Here is the thing: it disturbs him when she's quiet.

The little blonde is obnoxiously loud. She wails, she yells, she flails her arms to the heavens and emotes. He does not know her well, but he knows this much.

But he catches her in quiet contemplations with her friends. They're packed tightly into a booth, so closely that it's almost impossible to tell where each one ends and the other begins. They laugh, blonde hairs tangling with black tangling with brunette resting on blue, and when he hasn't quite had enough caffeine, he thinks the effect is rather like a single five-headed entity.

She's squished in the middle, seated squarely in his peripherals as he sips on a coffee at the counter. Their talk grows quiet and she toys with the pink and gold brooch fastened to the front of her school uniform.

Her eyes turn down and away and his heart jumps. The smile she's pasted on when she looks up is false.

And how he knows that, he just can't say.

It's absurd, he knows, that those moments when she persists in a delusion of another reality—one in which she's a princess (on the moon, of all things) and he, her prince—should have managed to endear her to him.

But they have. Her crayon drawings are charming, and she'd persisted with them more than once, even after he'd sprinted away from her that first time. He wonders what it's like to be someone like that. Someone who can believe in magic and love and past lives and soulmates.

(Here is the thing that he allows himself to admit, only once, and only after several beers one night with Motoki: he wants, almost desperately, to believe it's true.)

When she bumps (crashes) into him one morning, she nearly bounces off of him and instinct has him catching her elbow before conscious thought takes hold and he drops it, his hand lame at his side.

The tired sigh she releases twists something in him.

"Late again, Odango?" He's missing something in his tone: the snark, the bite that lives there.

It's just… he's sort of happy to see her.

"You know me, Mamoru." She laughs and looks up at him. Her smile is open and real and without pretense. For an instant, their eyes meet and his breath catches and there's a second of connection where he thinks…

Maybe he does.

(Here is the thing that worries him, that drives him to insomnia when he lets himself dwell on it: he can't shake the feeling that maybe she knows him too.)

If he'd had any idea, that first night when he'd teased her at the site of an asteroid crash, he thinks he probably would have stayed away from her.

Because the thing about Usagi, he's discovering is that, when she decides she cares, she sticks. Not like a glue, but like a superglue.

And he's not precisely… used to it. It's disconcerting, especially when he realizes that he likes it. He likes the unrestrained joy in her, her way of looking up at him as though the virtual monsters he vanquishes are real. She laughs and she gasps and she clings and he rolls his eyes in response. But the glares he shoots Seijuurou when he tries to not-so-subtly compete are anything but virtual.

He doesn't lend any credence to her delusions that they share a past, but he won't deny that he's not discouraging her. She ignores most of his taunts and he lets her into his home, contorts his face beside hers just to make baby Manami laugh. She blushes when her friends call them a family and he pretends he's not trying to listen when the blonde with the bow her hair whispers something to Usagi and, just for an instant, fixes him with a deadened stare.

Natsumi comes later—and that's also when he saves the worry for how, exactly, she knows his address. His patience unravels quickly with her and he's not one whit sorry when she storms out.

Until Usagi stands in front of him, mouth parted and looking horribly, horribly betrayed.

She's speaking, and it's without the energy of her usual speeches. No arms thrown about wildly, just soft words about how maybe it's Natsumi he prefers. Maybe she's just a bother.

She turns to leave and his hand shoots out to grasp her wrist.

She is superglue, but he's not exactly looking for an industrial solvent.

(Here's the thing, the reason he would have stayed away: he's afraid that if he becomes as glued to her, she'll only pry herself loose)

Truth be told, by the time she and her friends insert themselves in his play, he may be as disappointed as she is that she wasn't cast as Snow White. But it doesn't exactly go as planned and before he's knocked out by some weird monster thing that must be related to that one from the virtual reality theatre. He's told by a smirking Minako that the Sailor Senshi rescued them and he can't figure out why he feels like she's mocking him.

And not too soon after that comes the day when he thinks Usagi's sick. Knows she's sick. She must be. Because her smile doesn't touch her eyes and again, she's too quiet. Only this time, it isn't that strange sadness that's stolen her voice, it's the purple bruises beneath her eyes. And it terrifies him in the weirdest way, but she bounces back quickly enough the next day.

When he hears Natsumi's sick, he assumes she's been struck with the same malady; something going around their school maybe. And because he wouldn't let himself with Usagi, he brings her flowers to help her feel better, entirely too amused when Usagi masks her jealousy badly and follows him upstairs.

He'll curse himself for his petty jealousy later, that part of him that thinks it's better that he should be out on this balcony with Seijuurou than Usagi because suddenly she's screaming and every nerve in him is on fire inside of him and he's shoving past Seijouurou, shoving his arms off of him to find her.

And oh. Oh, he finds her.

With a tree wrapped around her, squeezing the life from her like a boa constrictor. She's glowing and screaming, but the volume on those screams grows fainter and fainter and she wilts in the branches.

And this, this is exactly what he's been talking about, he thinks in a flash of fury. He hates when she's quiet because Usagi is not quiet. She not stillness, not silence, not death. She is an orchestra. She is cymbals crashing together and violas singing and she is crescendos and music and noise and life.

He has no plan, but he rushes to her anyway.

The next moments are a blur. There's a blinding moment when he's actually glad that the tree lifts him up, a strange conviction in him that if only he can actually reach her hand this time (this time?) it will turn out all right.

But he's tossed aside and then he's screaming too. And then it's worried and furious Senshi bursting onto the scene. And it's a light show and it's—

Usagi is Sailor Moon.

And it's declarations of love in the heat of the battle and her throwing herself bodily across him, quietly defiant and stop it, Odango.

He hears her declare that she's give her life for his and—no. Just, no. He's not flattered, he's angry, because how dare she even think to leave him here. Another blast is leveled at them and it's his turn now. He's determined and he will protect her and he's leaping in front of her, not sorry at all if only it will keep her around, keep the orchestra playing a little longer.

Things go mercifully black for a while after that.

When he wakes, his head is full. He saves the smaller contemplations such as "oh, so that's why her friends look at me that way" and "exactly which part of my subconscious prefers a turban to something useful like armor?" for later because Usagi is Sailor Moon, of course she's Sailor Moon, how did he…?

She's unconscious though and he shakes her awake, somehow sure this time (this time!) that they've both managed to make it through.

Her smile tired when she wakes, but it reaches far past her eyes, reaches up into his and he is grinning back.

Here's the thing: he's still afraid that she'll pry herself loose, but less so now that she's made it clear how "ridiculous, Mamo-chan" she finds that idea.

Here is the thing: he sometimes thinks she knows him better than she knows himself.

Here is the thing: even knowing their story is true, he still wonders what it would be like to be the kind of person who sees the good in it before anything else.

…

No, this is the thing: he loves it when she's loud. When she's vocal, and expressive, and crying to the skies about a plushie, for God's sake.

But curled into him, warm and softly breathing and belonging to each other… he loves that too.