AN: Many thanks to RadiantBeam for betaing this for me!

Disclaimer: I own no rights to anything related to Sailor Moon. My name is not Naoko Takeuchi.

Breaking

She showed one face to the world and another to her team. Once, only the world face existed. In the beginning, the differences were not more than specks. A bit more attention given to the team when the world would be shown their expected, bubbly, oblivious blonde, for instance. The differences were slow to grow, but soon that half an ear that listened to the team and duty lectures became an entire ear and occasionally a bit of concentration given when enough incentive was given.

Unfortunately, that changed all too quickly. Just as unfortunately, the changes made were irreversible.

How did this happen? What caused this bubbly blonde to give full attention to duty and her team and show the mask of who she had once been to the world? To put it simply, she very nearly died.

And realized it.

She'd nearly died before, several times, starting at a young age when she'd gotten herself hospitalized by not thinking things through, such as what would happen if she didn't fly when she leapt out of that tree. But what crossing that thin line would mean had never fully hit her, until now.

There had been many trips to the hospital as a small child from her daredevil activities, trips that never had much effect on her. Yes, she was frightened when seeing her mother cry when she woke up after some of her worst accidents, but it had never deterred her from the next interesting, dangerous trick. Doctors' warnings fell on deaf ears. She was a child, had never lost anyone, and did not understand just how fragile her life and body were in the greater scheme of things. Why should she realize her own mortality?

It took monsters to teach her, things that should never have existed. But by then, she was already neck-deep in Hell and the only way out was to continue to fight against what had nearly killed her and would continue to do so again and again and again. Once she realized her own mortality, she had it shoved in her face over and over again, nearly every night. It was no wonder that her two faces began to show, began to veer down drastically different paths.

How do you keep from breaking?

She screamed at her cat, the companion that had been there from the beginning, the one who would not take offense at this show of nerves and violent emotion. She alternated indulging too much in an old love for comics and avoiding them altogether. She cried, her team her only comfort. She flirted outrageously, trying to lose herself in such a stereotypical teenage action.

She had many ways of trying to deal with the stress. Some worked, others did not.

In the end, really, it was her masks, her team, and time that saved her. Things were finally getting to be too much, too soon, too fast. It was so hard to keep up her mask for the world when she could barely remember having ever been that child. The mask was cracking, beginning to shatter, and her team could only help her keep it up some of the time. Her family was more than a little worried about her now, despite what she might've claimed before everything began.

Her team kept her grounded, kept her from losing herself in the "what-if"s, the failures, the victories that took too long and cost so much. Her team had long since been the family she could share anything with, the family that knew who she was. They reminded her of who and what she was, the seriousness of their missions—and their destiny—and the fun they'd managed to have throughout the years. Her team reminded her of who she was, breathing life into her when she worried about becoming simply a shell of a human being.

It was time that had the final hand in her salvation, allowing her to cast aside her false face for good and show the world who she truly was and always had been. She had been splitting too much, too far, and her team knew it. They knew if they waited much longer, she would be broken, the stress too much to bear. If they waited, they would be permanently weakened, unable to count on her to lead them, on her power to boost their own, to protect everything that had ever mattered.

The ten of them stood on a hilltop, ready to take their places in this new era, this era that they ruled and could openly protect. They had decided to reveal themselves as they took this final step, as the formalities of the transfer of power were completed. Though battle-hardened and strangers to nearly all that knew them, none of them wished the pain of a missing family member on those that had raised them and had once known them best.

She took a deep breath, trying to calm the irrational nerves—since when had she been nervous about people watching her?—as she ignored the crowd at the bottom of the hill who were wondering why their new rulers wanted them to see a group of young women and a man. She noticed the looks from her teammates and nodded, showing that she was ready. They would do this together. With a single phrase, she banished her world face and healed the cracks in her psyche.

"VENUS CRYSTAL POWER, MAKE-UP!"