet Haruka halfway. “Like how you feel when you’re driving, right? Although, I assume the sand in your shoes is a far cry from a gas pedal.” And it’s not even Michiru’s most clever turn of phrase, but Haruka still cracks a smile.
“A worthwhile sacrifice,” she acquiesces.
“I’m glad you did,” Michiru blurts out, entirely uncharacteristic of herself. “Thank you for—for taking me down to the coastline, and parking your car, and standing here next to me.” She can’t think of anything else to say. She stares at Haruka, breathless like the wind knocked out of her lungs. Haruka stares back. After being so used to those eyes flitting from road to mirror to road, Michiru is startled to have that intense gaze fixed on her .
She never noticed how tall Haruka is. Now that they’re standing by the sea, drifting closer, hands tentatively finding traces of skin—Michiru decides they’ve been spending too much time in the car, too much time not doing this . The sharp edges of her jealousy erode until there’s nothing left. All that remains is herself, and Haruka, and their silhouette in front of the headlights that Haruka didn’t turn off.
The car engine still hums, but it’s matched by intertwined voices of the ocean and the wind. There’s no one else on the beach, no one else in the world but the two of them.
Michiru doesn’t wait. She takes Haruka’s face in her hands, and she kisses her.
Haruka takes Michiru to the beach again soon after, and again, and then it’s a regular part of their nightly excursions—but they don’t bother getting out of the car anymore.
“Can you move the seat back?” Michiru asks.
Haruka nods, and Michiru has a vague awareness of her reaching down and fumbling with a lever. After approximately three painfully drawn out seconds, Michiru feels the driver’s seat shift backwards beneath them. She wants to say something clever or make a brilliant joke. But then Haruka’s fingers skim her jaw, and Haruka’s palm bunches the fabric at her waist, and Haruka’s mouth is pressed to hers—and Michiru has absolutely no brain cells left for being clever.
There’s no way that this turn of events is required for their mission as Sailor Guardians—no way that sitting in Haruka Tenoh’s lap and making out in the front seat of her car is part of Michiru’s cosmic fate.
That doesn’t mean Michiru plans to stop doing it.
“Better?” Haruka asks.
It’s embarrassing how long it takes Michiru to respond, to snap back to reality.
“Yes,” she pants. Her own voice comes out too high, squeaky like car brakes, far breathier than she’d like. Haruka laughs. Michiru has half a mind to get out of the car, dunk her head underwater and never come back up, to avoid being looked at like that. She surges forward and kisses Haruka again before she loses her nerve.
It’s something they do often enough that they’ve established an illicit routine of sorts. Night drives lead to flirting, which leads to parking by the seaside, which leads to… this . Haruka always turns off the headlights. The beach is mostly deserted at night anyway, but the more inconspicuous, the better.
What are we doing? Michiru thinks.
It’s a question that plagues her day-to-day life, plays on loop like the classical station they’ve settled on for most of their drives. The answer is, she has no idea what they’re doing. Maybe it was always inevitable. A surprise silver lining in a life comprised of her boring prodigy activities and trying to save the world.
And god , what a silver lining this is.
Now, with more space between the two of them and the dashboard, they could technically stretch out more—but entangled as they are, Michiru is pretty sure that little changes about their physical arrangement. One time, she leaned too far back against the steering wheel and accidentally set the car horn blaring. After that, she’s been careful to keep Haruka’s chest pressed flush to hers.
Which certainly isn’t difficult.
Haruka bites her bottom lip, and Michiru gasps—a humiliating sound, but it makes Haruka’s hand tighten in her now-frizzy hair, the other creeping up beneath the hem of her untucked shirt. From then on, she lets little whines and moans escape her lips with less restraint. She rocks her hips against Haruka’s, and Haruka more than meets her halfway. The realization that she’s writhing beneath Michiru is headier than floating atop the tide, than speeding on the highway.
Michiru’s thoughts blur, matching the utterly fogged up windows. This isn’t like her. She likes to have fun, yes, but she doesn’t do impulsivity. Getting caught up in the heat of the moment, getting flustered , isn’t her style. The run-on sentence in her mind is incessant, bordering on incoherent: what am I doing what am I doing what am I doing —
When she’s on top of Haruka, their faces both safely hidden in the darkness of the parked car—Michiru has learned to just stop asking herself the question.
As she shifts in Haruka’s lap, her knee knocks against the gearshift.
“Move up a bit,” Haruka whispers, and the way her voice sounds, it’s just not fair—
“I’m fine.”
“I can feel your legs shaking. ”
“Shut up,” Michiru says, settling further in Haruka’s lap, straddling her and ignoring the indecency of her skirt riding up her thighs. She is trembling in Haruka’s lap, but it hardly has anything to do with how they’re sitting. She could move up or down, left or right, stand on her head. She’d still feel this much tension in her body, like a tightly-wound coil, just waiting for Haruka to make her come undone.
Michiru breaks the kiss to breathe, like it’s the first time she’s ever breathed in her life—and for all she knows it is, as thoroughly as Haruka seems to have stolen the air from her lungs, her throat, the space behind her teeth, her open mouth.
“Are you having fun, Haruka?” she asks, a giggle masking the shake in her voice.
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t much for conversation, are you?”
Haruka cracks a smile. “Guess I’m distracted.” Michiru tries to memorize this specific image of Haruka, paused and yet in motion—pupils dilated, blonde hair out of place, her face delightfully unguarded and pink.
“We talk enough,” Michiru says. “Lean back.”
She does. Michiru leans forward with her, lips working down Haruka’s jaw, then the line of her throat. She never does things like this, doesn’t even know where the impulse came from. But she’s spurred on by each groan that hisses through Haruka’s teeth.
Haruka lets go of her waist long enough to reach up and unbutton her own shirt. She loosens her collar, tilting her head back against the headrest, her neck and clavicle exposed just so. Smugness absolutely overwhelms Michiru. Haruka’s hands roam higher, lower—Michiru hardly keeps track of where, all she knows is the sensation is white hot like steam, like being branded. She sucks on Haruka’s collarbone, letting her teeth scrape skin, tentative then greedy.
And Haruka, with all her rough edges and hardness, suddenly seems so soft in Michiru’s hands, against her lips. Like Haruka is at her mercy. Open, vulnerable, real .
“Shit,” Haruka says.
“You’re being quite vulgar,” Michiru teases, her lips against Haruka’s throat. Haruka’s hips grind senselessly underneath Michiru; the motion goes straight to Michiru’s head. “This is too easy,” she says.
Then Michiru feels Haruka’s fingers threading through her hair, and she pulls—and Michiru feels that in a hundred different ways, none of which she considered when she first chased after Haruka Tenoh. Not roughly—not roughly enough —Haruka tugs her head back, creating a distance between them again. It only lasts for a brief moment, and then Haruka’s mouth is on Michiru’s neck, the sensation hot and wet on her skin, returning the favor tenfold.
Michiru cries out, head tipped back in ecstasy, digging her nails into Haruka’s thin shirt. Maybe it’s Haruka in control then, calling the shots, pulling every last one of Michiru’s strings. As the moonlight makes nonsense of all the logic in her brain—Michiru doesn’t care to decide.
Salt water floats on the breeze, water and windstorms side by side. The leather seat rubs against Michiru’s skin, but the friction where she and Haruka meet holds far more heat, burning and gnawing in her stomach. Buttons keep coming undone. At this point Michiru isn’t keeping track of whose shirt they belong to.
Again, she doesn’t really care.
After they’re finished with their night drive detour, they’re always quick in returning to the highway.
Haruka always gives them time to catch their breath, of course, but they don’t make it a habit to linger. A parked car with lights out on the beach can’t go unnoticed forever, and neither of them is in a hurry to get caught in the middle of their—well, very active use of their free time.
When she’s close to Haruka like this, Michiru feels… eternal. It’s trite, makes her sound like a walking cliché. But when they kiss, and the car engine hums like a film score, and Haruka sighs into her open mouth, Michiru knows it to be true. The moment always lasts forever. Eternal, even in the way it ends.
No matter what, the moment always ends.
Because Michiru always moves back to the passenger seat (or some nights, they both end up horizontal and overheated, clamoring out of the backseat at the end of things). Haruka always takes off the emergency brake but then waits a few minutes longer before driving off. She stares out the windshield with unfocused eyes. Michiru re-buttons her blouse, fixes her hair, tries to look decent again. Haruka flicks on the radio, and Michiru doesn’t register what station it’s on tonight.
She feels Haruka’s gaze ghost over her. If Michiru turned right now, it would clue Haruka in on that fact—how eagerly Michiru keeps track of her attention—so she doesn’t turn to meet her eyes. Michiru rubs at where her lipstick is smudged (which is to say, her lipstick in its entirety), and she sighs.
“It’s not really fair, you know,” she says.
“Hm?”
“You always look windswept, so you don’t have to, well— fix anything after.”
Haruka laughs. “Is that a compliment?”
“Maybe,” Michiru says. Her eyes do flit to Haruka then, and she clocks Haruka’s cheeks dusted with pink. It’s different from the ruddiness they held earlier. The expression fills Michiru with pride.
Haruka rolls her eyes. “It’s always maybe with you.”
“Oh, would you like me to sit here and say that you always look like a renaissance painting? That your likeness should be displayed in museums, that your bone structure should be studied by art historians and the great painters of our time so that they can properly capture you?”
Haruka doesn’t speak. She moves to rub the tiredness from her eyes, like she’s actually just willing the color to drain back out of her face, and Michiru watches her usually so guarded expression turn softer, pinker . Michiru doesn’t worry about her own cheeks. She has no physical betrayer like that—veins always blue, brown skin schooled by the calm, cool hues of the ocean.
No, with Haruka, her betrayer is always reckless words.
And maybe that’s why Haruka suddenly looks steely, brave, bold—as though Michiru’s voice stuck to her like courage. Haruka is still red-faced, a flustered scowl pursing her lips, but she leans over from the driver’s seat, and Michiru watches her seatbelt press like an indentation into her shoulder, and then Haruka’s fingers are splayed across her cheek.
Haruka’s mouth is pressed to hers again, and Michiru finds that a hundred teasing pecks she initiated herself are nothing compared to Haruka kissing her just once. Kissing her like she means it, with no pretense or ambiguity in the warmth of her mouth.
This is Michiru’s betrayer, too, she realizes. The way she whines against Haruka’s lips, and crumbles like quicksand, and notices her mind has gone quiet.
It’s everything, to be kissed with no doubt.
Haruka breaks away.
“You and your paintings,” she says fondly, like it sums up everything.
“I’d still like to draw you sometime,” Michiru breathes.
“Maybe.”
Michiru laughs—not just to flirt, to get her way, but because Haruka genuinely does make her laugh quite often, like she’s a child again. Haruka settles back into her seat and shifts the car into reverse. The car tires struggle in the sand for a bit until they get back to the dirt road, and they’re back on the highway before Michiru realizes they’ve left.
There’s no time to stop and talk about what they did on the beach. There never is.
Haruka always puts the top up when they go to the beach—again, neither of them are particularly keen on being caught, by strangers or enemies or God forbid any of the other Sailor Guardians—but it’s back down for their drive home. Michiru lets her eyes drift up to the black sky. Stars loom above them, galaxies so far off that she almost forgets her connection to them. As deeply as their destinies are ingrained in their souls… sometimes, when Michiru looks up at the sky and stares the moon in the face, it strikes her as so impersonal.
She and Haruka are both so small . They may have supernatural powers, have fates grander than the average person, assume guardianship over entire planets—but in the front seat of Haruka’s car? They’re still so small. It makes all of this—night drives and talking and kissing in the dark—feel pretty meaningless.
And yet, something seizes in Michiru’s chest. Like their insignificance makes this matter even more.
“Haruka,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Forgive me for asking a very middle school question,” Michiru says, and she isn’t flushing, it’s just an oddly warm night, “but… what are we?”
Haruka goes silent. Michiru considers, very briefly, if throwing herself out of the car and drowning might be the best course of action. Depending upon Haruka’s response, of course.
And Haruka does respond.
“I was following your lead,” she says blankly.
“Oh,” Michiru says. “Would you rather stop?”
“ No , of course not—I just,” Haruka’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, “… don’t know what it means either.”
Michiru blinks. It’s an answer she could take the wrong way—and a few months ago, before she really knew Haruka, she might’ve jumped straight to irritation, at the thought of being led on and played with.
“Well, as long as we’re on the same page,” she says lightly.
Haruka doesn’t say anything more, and Michiru cuts herself off half a dozen times without ever speaking. Like always, she’s water turned ice cold. She doesn’t want to seem like she cares more. It’s preferable to do anything except imply that she cares.
Haruka is the one who turns up the radio volume by a few clicks. It barely helps the tension in the car. Instead, the song builds to a thrilling climax and abruptly ends only seconds later. Michiru flattens wrinkles in her skirt while the next piece begins, as the music grows more distinct if not truly loud. It’s a somber violin sonata. Michiru recognizes it as a piece she’s played.
To her surprise, she isn’t the first to mention it.
“Oh, this one is from your concert,” Haruka says.
Michiru blinks. She hears the words skitter around her skull. She nearly mouths them to herself in halfhearted repetition, the way she frequently does when she’s alone—or when she forgets that she’s not alone, and that people find it alarming when an otherwise normal girl starts muttering to herself. But she doesn’t have to double check Haruka’s words. She’s sure she really heard them correctly, wholly and real.
She laughs. “I suppose it’s my turn to be surprised.”
“Hm?”
“That you could distinguish this violin piece from any other.”
Haruka scowls, like she always does when Michiru flexes her pretentious violinist muscle. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Michiru says. “I was just wondering about the Daimon we fought last week. I had no idea it could hit you hard enough that you’d end up with ears attuned to classical violin. That’s all.”
“Well, you— you played this one!” Haruka stammers. “At your concert. It was yours, so I remembered it.”
Though Haruka is sharp-tongued sometimes, quick to snap or reject, Michiru recognizes it for what it is this time: a mask. A disguise, like their Sailor uniforms, when softness suits the moment but Haruka wishes to remain stony and unreadable.
Over time, Haruka’s walls have come down. She lets Michiru see her frustrated and flustered now.
Michiru glances over and sees Haruka’s eyes flit from road to sea to steering wheel. Controlled in movement, chaotic in every other way.
Michiru covets these quick glimpses of her soul.
“I appreciate that, Haruka,” she says, and she means it.
“Well, it’s not like I’d come to your performances and not pay attention.”
Michiru doesn’t let herself grin as widely as she’d like to—at the thought that Haruka noticed something about her, catalogued it, remembered it well enough to quip about it later. That Haruka made this effort to know her, the gesture awkward and flatfooted in its shape, but still heartfelt and genuine. There’s always been something that appealed to Michiru about being mysterious, hard to grasp… unknowable. Haruka has a way of never playing into that. Haruka never chases, never tries and fails to understand her in the way that Michiru intends.
Shockingly, infuriatingly, inspiring both dread and butterflies in stomachs—Haruka doesn’t have to chase after her. She’s just… already there.
And so Michiru grins, just a little bit, at the thought of being known.
Violins turn to strings, and strings turn to piano. Their time on the highway ends, and Haruka starts paying more attention to the speed limit—as a suggestion, at least. With every traffic light and stop sign, Michiru becomes aware of their world shrinking, conforming once more to a rigid normalcy that matches their day-to-day lives. There’s a loss of the freedom that they have in the fast lane, or when it’s just the two of them on the beach.
It’s always a little sad to drive home, even though they go together.
“Michiru?”
“Yes?” she replies.
“We are.”
Michiru turns and slowly raises an eyebrow.
“Meaning?” she asks.
Street lamps play on Haruka’s face, brightening her hair and casting shadow along her cheekbones. Her expression is filled with far more intensity than the road requires, contorted with all she’s trying to say but can’t get out. Finally, she does.
“We’re on the same page,” Haruka says. “I’m not just following along with what you want—I want you, too. Even if I don’t really know how, and even if I’m not sure what that means.” Her eyes stay glued to the road, never drifting to Michiru, like she’ll burn up if their eyes meet. Her grip on the wheel is relaxed—but her other hand shakes on the gearshift, knuckles turning pale and defined. “There’s so much I don’t understand about our lives, and why we’re here—so much about myself ,” Haruka says, “… but I know that I feel things for you. Even if I don’t fully understand them.”
Michiru doesn’t have to meet Haruka’s eyes fully to know that it’s all true. Even in her complexities and muttered truths… Haruka is straightforward. She’s earnest in a way that makes Michiru’s heart ache. It makes Michiru lose her taste for pretty words and poetic confessions. She responds as simply as she can—because she knows that Haruka will hear her, even above the rev of the car’s engine.
“Then let’s just keep driving, Haruka.”
Michiru reaches down, more tentative than she usually is—and she envelopes Haruka’s hand on the gearshift with her own. Haruka can’t exactly return the grasp while maneuvering the gearshift; Michiru doesn’t need her to. The intimacy of skin pressed to skin is more than enough.
“Okay,” Haruka smiles.
The sight is somehow like warm bathwater running down Michiru’s back. She’s never felt peace like this, a simple form of heaven that she’s found in Haruka Tenoh.
Soft song after song plays on the radio, and even as they occasionally fidget, neither pulls their hand away from the other. They each have their own calluses and scars. Bitten nails, marred skin. Remnants of violin and racing and defending the galaxy, all written in their palms and knuckles. They may never say half of these stories aloud—maybe they’ll always prefer light conversations and the silence of the beach when they’re in Haruka’s car—but with hands pressed together, it’s like they’re learning each other all the same.
“I have a request, then,” Michiru says.
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to take you on a drive in your fast car next time.”
Haruka snorts. “Do you have a license?”
“As if you do?” Michiru teases.
Haruka pauses, and then she laughs. She laughs so hard that Michiru can barely hear the radio anymore, but she doesn’t really care about missing the orchestra, not when Haruka’s laughter is somehow more like music than anything else.
Squeezing Haruka’s hand on the gearshift, Michiru laughs, too.