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The dreams are the first thing she remembers. Earlier than any of her other memories there are those visions, which she inevitably begins to suspect of being memories as well. She grows up but the dreams stay the same.
The warm shining light of a silver crystal. A moon, not many and variously-colored like those in the sky she sees daily, but a single moon glowing silver. A hand touching her own. A maelstrom of shadow. An iron will.
The will is not hers. She knows this and chafes against it, strains against it, claws against the knowledge that she was outdone. How can she live with herself, knowing that? What is the purpose of existing after failure? The cage of her past life asserts itself more and more strongly day by day until it bleeds through completely and she has difficulty distinguishing which memories are before and which ones after. She recalls a throne and bent knees and all the galaxy’s inhabitants destroyed for her like so much stardust, and when those around her fail to address her with the respect she is owed it begins to put her teeth on edge.
But before she ever transforms for the first (not first) time, before her Sapphire Crystal blazes (again) into life like blue fire, she remembers regret. She spent a lifetime in domination and destruction. She remembers the end and the futility.
Maybe that is what torments her so, not the shame of failure but the shame of remorse.
Her grandmother embraces her. Her mother calls her by name. But it is not her name. She looks through them and remembers her real name and her real past, and whatever present into which she has been born again fades away. She is Galaxia and her thoughts revolve solely around that distant little star system and its protectress.
The sky calls her name. The planet upon which her star seed was reborn is a claustrophobic world of petty strife and natural destruction. She sees Chaos in all things. She fights, halfheartedly, to push back the dark. But how can she do that, knowing what she knows? How can she play at righteousness in this lifetime? This is not her world and it is not her place. She hears Chaos laughing; as I devoured you once, so I shall again.
She finds her wings and this second birth planet becomes a memory, already faded behind the others.
Nomadic solitude suits her. She wanders outward from the busy swirling disc of the galaxy, avoiding inhabited worlds. She brushes by places she knows from that previous life. She came before to these worlds. She conquered some. She destroyed some. She changed all.
Have they rebuilt? she wonders. How long has it been? Has the galaxy put behind it the devastating but brief conquest of the Golden Queen? Or was there nothing left to recover? Did the power of that brilliant shining moon wash over every destroyed planet, every devoured soul, and coax it back to life?
The curiosity gnaws at her, though she is afraid of what the answer might be. She is afraid to know that she had no impact at all, that for every effort and every power she was but a mote of dust after all.
She watches the corona of a small red star leap out in a vicious orange glow. She drinks in the heat but is not harmed by it; her Sapphire Crystal pulses inside of her. Her power used to be thus, vast and monstrous beyond fathoming. Perhaps it still is. She has not tested it in this life. She has already lost the most meaningful contest.
She can hear, sometimes, in those quietest and furthest reaches of the galaxy, a familiar murmur. That uneasy ally whispers her name again.
Come, Chaos intones, and we will extinguish the light.
Some part of her wants to. Some part of her wants to repeat the past and believe the future will change. This time Sailor Moon will be swallowed and this time she will succeed.
But in this life she has weariness in the place of her lust for blood and power, and she closes her ears to the temptation.
At the edge of the galaxy she stares out into a sea of darkness where the stars are fewer and farther between. The black emptiness is overwhelming. It is too solid and unending to be nothing. But even Chaos doesn’t lurk there, in the hollow vacuum that dominates the universe. There is nothing at all there to catch her should she fall in. She drifts, wings spread, tempted to keep going.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees a flicker of light. She turns and beholds a distant figure, radiant like a star, a glimmer of white pushing back the chasm.
The sentinel offers a gentle smile. She is not unfamiliar. The smile is reassuring but leaves Galaxia feeling humiliated, her privacy suddenly violated. She does not want her hesitation to be witnessed. She turns her back on the galaxy’s rim.
Wandering loses its spark. The grandeur of the cosmos stultifies into mighty indifference. Freedom dulls into loneliness. Still she is not distracted from her thoughts. What is the use in rebirth, she would ask of the universe, if her past life is to dominate her present?
She awakes from a long and restless sleep in a garden of flowers. It is not where she fell asleep. She was on a small and uninhabited asteroid, a tiny bit of rock caught in the flood of energy between a bright young star and its collapsed neutron twin. She watched and felt the life stream by like a lullaby as she drifted off. But now she is somewhere else entirely.
She is lying on a slope on a tiny drifting body shaped like a bowl. There are blossoms all around her and the stars scattered above in their own garden. A waterfall pours into a pool at the center of the little cup. This place is not like the others she has seen; it is brimming with life. She can feel it thrumming through her. She can smell the perfume of the flowers, though there is no atmosphere above them.
It feels familiar.
For a moment, a day, or a lifetime, she lies in the flowers and stares at the stars. Then, as if called, she rises and goes to the center of the basin.
Opposite the waterfall there is an arched open entryway carved into the hill. Light pours from it like water from the falls. She enters it and what awaits is not the darkness of the empty universe but infinite halls and columns bathed in radiance. Is this not another cosmos, tucked away inside a bit of rock?
She wanders further and further from the fountain outside but the sound of running water grows louder and louder.
She knows where she is before she passes through the next doorway, before the light gives way to the great star-speckled backdrop of all space and the Cauldron falls before her in its awesome infinite luminance. Her heart catches in her throat. Her eyes well with tears. She is brimming with an alien emotion she cannot describe.
Did she feel this way the first time? Is this what the Cauldron’s home looked like before she made it her own?
She can’t remember. Of all the things she remembers, she cannot recall that.
Welcome, pilgrim.
A tiny light floats before her and blooms into the small figure of a woman. A Guardian. She is not familiar, but she smiles up at Galaxia.
“This place looked different before,” Galaxia says. “Is this Sagittarius Zero Star?”
Many paths lead to the Cauldron. Have you come to throw away your past?
She asks it and Galaxia is torn by hope and uncertainty.
“Will the Cauldron wash me clean?”
From this place your star may shine into a new future.
When she says it, it sounds beautiful. It sounds too beautiful to believe.
“I was reborn, but I remember my life before. I remember too much.”
The Guardian’s face becomes somber.
The Cauldron offers a future, but it does not destroy the past.
Galaxia lets her chin fall, a nod of acceptance or defeat. When she blinks, the tears linger on her eyelashes and slip down her cheeks. She turns her back.
Safe travels, pilgrim. May you find what you seek.
She does not really remember the planet; it was one among myriads she ravaged in quick succession during her ascension. But she remembers the crystals and follows their faint glow across the galaxy. She is not sure whether they will even remember her. Perhaps their rebirth was more complete than hers.
The planet has recovered. Indeed, there is no sign of her destruction at all. This pricks her pride and desolation follows fast. What was the use of all of it, of any of it?
They certainly remember her. The women she knew as Sailors Phi and Chi go slack-jawed and wide-eyed at the sight of her. They stagger back and look like they are bracing themselves for an attack, for punishment, for the force of her arrival the last time.
She chokes on shame and turns her back, muttering something like an excuse or an apology and fleeing that world as fast as she can.
Was she so cruel to them? Didn’t she give them power, a sight of the galaxy, visions far beyond what they would find here on their own miserable world?
She remembers them as her most loyal lieutenants. Apparently they do not remember her as their worthy leader.
The incident is enough to keep her a hermit for a long time following, but the pull returns. The next visit she plans with more care. She approaches the royal palace of the Tankei kingdom untransformed, unarmed, and yields without struggle to the guards who take her before the queen.
She would not remember this planet or its guardians if they hadn’t managed to escape her. She had followed them right to that little blue-green world. They had been so easily snuffed out in the end. She had dispatched every being in the galaxy so easily, except for—
“Sailor Galaxia,” Queen Kakyuu greets her with more grace than she deserves. Galaxia looks around at the palace built of deep red stone, the vast canyons outside its windows, and feels shame. She destroyed this place once before. How easy it would be to do it again. How easy, and how meaningless.
Kakyuu holds an audience with her away from the court, in a small tower where they are served tea and airy cakes sweet and spicy. Her three guardians stand like statues behind her. Their faces are colder; they are less forgiving than their queen. Galaxia finds their presence amusingly pointless. They failed to stop her once. Do they imagine this time would be different?
“I’m sorry,” Kakyuu offers, when she shares her story. “It would have been kinder if you hadn’t remembered.”
Her face is shaded by genuine emotion. It reminds Galaxia of that woman. She is not sure whether the emotion is repulsive or she is repulsed by her own lack of worthiness.
“Fate is not kind.”
“Could you find a gift in it? The chance to learn from the mistakes of the past?”
“I came in peace this time, didn’t I?” she asks. She smiles. It is not a nice smile. Kakyuu does not return it, and it sours and disappears.
“I thought I should be a hermit,” she continues. She has trouble looking the queen in the eyes, though the words are surprisingly easy. “But there was no meaning in it. Then I thought to help the people I hurt, but they were reborn and their worlds rebuilt.
“Sailor Moon helped them first.”
Kakyuu smiles, then, as warm as her namesake. Galaxia is taken aback.
“We can still feel it from here,” Kakyuu says, and holds out a hand as if to catch a falling star. “The warmth of her reign. Like an immense star at the edge of the galaxy bathing us all in its light. It was that feeling that brought you to her in the first place, wasn’t it?”
A shadowy hand reaches down Galaxia’s throat and squeezes her heart and tugs her vocal cords and threatens to turn her inside out. She chokes on rage and is swept with the urge to repeat history. In a single motion she could blow away this planet and this queen and her questions.
She swallows the urge and wallows in the shame of having it and the shame of being seen. She does remember feeling the glow of that silver light, so powerful, so gentle. She remembers the certainty that there was a rival worth besting. There was a crystal worth possessing.
“She was the last thing that stood between me and the galaxy. I suppose if I had faced her first, your planet would have met a different fate.”
Kakyuu looks down at her hands holding the cup.
“It is difficult to live in the shadow of that light,” she says quietly. Her smile is gone. “Sometimes I have felt—insignificant.”
Galaxia thinks of standing before the Cauldron and says nothing. They are all insignificant.
Is she?
“You were reborn; you are young,” Kakyuu continues. “Sailor Moon’s planet is ageless. Her power has given them life. But I am aging. Can I defend my kingdom? Am I needed?”
There are wrinkles around her eyes and the spots of age on her hands. She is not old, to Galaxia’s eyes. But older.
“Your Majesty.”
One of the guardians, hair black as the dark of space, has dropped to her knees beside her monarch.
“Of course you are needed. You are our light.”
“Am I, Seiya?” she asks, smiling a little, and the sailor looks at Galaxia with piercing eyes.
“Staring at a bright star will blind you.”
When they have finished tea and cakes and conversation they leave the little room. But the dark-haired sailor intercepts Galaxia with the same serious eyes and face. She is bold.
“I know how you feel,” she says.
This is so impertinent and laughable that Galaxia doesn’t react. She isn’t sure what reaction would be appropriate.
“About Sailor Moon,” she continues.
Laughable becomes risible. How dare she?
“If you hurt her, I will hunt you to the edges of the galaxy.”
Galaxia smiles.
“What do you think you could do to me? If you’re so devoted to Sailor Moon, why aren’t you at her side?”
“My place is here,” Seiya says, stone-faced. “My allegiance is with Queen Kakyuu.”
She adds the next part very quietly.
“No matter where my heart may lie.”
Galaxia leaves Kinmoku with the bitterness of the tea lingering in her mouth and bitterness of a different sort lingering in her soul.
The planet shines as bright blue as she remembers it. Its surface is interrupted with wisps of cloud and expanses of land, green and brown. Beyond it she can make out the small gray orb partially obscured behind its mother planet. That barren satellite that the people of the Earth call not a moon but the moon, as if it was the only one in the universe.
The only one that matters.
The guardians of this system are more alert than they were the last time. They recognize her, if their quickness to attack is any indication. She brushes away the force of their power and does not retaliate. She looks at them, one tall and blonde-haired and the other shorter with flowing waves of aquamarine, different in stature but united in determination. She does not remember them. The guardian of that tiny moon has eclipsed all other memory of this world.
“I wish to see Sailor Moon,” she says, a sword blade caught in her hand. She lets it cut a little just to feel the strangeness of the sting and see the red drip down her skin. “I do not mean her or your world harm.”
“Why the hell should we believe that?” the tall one snaps. She swings the sword again but Galaxia does not entertain being cut a second time.
“If I wished you harm you would no longer be standing,” she says.
She lets her power out. Not very much. Just a sliver. Just enough. That is harder, like unblocking a dam and trying to prevent all but a trickle. But her gift is not only destruction but its control. The two are blown back as if by a fearsome wind, not hurt, only grazed.
“Please,” Galaxia adds as an afterthought. She forgot to say it before. She is not used to asking.
The blue world glimmers. The sailors stare at each other and her, torn between their duty as sentinels and their knowledge that this is a fight they cannot win.
“The queen would want to see her,” one of them murmurs.
“She’s too soft.”
But to this softness of their queen, or the obstinacy of their visitor, they yield.
On the surface of Earth their star is setting and sending light golden and red onto the great crystalline spires of the palace. In her time of wandering Galaxia has seen nebulae bearing clusters of dust in colors far more glorious. She thinks of the Cauldron and even the palace on Kinmoku. This constrained place is not fit for Sailor Moon.
The guardians of this system line up before her with stern and resolute faces. Their king emerges clad in a mask and flowing lavender cloak. They are all, too, unfit for Sailor Moon.
And then the queen.
It is an odd sensation that arises in Galaxia. She has been unsettled for so long. She has been searching for so long. For all of this life she has been haunted by the woman who now stands before her and there is nothing diminutive about the reality. It slides perfectly onto the image in her mind. This is the woman of whom she has been dreaming. There is nothing left to look for.
She drops to her knees. She crosses an arm across her chest in a salute. Her Animamates did this for her a lifetime ago.
“Sailor Moon,” she murmurs.
“Galaxia!”
There are hands pulling her up and then tearful blue eyes looking at hers and arms thrown about her.
When the family that begat her in this life touched her their hands and bodies were ghostly. She did not register the caresses. Nobody since has dared to come close. But the woman embracing her now is warm and solid as the star casting its warmth over them.
“I thought you were dead,” Sailor Moon says. “I thought Chaos—”
“I was. The Cauldron offered me rebirth. Through your power.”
“I’m so glad.” Sailor Moon steps back. She holds her hands to her mouth as if to hide her smile. Her eyes are still brimming with those happy tears. Galaxia doesn’t understand.
“Why are you glad? I sought to destroy you. I took all of them from you.”
She looks around at the others. None of them wear expressions to match their queen’s.
“You saved all of them,” Sailor Moon counters. “You reminded me to believe in the future. You reminded me it’s worth fighting for.”
That was you, Galaxia wants to say. That was only you.
But the words are stuck in her throat.
Sailor Moon invites her into the palace with an enthusiasm that belies her regal bearing and appearance. She bids Galaxia join their evening meal, which she does. The others at the table do not share their queen’s enthusiasm but Galaxia’s eyes are only for her and her smile and the way she has lit up. She looks how Galaxia feels, like someone seeing morning after a night that seemed unending. Can she really be so glad to see her? Is this not still part of the dream?
The king and queen ask about Galaxia’s travels and about her life, about news from across the galaxy. She relates her tale without thinking about it; nothing has mattered in the space between her death at the Cauldron and her return to this planet. They tell their own tales of the kingdom, recently established, of a child born, of peace. Slowly the stony faces of the other guardians lighten. Some of them smile.
Galaxia sits at their table and is caught between two certainties:
she does not belong there
she has never belonged anywhere else
The moon has orbited high above and shrouds the glistening city in silver when the queen retires. She bids Galaxia come to her room. The invitation would be forward if it were anyone else. From Sailor Moon it sounds as natural as inviting a friend she has known all her life.
The king is with their daughter; the two of them are alone. The queen sits by the window. Galaxia stands behind her. They look out toward the horizon.
“You called me Sailor Moon before,” the queen finally says. “But I’m not.”
Galaxia says nothing.
“I can’t transform. I haven’t—in years.”
“Your daughter,” Galaxia says.
“Yes. Ever since I had her. The power passed to her. Now I’m not Sailor Moon. I’m just—me.”
Her shoulders slump. She looks small. She says it like there is anything just about her.
“I can’t fight you,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought that was why you came. Because you wanted to face me again.” She sounds tired.
“No,” Galaxia says. She feels repulsed that this is what was expected of her. But was it wrong? Would she not gladly face Sailor Moon in combat again and put to the test once more this power that she has suppressed all this life? Would she stand toe to toe with the galaxy’s brightest star without Chaos behind her and see how her strength compares?
There would be no point. She knows the outcome. She cannot defeat this woman. She does not really want to try. She came here for something different. She knows—she wants—
“I’m sorry,” it is Galaxia’s turn to say. “What is your—other name?”
It feels odd to ask. Her power may have passed on but she remains Sailor Moon. Their Sailor Crystals are the only part of them that matters. What use are the names bestowed by those who begat them? The specters of her family in this life had no inkling of her in the past. They did not know her at all.
Sailor Moon tilts her head. Her eyes are wide and blue. The moon reflects in them.
“Serenity,” she says. But her face doesn’t clear and her mouth moves like she isn’t settled with the word. Then she speaks again, more quietly. “Usagi.”
“Usagi,” Galaxia repeats, three syllables resonating on her tongue.
I know how you feel about Sailor Moon, the soldier on Kinmoku told her. How foolish. Nobody else could know this feeling. The light burning through her has only one equal and she is its cause and she is there in the room.
Galaxia stretches out her hand. Her fingers alight on the shoulder of this woman named Usagi. The Sapphire Crystal pulses with light. And the Silver Crystal responds, at once, as though it was slumbering in wait for her. The glow is warm and beautiful and she can see on Usagi’s face the wonder as the feeling spreads through her, as her wings stretch shining and translucent into the air behind her.
“How did you do that?” she gasps. She is the strongest soldier in the galaxy but she looks young. She is so innocent, Galaxia thinks, of the powers their crystals possess, of their strengths and flaws and the things that the guardians of this system have been lucky enough not to learn. Elsewhere where the war is unceasing soldiers learn or die or learn and die anyway.
“Let me be your wings,” Galaxia says. “I would show you—the places I’ve been.”
All the stars are reflected in Usagi’s eyes. The moment stretches and swells and it is almost painful to look at her. But then she looks away out the window at her city and her world.
“I can’t. They need me.”
“How many years since you ascended the throne?”
She wavers. “A lot.”
“Your system is at peace.”
“But...”
She needs and deserves what Galaxia is proposing; Galaxia believes that. But she is not so foolish that she believes her motives for pushing are so pure. She was selfish in her past life and she is selfish now.
“You will be able to feel it if you are needed here. After all you have done, you deserve a respite. Please. Let me repay you.”
Maybe it is her old foe all but begging that convinces the queen. Her eyes are wide and her face comes alight with anticipation.
“We’ll be quick?”
Galaxia nods and smiles and knows that if she has her way they will never come back.
In the velvet black they stop on the pocked expanse of an asteroid smaller than Usagi’s room in the palace. A massive planet hangs above them, colored in magnificent swirling stripes of blue and orange. This system’s star shines golden beyond it.
“That’s Jupiter,” Usagi tells her. Galaxia nods as though this means anything to her. The blue planet is too distant to be more than a tiny speck of light; its moon is lost in the black. She wonders that such a small satellite in such a remote arm of the galaxy should have produced the woman that stands before her, radiant enough to shine across all that distance.
Usagi turns to look at the other asteroids.
“They have names,” she says. “A lot of them do. But I don’t even know which one is Ceres or Vesta or Pallas or Juno.”
“It bothers you, not to know their names?”
“I should know. They’re Chibiusa’s—they’re important allies. But I’m not good at remembering names like that. I was always really bad at school.”
She has turned away. Her face is lifted toward the great swirling surface of Jupiter. But Galaxia hears in her voice when she begins crying.
“You know, I’m pretty stupid. I always knew that. But when I learned about the future, and I learned I would become queen, I thought I would feel different. I thought it would make sense. But I’m still just Usagi. I haven’t changed at all. The only thing that changed is I can’t even use my power anymore. Protecting the people around me was the only thing I could do and now I can’t do that.”
She is sobbing. Her cheeks are wet. Galaxia moves toward her and lifts a tentative hand. Usagi does not shrug away from a touch on her shoulder. She folds into the embrace when Galaxia brings her arms around her.
Usagi’s face is damp against her. It is an awkward position. Galaxia feels she is cradling a fragile bit of a star. She is reminded of a drop of tailed glass, shaped like a comet, the head all but indestructible until the tail is damaged. Something at once frail and steely.
“You’ve carried this alone?” she murmurs.
“I can’t tell anyone else. I need to be strong for them. I’m supposed to be queen.”
“Usagi,” Galaxia said. Those blue eyes, all the more brilliant for the tears in them, blink up at her. “Your Sailors. Your friends. Would it not hurt them more to know you were suffering alone?”
“They’ve all seen me cry. I don’t do anything else. I was supposed to be better. I was supposed to mature. Now I just try not to cry in front of them.”
Usagi pulls back from her and wipes her eyes and her face as though this will stem the tide of tears and snot. She shakes her head and tries to smile.
“I’m not like you. You’re so strong.”
This takes Galaxia aback. She is not the strong one. She lost their contest. It was hardly even a contest at all. Perhaps her surprise is obvious; Usagi continues.
“You know what you want and you go for it. You’ve been across the galaxy and seen so many things. I’ve barely seen the Solar System. I just sit in the palace while everyone else protects me. I’m useless.”
“That is enough.”
The firmness of her tone seems to startle Usagi enough that the tears stop.
“If you would call yourself useless after fighting me, besting me, haunting me, what am I?” Galaxia asks, and raises her chin. She can muster all the imperial authority she commanded when she was the Golden Queen, even if it is in the service of offering forth the gentle unprotected secrets of her soul. It feels like offering Usagi a knife pointed at her own heart, and it is terrifying insofar as the vulnerability is terrifying. But Usagi will not seize the hilt and drive it home. She knows that as surely as she has ever known anything.
Galaxia knows what she wants and she has come for it.
“We have further to go,” she tells Usagi, as Jupiter’s storms rage on above them. “Tears don’t suit you, Sailor Moon.”
They leave that tiny remote system at the edge of the galaxy behind, far behind, until its star has receded in size and brilliance and is barely discernible against the black velvet of the night. They go inward toward the rich spiraling center of the Milky Way until the dark recedes and the light of worlds spills around them and Usagi’s face lights up with the same awed expression she wore a lifetime ago at the Cauldron. Galaxia sees her smile and would take it and hold it, preserved forever, as she stole all those Sailor Crystals. She sees her smile and aches because it is not a thing that can be stolen.
At Kinmoku, again, Usagi embraces the queen and her soldiers and they all have tears in their eyes. Galaxia stands apart and watches. She was the cause for these souls meeting the first time, and she is the cause for their reunion, but it has nothing to do with her.
But the black-haired soldier catches her eye and something about the look on her face makes Galaxia smile in the knowledge that she is holding something, tender and delicate, that others also want.
“I want to see Mau,” Usagi urges, stars in her eyes and the weight of the world lifted from her back. “Coronis. Lethe and Mnemosyne!”
Her smile dims at the look on Galaxia’s face. She would not insist on going, Galaxia knows, if told about Phi and Chi and her shame at returning to these places. But her shame is nothing before that smile, so she indulges her.
Galaxia hovers, a shadow at the edge of Sailor Moon’s light. Sailor Coronis greets them with all the respect and kindness one of them deserves. On Mau they sit on a glass beach and watch distant lights streak across a purple sky. Usagi’s eyes are wide and often teary. She drinks down wonder and comes away thirstier.
Lethe and Mnemosyne, sentinels alone with each other in another distant arm of the galaxy, seem happy for the company. Mnemosyne embraces Usagi like a long-lost sister. Lethe’s eyes linger on Galaxia, something cold and accusatory in them.
Galaxia looks away.
It is quiet here, away from planets and stars and their sentinels. They hover inside the curtains of a nebula. From a distance its colors are blown wide in clouds more radiant than anything else in the universe. Here inside it motes of dust float past on their way inward, on that long journey toward the birth of a star.
Usagi’s eyes are filled with wonder. She looks so young again, younger than she did on her planet with the weight of all the world on her shoulders.
“Galaxia,” she begins, and her eyes turn from the spectacle to the woman whose hands she is holding. “Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted you to see it. All of it.”
“Why?”
She asks it and her expression is innocent but this time she won’t let the question go so easily. Reasons and excuses flash through Galaxia’s mind, numerous and inconsequential as the motes of dust.
“I wanted to see it with you.”
“Why?” Usagi asks again, her voice quieter now.
She knows she must tell the truth but it is a leaden weight on her tongue. She will say it and it will be reprehensible and this woman who has shown her compassion beyond imagining will look at her with the same expression as the others.
“In my last life I wanted to destroy you. In this one I only wanted you.”
“Galaxia,” Usagi breathes. Her fingers are hot on Galaxia’s cheek, around the back of her neck. Her lips burn soft and sweet when she kisses her.
The dust spirals inward. Somewhere infinitely far in the future hydrogen and helium and lithium burn hotter and hotter and a star begins to shine. Galaxia is crying. Usagi is kissing her. She was forged for this.
“I have to go home.”
The star has burned through its fuel. In its death throes it births cobalt and gold, lead and uranium. It does not have long now to live. A galaxy away it still looks young. It still looks bright. It will take a very long time for the visual evidence of its death to travel.
It is very dark. They stand out at the edge, further than Galaxia even ventured alone. The stars are few and far between. Even the spectral center of the galaxy is but a faint band against the black, infinitely far away. Galaxia wanted it further. She wanted to leave it behind. They could go to the next, and the next, and run until there was nowhere left to see.
Usagi, glowing jewel in the night, looks apologetically at her. The weight has settled back onto the queen’s shoulders; Galaxia can see it in how she stands. How she holds herself. She said she was not worthy of being queen but she wears the weight of it with such dignity.
“You don’t,” Galaxia says.
“I do.”
Usagi takes her hands and cradles them between her own. She smiles. But it isn’t the happy, carefree smile Galaxia has cherished. It is resigned.
“Everyone is waiting for me. They need me.”
Galaxia says nothing.
“I need them.”
It feels like an insult, absurdly, that she should need anyone else, though Galaxia knows how egotistical it is to see it as such. She is a shooting star come into Usagi’s life with all its sudden fire and dazzle; now her streak has faded from the atmosphere, and the world left behind is the one that matters.
“You said we would be quick,” Usagi says, and her smile grows more impish. It hurts. Galaxia will never see that smile again and she will be haunted by it every day of every lifetime.
“I don’t want to let you go,” she is desperate enough to admit.
Usagi squeezes her fingers. Galaxia wants to kiss her, hold her, learn her again as they have known each other across systems and star-rises and heartbeats. She is going to go back to that pathetic man and her pathetic soldiers and the child whose existence has stolen her power, and Galaxia is going to let her. There is nothing else she can do. She thinks she would do anything Usagi asked of her, even this, this thing that hurts more than anything.
She just wanted Usagi to ask something else. A fantasy. A fleeting dream.
Take me away—
Love me—
“You can always visit,” Usagi says brightly. “And we can go on another trip in a century or two.”
The casualness of it drives the knife home.
And what am I to do? she doesn’t ask. There is no answer. This woman is affliction and cure and Galaxia is paying the price for everything she did in her past life, and she will keep paying. She sees the future now and it looks only like the past.
She takes Usagi’s hand in hers and their wings spread huge and luminous and they fly from this place at the edge of their lives back toward the place one of them can call home.
Usagi’s room at the top of its crystalline spire is the same as they left it. Her chair is turned out at the vanity in just the same way and her sheer wrap is draped over the back of it. There is no dust. That, at least, is perhaps to be expected; her absence would not prevent the room from being cleaned. But in sum the impression is of a place where no time at all has passed. Galaxia is not sure how long it has been. Their absence and the years and lifetimes before it blur into nonexistence. The two of them have come back and the world is the same and the interlude means nothing. Usagi will go on with her life and this blip will eventually be smoothed down into barely a bump by the slow erosion of time.
“Galaxia,” Usagi says, as though intercepting her thoughts. She holds out her hands to clasp Galaxia’s. Her touch is warm but Galaxia cannot feel the warmth any longer. She does not feel much at all.
“I hope you find home to your liking,” she says. There is venom in it and she does not regret it. She is a dying star throwing off radioactive elements.
“Thank you.” The barb slides off of Usagi as everything else does. She smiles, that perfect smile, and there are tears in her eyes again. Galaxia does not know what the tears are for, if this is what she wanted. “For everything.”
“I was repaying a debt. I don’t need thanks.”
It is not repayable. Not in this life; not in the next.
“You can stay here,” Usagi says. “Just for a little while?”
Somewhere nearby a child is crying. Soon the people will come find their queen and their faces will offer all their joy at seeing her again and all their contempt at seeing Galaxia again.
She turns away.
“This is no place for me.”
Usagi catches her hand. The smile is gone. Her face is earnest.
“You reminded me that there was a future. You need to believe in that too.”
Galaxia was wrong; she can still feel the impact of those words.
Sailor Moon is wrong. She has no future. Her path ended a long time ago. All the rest has been theater, a play of remorse. But remorse cannot rebuild worlds. In her last life she failed as a destroyer. In this one she has failed at everything else.
Alone she flies past the places they flew together. If Chaos is whispering to her even now, she cannot hear. She hears and follows only the sound of running water. She will drown her heart.
Will you give yourself to the Cauldron and seek a new destiny?
The words ring in her ears with an irresistible promise that she does not believe, a hope she does not dare to nurture. It is not a question. It is the only thing to do.
Still she is certain that the shining thread of that woman will follow her to whatever new life she finds.
She closes her eyes and thinks of that smile and the Sapphire Crystal burns with all the brilliance of a supernova forging new elements in its dying fury.
