Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The Future Falls
Usagi is dying. Usagi is dying in his arms. Her blood is staining his clothes, running across his flesh.
This couldn’t be real! Her body weighs nothing. Her body weighs everything. Her ribs move under his palm the wrong number of times per breath, and then they stop moving, and then they crack inward like a clay vessel collapsing on a wheel, very slowly, very wet. He has hands. The hands are useless. The hands are doing nothing.
“Mamo,” she says. The wrong voice. Her voice full of something he does not want to know the name of.
The sky above her is wrong. Not black. Worse. A black moon hangs where the moon should hang, ringed in a corona of bruise-purple light, emitting nothing. The tide does not move under it. The moon hangs and witnesses.
Her hand comes up to his face. Like she’s done a hundred thousand times before, and she’ll never do it again. He’s touched that hand, memorized the calluses, knows the shape of every knuckle and the small white scar on her second finger from a kitchen knife when she was nine.
Her hand lingers, but it’s cold. It’s cold, and it doesn’t smell like her, and the weight is wrong and it can’t be Serenity’s hand. But it is, except she’s dying. That is so much worse than a stranger’s hand.
The hand crumbles. Not into dust. Into a thing that was never a hand. His cheek is touched by something that has stopped having edges. He cannot pull away. His head will not turn.
“You’re killing me,” she says. Without reproach. Her voice is full of love.
That’s the horror. Her voice is full of love.
The ground beneath them is glass. The glass fissures in slow spirals. Under the glass, the earth is not earth.
Something speaks.
It does not speak with a voice. It speaks with the absence of voice. It speaks the way pressure speaks when it changes inside a closed room, against the eardrum, before the door slams.
LEAVE HER, the not-voice says.
The black moon pulses. Once.
IF YOU LOVE HER, LEAVE HER.
He cannot. His hands are full of the wrong number of her ribs. His hands have always been full of her. From before he had hands.
LEAVE HER, OR SHE DIES.
She is already dying.
THIS IS NOTHING. THIS IS BEFORE.
He can see the black moon through her now. Through her chest, through the soft place under her clavicle, the corona of bruise-purple visible through what should be opaque. She is dimming the way a lamp dims when something is wrong with the wiring of the whole building. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
A child cries somewhere. Pink hair. Pink as old blood. He does not know how he has the information about the pink hair. He has not met any pink-haired child.
LEAVE HER, the not-voice says, AND SHE LIVES.
STAY WITH HER, AND THIS.
A pulse of the black moon. The corona widens.
THIS. AND WORSE. AND WORSE. AND WORSE.
Usagi smiles up at him through the dimming. The smile is the one she gives him after she’s done something foolish, after she’s tripped on a curb or said the wrong word in English class, the one that braces for him to laugh at her.
“It’s okay, Mamo,” she says. “You don’t have to stay.”
He came awake with a sound coming out of him that was not language.
The clock read 4:17. The sheets were soaked through. He could taste copper at the back of his tongue, and his teeth were not bleeding.
He stayed flat on his back. The words kept repeating themselves on the inside of his skull. Leave her or she dies. Leave her or she dies. They repeated in a voice that was almost his and was wearing his voice the way a coat fits a man it was not made for.
His hand was at his throat. His other hand was reaching for the empty side of the bed.
He had not slept beside anyone in this apartment in his life. He pulled the hand back.
The refrigerator hummed. A car went by. A train, very far off, sounded its long sad note.
He put his face in his hands and sat with the dread until it climbed up his spine vertebra by vertebra and seated itself in the small space where it had been taking up residence for weeks.
He did not eat breakfast. He couldn’t eat breakfast. Not with the taste of blood on his tongue and the sound of her voice in his head and the dust of her body in his eyes.
All he could do was stand in front of the bathroom mirror and shave with a hand that didn’t entirely belong to him. The face the mirror gave back to him was the face of a man who had not slept and was not pretending to. The bruise-purple around his eyes was the wrong color. Or it was the right color, and that was worse.
He could end it today.
The sentence assembled itself in his head while he ran a razor along his jaw. He could meet her at the park at four like they had planned, and he could sit her down on a bench, and he could say it in a calm voice. We can’t see each other anymore. He had rehearsed it. He could speak the rehearsal aloud right now into the mirror, and the rehearsal would sound believable.
The rehearsal failed at her face. Every rehearsal failed at her face. The rehearsal failed at the part where she would not, would never, would never in her life accept it without making him explain, and there was no explanation he could give her. He could not put the black moon in her mouth. He could not make her carry what he was carrying.
He had eight hours until four o’clock. Eight hours to practice what he’d say. To decide the right words to express the truth that haunted his dreams.
First school, lectures that didn’t touch the dread in his chest. Faces of his friends who smiled and asked stupid questions. Yet, all he could see was her face as she died. Next, he shelved books in a small used shop in Jinbocho.
The owner had stopped trying to make conversation with him weeks ago, for which he was now grateful. The smell of old paper was a kind of medicine. He stood between the stacks with his hand flat against a row of spines and let the static build under his sternum, the way it built before lightning, when the air begins to remember it has weight.
By noon the static had not lifted. By one he was unable to swallow the tea he had bought from the vending machine on the corner. By two he could no longer stand still inside his own skin.
He went to the park.
He was three hours early.
The bench was wet from a rain he had walked through without remembering the rain.
He stood near it with his hand on the back of it and let the wet soak into his palm. A woman pushed a stroller along the path. An old man fed bread to a pigeon that didn’t particularly want bread. A pair of high school students shared a melon-pan and pretended very hard not to be on a date. The cherry trees were past their bloom. A small pink confetti of dead petals scattered across the path each time the wind moved.
He sat. He took the book out of his bag. He opened it to page 142.
He had been on page 142 of this book for a week.
He could not, on penalty of death, have told a stranger what page 142 said. The sentences arrived in his eyes and left without leaving anything behind. He kept his eyes on the page until he could no longer pretend he was reading. He closed the book and set it on the bench beside him. He put his elbows on his knees and let the dread sit with him, since it would not leave.
He counted his breath.
He got to thirty before he lost the count.
He started again.
She arrived in a half-run, the way she always arrived, her bag swinging off one shoulder and a pencil somehow lodged in her hair. He picked her out from the end of the path. He picked her out before she found him.
If he was just sitting here doing nothing she’d question him, so quickly he picked up the book again. Page 142.
The afternoon light came through the cherry branches and stripped her into pieces. Bright on the gold of her hair. Bright on the white of her collar. Dark in the hollow of her throat. She was nineteen for one moment that wasn’t quite real. Twelve, the next. The woman she would never be permitted to be.
She found him. Her whole face changed.
“MAMO!”
“You’re late, did you get detention again?”
He stood up too fast. He had been sitting too long.
She reached him at full speed and did not slow down. She kissed him on the cheek and did not pause for breath. “I’m so sorry, Mamo, I’m so so so so soooooooo sorry! Hey! Why did you assume that I got detention?!”
“Isn’t that why you’re always late?”
“No! Well, maybe, but not today!”
The corner of his mouth did something he did not give it permission to do. He let it.
“I was on a special mission! Yeah, a super-secret mission, but I succeeded! Look!” She rummaged through her bag. “I have something for you. I have something. Look. I got it fixed just for you. I had to ask the silver crystal to help, but it worked!”
She produced the pocket watch. The light caught it perfectly, the gold shimmered brightly as if the world was good.
The ticking sound curled around the tight fibers of his chest and tried to ease the darkness inside. But ultimately, it failed. But it was working again. The symbol of their love from Silver Millennium, his compass before he found her, and it was working again.
She held it out in both her palms.
“See?” she said. “Listen. Listen close. It’s ticking again. Like normal.”
He took it. The metal was warm from her hands.
It ticked.
He had not heard it tick in since she first presented it to him, as the love they couldn’t share. The sound came up out of the silver casing into his palm with the small specific weight a heartbeat has when you put your hand on a chest. Tick. Tick. Tick.
His throat closed around something.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. Anxiously. As if she were afraid he would not like it. As if she had not just done a thing for him she could not possibly have understood the size of. “It was hard to find a watch maker who’d fix it, but I did. Then, I polished it. I shouldn’t have. The watchmaker said I shouldn’t have, but I did. Is it okay? It’s okay, right?”
“It’s okay.”
His own voice was a stranger’s voice. The pocket watch ticked in his palm, each second a small, merciless reminder that love had never been enough to save them.
Leave her or she dies.
He pulled her in.
He kissed her the way a man kisses a woman he is about to lose.
His hand was at her cheek before he had given his hand instructions. His mouth was on her mouth before either of them had had a chance to brace. She made a small sound against his lips. Not displeasure. She tasted like strawberry candy and toothpaste, like something bright and ordinary he had not earned and had been earning for a thousand years anyway.
The pocket watch ticked between them. In his other hand. Against her back.
Behind his eyes the black moon pulsed.
He kissed her harder. He did not have the right to. He did it anyway. The dread was in his throat and her mouth was the only thing that quieted it. Her hands had come up to his lapel and her fingers were curled into the fabric and she was kissing him back the way she did everything in her life: all-in, no hedging, no part of her held back for safekeeping.
It’s okay, Mamo. You don’t have to stay.
He pressed his forehead against hers. He could not stand it. He pressed.
A car honked somewhere on a street he could not place.
The light above them changed.
The air went wrong.
The cherry branches above them moved against a wind that was not the wind. The light came down. Something was screaming above them and it was not a person. It was the sound air makes when it is being displaced by something that should not be moving through it.
He lifted his head. He had two degrees of motion before the sky was full of something falling, and his arms tightened around her, and a small body the wrong size for the sound it had just made arrived at velocity against the bench and against Usagi and against him.
The world went white at the edges of his vision.
The impact landed half on Usagi and half on the bench. He took the rest on his shoulder. Pain went up his arm and into his neck and stayed there.
Usagi made a sound that was not a word.
“Ow,” said the small thing.
“OW,” said Usagi. “OW. Mamo, owww. Mamo, my neck. My neck is BROKEN. Mamo, my NECK is BROKEN, owwwww.”
“Your neck isn’t broken.”
“My NECK is BROKEN.”
“You can speak. Your neck is not broken if you can speak.”
“MAMO!”
The pocket watch was on the path. Open. Catching the light. He hoped to god it had not stopped ticking.
The small thing was clutching his shirt.
Pink hair.
Pink as cherry blossoms on a wet road. Pink as old blood. Two small odango on the top of her head, more carefully done than Usagi’s, longer, tighter, the kind of odango a child might do herself in a hurry in a dark room with shaking fingers. A school uniform that was almost a Japanese school uniform and almost not. The shade of red was wrong. The collar was wrong. The fabric had never been washed by a human being’s hands.
She was maybe five. Maybe six. Her eyes were the color of a wound that had not quite healed.
He had been dreaming this child.
The knowledge sat in him whole. He had not arrived at it. The crying child the dreams had given him in pieces had been this child. This actual specific child. She had landed on his girlfriend out of the sky and he had been dreaming her for weeks.
The air around her shimmered. Not the way heat shimmered off a road. The other direction. Cold, rising out of her, as if she had brought a different temperature of time with her and the temperature was leaking.
“Hey! Little girl, what the hell are you doing? Who are you?” Usagi was already pushing up onto her hands. Already angled toward the girl.
The child stared at her.
The child stared at her the way a person stares at the painting they have only ever encountered in reproductions.
“My name is Usagi,” the girl said.
“Usagi? My name is Usagi. I’m the original Usagi Tsukino! You’re copying me! The hairstyle, that’s MY signature hairstyle. Undo them! That’s my hair!”
“Please,” the girl sneered. “Those buns look about as good as a moldy pork bun.”
“Moldy! Pork bun!! Say that to my face punk!”
“You look like moldy pork buns!”
“HEY! You don’t get to insult me like this!”
“You’re Usagi Tsukino, right?”
Usagi paled. “Yes.”
The child reached into her uniform pocket.
The gun came out.
Small. Too small. The proportions wrong for any weapon Mamoru had ever handled, and he had handled some. Pearl handle. Silver barrel that caught the afternoon light wetly, like wet metal that had never been wet. Could have passed for a toy from a country that did not yet exist.
She was holding it crooked. Both hands. She did not actually know how to fire it.
That was not a comfort.
She was pointing it at Usagi.
Usagi went very still in the specific way Usagi went still when something was happening that her brain had not yet caught up to. Her hands were still half-raised toward the child. Her mouth was still open from the last sentence she had been forming.
“The Silver Crystal,” the child said. Her voice cracked on Crystal. “Give it to me.”
The pocket watch on the path ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Leave her or she dies.
Mamoru could not move. His body would not obey him. The corona around the black moon was pulsing behind his eyes again. The dream had been telling him this for weeks. The dream had been showing him this exact angle of light and this exact small shaking hand and the exact specific stillness in Usagi’s mouth and he had not listened. The watch ticked. The watch ticked. The watch ticked.
He took the step.
BANG.