A/N: Tremendous thank you to Jade and to all you patient readers. I am very sorry for the long wait.

Disclaimer: I do not own Sailor Moon or the quotation below from Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History.

Date: 9.11.11

Warnings: Language.

Summary: "Clearly, there's something you expected me to know, and I don't know it. What's going on?" The more things change, the more they stay the same for Moon and Mask in this final installment to Subject to Change.

C

The way back is lost, the one obsession.

The worst is over.

The worst is yet to come.

– Carolyn Forche, "The Testimony of Light"

C

Subject to Change

Season 3

Chapter One: Mikai

C

The little girl was blonde. It was weird. Her mom–at least Mikai assumed it was her mom from the way the little girl was half hiding her face in the woman's skirt as she peered up at him–was dark-haired, and so was the boy in the Juuban Junior High uniform who had come in with them. Maybe she was adopted?

The boy cleared his throat.

Mikai lifted his eyes from the girl to him, then to the mother. He felt a little sheepish, especially when he saw the slightly uneasy expression on the woman's face. He had probably made her think he was some sort of pedophile, staring at her kid like that. Or maybe she was just put off by all his piercings. Mothers in particular tended to be, as though their children's minds would be corrupted just by seeing him in all his blue-haired, metal-studded glory.

"Sorry," he said, offering his most charming smile–the one that didn't show his tongue ring. "You're the white Honda, right?" He read the name off the paperwork he had on the counter in front of him. "Iwara?"

"Yes." The woman nodded, pulling out her checkbook, then glanced toward the mismatched group of chairs and magazine-strewn coffee table a few feet away. "Buji, could you take Mina over there…?"

"Sure." With one last semi-suspicious glance at Mikai, the boy took the little girl's hand. "C'mon, Mi-chan, let's sit over here while Mom finishes up, okay? I have some paper in my backpack, d'you wanna draw?"

"You can change the channel on that if you want," Mikai said, nodding at the TV in the corner. It was currently set to the news, showing an update on the cleaning efforts at the nuclear plant that had been damaged during the earthquake last month. He watched the grim-faced scientist being interviewed for a second, then turned his attention back to the woman. "Sorry, Iwara-san. Uh…okay, it looks like the problem is just your rear wheel bearings."

"Is that serious?" the woman asked anxiously. She was clutching her purse tightly. "That noise the wheels were making–"

Mikai smiled reassuringly. "Let's just say it's a good thing you brought them in to get fixed. Wheel bearings can mess up your brakes and steering you don't get 'em checked in time."

She nodded, wide-eyed, and he pulled out several forms and a pen for her, setting them in front of her and explaining the repairs the car would need and how long it would take. It was a minor repair, but the woman was listening intently, nodding seriously as he explained it, like he was describing some risky full-body operation of one of her children. He recognized the behavior, just as he had recognized the tight clutching of her purse: she was an anxious single-mother type. The fact that she had only just now been able to bring her car in for repairs when he was fairly certain the damage must have been caused during the tsunami–water had probably gotten in the bearings and contaminated the grease in the seals–probably meant that she'd been saving up a while.

"Hey, Nobu," he called into the back room, "lemme see the receipt for order three-six-five before you print it out, all right?"

Nobu poked his head out the door. "It's ready when you are, boss. I'm about to leave. Mei already locked up in back."

"Great, thanks." Mikai smiled again at Iwara-san, who had just finished the last form. "I'll be right back." He ducked into the back room, scanning the invoice form, scrolling down to the total. He clicked on it and retyped it so that it was half of the original amount.

Nobu laughed under his breath. "Another one, boss?" Peeling off his coveralls, he craned his neck to peer out at the counter. "At least this one's pretty."

Mikai just winked and pressed the print button as Nobu left through the back door, snickering.

Plucking the invoice from the printer, he slid it onto the counter in front of the woman – who, he had to agree with Nobu, wasn't bad-looking at all. She didn't have quite that run-down look a lot of single moms (his own included) had, and he thought a lot of that was probably thanks to her son, who was now making balloon cheeks and faces at his sister where they sat in the corner, making her giggle and clap pudgy hands. The sight gave him both a smile and an ache. His gaze went again to the TV, which hadn't been changed from the nuclear plant coverage. Darien hadn't called or even texted from America to see if Mikai had made it okay through the quake. Not that the quake had really affected them too badly in their area, and Darien would have known that from seeing the coverage, but still…

"Sir? Is that everything?" The woman was holding out the check she had just torn from her checkbook.

Mikai took it. "Yep! We'll call you when the repairs are done."

"Okay. Thank you." Looking relieved, she quickly backed away from the counter, going to her kids. "All right, let's go, you two–"

She broke off as the ground beneath them shook.

Dismay threw Mikai's insides against his ribcage. Not again. He automatically bent his knees to brace himself, and just as automatically stumbled his way around the counter to where the lady and kids were.

"Come on, come on!" he shouted over the sound of the hydraulic lifts groaning and metal crashing outside the office. The boy had already pushed his sister under the coffee table and was now covering his mom as she crawled under too. Mikai put a hand on the boy's head and shoved him under it as well, then squeezed in himself. The boy's elbow was digging into his collarbone, and someone's shoe was digging under his ribcage; he wondered if they could feel his heart thundering in his chest.

The TV crashed onto the floor behind them. Mikai winced – he had just bought it to replace the one that fell last month–and then winced again, realizing he could feel pain stinging along the hand he had stretched over the kids' heads. Debris from the TV must have cut him or something.

But that was the worst of it. The ground stopped moving beneath them, and Mikai realized that the quake probably hadn't even lasted thirty seconds. He carefully eased free of the elbow and the shoe and wriggled out from under the table, then helped the others out.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" he said reassuringly, for Iwara was holding the blonde girl even more tightly than she had held her purse, and the little girl's face was drained of color. Her eyes were wide as she clutched the back of her brother's shirt. "Probably not even a four."

"You need to secure your furniture better, mister," said the boy, looking at the toppled television set and then out the window at the garage, where various tools had fallen and lay scattered on the cement floor.

"Bujiro," scolded Iwara, but there was no fire in her voice. She got carefully to her feet, still holding the four-year-old. She smoothed back her hair unconsciously, then did the same to the boy. She looked then at Mikai, and her eyes widened. "You're hurt!"

Mikai's brows rose. He glanced down at himself. His arm was injured, a shallow but surprisingly bloody laceration extending from just above his wrist to just below his elbow. He frowned and crossed around the counter again, looking for a clean cloth amidst the mess of fallen papers.

"You probably shouldn't go outside just yet," he said as he searched. "There might be aftershocks." He found a box of tissues and grabbed a couple, pressing them against the cut. "Lemme get the emergency radio–"

"Your head," said a little voice, and Mikai looked up from rummaging for the broadband radio to see the blonde child pointing at him. He lifted a hand to his face…and touched wetness. He took his hand away and saw blood on his fingertips.

"There's a cut. On your forehead." Iwara pointed gingerly and took a step closer, grabbing a handful of tissue to press against the skin above his eye. The girl, carried in her other arm, blinked seriously at him.

"Mommy, you can use my bow." She reached up to untie the big red bow in her bright hair. Iwara put her down, and the girl handed her the long strip of red fabric, looking at her, then Mikai, solemnly. "You should tie it around to stop the bleeding. Right, nii-san?"

Her brother had found the radio Mikai had been looking for and was now tuning it. "Right," he said distractedly.

"I can do it," Mikai said as Iwara pulled the tissues from his head, peered at the wound, and lifted the bow to tie it around his head. She tsked, ignoring his attempts to take it, and wound it gently around his scalp. For the second time, Mikai felt a fleeting ache. He felt like he was being mothered, and it felt…nice.

Iwara finished knotting the makeshift bandage around his head and stepped back. The little girl craned her neck back to examine her mother's work and said solemnly, "You look like a ninja."

"Sweet." Mikai cracked a grin. Then there was a flash of white in his vision, and he turned to see, of all things, a cat streaking across the room and into the little girl's legs.

"Kitty!" she shrieked happily, picking it up. Or trying to–it was scrambling to get up into her arms, too, but neither of them was quite managing the feat; its hind legs still scratched at the floor as she hugged its upper half.

Mikai did a double-take at the cat, then the door. "How did it – ?"

Iwara looked equally bemused. "We're never sure how he does it. He always manages to find Mina no matter where we are."

"Even the time we flew to Osaka," muttered the brother, and then there was a squawk of static from the radio he was fiddling with.

"–subway is running again," the voice coming out of it said. "Seismologists do not expect any further activity. But authorities warn citizens to stay alert and have emergency supplies prepared in case…"

"So we can go home?" The boy looked appealingly at his mom.

Iwara bit her lip. "I think so." She looked at Mikai. "Do you want us to walk you to the hospital? Is there anyone you can call?"

Mikai felt that pang again, but grinned and gestured at his forehead. "What, the hospital? For this? This is nothing. I'll just head home and disinfect it."

Iwara bit her lip again. "It's a head injury, I really don't think you should be walking alone…"

Mikai was touched. "I appreciate the concern, Iwara-san, but I'm a grown man. I'll be fine. Really. I only live a few blocks away."

Iwara was weakening, he could tell. But then Mina crossed dimpled arms and said, "We can walk him home, Mommy."

Mikai swallowed a snort at her authoritative tone, and the boy rolled his eyes, but Iwara looked decided. "We will walk you home. Just in case you start feeling woozy during the walk and need us to call an ambulance."

So that was how Mikai found himself being walked home by a four-year-old, a twelve-year-old, their mother, and their cat. It was a good thing the streets were as good as deserted thanks to the earthquakes; he couldn't imagine what someone passing by would think if they saw them all walking together. Possibly they would think the tall, bleeding man with the earrings was somehow holding the little family hostage.

"You really didn't have to do this," he said one last time as he climbed up his front steps, taking out his keys. "But thank you." As he fit his key into the lock, he tried to remember just how messy his living room was. Did he have old beer cans or any of his boxers lying out? He hadn't done dishes in a while…

But it didn't really matter; his adoptive mother had drilled manners into him too fiercely for him not to offer. "Would you like to come in? I could offer you some soda, juice…?" Maybe? He wasn't sure if he had any juice. Four-year-olds could drink Mountain Dew, right?

"Oh, no, we couldn't impose." Iwara stepped backward, down the steps, Mina clutching her hand. "Just as long as you're sure you're all right…?"

For a minute, it occurred to Mikai to say that he wasn't. That no, he was really feeling kind of unsteady, and maybe he shouldn't be left alone, so maybe they could come in and just have dinner with him, maybe watch some TV or play a board game? Then propriety caught up and smothered the loneliness he hadn't realized he felt until just now, and he heard himself say, "I am. Thanks again for walking me."

"Thank you for…" Here Iwara paused, looking a little unsure of what to say.

"Shoving us under the table," Buji finished with a quirk of his lips.

Mikai grinned. "Any time." There was a weight at his leg then, suddenly, and he looked down to see the little girl hugging his knee.

"Thanks, mister," she said simply, then, dragging her cat by the tail–only now, as it peered up at Mikai, did he notice that it had the funkiest, ugliest bald spot he'd ever seen nestled between its creepy blue eyes–retreated back to her mother's leg.

Then they left. And as he made his way into his dark living room, Mikai, despite himself, couldn't help but wish that he'd taken the creepy route after all and asked them to stay.

C

Two o'clock that morning found him in a club in Roppongi, nursing his third bottle of lukewarm jizake. The band–a group of wannabe college kids that hadn't sounded that great to begin with–had ended their set and were slumming in the crowd. The DJ who had taken over sucked. Plus the social pickings were slim. The only people who went out the night of an earthquake were people just desperate not to be alone (he wasn't too proud to realize that he was one of these) or the ones who were too out of it, either from drinks or drugs or sheer ignorance, to have noticed that there had been an earthquake that evening.

Even with so few people as there were, though, there were enough to create a press and crush on the dance floor, to squeeze you up against other people and leave you damp with each others' sweat. Mikai found himself thus pressed up against a girl who was trying to tangle her tongue ring with his. She was drunk, he could taste it, or maybe that was the alcohol on his own tongue he was tasting. Maybe it was that sour taste, or the painful tug of the ring in his tongue, or even the sudden memory of the little girl with her bright hair and big red bow, that suddenly had him blinking, looking blearily around the crowded club. What the hell was he doing?

He took his hands out from under the girl's shirt, untangled his tongue ring from hers, and left. The trip home was a little blurry; as he unlocked his door there was a nastiness to his mouth that made his think he might have blown chunks once or twice along the way. He stumbled inside and to his bathroom. Off came the jacket, the wife-beater, the oil- and sweat-stiffened jeans. By then the shower water was billowing steam, and he got in and scrubbed away the gel, the grime, the smell of smoke and sweat and sex, the puke from his tongue and teeth.

By the time he was done, his head was drooping against the tile. He managed to turn off the water and wrap a towel around his waist. He walked out into the living room, trying to remember if his flannel pajama pants were clean, and slipped in a puddle of freezing water.

Bam! He slammed to the floor on his bare butt. His teeth rattled in his jaw, his vision shook, and his first thought was that somehow he'd burst a pipe using so much water in his shower and it had leaked into his apartment.

Then he blinked and saw a gigantic block of ice sitting in the middle of his living room.

With a girl frozen inside it.

It was like one of those souvenirs you could buy at science museums, the kind with insects trapped inside cubes of resin or glass. Except there wasn't an insect inside it, there was a girl. A life-sized, dark-haired girl in a skimpy, kind of kinky outfit, whose face was frozen in a mask of terror.

"Holy shit." Mikai scrambled backward on the floor. He suddenly felt wide awake and alert. But he was dreaming. He had to be dreaming. There was no other explanation for a frozen girl in his living room.

He relaxed a little with this realization. He was dreaming but aware that he was dreaming; that meant this was a lucid dream, and he knew how to break out of those. He just had to stare fixedly at one thing in the dream, breaking the rapid eye movement that accompanies dreaming, and he would wake up. He narrowed his eyes, focusing on the girl's face. It wasn't the most pleasant thing he could have chosen, considering how terrified she looked, but he felt too guilty looking at any other part of her body, barely covered as it was by that Victoria's Secret version of a school fuku.

Her eyes scrunched shut, and she was very pale, almost like a ghost inside the ice. Really, why would he have dreamed of such a girl; she didn't look like anyone he'd ever seen before…

He shook his head and refocused his efforts on the task at hand. But minutes dragged by in a very un-dream-like state, and he was becoming slowly, horribly aware of the fact that this really didn't seem to be a dream.

Then the girl's eyes opened.

"Holy shit. Holy shit!" Mikai scrabbled to his feet. Racing across the room, he grabbed the first heavy thing he could find – an old tire iron he had put near the front door to take to the shop.

He smashed it into the ice. Flurries of ice bits spattered onto him, cold against his bare chest. The impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across the ice so that he couldn't see the girl's face anymore, and it made fresh panic surge through.

"C'mon, sweetheart," he mumbled fast under his breath as he swung the iron again. "Stay with me–"

The next blow freed her; he could tell from the strangled gasps and watery coughs and the icy water that splashed onto him. He dug his fingers into the pieces of ice still caked around her face, scrabbling them hastily away. He had managed to make a big hole right in front of her face and neck, though ice still encased the back of her head. Her eyes were closed again now, her lips and eyelids blue with cold, and fresh panic leapt inside him.

"No, c'mon, come on–!" There was no breath coming from her mouth or nose. He began to pound at the rest of the ice around her, hammering it until she slumped forward out of it onto his shoulder, wet and colder than anything he'd ever felt before. Two more mighty swings cracked away the ice around her legs, and he rolled her onto the ground, shoving his cupped fists under her rib cage.

Water burst from her mouth. Bubbled out of her as though she was a fountain, and he shoved her, more roughly than he had intended, onto her side so that she could splutter it out. He rubbed hard, brisk circles on her back as it came out – and out and out and out. He couldn't believe such a tiny girl could have so much water in her. She was coughing and crying and vomiting up more water, choking on it as she tried to breathe around the water coming out of her mouth. He pulled her upright and realized she was gripping his arm tightly, her nails digging into his skin. Somehow he didn't think she was frightened, though. Actually, he got the strangest sense she was trying to tell him something.

Whatever it was, she didn't manage to get it out, for as the last of the water finally dribbled out of her, her strength seemed to leave her, too, and she slumped forward. Mikai caught her, his movement jarring, but not dislodging, the grip she had on his arm. Even unconsciousness hadn't slackened it.

Her short, unsteady breaths were cold against his neck. Goosebumps covered his body where her frigid skin touched his. Worse than her cold breath or skin, though, was that despite her coldness she wasn't shivering. Her body was in such shock that her metabolic center wasn't responding properly to generate heat. Automatically he began to chafe her wrists, trying to warm the blood beneath the thin skin, and trying to think of what to do.

The obvious solution was to call emergency services. But he had no idea how he would explain the presence of an unconscious teenage girl in his house, much less one dressed the way she was. Especially because his blood alcohol level wasn't exactly low at the moment…

As he thought this, the girl's outfit faded – literally faded – into something less jail-baitish. A dry sweater and jeans that were already becoming wet from her dripping hair and his, not to mention the puddle of melting ice they were sitting in.

"Shit," Mikai said, beginning to feel like a broken record. When this sort of thing happened in manga, the conscious character stripped the unconscious one of their wet clothes and, er, cuddled to share body warmth. But this girl couldn't be more than sixteen, if that. He couldn't do that with her, even if she wasn't (if her weird clothes were anything to go by) a normal teenage girl.

After a moment more of internal debating, he grabbed an old bandanna from under the couch to tie over his eyes as he put the girl in his bathtub, setting the water to its highest setting. He peeled off her sweater and jeans and nothing else, lifting the bandanna just enough that he could chafe her fingers and toes to see the cyanotic blue receding from the nail beds. He tightened it again as he pulled her out of the bath and put her in a huge old shirt he had gotten from donating blood years ago, although in hindsight this may just have resulted in him accidentally touching the parts he had put the blindfold on in order not to see.

"Sorry, didn't have time to wash the sheets," he said to her motionless face, trying to break the tension with a joke as he would have done if she had been awake. It didn't really help, and he sighed as he struggled to pull the comforter and sheet back one-handed to put her between them.

She didn't move, didn't make a sound, as he piled extra blankets on top of her and adjusted a heating pad beneath her. He put his ear to her mouth again, afraid she had stopped breathing again, but a train of goose bumps sped down the side of his neck, lifted by the faint, icy exhalations from her lips.

"All right," he said, in what was meant to be a decisive voice, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He went to stuff the grimy blindfold into his pocket and realized he didn't have one: he was still wearing only the towel he had knotted around his waist when he got out of the shower. A snort of laughter filled his throat as he remembered how he had landed sprawled on his floor in nothing but that towel. And he had gone to all this effort to preserve her modesty!

He got up, going to kitchen to fill a hot water bottle for her feet. On the way back through the living room he saw a dark shape in the puddle, nearly hidden by one of the coffee table's legs. He scooped it up and examined it as he returned to the bedroom, sliding the bottle under the covers to the girl's feet. It was like some kind of big, clunky costume jewelry, metal shaped like a heart with a fat reddish-purple jewel in the middle of it.

He turned it over in his head, his eyes lifting to scrutinize the girl's pale face, and then reached for the cell phone sitting on the nightstand.

Darien, he texted, and only when the letters ended up coming out dstin did he realize how badly his hands were trembling, slippery on the keys. a grl shjwed up in my apsrtmnt.

A few minutes passed with no reply, and as he sat there in the lamplight slouched over the phone next to the unconscious girl, he knew that he really hadn't expected one.

Then there was the chime of a received message, and he jolted upright, blinking. He must have dozed off.

And I care why? it read.

Fingers trembling now with exhaustion-edged excitement instead of pure panicked adrenaline, Mikai typed a response, something half-coherent about strange outfits and ice blocks and what should he do.

The reply took a long time. When it did come, it was short. You're drunk.

What? Mikai typed, this time wide-awake again, making an effort to type correctly. I'm not! I swear!

He waited, but there was no reply this time. And when he tried to call Darien's phone a full five minutes later, it went straight to the automated voicemail message.

Mikai pulled the phone away from his ear, staring at it. On the glowing screen he could see their text conversation, and he could see from the number of words his trembling fingers had messed up how he might have seemed drunk…but Darien should have trusted him.

"Shit," he said one last time, softly. Tiredly.

He leaned forward and turned off the lamp.