The water pours down on her in the shower. It is hot, almost painfully so, and she twists, letting the sweet burn spread across her body. It hurts, but in a good way. It helps her forget the cold.
Slowly, she slumps to the floor, pulling her knees to her chest as the shower goes on and on. A couple more minutes, she thinks, and the she'll finish, but for now, she wants to be warm, she wants to hurt, she wants to be alive.
The seconds, minutes, hours, drag on and still she stays there, huddled beneath the water, whimpering quietly. She's burned the layout of the shower stall into her mind, every cracked tile, every crinkle in the curtain, and still, whenever she closes her eyes she goes back there. Back to the ice and the cold and the loneliness, back to her…
For a moment her eyes are perfectly focused, her perception heightened exquisitely by the pain as dark energy rips through her body. Then she hits the ice, shattering it upon impact, and hurling a cloud of crystalline frost into the air.
Pain.
Panic.
Fear.
Blood trickles from between her lips, and through the countless cuts on her uniform and onto the ice, turning it a dull crimson. Dimly, she is aware of other pains, her arm, her leg, her back, a maelstrom of broken bone and battered flesh.
High above her, wreathed in a storm of malevolent fury, her enemy readies another withering blast of negative energy. She is laughing at her, crimson lips pulled back into a sneer, pale face twisted with hate. Power, power enough to turn two thousand tonnes of ice into steam in a millionth of a second, crackles around her fingertips. It is over.
From her position on the ice, broken, defeated, all she can do is watch. The other can't help her now. They're gone, long gone. Separated, isolated, taken down, one by one, even her Prince is gone. She is, for the first time since the beginning, completely alone. How fitting.
The dark energy thunders through the air towards her. In the blink of an eye it strikes, and she feels everything ending, ending, ending…
Her costume is gone, consumed by a hail of ebony flame, and she can feel her skin and flesh, burning, boiling away as her bones turn to ash, and scatter like fine powder on the winds…
Only, only somehow she isn't dead.
As the darkness closes in, and she falls forever into the unearthly silence of death, she feels it. Something beyond white, beyond light, beyond anything, fills her, so bright that all she can see, all she can feel is an impossible radiance, holding her spirit, caressing her soul. It's healing her, saving her, changing her…
The explosion is enormous.
Her own power, the antithesis of darkness, billows outward, unfurling like a sail in the wind, a shockwave of rolling thunder rippling across the ice. She stands now, all trace of weakness, of fragile mortal frailty gone.
In place of a clumsy, empty-headed school girl, stands a Princess of Light, serene, tranquil, perfect. She has become a goddess of purity, sheathed in the blinding brilliance of her own soul.
An instant later, she strikes back at her enemy. Her power, the power of life, the power of purity, the power of light and love and hope, hurtles forward. It tears her enemy apart, rips through the darkness and death, and evil like a white-hot knife through butter…
"Honey," she turns, startled out of her memories as someone knocks on the door. It is her mother. "You've been in there a long time, are you all right?"
"Yes mom," she shouts back. "I'm fine." But she's not.
Later, she's up in her room, huddling beneath her blankets, hoping, praying that everything will go back to the way it used to be. She's afraid to sleep, afraid that maybe, once she closes her eyes, she'll be back there again. Remembering…
The ice is cold beneath her feet and she stops, pausing to look at her reflection. Something in her has changed, something has broken that cannot be mended. The innocence is gone from her eyes, replaced with a cool, almost cold serenity. Her cheeks seem almost gaunt now, regal in their shape and form, but somehow devoid of the easy-going warmth they used to have.
The power is still there, smouldering inside of her. It's almost like a living thing, raging away inside, looking for release, for the sweet, sweet thrill of use, like a drug. Her awareness now, is a thousand times what it used to be. She is bound to every soul on the planet, privy to every thought, every wish, every desire and it is frightening.
She doesn't want to know about the children crying on the street corner, or the woman whose husband won't stop hitting her. She doesn't want to see fields of mud, the remnants of a field torn to pieces by artillery, and she doesn't want to feel the sorrow of a billion weeping souls, mourning everything and nothing all at once.
She just wants to be normal. She just wants to worry about the next school project, or the next movie, or the next arcade game or the next…
She wakes, without even really realising that she was ever asleep. Her eyes, wide and afraid catch the glint of the mirror by her bed and she draws back, afraid, a scream dying on her lips. Slowly, she brings one hand up to her cheek, tracing the path of her tears.
Who is she, really?
A schoolgirl?
A senshi?
Or is she just the girl who died so that a goddess, a queen, could be born.
She's crying because right now, right now, she isn't sure. Because just for a moment, it wasn't blonde hair she'd seen in the mirror.
It was silver.
Author's Note
Yay! I've finally got another out. Let me start by saying that this will probably be edited extensively. I'm not too happy with how it came out, but I really wanted to put it out there and let everyone have a look at it, because really, Moon is one of the deepest characters, if you look hard enough. For me, I've always found it interesting how different she is in the future. It makes me wonder, did Usagi die so that Serenity could live? And yes, this is set after Beryl.
As always, I live off feedback. So, drop me a line, tell me what you think. Was it good, bad, whatever, just say ;;.
To All Reviewers : Thanks a ton for being along for the ride with this series, your support has meant a lot to me, a real lot. You've made it worth writing. That said I have a surprise for you all : I'm not done yet! And what's even better is that I have something else, another project if you will, in the works. Till later…