Queen of the Thousand Years

I. The cold space between moments
After the lovemaking

When she emerges into the mist, it is a blessing. Not because it happened, though that is part of it. Not because of the guilt, though that goes without saying. It is because she doesn't know how she will survive reliving it, when time turns upon itself and begins again.

But she knows that she has no choice. His hands on her body were familiar, in that vague way that she sometimes recognizes things she did or felt in another time and place. Pluto is the walking example of compromise, as much a slave to time as anyone else; more indentured to it than most, in fact.

She leans heavily against the stone arch of the Time Gate, and its solid weight supports her against the pain of letting go. Her arms lift from her sides, and wrap around herself in a cold imitation of an embrace. The Time Key falls to the floor, clatters loudly in the oppressive, heavy silence. He will rise from the bed, she knows, a handsome, kind, doomed young man. The pretty dark woman will have gone, led from his bedchambers by a tactful guard.

She stares pitilessly at the Time Key, resting on the floor that isn't a floor, wishing, for a moment only, that it had shattered into a million pieces upon impact. There is only a floor, Pluto knows, because she is used to something firm beneath her feet. As she is the guardian, the realm in which the gate is housed bends to her command. In a way, it is an echo of her expectations. She has only ever known its gloom which soaks up all light, its mist which absorbs all sounds. But there is no floor. There isn't even a proper gate. The mist doesn't dampen her hair or obscure her vision, because she knows it is an illusion. Often, she wonders what other guardians have seen, if there have been other guardians besides her.

She is nowhere, leaning against nothing. Insofar as nothing can be said to exist. Insofar as the human mind can wrap itself around the idea of a tear in the fabric of time, and a solitary soldier whose task is to stand guard at a gate which does not exist for ever and ever. Perhaps while she is here, exempt from the death knell of that most primordial of all clocks, she does not exist, either, and the thought is a comfort.

She has already lived the future in which he will forget that pretty dark woman for the blonde princess. For their love, for his love, worlds will fall. And she?

She is eternal. She knows her duty better than most. She is not permitted to forget.

II. Stopping time
To sleep beside him for a thousand years

He lies frozen against her like permafrost against the flesh of a colder land. She is free to watch him, to memorize him with unabashed interest, and she doesn't hesitate to take advantage of the kind of freedom she has never really known. As the sweat cools, her hands ghost reverently over his body. She breathes him for as long as she wants, and lies beside him in the still, sterile quiet, sleeping as she has never slept.

As she has never been permitted to sleep. These years, after all, are stolen. The seduction is complete, and now that time stands still and it is safe to wear her own face, she closes her eyes and wishes the disguise away.

Having witnessed the rise and fall of tyrants and saints, watched ancient seas dry into nothing, seen civilizations turn to rubble, she still has never seen anything as profound as the rise and fall of his bare chest as he sleeps. She sleeps with him, beside him, closer than air, closer than dreams. Eats, and bathes, and wanders through the halls of his palace, and rules their silent kingdom. Serenity's is not the only kingdom that will stand (has stood?) for a thousand years; Pluto's rule at Endymion's side is long and peaceful, also.

But after a millennium beside her sleeping prince, she finds that she can no longer remember his smile. Pluto, who knows a few things about tragedy, understands that this is a tragedy both moral and aesthetic. Besides the fact that she has committed so many grievous wrongs, of course, she misses the living light in his eyes. She can't not see him in motion. Reaching for the disguise pen, which has rested on the elaborately carved bedside table, she invokes the power, and becomes his pretty peasant girl, once more.

Surely, she thinks desperately, a thousand years is long enough.

Slowly he stirs, and stretches out the kinks from his muscles, so very long since the last moment he drew breath.

To him, Pluto knows, this is only a tomorrow.

She imagines the way she must look to him: a sweet, simple peasant girl, with bare shoulders and a tremulous, embarrassed grin. Just another Earth girl. Just another roll in the hay for the privileged golden prince, who will forget all the girls who came before when he meets the one destiny created just for him.

A thousand years, and it changes nothing.

After a moment, he adopts the alarmed smile of a man who is not used to the sight of a woman's tears.

"Why are you crying?" he murmurs warmly, his hand lifting to her cheek.

III. Selene and Endymion
Which stories to tell, and who has the right to tell them

Poets and philosophers have told the story for centuries. Their love has long appealed to the artistic mind, after all. The myth is as familiar to her as her own skin, as known to her as her reflection in the mirror.

Selene, the goddess of the moon, grew pale and cold in her celestial bed, and gazed down upon the warm, vibrant mortals, sleeping their strange human sleep. Some said she so loved the way Endymion's eyelashes lay upon his face, the way his chest rose and fell as he slept, that she implored Zeus to give him to her forever. Whatever the source of her desire, the king of the gods answered her cries, and Endymion, shepherd in some stories, prince or astronomer in others, slept for all eternity, beneath the adoring gaze of the moon goddess who loved him.

Lesser known is the reality of the story, of the poison which swept (will sweep? is sweeping?) the people of Earth, infecting their minds with hatred of the Moon Kingdom and its ruler. Of the queen's sacrifice: death's long sleep, in exchange for a shorter sleep for her daughter and the golden prince she loved.

And, that night which stretched the primordial clock to its breaking point? That night, which may as well never have existed, for what can exist outside the natural flow of time? The least known of all.

It is better that way, she repeats, fevered, frenzied. Princes need princesses, not soldiers. And hers isn't the story with the fairytale ending.

She will consider herself lucky if her story has an ending, at all.

IV. Leaving the Time Gate
To see him with new eyes

Having been, in a manner, his queen, she cannot say what it is that grants her the ability to deny the pain, deep in her chest, that strikes her upon her first sight of him. What strange gift of time's apathy that permits a whispered, anguished utterance to remain imprisoned behind her teeth. But time is a snake that eats its own tail; it knows how to deny pain. Anyway, he does not know her in this time.

She is obliged to remain at her post, and does so with a strange sense of completion, as if it is all she has ever known. Her time as a child, coming of age in the Silver Millennium's most distant kingdom, is lost to the ravaged memory of a woman who cannot recall her mother's laugh or her father's embrace. Assuming she had parents, of course; assuming that she is not a figment of the Time Gate's imagination.

Which may well be. When at the gate, she does not age, feels no hunger, lives inside a body which desires nothing. Until she, perusing the Time Stream, sees him.

Beautiful, isn't he? The prince of the Golden Kingdom, and he is well-suited to it: golden skin stretched over a fine physique, white pearls that flash when he smiles. Golden seas in his blue eyes. Noble of spirit, strong of body: he is beautiful as all princes, in that time of fairytales and moon goddesses, are beautiful. But he is beautiful in his own way, too, a man whose beauty brought about the downfall of the moon.

Above all things Pluto knows that he, like the rest of humanity, is a walking corpse queuing up for the grave. Human lives are so short, and death is so long.

V. Traveling through time
A pretty Earth girl

Her hair is the deep brown of freshly turned earth, her eyes the cool green of a shadowed spring pool. The disguise pen is warm, grasped in a white-knuckled grip.

Disguise magic, a chaotic, deceptive, intuitive thing. She does wonder, of course, why the magic did not choose silvery-blonde hair, or eyes of a need-you, deep blue shade, something to appeal to his tastes. If nothing else, though, she will blend in, in a way that blonde hair, or even green-shot black hair, won't.

A pretty Earth girl, like any other, who waits with a lingering gaze by the gates as the prince and his four guardians exit the castle, is bound to catch someone's eye. Especially those same guardians, whose job it is to provide companionship and camaraderie to the golden son. What better camaraderie is there, between five privileged, carefree best friends, than that which arises from teasing the only one any of the women have eyes for?

That they contrive to find the pretty brunette, and gift her to the prince after a long, exhausting day of learning kingship at his father's side, is nothing out of the ordinary.

When a guard, picked for his discretion, leads her from his room, and she looks back over her shoulder, clutching her arms around herself as if she'll never be warm again, the guard pretends not to notice.

That she begins to tremble, and that her pretty green eyes well up with bitter tears, is perhaps a little unusual. The prince is kind, and generous, and loving, but such a reaction is extreme, from what the guard has witnessed.

Full of remorse, the guard pats her awkwardly on the back. Most of his adult life has been spent in service to the royal family. He believes he understands her trembling, her tears: a brush with greatness is always jarring, for common folk like them, no matter how intimate, no matter how brief. Commends her, silently, on the willpower it must take to keep them from falling. "There, there," he murmurs self-consciously. "He loved you for a night. Surely that is better than nothing?"

VI. Refusing the offer
To feel the weight of the ages

She enters the queen's private parlor already knowing what Serenity wants, having already lived it, knowing that somewhere, a long time ago, she hasn't lived it, yet. But she has. She will live it, over and over, on a loop. If time ever goes off the rails, her worst nightmare is this: she will live the moment like a scratching record, repeated forever.

Since Serenity gave her acceptance, and it occurred so far in the past, and Pluto knows it has happened because she remembers him, it has always happened, hasn't it? She has lived with the memory for eons. The weight of knowledge is evident behind Serenity's calm gaze, too.

But no one, save Pluto herself, knows that it is his destiny to lie frozen at her side, for a thousand secret years.

Time is winding down. The battery will die, eventually: entropy and chaos, the heat death of the universe. When she lives this cycle for the last time, when time loses the energy to carry her into the next forever, she does not know how she will confront the knowing look in Princess Serenity's eyes, in Tsukino Usagi's innocent gaze, as past knowledge and future experience become unbound from the linear flow of time, as it grounds to a halt.

Pluto, so rigid, who has had ten thousand eternities to form a hardline adherence to her duty and to her allegiance. (But if it has already happened, and will happen again, then isn't it meant to be, too?)

Neo-Queen Serenity is nothing if not selfless. A charitable leader. A good friend. She has lain beside her prince for a thousand years now, too. She senses Pluto's desire as if it is her own. And it is, in a way.

It is eternal, that desire; though, all things considered, it may never have existed.

"I know that you love him," she says, with the infinite kindness of one who knows she has won. Nothing that comes to pass will overturn the tides of fate. She knows she has the soldier in front of her to thank for that security, the ability to be so generous. "What is yours is mine—has always been."

When Serenity makes the offer, Pluto refuses it flatly, a line she has rehearsed a thousand times over. This time, the words are worn thin, like a piece of fabric stretched too harshly over an unyielding surface.

It never existed, but it is eternal.