Part III - Midnight to Dawnbreak
I was kneeling before Mercury’s funereal mound when the ground began to shake again. This time, though, there were no senshi left to bury under the frozen crust. Without a doubt, Beryl, Moon, or possibly both had a hand in the strange, tearing vibrations emanating from the epicenter of the Dark Kingdom. Vaguely, I wondered if Princess Serenity had died again. When her mother the queen had passed, the moon had all but ripped itself apart. Would the earth now do the same?
Before I could ponder what the effects of floating around in space amid the ruins of the earth would be on my already questionable sanity, the tremors began again. This time, they were in my immediate vicinity – and within seconds, Mercury’s icy tomb split open.
I watched disbelievingly as she rose slowly from the dark opening, looking almost exactly as she had looked when they first set foot on D-point. Only she wasn’t returned in the flesh but in the spirit, and she was no more solid than I was.
She could see me now. I saw the translucent blue of her eyes shining under scarcely more corporeal eyelashes, and the recognition in them as they focused on me. I always thought I was right to stop believing in miracles.
“Zoisite!”
The time I had to hope filled a space shorter than the span of two heartbeats. Fate was cruel enough to add horror to the fury and scorn I had felt the last time we had come face to face, for these three emotions came through strongly in the intonation of her lovely voice. She still saw only the monster and none of the memories.
Doomed by the all too human desire to persevere and a longstanding habit of overestimating my own efficacy, I gave in to the insurmountable urge to try and reach her just once.
“Ami, believe me, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not who I was, I’m –” I stopped then. I wasn’t sure who I was and wasn’t anymore.
“No. You are evil, and you are a liar. You will not keep me from her!”
“I’m not trying to – I need you to listen to me –”
“Stay away from me. Stay away from me!” she cried, panicked now. Before I could respond, the defiance, written most clearly in the angry furrow of her brow, vanished. Her expression smoothed again, and a certain radiance radiated outwards with the calm. Her princess’s need had the power to transcend my own.
Admittedly, the fissures in my heart were trivial compared to those which were racing across D-point. My situation was far from life-threatening.
It wasn’t the first time I hadn’t come first in her life. It wasn’t the first time I had felt entirely defeated before I asked. When I had made my impossible demands on her in the Silver Millennium, my fear was that my wish would never be granted. This time, I dreaded that I would never have the chance to ask her again.
Why is Serenity the only one in the world who can have this effect on her?
Serenity is her princess, and you are only her past lover, you might have told me. If I loved her enough to put her before Endymion, does the fault lie with me? Does it mean that we were never meant to be together?
The world was about to end, you might have argued. This is very true. But if I had known that sometime, somewhere, I would be her world and she mine, I would wait five hundred millennia for her. Why does this dream of mine seem so impossible? It is only as far away as absolution.
Unlike Nephrite, I have never been able to predict the future. But all the shades of the past are mine to read, and they tell me the distance between me and my desire is infinite.
Serenity may be the only person who can convey such peace of mind on Ami, but I had seen Ami like this once before, in the Silver Millennium. She had been playing her harp alone in her room, and I had snuck into her parlor and seen her reflection in the mirror she practiced in front of. She used it to check the positioning of her fingers on the strings.
For the scant minutes before she sensed my presence, she had never seemed so far away from me before. Her eyes flickered rapidly beneath lowered lids, a contrast to the way her graceful fingers seemed to be wandering across the strings to drench the room in liquid notes. Everything else but her eyes and fingers had been absolutely still. For her, there had been nothing but the glory of the sound and the continuation of it. I wondered if it was possible to keep pouring yourself into the notes until there was nothing left of you physically, and the stream of music flew out the window with your soul to go where it would.
She had seemed practically ethereal to me; I had felt completely nonexistent. That day, her eyes had flown open to meet mine in the mirror, and her fingers had stilled, silencing the music.
In the present time, I hovered before her, mortally afraid of the reaction I would provoke in her. I couldn’t bear to walk beside her and not have her see me, but I couldn’t bear to see the expression on her face when she looked at me. After all, there is music, and there is Serenity, and then, there is me.
I was spared the reinforcement of the realization that out of all these things that had once been an integral part of her life, I was the one that didn’t belong, that had caused her the most pain both in the past and now. She spoke in a faraway voice, so softly that if we had stood on the banks of the quietest babbling brook, its murmurings would have drowned her out.
“I’m coming. Hold on, Serenity. We’ll all be there with you soon.” She disappeared in a flash of blue-tinged light, and at the periphery of my vision, I saw three other colored beams join it: green, red, and orange.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
A shadow falls over me, deeper and thicker than the others. If I have no form, how is it that I can feel that I am weeping through every pore of my being? If I have no form, why am I hunched on the ground and wishing that I would fall asleep in this deathly cold and be sent into oblivion? I peer up at the intruder, wanting to be left alone. His identity makes me let out a ragged croak. “My prince…”
He looks down at me, glowing gold around the edges.
“Are you dead as well?”
He smiles now, and it is a warmer smile than it was in the past. “The battle is over, Zoisite. This battle, at least. We’ll need you in the war.”
“I cannot serve you anymore, Endymion. I have no power, no…” No will to do anything if my future is empty.
“Come back with me.” It sounds more like an offer than a command.
The tawny glow around him no longer hurts my eyes. “I cannot.” It hurts to hope. Sometimes, you start believing something you thought was completely impossible is attainable. When you realize again that you can’t have it, it kills you even more than accepting reality the first time around does.
“I betrayed you, and her, and you died, and…”
“Well, I’m very much alive now, aren’t I?”
I stare at him in disbelief.
Endymion sighs, sounding somewhat impatient. “I don’t believe in redemption without price, Zoisite. Come fight with us in the war, on the side your heart and mind are sworn to.”
“I cannot serve you as I did before, Endymion. I put and I will put Ami before you.” I can hardly believe my audacity. And yet, arguing with an illusion cannot do me much harm, can it?
He smirks at me, an expression which makes my jaw drop open in surprise rather than annoyance. No daydream of mine would do such a thing. Would it?
“I would choose Usako over you, but fortunately, I don’t have to.” More seriously, he adds, “I don’t believe in the system that was established during the Silver Millennium. I think it caused more harm than good, and it was an unstable and unsustainable situation. There will be times in battle when you and Ami will be harmed in defense of your own lives, but also for Serenity and me, because we pose the greatest hope for the future. I want it to be a choice rather than a duty. But the rest of the time, you deserve to live your lives for yourselves. Otherwise, it won’t be a life worth living.
"I’m going to have a second chance, Zoisite. I too know how it feels to be brainwashed by Metallia now. It’s time to go back and make amends. Do you really want to stay here?” He flings out an armored arm, gesturing at the barren white expanse all around us.
“I… I have Jadeite for company here.” And the youma limbs and the bodies of the Doom and Gloom Girls.
“Wrong. You haven’t spoken to him since before you died, and I’m taking him with me. Why is it taking you so damn long to agree, Zoisite? I want to be reborn already.”
I scuff my metaphysical boot against the frozen crust. “This is all I know, Endymion. I know this wasteland, and I know my misery, and I know my guilt. I know how Ami feels about me now, and I have no faith in my ability to change her mind.”
Endymion scowls at me, and I feel two years old again. Perhaps five. Jadeite was the one getting into scrapes right out of the cradle. I bided my time. “I should give you a good kick in the behind, only my foot would pass through it right now.”
I can only look back at him, uncaring if all the sorrow shows on my face. “She despises me, Endymion.”
“She needs you,” he says more gently. “I need you, but she may need you more. Do you want to watch her meet Urawa Ryo again, and perhaps convince herself that she loves him? Do you want her to find knights who are less worthy of her, who won’t be able to catch her when she falls?”
“I didn’t even try when she did,” I whisper.
His eyes are drilling through me, boring into my skull so I cannot look away. “That fault lies with your faith and not with hers. So next time, stick out your arms and put those muscles to some use if they haven’t atrophied already. If you don’t catch her, at least be there so she can yell at you for it.”
“Ami doesn’t yell.” Does she? The idea is strangely appealing.
“She does in this life,” he counters. “There’s nothing here for you, Zoisite. Come back with me.”
I look at his outstretched hand warily.
“Be selfless and do it for her sake, for my sake, and for the future. Be selfish and do it for your own. I can’t promise you it’ll be love at first sight. I can’t even promise you it’ll happen – but I can put a new page on top of all the other mistakes so you can make new ones in the revision.”
Slowly, I place my hand in his and let him pull me upwards.
“All right. But if you’re lying about this or turn out to be some crazed imagining of mine, I’ll curse you until the end of eternity.”
He grins at me as D-point melts away to be replaced by a new place, one I don’t recognize. “Not to worry. My money’s on you, Zoisite. But it had better take less than five hundred millennia.”
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