Usagi looked at the table, staring through it as if it would open a hole that would let her escape into another world, a world where none of this had ever happened, where things had never gotten so ugly, where the decisions she had made were not being brought back to her doorstep, baring new teeth and claws.

"Usagi, I know you don't like it, but we have to." Rei spoke with authority, her mind decided and set as concrete.

"There has to be…"

"There's not." Mina did not let her finish. "She's killing innocent people, Usagi. She's lost control. You don't have to be there, Usagi."

Pluto looked down at Mina, her voice somewhere between sorrow and determination. "Mina, you could perhaps help her. You know what it is to keep something like this controlled, I know that you can help her."

Mina took a sip of her soda, a crooked smile and flicked eyebrow punctuating her face. "I think your faith in me is a little misplaced. I've never gone this far off-leash." She looked around, suddenly aware that she was speaking about the spectre of Venus lurking inside of her in front of her army. "And I'm stronger than Michiru. And we're not talking about me."

Mako stood up from the table. "I started this." She rested her hand on the table, biting her bottom lip. "It should be me."

"It's gonna have to be all of us." Mina shook her head. "Not that I don't appreciate your willingness to kill yourself for the greater good, I've been missing that lack of self-preservation since Haruka died." She regretted it as soon as it came out of her mouth, each girl wincing visibly at those three syllables. Mina was the one to break the silence, though her voice was now a swift mumble. "Anyway, Michiru's too strong for one of us."

"Has anyone really tried to speak to her?" There was a note of panic in her voice as the tide in the room turned, a quiet, almost imperceptible drift toward the decision, and Pluto could not control it. "Mina, think of the waste of a soldier!"

"She's no good to me now, Plu. I'm sorry." The apology, for once, sounded genuine.

But Pluto felt a rare, desperate rage surface in her. "And what do you think Haruka would say to you about this?"

Mina leapt to her feet. Pluto was much taller than she, but in the moment it did not seem to matter, a small ball of fury at her feet, finger sharply pointed in her face "I don't KNOW what Haruka would say, Pluto, because she's fucking DEAD, because YOU and the rest of them didn't have the fucking STRENGTH to DO what needed to be DONE!" She whirled around and slammed her fist against the table, shaking it, swallowing hard and pinching the bridge of her nose, trying to deny the grief that rose up in her throat, the tears at the edge of her vision. She took a deep breath and growled at Pluto. "I am tired of everyone thinking this is a democracy around here! STAND. DOWN. SOLDIER."

"Of course, Commander Venus." She nodded and stepped back toward the door.

"Fuck you." The words flung like an arrow, and Pluto recoiled, her momentary rage abating and leaving her open to the subtle hurts humanity aimed so well.

Hotaru regarded her with a momentary sadness, but tugged on the edge of her hair and scowled. "Are we done with the soap opera or…?"

Rei huffed. "We need a plan. She won't go down easy."

Mina tossed her hair and smiled, shrugging in an air of false cheer. "The only person she'd have gone down easy for's gone!" The joke fell flat into a sea of silence.

Usagi whimpered.

Mako stepped forward, the willing and able distraction for Michiru. She buried her spear into the sand, her eyes uncommitted to that task, suddenly.

Her voice wavered. "I'm sorry, Michiru. I'm sorry I made you this way." She picked the spear back up. "I'm sorry I have to be the one to fix it."

Michiru looked up at her, her eyes hollow, almost glowing with power and rage sorrow. "Would that I could believe it. I do hope you felt something, in the moment that you killed her. When you left her to die."

Mako shook her head fiercely, looking down at the sand, her teeth gritted. "I didn't do that. I didn't leave her to die. I was there." She looked back up at Michiru, a look of sad resolve on her face. "She just kept asking for you."

Michiru gave a kind of hiccup, the thought hitting her brain in one painful instant, for a moment an ordinary girl with her pain laid bare, and Mako took her chance, jumping forward, spear in hand. Ami and Hotaru watched from their posts in front of Usagi, the last lines of defense if everything else failed.

Michiru caught herself, the wave hitting Mako and smashing her into the rocks like a lost ship in a storm. Mako grasped at the sand, her vision blurred, her head pounding, the light too much to bear. In a final act of desperation, she called down the electricity from the sky, guided only by a firm feeling that this could be the last thing she did on this earth, caught between wanting to live and believing she deserved to die.

And certainly, if she deserved to die at any hand, it was Michiru's.

Mako threw the lightning with everything she had, but Michiru effortlessly called up a wave of water, dissipating it into the sea, a few fish bubbling up dead near the strike. She just as easily discarded the water back into the ocean, continuing her slow, measured march toward Mako. Mako closed her eyes, silently preparing herself for her last moments. Drowning wouldn't have been her first choice. She heard the saltwater tore up your lungs, that the pain was agonizing.

But, she supposed, Haruka's first choice hadn't likely been a spear between her ribs. Drowning would, at least, be quicker.

From her perch on high, Rei trained her arrow, visualizing the strike, the clear twang going through her mind as she prepared to loose the arrow. 'I'm sorry, Michiru." She softly breathed, her one finger on the string barely stopping it when she heard Mina call out.

"STOP." Mina's eyes were wild with desperation, and she signaled all the girls to lower their weapons, running out in front of her, blocking Rei's shot. "Michiru, you don't want to do this, I know you don't."

Michiru laughed. "I assure you, I do."

Mina shook her head firmly. "You'd have done it already. You wouldn't be waiting for us to come at you, playing with it. You're smarter than that, I've seen you fight."

"What you know of me could fit inside a thimble, little girl."

"Michiru! Do you know why I brought you here? This is where you and Haruka used to picnic. You were so happy here, and so was she. Michiru, there's literally an entire ocean here, we're trapped by the geography, you could sit back and read a book while we all drowned, but you didn't, because you know Mako never meant to hurt Haruka, because you know Usagi would never have ordered it. Because you loved this place and can't sully it with something Haruka would have hated. Because you're our friend and you don't want to do it."

Pluto's eyes widened in hope.

Rei threw her head back dramatically. "We are all. Going. To die. WOULD YOU NOT GIVE HER TIPS?"

Mina didn't even register Rei's voice, "You act so cold, but I know different, Michiru! I've seen you! I saw you every day with Haruka." She said her name in every sentence, like a spell that could cast out the demon. Haruka. Haruka. Haruka.

"Don't."

"I saw how you took care of her, how you loved her. I know there's something warm in you, something really human, and that's still there. Or you wouldn't hurt like this."

"Everything I'm doing is for Haruka!" The sea rose up and misted over the rocks, as if splitting with rage, roaring with each wave.

"No, you're not! You're doing this because you're pissed off!" She looked into Michiru's eyes, swirling now like a whirlpool. "Do you think this is what Haruka would want her legacy to be? For fuck's sake, do you just lack imagination, or what? Your family pulled in some several hundred million last year, Michiru, there's all this stuff you could do with your money. Start a charity or something in Haruka's name, save the Harukas of tomorrow. What would her life would have been like if someone had made sure the kids on the track team got food boxes to take home, or if teachers could tell you who needs new jeans? You're punishing all these people for not taking care of Haruka, but you're not fixing anything." Mina shrugged casually, her voice dropping once again into the familiar comedic patter "Hell, open a school for wayward butch girls, you're rich enough."

Michiru's face softened, and she looked at Mina, almost pleading. "I could…" She shook her head. 'I murdered my brother and parents, there's no going back."

"Yeah, everyone's gonna believe you killed your folks with your magical mermaid powers." Mina laughed. "Besides, they had it coming, trust. Michiru. C'mon. You don't have to do this."

Michiru stepped forward, but then recoiled back, her voice the odd echo of Neptune once again. "And what concern have you ever had for me? This isn't for my benefit! This isn't about me at all!" The spray flew up behind her and looked poised to strike.

"You're right." Her voice was soft, as if to verify anything Michiru said pained her. "It's about Haruka. It's the way I think she'd rather be remembered. It's what she'd want me to do." Mina walked toward her, the other girls now standing in a huddle around Usagi, Mako still reeling from the fight. "Michiru, I know what it's like to have a monster inside you. I've been fighting it my whole life. It doesn't have to win. I can help you. Just let me."

Michiru looked at her, shaking her head. "Haruka's gone."

"I know. It sucks." She walked toward Michiru slowly, as if she was trying not to startle a deer. "But we can make sure no one ever forgets her. I promise."

There was a moment, there, where Michiru hung her head, the sea now laid down still and quiet, a look sadness on her face, of loss, and of hurt, and Mina got a glimpse of the child she must have been, the times she must have been spurned in her pursuit of affection and acceptance, how she had slowly killed every part of herself that cried out for those things, twisting herself into something hard and unbreakable. She was nothing like Haruka, who let herself keep getting kicked. She learned.

She was more like Mina.

It was a dark thought, but not an untrue one, and as Mina held her hand out to Michiru, she saw a chance to forgive Michiru for all the things that she was, to forgive herself for every mistake she'd made, for them to build together something better, and in a strange way, to be more affected by Haruka's singleminded desire to do what was right and good than either of them had ever been in life. It was that rare moment of divine forgiveness that Mina had head spoken of so many times but never felt for herself.

Michiru looked up at her, and gave a weak smile. Her eyes, for the first time Mina could remember, were just green. And she held out her hand, just barely touching the edge of Mina's fingers.

And then Michiru recoiled, the sea flaring in her eyes once more, the waves roiling up behind as if the rage in her body could not be contained, her voice loud and booming.

"You sent her to her death! You were the command, you were supposed to protect her!"

Mina's eyes narrowed. "You can kill me if you want, Squidward, but I'm telling you now, it will never, ever be enough." She drew her sword. "Bring it."

There was a sharp clash between the two of them, and Mina managed a short swipe, nearly grazing her cheek, before the wall of water hit her. Rei grabbed Usagi and started to run, wondering where they could take her that Michiru could not find them, her mind racing as the water swirled around and blocked their exit. Her eyes searched for something, anything, beginning to panic, knowing that even all of them together could not match her power.

And then the sea fell.

Rei looked back behind her, Mina lay on the sand, hurt but still conscious and struggling to her feet. Mako was stumbling behind she and Usagi, Ami supporting her. Pluto stood, her face pressed sadly to her rod buried in the sand, looking down at a set of tiny footsteps crossing the secluded cove. Her eyes followed upward to Michiru dazed and far away, the point of the glaive visible through her middle, Hotaru breathing hard, hands shaking, but still firm in her stance. She withdrew the glaive, and it made a sickening sucking sound that echoed through the rocks.

Michiru fell to her knees, and looked back at Hotaru. "A tactician."

"Not really." She shook her head. "I had a shot, and I took it." She circled around to Michiru's front. "I had to do it. You taught me to."

Michiru looked up at her, a motherly look of regret. "I am so sorry that every adult who was meant to protect you, failed you"

Hotaru did not rise to the comment, trying to put every good memory she had of Michiru out of her mind. "I guess we're even now."

Michiru chuckled darkly. "Fair is fair, I suppose we are." She slumped to the side, and her look turned to one of pleading. "Do you think Haruka will forgive me?"

Hotaru knelt in front of her. "I know she will. She's like that."

"Yes. You were always more like me." She touched Hotaru's face. "Don't be. That is my deathbed wish, Hotaru, that you are nothing like me."

"Okay, Michiru-mama. Okay."

There's a good girl." She withdrew her hand and looked up at the sky lying down gracefully in the sand and closing her eyes. "Mina." It was as a call to action, a command, almost.

"What?" She called from her place on the sand.

"Do better."

"That's impressively vague, care to elaborate, Princess?"

But no answer came in response, no final clarification of the rules of game. Usagi cried out as Michiru's life dissipated from her, just a young socialite dead on the sand, nothing impressive about her except as a final note to the tragedy of an old family who would later be accused of having been in league with the devil, of purchasing cursed jewels, and a slew of other myths that good never touch the strangeness of reality.

And the sea roared in Mina's ears.

Mina's shorts were longer than she liked, longer than anyone liked, she thought, but Rei had drilled into her the importance of making a decent impression on the slew of middle-aged people they dealt with at the school, and how her favorite pair of daisy dukes was unlikely to do that. She stood in front of the mirror in the girls' locker room, looking at herself in the mirror. Rei's reflection appeared behind her, and she smiled.

"Look at me, I look like a very femme Haruka." She put on the pair of aviator sunglasses, too big for her face, but treasured all the same.

Rei assessed her board-strapped white tanktop and her long khaki shorts, and laughed. "You really do. It's frightening. But kinda a good look."

"Did you just compliment me, Rei Hino? Has earth as I know it ceased to exist?" She turned and grinned.

Rei huffed. 'Shut up, Mina. We gotta move these boxes." She picked one up to carry out to the track. "Move it."

Mina had made, the board would later say, a compelling case for Kaioh Industries to start this charity. And she had offered the initial labor to start up, her and the other girls, packing boxes full of food and driving them down to the dilapidated school on the other side of town. She picked up a box and started toward the hallway, whistling to herself.

She passed a trophy case, medals and ribbons going years back. A big trophy caught her eye. Haruka Tenoh. Girls' All-state. The year and event blurred, and it took her a moment to realize it was from her tears. She set down the box, wiping them away and cleaning the smudge from her sunglasses. Had it been three months already? It hardly seemed like it could be. Some nights she woke up, thinking it was still a dream.

Rei called to her from down the hall. "I'm not doing this for my health, Peaches!"

"Coming, my angel buttercup!" She set the old sunglasses on top of her head, and picked up the box, laughing at Rei's growl in the distance. She nodded her head. "I did better."

Not a better leader. Just better.