A/N: Yeah, so, a new series of sorts from me! Don't worry, loves, still working on the R/J and M/N fics of the Magnolias In Bloom/Laws Of Attraction story arc. Eventually I'll get around to them. But... yes. Here's something new and somewhat experimental, so hopefully y'all like!

Disclaimer: Same ol' same ol'.

You're still searching for me in every woman.

I.

The air is hot and smells sharply of salt and drying seaweed and carefully pitched wood. Five-year-old Kareem Al-Hassan can barely sit still, taking in all the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of being on Abee's boat for the first time. His father is humming, an old Moroccan folk song that is both cheerful and sad, and underneath a small fez and a cap of straight black hair, Kareem's face is all wide-eyed fascination as Abee pulls up the nets, dripping with water and bits of kelp, breaking the surface of the blue water and sending drops splashing sun-glossed gold as he pulls up the squirming, silver-skinned fish.

Something about the colour of the golden sun reflecting in the water draws his eye almost more than the struggling, flopping fishes that are his family's livelihood, and he doesn't know why.

II.

"Monsieur Pierre!" The ten-year-old boy smiles and dashes up to a boat being anchored at the dock. Kareem does not spend most of his days by the water any more as he did in his earlier childhood, but it is summer, and the crusty old French sailor chuckles gruffly as the boy approaches.

"Your père says that you are at the top of your class in both mathematics and languages," Pierre Benoit's skin is almost as dark as an Arab's from long days at sea, but his hair is a pale straw blond. Underneath his bushy moustache, his smile is even wider than Kareem's. "I don't suppose you told your classmates who your real French teacher is?"

"They don't understand," Kareem says with that mixture of levity and gravitas that characterizes young, particularly precocious children, then pulled something out of his pocket to show the old sea salt. "Look! Abee bought me glasses. They are to help me read."

The glasses are cheap, with plain plastic frames, but when Kareem puts them on, they just seem to magnify his inquisitive eyes. The sailor, one of many who have known the fisherman's son for years, chuckles again and digs through his knapsack. "I brought you something from Italy."

"Another picture?" Kareem perks up. All the men here, who have the opportunity to travel farther than his own father ever will, bring him back postcards from distant shores. Pierre usually has the best ones.

The boy falls silent when the glossy sheet of thin cardboard is placed in his hands, and feels a chill down his spine. It is a painting, likely a famous one, with girls throwing rose petals and dancing in a lush spring garden, but his gaze is immediately drawn to the figure right in the center, a carnelian cape cascading down her back, her blue eyes tranquil and all-too-knowing under a coronet of golden hair.

"This is a famous painting called Primavera, by an artist named Botticelli who lived hundreds of years ago. The cold wind of March pursues the nymph of the Spring even as Flora covers the land with flowers and the Graces dance in the sunlight. And watching over and rejoicing as the world wakes up from its winter slumber, Venus presides over the scene."

Venus. Something about the name echoes in his mind like a gunshot. Behind his brand-new glasses, if Pierre could see them, his eyes are suddenly haunted and too-old.

And yet, this postcard he looks at more often than any of the others.

III.

London is a completely different world than Morocco, and it takes him more than a month to get used to the fog and the chilly weather. But that is a small price to pay for the opportunity to study at the prestigious London School of Economics. For a young man whose family had lived by the sweat of their brow catching fish for the last five generations, whose parents had hoarded a week's earnings to travel to Casablanca to procure him a passport to travel to another country, it is a prospect more amazing than words can express.

Kareem is on scholarship, studying International Relations, and throws himself into his work with verve and single-minded sincerity. Aside from a twice-a-week sojourn to a local cafe for a hot chocolate (a pleasant surprise in the otherwise-bland world of English cuisine) and a weekly phone call to his mother, he does not socialize on a regular basis. The classes are interesting and challenging, the competition fierce, and a part of him that has only recently been given voice is coldly, almost viciously determined to finish first against all odds.

But he decides, about three months after his arrival, to accept the invitation of a few classmates to catch a film at the cinema. They agree on an arthouse film from France, in the original language with English subtitles, with deep philosophical subtexts and renowned actors, and locate good seats in the theatre.

Kareem's mind is still mostly on the paper for his Sociology class as the previews start playing, but he looks up in time to see a blonde girl with eyes like blue lightning behind a blood-red domino mask vault, catlike, from the top of a three-story building to tackle a brutish thug lurking in the alley. "Code Name: Sailor V!" the voiceover speaks over the gritty, pulsing beat of rock music. "Coming to theatres next July."

"What a bunch of mindless self-indulgence," One of his female classmates, a honey-blonde with sharp features and raggedly-bitten nails scoffs. "It's bound to be another insipid comic book adaptation with too many explosions and a plot as flimsy as a sheet of tissue paper. I am SO glad we are not watching THAT."

Kareem barely hears her through the roaring that fills his mind like a freight train, and doesn't remember any of the film they watch. For a moment, through time and space and wire-frame glasses and a red mask and a silver screen, his eyes meet the blue ones of the girl on the screen and something wondrous and terrible takes hold. The girl is beautiful, beguiling, but something about her unsettles and terrifies him as much as though the words "Run away" are etched over and over again on her skin.

From that day, he finds himself searching, without even thinking about it, for her if-only-he-knew-who in every blonde he sees.

From that night, the dreams begin.

IV.

He finishes his studies with honours several years later and is almost immediately offered a job as an interpreter in New York City, and he accepts the work, another new world, another country.

But even as the airplane flies across the ocean and he sleeps fitfully in a seat too small for his tall form, visions of blonde hair and blue eyes and golden chains follow and flare like a flashbomb through his subconscious.

V.

Kareem calls his mother once a week, dutifully, regardless of his location. It is a habit wrought of a promise and he is methodical to a fault. It is his third year in New York City, and the job pays more than adequately. His apartment a sleek, pristine loft, the car he drives is a black Mercedes Benz with leather seats and spotlessly shiny windows. And he knows for a fact that the money that he sends back to his parents could buy her a much better telephone, one that does not sound scratchy with static.

He tells her so when he calls her. It is bright and early, a sunny Saturday morning in Morocco, and he knows that his father will already be out in the boat, casting the nets. In Manhattan, it is not so early, not so sunny. He had worked until almost midnight before falling into a fitful sleep, only to waken at four in the morning, vivid images of sharp blue eyes and sun-kissed hair and laughter that turns into a jarring scream flashing behind his eyelids. After an hour of tossing and turning, he had picked up the phone.

"I can hear you just fine, habibi," his mother tells him, and her voice is still the same as it has always been. "I do not need to spend your hard-earned money on a new piece of machinery."

He makes more than the cost of a phone in the space of half an hour, but she brushes away this factoid as though it is nothing, and he sighs in frustration. Instead, she asks him if he is happy, and if he is eating well, and if the next time that he calls, he will tell her of finding a good girl with a gentle temperament who would be a good mother to his children.

She is his mother, and he loves her devotedly, but he can't find the words to tell even her about the face that haunts his dreams and nightmares, the blue-eyed blonde whose identity is ever a mystery, who probably does not have a gentle temperament at all.

He tells no one, and throws himself whole-heartedly into his work. The rich and powerful begin to know his name, and he is invited to several glamourous affairs. He accepts- it would be foolish not to, and moreover, distractions are welcome in the face of illogical flights of fancy. The striking, redheaded woman who introduces herself as the governor's personal assistant compliments him on his skills, and listens with flattering interest to the story of his beginnings. Something about her gives him an uneasy feeling, though not the same sort as the dream-girl blonde.

He steps outside, waits for the valet to pull up with his car, and his head is spinning though he barely touched the champagne. As he takes a seat on a bench underneath the glaring white moon, his mind fills with the horrifying image of an Arabian scimitar slicing through a strange yellow-and-white bodysuit, blood splattering and spraying everywhere as she stares up at him with bleak blue eyes. Time slows into a crawl, stretching like a rubber band just before it breaks, and the girl falls-falls-falls in an arc of red blood and yellow hair.

It is the last thing he sees.

VI.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

The noise, or perhaps something else, wakes him. The walls are white and narrow, and the bed is just this side of uncomfortable. There is no sound aside from the beeping and his own breathing, and it takes a minute for him to realize that he's in a hospital room.

The beeping comes from the machine hooked up to his body and monitors his heart.

"You're awake." The sound of a woman's voice- smooth and low, with a subtle accent that even he cannot place- has him sitting up, reaching for a pair of glasses that he knows to be his resting on a nightstand. There is a faint, phantom pain in his chest and an IV drips something into his right arm, but he focuses on the woman. She is beautiful- tall and stately, clad in a sophisticated black pantsuit and high heels. Her dark hair falls sleek down her back and she wears no jewelry aside from a garnet and silver lapel pin in the shape of an antique key, and he can't place her at all. She affords him a smile that he instinctively knows is rare. "My name is Trista Mason. What do you remember?"

He remembers his name, his address. He remembers a dinner party and a phone call to his mother. He remembers recurrent dreams of a girl who is never quite within reach, a musical laugh, the scent of exotic flowers that he cannot name drifting through soft blonde hair. He remembers a blurry image of a man with black hair and archaic armour. Nothing is clear; each memory bleeds into the next like chalk drawings in the rain, and he has no idea why he is in the hospital.

His voice is scratchy from disuse and his words fall incoherently, without any sense, but she nods in acceptance, opens a small notepad and jots down a few words.

"How do you feel?"

There is an ache in his chest, and his legs feel heavy, as though they have not been used in a very long time. Gingerly, he rubs a spot over his heart that feels as though it had been ripped through with a blade, and then sees something else in his peripheral vision.

His hair, which had been short, precisely cut and black the last morning he woke up, is long enough to fall past his shoulder-blades. And it is the white of freshly fallen snow.

But before he can even ask about that, or about the day-by-day calendar on the wall which reads "April 24th, 2011" (a whole four years and six-or-so months after the last time he'd called his mother), the face of the blonde flickers back to life behind his eyelids, and a crushing sense of guilt swoops down upon him like a flood. Mute and terrified, he turns to the woman who calls herself Trista Mason, because no one else is around to help or to explain.

She reaches over, and places one surprisingly warm hand over his. "You're alive. We were worried for a while that you would not make it. That, at least, is a start. You can fix things later."

The disorientation and panic and the hole in his memories prevents him from noticing that she knows he needs to fix something and wondering at her knowledge. She pushes the button on the remote by his bed to summon a nurse, and leaves silently.

VII.

"Steady now. You've been asleep for a very long time, and it will be a while before your muscles recover."

The woman called Trista Mason has taken to visiting him a few times a week, generally when the doctors and nurses are off seeing others. Though she has no answers for him, something about her is reassuring. She is present when he discovers the scars on his chest, and when he lies awake at night, plagued by guilt that he cannot understand and the phantom pain of being stabbed. She brings him his personal effects and several years' worth of mail, and lets him open the parcels and envelopes with postage stamps from Morocco in sympathetic, discreet silence.

She listens with the sort of understanding that doesn't try to comfort with platitudes as he rambles like a madman about blonde hair and bloody scimitars and unfinished business, and encourages him to heal, physically.

Today he is taking his first step in five years, and it is in the middle of the night. Certainly the physical therapist will be around in the morning to do this properly, but he has gone too long in this state of inaction. She sits, watching him with her fathomless burgundy eyes, but does not offer a hand as he shakily stands. One foot in front of the other, and he's already shaky with exhaustion.

"The first step is always the hardest," she pours him a glass of water and motions for him to take a seat back on his bed. "It will be easier now."

"Perhaps," Kareem murmurs between gulps of water. "I still feel so lost. I don't even know if I have a job any more."

"I daresay that your former employers will be happy to have you back, though you shall not have to worry about it quite yet." She slides forth a manila envelope before refilling his glass. "Your investments paid off. You are quite comfortably well-off, not that you weren't before."

He gapes at the statements and figures printed on the sheets of paper, and she stands. "I think you will have many options in regards to what you wish to do with your life after you leave from here, Kareem Al-Hassan. Choose well."

He listens to the click of her high heeled shoes down the hallway until the sound fades into silence. And when he falls asleep, for the first time since he awoke in a hospital bed, he doesn't see visions of blood and death.

One step leads to two to three to dozens. He makes numerous phone calls and arranges to sell his loft. He quits his job, sells his Mercedes, and buys a plane ticket to Casablanca. It is illogical, unwise, probably insane, but when he is given a clean bill of health at last, he walks out of his hospital room with his head held high, silvery hair combed back to brush his shoulders.

He stops at the reception desk; it has been a month since he last saw Trista Mason. He had barely noticed her absence during the frenetic days of physical therapy and the complete rearrangement of his life and affairs, but now he feels vaguely as though he should leave a message, one of thanks.

The desk clerk looks up with a perky smile that falters when she hears his request, and then frowns as she types something into her computer.

"We don't have a Trista Mason employed in this hospital in any capacity, sir, nor any social workers by that name affiliated with us. I'm not sure I know anyone bearing the description you gave, though I might be wrong."

Kareem's protests die on the tip of his tongue. Illogical things no longer surprise him any more.

VIII.

His town is much as he remembered it, with its narrow streets and noisy buyers and sellers haggling over produce and fish and live chickens and household goods on market day. He had not informed anyone of his arrival, and the taxi from Casablanca's airport only takes him so far. Several give the tall, stern-looking man with hair too pale for his colouring and his age a wide berth as he walks the rest of the way, out of place and solitary in his western-style suit.

There are boats, more of the modern motorized variety than the traditional fishing vessels of his youth, anchored to the docks or sailing within view on the sea. He sees a familiar figure, unloading crates, and walks forward.

Old Pierre Benoit's hair is now more gray than blond, but his eyes are still shrewd, with the corners deeply creased from laughter and sun, and the arms that push a dolly of wooden crates down a ramp are still wiry and strong. His eyes meet Kareem's, and after a moment, the leathery, sun-bronzed face breaks into a wide grin.

"Still top of your class in languages, mon ami?" Pierre asks, clapping Kareem heartily on the back. "Your father tells us about how well you have done for yourself, travelling the world and working for the most powerful people in America." The Frenchman gestures towards his boat, a sleeker and larger model than the one Kareem remembers from his childhood. "He loaned me the money you sent him one year to buy a new boat after the other was destroyed in a storm, but he never buys a bigger one for himself. Still, he and your mother must be pleased to see you home after such a long time."

Kareem drops his gaze, his hair falling forward like untimely white frost in his peripheral vision. "I've not spoken to them in a long time."

"Mais Oui. Your father told me," Pierre says without an iota of surprise. "A lady from a hospital contacted them to let them know that you had collapsed, overwork perhaps, with some physical trauma. But it was about three months ago that she called again to let them know that you were recovering, and that they would hear from you soon." The old sea salt surveys the younger man for several seconds. "Pah, it is not worth gambling your health or your happiness for the sake of ambition, my young friend. But it is good that you are well and have returned."

Kareem does not ask who the woman is; he does not have to. His purpose for returning comes back to the forefront of his mind, and he clears his throat. "Well, I daresay that I will be here for a while. I should go to my parents'."

Pierre nods, squinting against the sunlight before expelling his breath in a long puff. "Before you go, I have something for you."

Kareem watches as the old sailor digs through his battered knapsack and extracts a stack of postcards, some yellowed with age, capturing the most beautiful places in the world in all their glory. The sun sets over the Golden Gate Bridge in streaks of gold-and-rose like a beautiful woman's flowing hair and delicate skin. Graceful maidens support the roof and beams of a pristine Greek temple. A delicate patch of plum blossoms bloom amidst bitter winter snows and adversity in an Oriental garden. Dazzling birds of paradise fly over lush greenery in a tropical rain forest. Kareem knows without telling that Pierre has saved them throughout the years, and the pack of thin cardboard photographs means more to him than all the money he has ever made in his life.

"I will keep these, and treasure them, and teach other children about these places the way you have taught me," he tells the old sailor quietly. There is a sting in his eyes like tears, but he can't bring himself to feel ashamed.

Pierre smiles, and his eyes, too, are damp. "Go surprise your parents."

IX.

The village leader is one of his former classmates, and seems to be slightly intimidated by his presence and the almost mythical wealth he is purported to have attained in the US. Selwan Nazari is slightly mystified as to why Kareem would give it all up, but upon hearing the latter's thoughts, is more than willing to get onboard with the plans, and gives Kareem an "office"- really a chipped old desk with a telephone in a room in his house, to use at his disposal. There is no air conditioning and the wood of the desk is splintery with age, but Kareem feels more fulfillment with the work he does there more than any he'd ever done in more plush surroundings.

With Selwan's help, they work fast. The first of the pipes arrive within a week. After a month, the villagers become accustomed to the sight of men in denims setting up irrigation and running water through their lands and homes. After three, most of the work is done, and it is no longer strange and miraculous to the children that turning a knob over a faucet causes water to flow out.

Kareem tours the schools that he went to in his youth, tearing down dilapidated buildings and putting up new ones, buying desks and chalkboards and books. He even teaches a class or two himself in the mornings, and makes good on his promise to Pierre to teach little children about the places and worlds beyond their own.

In the afternoons, he helps his father clean the freshly-caught fish and fillet it for the market, and in the evenings, he sands lumber and pitches planks to help repair any number of old fishing boats, including their own. His hands become rough and strong from the work and in his dreams, the girl is smiling again, as though in approval. Her face is so achingly beautiful that it almost hurts to look at her, but in all this time, in all his travels, he has not found her yet.

But in the very least, he has some semblance of peace. One year after he was given a clean bill of health by the hospital in New York, he eats fish tagine with preserved lemons and green olives and pours mint tea for his mother. She has still not purchased a new telephone, but she smiles at him with her wise eyes and runs her gentle fingers over his still-white hair.

"I am proud of you, habibi."

He knows that she speaks more of the work he has done in the past year than any of the accolades and prestige he might have earned in the past. His work has attracted the attention of several politicians and news agencies, but he always lets Selwan take the spotlight and does not sit for any interviews. There are other, bigger things than fame or glory.

X.

The next day, as he steps out of one of the school buildings he's renovated, he pauses at the side of the road as a Jeep comes to a stop, windows down, as the schoolchildren cross the street. He has one moment to register that the woman at the wheel- dark-haired, stately, clad in black- looks familiar, before he hears it.

The song on the radio could be any popular tune sung by any female singer with a sweet voice, and he doesn't pay much mind to such things. But the words reach him-

-"Here comes the feeling that you thought you'd forgotten.
Sometimes we're broken and we don't know why.
I keep dreaming, and I want to be
Your favourite hello and your hardest goodbye." -

The Jeep drives past, out of earshot, and the song pokes a hole in the dam of memories that are-yet-are-not his.

He does not sleep that night, does not dream. Names come to him then- Prince Endymion of Elysium, Lady Morrigan of Castle Magellan on Venus. Queen Beryl of the Dark Kingdom. Kunzite. Tokyo.

Tokyo.

He bids his parents farewell that morning, and they are not as surprised as he would have expected. His mother holds him tight, embracing him as though he were still a child small enough to bury his face in her stomach, then pulls back and smiles.

"When will you come back to tell me that you have found a nice girl?"

"When she forgives me, Ommi." He replies, and then leaves for Casablanca again.

Perhaps the fates are smiling upon him now. The taxi driver has his radio station turned onto some top 40's countdown, and the announcer is just calling out a name as he disembarks.

"Tokyo idol Minako Aino, once upon a time known to the world as the teenage star who played Sailor V, brings us her third single- Your Hardest Goodbye. Taking the top spot for the first time this week..."

He arrives at the airport and buys a one-way ticket.

XI.

"Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. The local time is now four thirty-two, and we will be arriving in Tokyo shortly. Please fasten your seatbelts and return your seats and tray tables to their regular upright positions. Flight attendants, prepare for descent."

Tokyo is a busy city with a crowded airport, and Kareem hasn't the faintest idea where to go, or how to find her. He finally has a name to go with the face, a memory that is not just flashes of ghostly images, but he is not the sort to go off in pursuit of celebrities.

But he will figure it out. This is where his life has been headed all along, and he squares his shoulder, picks up his carry-on bag. Everyone disembarks from the plane and he walks out with all the other people as the familiar sounds of airports around the world surround him- pleasant-voiced announcers on the PA, multilingual chatter, the growling slide of luggage wheels on buffed floors. He has his eyes cast skyward, reading the signs posted up high in order to find out where to go through customs and baggage claim, and doesn't see or hear her until she's close.

The cheerful clack of high-heeled sandals on uncarpeted floor. The smell of exotic flowers in her hair. The girl- young woman, really- wears a bright yellow sundress the colour of ripe lemons and a red bow in her sunny hair. And really, it isn't complicated at all. He has known her in his dreams and memories all his life. Time and death and betrayal had separated them before, but the love had always been waiting.

He drops his bag, unmindful of the crowd or the flashbulbs of enterprising paparazzi, and catches her in his arms. "I've found you," he murmurs, and meets her kiss halfway.

It is as though all the jumbled puzzle pieces of his life-this one and the last one and perhaps any number of others before that- are finally in place. Her lips are sweet and warm under his, her hair soft and golden like the sunlight as he twines it through his fingers. When they finally pull apart, her eyes shine with unshed tears.

"I wasn't sure that you would ever come."

"I've been headed here all my life," he replies, his forehead pressed against hers, his hands cupping her face. She's even more beautiful than he dreamed, up close and soft and strong in his arms. "Forgive me."

She smiles radiantly and touches his face, adjusts his glasses minutely. "I have, long ago."

And maybe it is as easy as that.

XII.

She lives in a small but comfortable apartment decorated with brightly coloured rugs and knicknacks, with chiffony yellow curtains that make the rooms seem constantly awash with sunshine, but the only thing he notices at first is that it's on the third floor, after carrying her up three flights of stairs. They stop every few steps to kiss, and really, he doesn't do this sort of thing.

But this isn't a fling, and when he carries her across the threshold, it feels like coming home. Her fingers are already busy with the buttons of his shirt and they barely manage to undress between kisses. The first time is fast and frenzied, on the living room rug, but the second time is slower and sweeter and they make it to her bed, and afterwards, she traces her fingers over the scars on his chest as she rests her head on his shoulder.

"They're from the sword- when your princess stabbed my prince," he tells her. "Our stones blocked the blade from his heart, and splintered. Maybe that is what freed us in the end."

She nods and presses her lips to the faint white line over his chest, and he strokes his fingers through the length of her hair. Both of them are slightly sweaty, and goosebumps arise on her skin in the cooling air. He pulls the blankets over her and smiles faintly.

"I'll call the others, maybe tomorrow," she murmurs drowsily. Under the blankets, her fingers link with his. "Mamoru will be so glad that you're here. Pluto let us know that you were reborn, and he has missed his friends, I think."

He is slightly nervous at the prospect, but that, too, is a contemplation for later. For now, forever, there is her. He has a lot of lost time to make up for.