"Do you ever feel like we're, y'know, useless?" Minako asks. Usually these are the kind of thoughts she'd keep to herself, lock up tight, not tell anyone (except, maybe, if she's desperate to get something off her chest, Artemis) – but it's long past midnight now, the time where peoples' lips loosen, when they admit to things they'd deny in the light of day.

"What do you mean?" Mako asks, hand temporarily pausing from where she's been stroking Usagi's hair.

Usagi mutters in her sleep and pushes her head further into Mako's chest, nudging against the bigger girl's hand.

"All right, all right," Mako says softly, fondly. She starts stroking Usagi's hair again but still looks quizzically at Minako.

Minako lifts her head up from against Rei's knee, props herself up on her elbows and looks around at her friends. Mako is half sitting, half lying against the wall and a pile of pillows and blankets, Usagi's head on her chest. Next to her, Ami is sitting cross-legged, left shoulder brushing Mako's right, fiddling with one of Usagi's braids in her lap. Rei leans against the wall at right angles to Mako's, feet extended out to just touch Mako's right leg. Across all three is sprawled a sleeping Usagi – head on Mako, legs on Rei, Ami's knee digging into her side. Minako recognises the expressions her friends wear when they look at their sleeping princess – she's worn it herself, often enough. Now, though, the sight of Usagi sleeping – so innocent, so fragile, so unconsciously unguarded – just adds to the dullness inside of her, the wistfulness that had prompted her to speak out to start with.

"Minako-chan?" Ami asks, and Minako realises everyone is looking at her, expecting her to speak again.

"I mean, Sailor Moon is so powerful," she says. "So much more powerful than any of us. How many times now has she saved the world? And what could we do? Watch. Die. She can do so much… so much more than we can. And we're supposed to be her guardians."

"Usagi needs us," Rei tells her.

"She needs you," Minako says, and hates the tone of jealousy she can feel creeping into her words.

"She needs all of us," Mako says, firm, before Rei can retort. She is still stroking Usagi's hair. "C'mon, Mina-chan, you know she loves us all."

"I – yeah," Minako says. "Yeah."

She nudges her head against Rei's knee in apology, feels Rei's hand ghost over her shoulders in acceptance. There is silence again, comfortable, for a few minutes.

"But?" Ami asks, looking at her.

"But what?"

"You're clearly still brooding about something," Ami says.

Minako always forgets how perceptive the smaller girl – okay, fine, technically they're the same height, but Ami feels smaller, okay? – can be. When the others, Mako and Rei and Usagi, notice something they can't help but speak up about it. Ami keeps things to herself, sometimes. Minako – Venus – both of them – had sworn to stop underestimating Mercury a very long time ago, but even so Ami still takes her by surprise every so often.

"It's just-" Minako says. "It's just – okay, fine, Rei-chan's right, she needs us emotionally. But physically? Half the time she has to rescue us from the monsters we fight."

Silence from the others tells her that her words have hit their mark. It just makes her feel emptier, like the silence is confirmation of her uselessness.

"Doesn't it bother you at all?" Minako asks.

Ami is the first to reply. She shrugs, seemingly unconcerned, and drops Usagi's hair to place her hands in her lap.

"If I got upset every time someone else was stronger than me I'd have quit being a senshi long ago," she says. When Mako opens her mouth to protest Ami reaches across to squeeze her shoulder. "No, Mako-chan, it's true, we all know it. I'm the weakest of us all."

"But that doesn't matter!" Mako says. "You've rescued us so many times with that brain of yours."

Ami smiles at her. "I know." She looks across, at Minako and Rei, and speaks again. "I am the weakest of us all, and there were times when I worried about it. I felt like I was useless, a burden to the team, like I was slowing you down. But I know that's not true. We're a team, and just because I'm not as strong as you guys, that doesn't mean I can't be useful."

"I know what you mean," Mako says softly into the silence that follows. "I – when Uranus and Neptune first showed up, you remember? There were stronger monsters and we had our same old attacks and I just felt really, really useless. So I went up into the mountains to try and train – you guys remember, right?"

Minako does. She nods.

"And, I dunno," Mako says, "I guess I learnt that I didn't have to do things on my own? We are a team and we're best when we work together? That's what we have over the others, anyway. They're stronger on their own, but they can't work together like we can."

"Because we have different roles, I know," Minako tells her, and remembers being Venus and young and having Queen Serenity give her the same explanation. I'm entrusting you with my daughter, she'd said, but Venus still doesn't know how to handle this new world sometimes, the one where the Princess is fighting alongside them. In the Silver Millennium the power of the royal family and the ginzuishou had been a known but abstract concept; now she's faced with the reality of it every day. Mako and Ami have tried to be reassuring, but their responses miss the target – it's strength relative to Sailor Moon she's worried about, not strength overall.

"Usagi needs us," Rei says staunchly, again, as if she's read Minako's mind. "This is Usagi we're talking about, even with all of Sailor Moon's powers. That girl can't go a day without falling over or walking into something – you know her."

Minako has to smile at that, filled with affection for the sleeping girl between them all. "Yeah, I know Usagi-chan."

"She needs us to watch her back in battle and tell her when she's being an idiot," Rei says.

"And she needs to know we're there," Mako points out. "She can't handle being alone."

"We can still be useful even without raw power," Ami adds. "If we hadn't put up that barrier when she was fighting the Death Busters there'd be a lot less people alive in Tokyo right now."

Minako looks at all of them, tries to let the gratitude she feels show on her face. "Thanks, guys. I guess I hadn't thought of it that way."

"What were you thinking anyway?" Rei demands. "Were you just going to stop looking after her? Quit being a senshi?"

Minako can't quit being a senshi, not ever. She knows – she's tried often enough. Venus is who she is deep down to her core, never really gone completely. Guarding Usagi is her duty; it's what she was literally born to do. But it's a duty she does willingly (most days) because it's for Usagi, and Usagi is worth every drop of devotion Minako has to give.

"You know I'd never do that," she says, and knows the others understand. They all feel the same way about Usagi, Sailor Moon, their princess, as she does.

"Well, then," Rei says, triumphant. "There really isn't any point in brooding about it then, is there? It's not like it would change anything anyway." She pauses, continues more softly. "Anyway, it's not like you're the only one who's thought about this. I have too, and this is the conclusion I came to."

Ami and Mako are looking at each other. "We all have," Mako says. "I think we kind of had to, after…"

"Yeah."

There is more silence. Minako puts her head back on Rei's knee, and Rei absentmindedly strokes her hair with one hand and traces patterns on Usagi's shin with another. Ami shifts to fold her legs off to one side and leans her head against Mako's shoulder; Mako puts her head on top of Ami's and closes her eyes.

Usagi wakes with a yawn and a stretch, narrowly missing Ami's face with her arm and Minako's with her leg.

"Aw, man, I fell asleep!" she says. "Did I miss anything exciting?"

"Oh, nothing much," Minako tells her.