Author's notes: Happy 25th (unless he is 28) Birthday to everyone's favorite
fictional animated character (besides Tom from Daria, of course... ::sighs::)
Thank you Lelu, MK, and Jayhyun aka W.Bymeeh. The latter wrote a few lines
of this her very own self, and only charged me 50 yen per letter. If you want
to know what lines she wrote, they are the good ones.


Disclaimer: I don't Sailormoon. Surprise!

Fleeting Dreams
By Antigone



Sighing with deep exhaustion, Kasuga Moemi lifted her hand to press the
buzzer on the green apartment door before her, then paused, lowering her hand as
the familiar beating of her heart echoed in her ears.

"One more," she murmured to her aching feet, "then we rest." Who knew
this would be so hard?

Then again, she was always doing spontaneous things like this: a need
would grip her, and she'd have to follow it, obsessively, determinedly. Moemi
could only hope this wasn't as fruitless and emotionally draining as her recent
search for her biological parents. Green eyes closed for a moment, and Moemi
rested her lean body against the wall.

Hazy images of her childhood haunted her, pulled her on this stupid
search. All she had to work off of was a name. A name and a vague indication
of 'the Tokyo area'. But she had to find him. Even all these years later, she
could still see him in her mind: quiet, withdrawn but very kind. Thoughtful.

Moemi still flushed remembering the pout that tugged on his mouth when his
too-blue eyes stared into space, pondering something, or maybe wishing for
something.

He had always let his hair grow slightly more than it should,
it fell around his face, black as night and straight as can be, save a few
random curls that would gently brush his forehead. It was the sort of hair that
begged to be familiarly tousled by the workers, or the other children.

But Chiba Mamoru was never the type of child to let strangers touch him in
such a loving way. Even his close friends. Even one of his closest friends...
her.


This is stupid, Moemi almost said out loud. Searching high and low for
her first love, who never returned her feelings, who *ran away* from the
orphanage... and let her find out the same way as everyone else. Who made the
biggest decision of his life without her.

No one had been close to Mamoru. But she had been closer than anyone
else. Friends, she'd thought, maybe even best friends. Both lonely. Both
outcasts, him despite of his beauty, her because of hers.

How could she help but fall in love with him?

But how could he fail to return her feelings? Moemi had always been told
she was an adorable child, who naturally grew into the rose of the municipal
home for children, the most beautiful young teen. Long, brilliant chestnut
hair, a few dark freckles, soft almond eyes. 'My goodness,' she could still
hear, 'my goodness, it makes you wonder why they ever abandoned her.'

She cried to him for hours, sitting cross-legged on the floor, pouring out
her heart, braiding and re-braiding her hair absent-mindedly. He sat still, on
his bed, head rested on his hand, listening to her. Silently. Eyes that always
looked to startlingly bright looking at the wall, but not seeing it.

Moemi sighed. They were both loners, even when together they were each
alone, truly. She had never, actually, opened up to love. But she wanted to
open up to him.

So that's why I'm here, she thought dryly, in Tokyo, in the fifth
apartment building I've tried today. And a week to finish my search. 'I wonder
if I'm crazy.'

Groaning with frustration, she pressed one delicate finger on the buzzer.
"Here goes nothing."


The door flew open and shut nearly all the way behind a small woman with a
baby blanket across her shoulder and a bottle-milk dotting the sleeve of her
soft pink sweater. "SHHHHHHH!!!" she hissed, blue eyes wide and disheveled
blonde hair escaping it's strange knotted style, graceful wisps across flushed
cheeks. "I just got her to sleep," the smaller woman admitted apologetically at
Moemi's shocked face.

The blonde shrugged sheepishly. Then looked up curiously.

"Can I help you?"

Moemi looked at the younger person before her and felt a familiar mix of
disappointment and embarrassment fill her.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, "I have the wrong person." Again.

But the other girl caught her sleeve as Moemi turned to leave.

"Who are you looking for?" she said, and Moemi couldn't help noticing what
a soft, sweet, little-girl voice she had, "Can I help?"

Moemi paused, "My name is Kasuga Moemi, and I'm looking for a Chiba
Mamoru."

"He lives here," she said automatically, "but won't be home from work for
a while."

"Iie," Moemi laughed slightly, "you don't understand. I'm looking for
someone of that name. But there are so many... I've been wrong before. It's
okay."

For a moment light blue eyes regarded Moemi thoughtfully, then a small,
warm little hand grabbed Moemi's sleeve and tugged slightly.

"Come in and rest. You look so tired."

Before she could protest, Moemi found herself standing in the doorway of a
small, homey little apartment. Baby toys scattered across clean, vacuumed
floors, the sink was full of clean, drying dishes, and flowers adorned the small
family table.
The window had a lovely view of the park.

"I'll make tea." The pretty blonde said, adding as an afterthought, "My
name is Chiba-Tsukino Usagi." The girl gestured to the small sofa, offering
Moemi a seat.

"That's a mouthful," Moemi said, forcing a slight laugh as she took off
her shoes and slipped her feet into soft guest slippers then walked to the sofa
and sat down.

Usagi grinned as she set the teapot on the stove, "Hai, I know. I go by
Chiba Usagi every way but officially. I'm a bit attached to my family name,
though." A blush stained her cheeks, clearly she was slightly embarrassed by
this lack of convention. The girl gestured to the small sofa, offering Moemi a
seat.

Changing the subject, Moemi asked about the baby who obviously shared
living space with the young woman. At the subject of her 6 month old daughter,
Usagi beamed, and flushed with pride and happiness. "Her name is Usagi, too*,"
Usagi said, running a hand over her forehead, "it was Mamo-chan's idea. I would
be so confused if it wasn't for her nickname, ChibiUsa."

"Is it confusing having to call her by a different name?" Moemi asked.
Usagi raised her eyebrows, giggling her little-girl laugh.

"I'm very used to it." She said, a statement Moemi could make no sense of.
Now, though, it was Usagi's turn to change the subject.

"Why are you looking for this Chiba Mamoru of yours?"

Moemi paused. For some reason, she had this strong feeling the young wife
before her was the sort of person who would completely swoon over the idea of
searching for a lost first love. But, that felt like too much of a lie.

"He was... an old friend of mine." Suddenly, her green eyes were studying
her hands with extreme interest.

"How old are you?" the sweet voice asked, bluntly, and Usagi blushed
again, deeply, when Moemi raised surprised eyes to her. Pressing light pink
painted fingernails to her forehead, Usagi muttered under her breath, "Baka,
always have to say the wrong thing..."

For a moment Moemi took in the sight this girl made. Jean skirt, soft
pink turtle-neck sweater, soft blonde hair. The hand pressed to her forehead
glittered with the diamond sparkle of her engagement ring, the graceful gold
wedding ring sitting above it. She was thin, small, but glowing with
contentment and happiness. She had married her own Chiba Mamoru, 'Mamo-chan',
had a daughter, a family, a loving home. Moemi felt jealousy so fierce it hurt
like longing. She never desired to be a housewife, but to share her life with
someone forever, to have a family... those were wishes she never expressed but
were never so strong as now. Suddenly, she wanted to continue on her search.

"I'm twenty-four," Moemi said, with a smile, to ease Usage's discomfort.
"And he is my age."

The squeal of the kettle interrupted them, and Usagi ran to turn it off
before it woke her sleeping baby in the next room. She stretched on her tip-
toes to get two tea-bags and cups from the cabinet and shakily lifted the tea
pot to pour the tea into the stylish floral ceramic cups. Moemi swore she
heard a sigh of relief as Usagi placed the kettle on the stove again, and passed
the mug of frequent liquid to Moemi without spilling a drop.

Sitting on the sofa with Moemi, Usagi said, "Tell me about him."

Moemi blinked, then smile. "He was my friend, when I was growing up. But
we... lost touch when we turned 16. I heard he went to Tokyo."

Usagi stared open-mouthed at this beautiful, but obviously insane, woman
before her. "A name, and Tokyo? That's *all* you have to go by after eight
years?"

Moemi nodded ruefully.

Biting a fingernail slightly, Usagi turned, seeming deep in thought, a
little frown of worry across her forehead.

"Be right back," she said, placing her teacup on the coffee table and
padding away on the carpet.

Moemi leaned back into the sofa. No, this wasn't the right Chiba Mamoru.
The man she knew would never, ever be married. Not this young. Not to someone
as open and sweet as 'Chiba-Tsukino Usagi.'

She remembered walking along the path outside the children's home, between
trees and plants overgrown with weeds. The garden was unloved and under-cared
for. Just like the children. Which was probably why they loved it so much.

It housed many bug hunts, games of rather violent tag and tackle, and
many, many fights. No, the orphanage was never a friendly place.

But she remembered walking there, and always coming across Mamoru, sitting
under a tree, or curling his thin body to find solace under a large bush or
shrub. He wasn't hiding... people like Chiba Mamoru didn't hide. Moemi asked
him once, what he was doing out there. The 13-year-old gave her a look that
was years too old for his face, "I'm knitting a sweater."

Since that day, Moemi always learned this was one of many times to leave
Mamoru alone.

She figured he had gone their to find some sort of peace. Once or twice
she tried it, but her body was already too curvy to hide under a bush
comfortably. And besides that, the branches gave her a freaky feeling of being
trapped, claustrophobic. The same sort of feeling would come and lock around
her heart when she realized later that year that she was falling in love with
her dark-haired friend.


"Moemi-san?" Usagi's voice was gentle, but Moemi's eyes snapped open
immediately.

"Gomen," she said quickly, "I wasn't asleep I..."

But her impromptu hostess was smiling forgivingly. "It's alright." Her
small hands untwisted and Moemi saw what the young woman was holding, a silver
picture frame, which she trust into Moemi's hands, her expression serious again.

Still trying to figure out why Usagi's blue eyes held a bit of worry deep
beneath the kindness, Moemi didn't realize what she was looking until she had
stared at the picture in her hands for a few long moments.

It was a wedding portrait, and a beautiful one. The woman now standing
beside her was decked out in white, lace, and roses, her blue eyes sparkling
with joy out of the frame. "You look so beautiful," Moemi said, but Usagi just
shook her head, tapping a slim finger on the glass over the photograph of the
man.

"Is that him?" Usagi asked.

Usagi's Mamoru was grinning up at the camera, his eyes alight. Eyes that
were too-blue against his light olive skin and dark black hair. His face was
shaped slightly oval, eyes wide spaced and slightly slanted, the smile splitting
his features so brightly, though, that Moemi couldn't be sure he even resembled
the boy she grew up with. The fact that he was smiling with such an open,
loving look, though, told her the truth.

"Iie," she said, giving Usagi a rueful smile, "I doubt it."

Usagi frowned, nodding. Moemi wondered about the relief deep hidden in
the lightness of her hosts' eyes. "Gomen nasai," she said, "you are the same
age, so I thought.. maybe..."

Then she turned, "I'm going to see if I can find anything less recent."
Moemi got up, too, wanting to give Usagi back the photograph but stopped at the
slightly open door into a darkened room at the end of the hallway.

Feeling like a criminal, but unable to stop herself, Moemi slipped through
the door and walked slowly to the crib in the center of the room. Light from
the closed shades fell across the baby's face and Moemi couldn't help sighing.
The little girl was adorable. Blonde-red curls framed her round face, her eyes
were closed but her lashes were black and thick. One tiny hand curled around a
soft stuffed bunny rabbit.

Lucky, loved little baby.

Moemi felt a burning behind her eyes, felt a welling in her heart. 'May
you always be happy' she thought the sleeping child.

Before Usagi could see her snooping, Moemi slipped back out through the
door and waiting for Usagi to return from her bedroom. When she did, she
carried something in her hands.

"This was all I could find." A wooden frame was handed to Moemi, and the
older girl flipped it over.

"That's late 1992. He's eighteen."

Usagi was younger, much younger in this picture. Bubbly, grinning at the
camera, the same style in her blonde locks as it was today when she answered the
door. The man beside her wasn't smiling as widely as bouncing, peace-sign
giving girl beside him, but he was smiling. Slightly. His eyes, larger than in
the wedding picture, his face, rounder, younger, his hair falling slightly into
his eyes as if he had avoided getting a haircut. Again.

"Mamoru..." Moemi whispered soundlessly.

1992.

Two years after he ran away. Two years after...



Moemi had asked about his dreams. Innocently enough, but her heart was
ramming in her chest. If he asked her about her dreams, she promised herself
to tell him the truth. That her dreams were only to be with him. Forever.

He was sitting, as he had recently taken to doing, on his window sill, his
arm resting on his knee, his face gazing up into the evening sky.

It was a dreamy pose, especially for Mamoru, so Moemi asked the 16-year-
old what he was dreaming about. Startling a little, he looked at her. Had she
ever noticed how cold and detached those heavenly eyes were? Mamoru shrugged in
response to her question, and returned to watching the moon rise, the stars come
out one by one.

"What are your dreams, Mamoru-kun?" Moemi was in her mid-teens, now used
to being told of her beauty, being begged by boys, being able to talk her way
into and out of everything with a blink of her lovely green eyes. It made sense
that the best looking boy in the place would eventually gain interest in her.
Didn't it?

There was a long time passed before he answered, "I want to be free."

Moemi was silent. Free? "Of this place?" she had asked. They all called
the children's home a 'place'.

He didn't answer. Years later she would look back at the conversation as
a major sign of his running away to Tokyo. But sometimes, late at night,
remembering how the kindness shone through his eyes beneath the coldness, she
wondered if that wasn't what he meant at all. Maybe he didn't only want to
leave the orphanage, but to leave his detached, lonely state behind as well.

And that was what she thought that night, and that's when she threw her
arms around him, the first time she ever got up the courage to do something like
that.

He was warm. So much warmer than she'd thought he'd be. His hair tickled her
face... it was soft. Like black silk.

"I love you, Chiba Mamoru."

Moemi never remembered if she had even said that out loud, or just
screamed it in her heart.

Mamoru pulled away, gently, and smiled at her, kindness in his smile,
frigidness in his gaze.

"Gomen nasai, Moemi-san," he said, softly, and left the room.

She saw him again. Once or twice that week, only briefly. The night
before he left, she had asked him if his dreams ever included love.

His answer turned out to be the last words she ever heard from him.

"I don't think I can believe in love."

His voice had broken, his eyes were so sad. The ice had melted into
almost-tears, if Chiba Mamoru could ever cry.

She concluded his dreams did include love. But she knew when he answered
her, he wasn't lying.


Two years later, this picture was taken. His eyes were kind. They were
subdued, but they were light. That's when he started to believe.

Six years later, he married. His eyes, still too damn blue, glowed with a
life all their own.

That's when his dream finally came true.


Moemi lifted her eyes to Usagi's. The young mother's eyes were shiny, her
voice hoarse. "It's him, isn't it?"

For a minute Moemi only saw Usagi as a swirl of color. Gold, pink, blue.
Beautiful, open, kind, loving.

Always, this was Mamoru's dream. Moemi could never, ever come close. The
boy she knew... the person she fell in love with was empty, with a void that
begged to be filled. She loved him as a lonely, painfilled little boy, longed
to be the dream that lurked deep in his eyes. But he had found someone else,
who melted his heart and resolve. And it was not her, could never have been her.

Slowly, she turned the picture over, pressing the frame face down into
Usagi's ring-adorned left hand.

"Iie," Moemi said, firmly, "It's not him."

The tea was cold by then. So she left.

"Good luck," Usagi said softly from the doorway.

Moemi just looked at her, a small smile across her face. 'He is happy',
she thought, 'now I should make myself so to.'

"Thank you."

The door shut behind her.

Usagi leaned against the door, her eyes filled with a shimmering layer of
tears.

Shaking her head, she walked slowly into ChibiUsa's room and lifted her
child to her, wrapping her arms tightly around the whimpering baby. Clutching
her daughter in her arms, Usagi lowered her head to rest on ChibiUsa's sweet
baby-smelling curls. ChibiUsa's tiny hands pulled and curled around her
mother's hair, pulling a few glittering strands into her mouth, and Usagi let
her, not moving for a long, long time.



That night, Usagi picked at her food, watching ChibiUsa sleep beside her
in the baby carrier. Mamoru asked her gently what was wrong, and for a long
moment blue eyes searched his.
"Did you know a Kasuga Moemi when you were a child?"

Her husband was silent for a few seconds, blue eyes thoughtful. "Hai," he
said after a while. For a moment he started to continue, then stopped, shook
his head.

"She was here today," Usagi whispered.

His eyes met hers, and she could see the questions burning in them. For a
moment she shook her head, she'd answer them later. Now, she just wanted to
know...

"I knew her from the children's home," he said, "She was my friend... in a
way."

"And?" Usagi prompted, trying for the forth time to grasp a rather
slippery clear noodle with her chopsticks.

"I haven't thought about her since I left the orphanage, but..."

Usagi met his eyes, waiting.

"Now, I wonder if she ever found her dreams," he admitted.

"You think she didn't?" Usagi looked so sad, Mamoru reached around the
table and pulled her into his embrace. She shut her eyes, leaning her head on
his warm shoulder. His hair slightly tickled her face, he needed a haircut
again.

"That place wasn't exactly a breeding ground for healthy dreams," he
murmured, brushing some wayward strands of blonde off Usagi's face, "but I think
there is hope."

Usagi looked up at him from her place in his arms. Slowly, he lowered his
head to hers and kissed her, slowly, softly. It was a long moment before Mamoru
pulled back and looked at his wife and daughter.

"After all, I found mine."~
E-mail me.

Or I'll send a huge wheel of cheese (courtesy of Jayhyun) to run you over while
I laugh at you.
"Ha ha! Look at the loser covered in cheese!" I will say. "If only she/he had
e-mailed me!"

* ChibiUsa's full name: Usagi Small Lady Serenity. ^^;; I think it might be
Usagi "Small Lady" Serenity, Small Lady being a nickname... but you never know
with Naoko...