Notes: This story is complete at 11,000 words, and will be posted in four chapters over the next few days. It was written in 2011.

"Hey," says Elsa, "you're not really here at all, are you?"

Michiru blinks and draws herself back to the present. "Hm?"

"Hah! I knew it."

Elsa is laughing now, and Michiru smiles mildly at her. "I was daydreaming."

"Mm-hmm," says Elsa. "No kidding."

She leans in against Michiru's shoulder and they sit together quietly again. It's early summer, and the air is warm and damp. Behind them, at a distance, is the sound of running feet and muffled shouting - everyone is on their way home from school. But here they're screened away by trees and bushes, wild spring growth that makes it hard to even see the path they came down. It's one of the safest places to be together near the school.

Michiru breaths in the smell of earth and leaves and the morning's rain.

Beside her, Elsa, never good at sitting still, has begun to fidget, feet tapping against the ground, fingers pulling at clothing that isn't out of place.

"Oh come on," she says. "Are we just going to sit here all day while you drift off wherever it is you go again?"

"Sorry," Michiru murmurs, manages a small smile. "I'm sure you have practice. You should go."

Elsa exhales loudly. "Tell me when you feel like talking then."

She leans over to kiss Michiru, who, still half spaced out, responds a little too slowly. Then she hops to her feet, bag already swinging into place over her shoulder, and runs, tearing along the edge of the embankment they've been sitting on, following the curve of it away and out of sight. She runs beautifully.

Michiru lowers her head to her drawn-up knees, closes her eyes, and sighs. She would love to explain everything to Elsa, but it seems beyond implausible: hey, you know I mentioned that I've been having nightmares? Well, yesterday I found out that they're real. I'm sorry if I seem a little distant, but it looks as though I have to save the world, so...

No.

The whole thing, she tries to tell herself, is just too ridiculous. She would love to be able to disbelieve all of it.

But her attention is pulled back to her bag and the wand tucked carefully into a pocket deep inside it.

She imagines that in other families there might be some kind of awkwardness associated with this new secret. But dinner-table silence is an entirely expected part of everyday life for hers.

"We got our test results for biology," she says mildly half way through the meal.

"I hope you did well," her mother murmurs.

"Yes," she says. "I'll show you the paper."

Her father nods.

And they lapse back into silence, familial duty done.

Really, no acting skills seem to be needed. It actually makes her bitter, just for a moment, about a situation she'd thought she was entirely resigned to. What would happen if she told them all about her day, the real one? In the same light tone, of course.

That's nice, dear.

Pass the sauce.

"I need to train," she says when they're done and the atmosphere of the house is becoming too much for her already worn down state. "I think I'll go to the pool for an hour, if you don't mind."

Of course they don't.

Outside she breathes in cool, damp air as steadily as she can and tries to stop thinking in circles. It feels better to be out of the big, echoing house that is meant to be her home, better to be going somewhere, doing something. But it doesn't feel the way it should.

She wonders if anything will now, and gets her answer in the form of an urgent pull on her consciousness directing her towards a threat.

Stepping off the well-lit pavement and into the shadow of an old, thick-stemmed tree is almost reflex; so is reaching out after the source of danger. All day she's been wondering if she'll actually react if destiny or whatever it is calls on her again. Well, now she knows.

She takes a moment to steady herself, to push all the things she's feeling deep down until she has time to deal with them. Transforms, and fights.

Elsa has always been focused on sport but now she throws herself into it harder than ever. Or perhaps it's just that her priorities are shifting in other ways which makes it seem like that to Michiru.

For her own part Michiru has never surrounded herself with people but now she can feel herself slipping away from the ones she has, going through a mental process of disconnection which she can't seem to stop. She watches Elsa train, standing on the sidelines, and feels as though she's actually somewhere above the scene, watching herself; she is not in her own body. She is not herself.

They haven't kissed since what she has come to think of as the day after, though they go places together still, chat a little. Maybe they're done with the other thing now. Maybe that's for the best. She doesn't know, can't find the energy to think about it with any kind of clear mind.

She does find herself wishing for someone to draw in closer, but Elsa probably can't be it; Elsa has her own future, and Michiru isn't going to mess it up for her. Besides, a part of what she suspects she's really wishing for is someone to talk to who would understand, and although something tugs at her with the hint that that person or those people might exist, she can't reach them yet. She can't see their faces or their forms.

She has no-one who she can tell about the first time she transformed, and how it didn't feel like putting on a costume so much as like tearing out of something, breaking apart her smaller, more human self. How she feels as though being human is now some kind of act of tentative and incompetent reconstruction, and that she's amazed every day when none of her teachers or classmates or family members notice the difference except maybe as a little distraction. But then not many of them were watching closely to begin with.

Sometimes the monsters she fights become people again.

Sometimes they don't.

The first don't should be a shattering moment, but she experiences it from a long way away, as another person, almost like a dream. It happens in the middle of the day. She's on her way to a class. She carries on after the fight, and sits through all her lessons.

Reality only crashes in much later, and she sits on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and cries for hours, is sick, cries more.

She still gets up the next morning, puts on makeup - a little more than usual, because she's sure her face is a mess - and leaves the house, smiles at the right moments, and acts like a person.

It takes a while longer before she can eat again.

Fighting does get easier with time - at least in the moment when she's doing it. One of the few benefits is that it's a mental space in which she gets to shut off everything else and focus on just the thing itself; the only other spaces which can do something similar for her are artistic ones.

Otherwise she lives in a kind of overload, her mind filling with threads of future and past until the present begins to get lost.

To play the violin imposes order and allows her to separate memory from prophecy and reality. Occasionally it even pulls forward a new kind of clarity, a sudden insight into which thread she should follow to find a new piece of herself; to paint is to crystallise those pieces and hold them in a form she can trust not to disappear. To fight allows her to push everything but the most pressing version of reality out of her mind.

Her art changes, and not for the worse. But she begins to feel older, and isn't sure she likes it. No choice, though; there isn't much time left for being a child.

Besides, sometimes she kills people. She doesn't have the right any more.

"I don't know what you do with your time these days," Elsa says, breaking into one of the awkward, tense moments that have grown into their relationship, weaving their way into the fabric, "but if you want to catch a race at the weekend...?"

"Are you running?" Michiru asks, relieved at the chance to move back into more comfortable territory.

"Nah, I was thinking we could just go and watch. You know, get you out of the house, talking to people who aren't your little fangirls. And boys. It's a bike race. What d'you think?"

Michiru has never had any particular interest in or feelings about motor sports, but she nods. "That would be nice."

Elsa has these bursts of investment still, out of pity or friendship or something more obscure, Michiru isn't sure. She invites Michiru to events, to the cinema, out to a café. Michiru tends to go along with it. She feels that she's playing at being a normal girl whatever she does with Elsa, but sometimes it's nice to play.

It's at the bike race of all places, standing there by the finish line with Elsa, pressed up against the barriers, that she finds someone entirely unexpected.

"Oh," she says, as the winner of the race takes off their helmet, runs a hand through their short, blonde hair, laughs at something one of the attendants says. She searches after something else to add, and doesn't find anything in her vocabulary that seems appropriate. "Oh my..."

Beside her, Elsa whistles. "Nice."

The girl, tough and androgynous and unbelievably attractive, is swinging herself off her bike. She straightens up, looking elated.

Michiru feels suddenly clear-headed, anchored to her own body and her own humanity again. She's a teenage girl with a brand new crush.

"Who is that?" she asks, fascinated. But Elsa shakes her head.

"Never seen her before," she says.

But they do see her again. It turns out Tenoh Haruka is big news.

In fact, Haruka seems to be everywhere. She turns up in magazine features. She turns up in classroom gossip. She turns up at all kinds of different sporting events.

There's a rumour that she's started running, and Elsa gets a glint in her eye which means she's eyeing up the competition and finding it of interest.

Michiru wonders if Elsa can see how she feels about Haruka. She wonders what Elsa thinks if she can.

She keeps magazine clippings in her desk draw at home, deep down under old school assignments and boxes of pens, and worries that someone will have a burst of interest in her life and cross enough boundaries in the process to find them - and then feels ridiculous. They're only magazine articles. She could just as easily be using them for a project, or for reference material.

No-one can actually read her mind. Especially not her parents. If they could she'd have even bigger problems than her sexuality being discovered.

But they're almost entirely disinterested in her life as long as appearances are maintained. She doesn't even have to be a good girl, really; she just has to look like one from a distance.

Things begin to shift and settle in her mind. The flood of information gets less overwhelming, more organised. A lot of the unnecessary input has been cut away, and her second past is becoming more and more a natural part of her, though she knows she can't see all of it yet. It's not just there, laid out; it's like other memories that can lie forgotten for years. And there's so much of it.

She still dreams about the end of the world.

She also dreams about another warrior who fights alongside her. She can feel them coming closer, though she can't see them properly yet.

And she daydreams about Haruka. Sometimes she imagines that the other warrior has Haruka's face, and then she catches herself, feels horrified. Better to daydream about sitting in Haruka's car as a normal girl than to pull Haruka into her world, even if it's only a game.

Michiru wakes up abruptly in early morning half-darkness, shocked out of a dream without being able to grasp what the dream was about. She's too aware of her heartbeat. It feels intrusive, a little unnatural, and it takes several deep breaths to reassure herself that her body is still working right. It's only the strangeness that comes from waking up too fast.

She can feel her pulse intensely in different parts of her body. A thudding in her ears. An excited, urgent beat between her legs.

Ah.

She reaches carefully down and inches her hand inside her underwear, fingers sliding through rough, curled hair until they reach her clitoris and slide lower, deeper. She presses a finger into herself, shifts against it, slides in another; grinds the heel of her hand against herself as she moves. Groans faintly, stifles the noise.

The house is so quiet that it's almost impossible to convince herself no-one will hear. But no-one will. She's snuck out of the house in the middle of the night to fight, she's had Elsa home and gone to bed with her - once her mother even slept through their old cat knocking over a glass-topped table.

It's just the silence at this time of night, where everything seems to be held in such perfect stillness that a small movement could destroy everything.

She touches herself slowly, tries not to make even the smallest sound. But it's infuriating, not enough.

A deep breath, a reminder for herself that the house is large, that her bedroom is tucked away at the end of a wing. Her hand moves faster, searches for the spots that will make her whole body react in sudden pleasure.

It's been a long time since she masturbated, and then she was really just trying to understand her body. Then there was Elsa for a while, and it wasn't as important. Then she was busy.

Now she's thinking of someone else entirely. It's not her own fingers curling and shifting there inside her body, not Elsa's with their quick, impatient movements - it's this other girl's, the one in her mind, who is partly Haruka and partly someone she knew a thousand years ago (but she wasn't going to think of that, was she?). She imagines that they pull up the shirt of her pyjamas, lean in close to her breasts, warm breath ghosting over them for a moment before being followed by a warmer mouth, teeth pressing down on a nipple just a little, not too much, not too far - a little thrill that makes the flesh around her fingers - Haruka's fingers - Uranus's fingers - tighten for a moment.

She comes almost too fast, lies there breathing hard with one hand still between her legs, fingers resting lightly against her clit, and one hand cupped over a breast. She opens her eyes to the empty room, stares up at the ceiling, letting the aftershocks of orgasm drift away.

Who was she thinking about? Uranus. A sailor senshi who looks like Haruka.

Oh, great.