Moving On
Title: Moving On
Description: "Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be." -Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks
A/N: It's been a long time since I've written a drabble or posted something, really! Definitely a sure sign of writer's block -- the Ficathon entry was dastardly difficult for me to write this year. This piece is somewhat in dialogue with Last Rebirth. Line borrowed from a popular work of fiction which I don't own...
Moving On
She really should have seen it coming. It blindsides her, like Jupiter’s punch during morning practice, which left a bruise under her uniform. But she is so tired, eaten up with worry for Serenity. And she has never been very good at dealing with people. She thought he understood that.
“I’m leaving,” he tells her.
She sits back in her chair, thinking about all the hundreds of times she has heard him say it before. Leaving for work, leaving the city, leaving his wife, even. There were dozens of other women he had fallen in love with and married before he remembered the past.
She thought she had learned to accustom herself to it. She even thought she had gotten used to him saying he was leaving her. They always found each other in each new reincarnation. It didn’t mean they had figured out how to make it work.
“When will we see you again?” she asks politely, as if she were a put-upon housewife addressing an erratic great-uncle-by-marriage who always dropped by at the most inconvenient times.
“You won’t,” he says curtly.
Her fingers are icy, and she places her hands on the desk to steady herself, seeking the reassuring blandness of the blotter against her palms. “Why are you always walking away from me?”
She expects a sharp retort, something defensive and accusatory that will make his eyes flame as brightly as his hair with incandescent rage. Instead, he is as dispassionate as if he were explaining how the monorail worked. More so, really. “It never works out between us.”
“What will Endymion do without you?” She knows she really means, “What will I do without you?” But she doesn’t know if he knows it.
He pauses in the doorway, and the vaguest hint of his old ironic smile returns. “I would try to be original, but with us, nothing ever is. My dear, I don't give a damn.”
*****
“Ami, I need-” Serenity stops short at the bewildered expression on her senshi’s face, then rushes towards her in a white cloud of crinkled skirts. As always, the scent of roses precedes her into the room, and it will be the last thing to leave the room.
She relays the news quietly in the circle of Serenity’s arms, still sitting at her desk.
“If he just gave up on you like that, he didn’t really love you.”
“I know,” she says, her dry but throbbing eyes fixed on the cloudless sky outside the window as Serenity strokes her hair.
“I love you. I’ll never leave you,” Serenity promises, her breath caressing her ear like the wind moving through the willow trees.
“I know,” she repeats and at last, weeps.