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With night comes fear.
She's always been afraid to sleep. She sits before the fire and prays, begging any god that might happen to be listening to let her sleep through the night unharmed.
She dies in the dreams. Over and over, the same way. She rises and she falls, she must defend the princess - her honor. Everything is tied up in that moment, and she cannot stand it.
The pressure is too much.
She can't take it, just like Mars couldn't take it then. They're two halves of the same coin, and Rei hates it. She hates that Mars is there, a part of her that forces her forward - always pressing against her consciousness.
She's only just a girl.
Only she's controlling the fire with her breathing. Her hands press together as she concentrates. At each inhale the flames go down, but at each exhale they surge forward. This is a sacred fire; its flame will never go out. It has been close to seventy years since this fire went out.
In the nightmares, there is no fire. There is only blood, there is only death. She's only fourteen, she shouldn't have to deal with this.
The youth is going to save us, her grandfather will joke.
She's not the youth for this job.
Her hands clench together and she sees Venus' face in her mind, lifeless again. "No," she wails, hands flying from where they were before her to press into her head. "No no no..." Venus is the strongest of them all. Rei can see hear dead so easily in her mind's eye. It seems so easy to slay Venus, so completely and utterly effortless. Every single time.
It cuts her, deep within. She's seen Ami dead, Makato dead. Usagi dead.
Nothing is like Venus dead.
Nothing at all.
The feeling of utter powerlessness presses in around her and she feels like she's drowning over and over again.
The fire roars to life before her and she lowers her hands. They’re shaking and she can't quite stop them.
She won't sleep tonight.
It's so easy to rise to unsteady feet and pick up her phone and leave the fire room. Reis' done this a million times, calling Venus for help, calling for something she can never quite put her finger on.
It could be that Venus is the only one who admits to remembering the past life. It could be that she just wants to make sure Venus is okay.
"Where's the youma?" Venus asks as soon as she picks up. Her voice sounds thick with sleep and Rei glances at the clock on the wall in the shrine's kitchen to realize that it's close to two in the morning. She runs a tired hand through her hair.
"There isn't one," Rei says shortly. Their conversations are always like this, all implication and thinly veiled insults. Rei is okay with this "Do you dream about being a senshi?"
Venus is silent, almost contemplative for a moment, before she hums quietly and there's the tell-tale sound of her body shifting in her bed. "I dream about a lot of things, Mars," she says at length. She exhales quietly and Rei wants to turn into that sound. Just to hear Venus breathing, to hear her voice is enough to quell her fears. "To say that I dream about being a senshi is a complicated question, however."
"Why is that?" Rei asks, even before she takes the time to wonder if it's because Venus is goading her, trying to get her to remember a past that Rei desperately cannot remember. She won't let it happen, because she doesn't want to know. To know means that she has to admit that she has this past and she's already come to hate it. She doesn't want to know. "Why can't you just be honest?"
"Because, Reiko, if I were to say what I wanted to say..." Venus' smile, small and bewitching, is evident with every word. Rei hates that smile, hates that she cannot understand what it means and why it makes her so angry. "You would never understand what I am trying to say."
It's Rei's turn to exhale angrily, and she stands up abruptly and stares out the window of her bedroom with a scowl on her face. She cannot see the stars, only the moon, hanging low in the sky. "Can you see the moon?" she asks.
Maybe it's an abrupt change of subject, but it's a question worth asking.
"Its image is burned into my mind, Reiko," Venus replies. "I can see it as clearly as I can remember it, a smoldering ruin, a beautiful civilization. I forget other things - but never the moon."
"Why does it have to rule our lives?" Rei asks, because she hates it so. Hates the memory of the moon, hates that it's there, hates that she closes her eyes and sees that kingdom in ruin. She's seen them all dead, dead over and over again. "Why can't I get it out of my head?"
Venus sighs and has no answers, because she never does. She breathes into the phone for as long as Rei dares to let the silence stretch out. She needs Venus; she needs her here, needs for things to make sense. She hates that they don't and that she cannot ask Venus for these things. Venus would come, and that’s what Rei’s afraid of most of all.
"How can I stop them?" Rei asks.
"Stop fighting the past," Venus replies.
And that is something that Rei cannot do. She cannot forget the past no matter how desperately she wants to. It's the sort of a place where she would go to wallow, if she had no hope and no future. She doesn't know why someone as brilliant and as promising as Venus would ever spend her life trapped in memories of place that never was.
When she closes her phone after a terse goodnight, Rei realizes that maybe there's a reason for Aino Minako, pop idol and international star, to be so attached to a past she's never lived.
Control, after all, is everything.
Rei settles back down in front of the fire and inhales slowly and calmly. She's drawing the fire's power once more - and it's never struck her as strange that she can do this. The memories of Mars still somehow rule her, despite her rejection of them. She hates it, hates the dreams, and hates Venus for having no answers to the multitude of questions she can’t quite bring herself to ask.
She has to be a senshi because it's the right thing to do.
Except that she wishes it wasn't.
The past should be left dead. Nothing good ever comes out of dwelling there.