Last Rebirth
Title: Last Rebirth
Description: What more is there to say, when everything else has been said?
A/N: Crystal Tokyo in the far future, an idea that's been rattling around for awhile.
“Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.”
-William Maxwell
“He who lives happiest has forgotten most.”
-Robert Anton Wilson
She dragged her fingers along the park bench, relishing the feel of scarred wood and flaking paint against her skin. The bench was the last of its kind in the city, maybe in the entire world, and it was a change she had helped bring about in one of her many past lives. Perhaps the most important past life, the one that had given rise to Crystal Tokyo, even if she did not recall many happy moments from that era.
The breeze rustled through her hair as a voice she knew better than the one she used now whispered in her mind, No one ever promised we would be happy.
A bittersweet smile flitted across her lips. That was Venus for you, always ready with some idea of how you should be running your life even though she had never quite figured out how to manage her own. To be fair, she was usually right, but that didn’t make her advice any easier to take.
Her fingers tightened their grip, and the ancient wood, gray under green, let out a mild groan of reproach. Some things never changed - like Venus being the leader, their senshi powers, and the color of her eyes. She wondered how much of that was a blessing, and how much was a curse.
Looking back across the endless span of years gave her a bizarre sense of vertigo, as if all along she had been slowly draining away into the sands of the past while her consciousness was forced to exist in the present. No matter what Pluto said, there was never any future. And yet, it seemed like so much of their time, so many of their lives, had been spent in an effort to secure the future. It reminded her of a ridiculous game she had played once in her second life, where the goal was to carry a bubble on a pink plastic wand to the finish line. You were promised a prize if you made it there with the bubble intact, but you spent so much time looking out for the things that might trip you up that by the time you reached the endpoint, you never really got a good look at those gorgeous colors hiding inside their insubstantial shell. And the prizes were never as good as you were led to believe.
Even worse than the perpetual strain to exist for even a second in that ever-intangible future was the constant worry, the looking behind her shoulder and around each shadowy corner for the next thing that would go wrong. Because in as many lives as she had lived through, something always went wrong. There was no chance to savor the sinus-tickling scent of fresh grass, to feel the soft caress of warm sunshine on her cheeks, to hear the carefree laughter of her dearest friends. Not that there was much of that. Laughter and joy were the two sides of the coin with which they had purchased the future, a cost they had been willing to endure before they had measured its weight.
They had reached a time when the fall of the Moon Kingdom was no longer the greatest tragedy of them all. Sometimes, she thought she would rather relive every day of her Silver Millennium lifetime up through the very last day, every day, rather than go on as she was. Nothing felt less real to her than this park bench supporting a body that felt more insubstantial by the second, and yet it was the most real thing in the city.
She sighed regretfully, reaching into her pocket to touch the slip of paper that had been folded so many times it was starting to separate along the fault lines as easily as her love had fractured. In hundreds of her other lifetimes, she had experienced a bubbling sense of expectation, exhilaration, and ill-contained impatience at this moment. She couldn’t remember when she had stopped feeling that way, but she knew she hadn’t been the first. No, it had been Jupiter who had given up earlier than the rest of them. Jupiter, who had wagered all her hopes and dreams on the promise of true love, had fallen the hardest. There was only so long a heart go on hoping, only so many times those hopes could be shattered, before the heart forgot what hope was entirely.
Just as Serenity and Endymion’s souls were joined by an unbreakable bond, so too were their guardians destined to find each other in each new life. Like but not like. No matter how fevered or cool each subsequent reunion was, they never managed to stay with one another for long, while their prince and princess always managed to remain together. It went against the laws of probability, but then again, she had long since accepted the fallibility of the laws of mathematics.
She hated being the one to find him. At first, he would look at her with those brilliant green eyes, so vividly alive every time they reencountered each other, and she would feel the blood careen wildly through her veins. She would be a teenager tasting her first kiss, the princess before the midnight stroke, a child who still believed in miracles and this-time-things-would-be-different. But before long, she would remember the hard truth again when his eyes burned down to faded jade and they went their separate ways.
She knew Venus and Kunzite still kept track of who found whom first, a never ending game of one-upmanship. Except this time, it was the end. Pluto had warned them that this life would be the last, that the chain of reincarnations ended here, and that it was time for the mantle of the senshi to be passed on at last. She wasn’t sure she really believed it, and part of her shrank away like a rabbit fleeing the most dangerous predator of the forest. The other part of her embraced that knowledge and held it closer to her than she had ever been able to hold her own restless soulmate.
What she did understand, on some level, was that she had just one more lifetime in which to find Zoisite, one final chance to make things work, and the precious moments were ticking by. Even Mars, who hadn’t spoken to Jadeite in the last fifty-five of her reincarnations, was out on the streets of Crystal Tokyo searching for him.
She had the advantage of knowing exactly where he lived, what he did, and what he looked like in this time and place. The question was, what would she do with this knowledge?
**
As the incurious eyes of strangers flicked over her and away, she felt herself fading more and more into the early morning fog. She was effectively invisible to all these people and the billions more who owed their existences to her, in some part, and they would never miss her when she was gone.
Her feet carried her to her destination without much conscious direction on her part, and she found herself standing before a little house with a pocket of artificial grass and shuttered windows. It looked exactly like all the other houses on the street and somehow nothing at all like them.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, machines, machines walking animals, and even more rarely people passing her by without realizing she was there. Her breath caught when the front door opened, and the veils of mist fell away from her without her command.
A man with green eyes stepped out, accompanied by a slender woman with dark hair. A choked laugh filled her throat. Even when he wasn’t yet awakened, something within Zoisite always seemed to gravitate towards his memory of her Silver Millennium self. She had been called a homewrecker more times than she could count by women who looked more like her first incarnation than she did.
“Good morning. Can I help you with something?” he called when they noticed her, his tone friendly and his smile coming quickly and easily.
Her eyes met his, letting the world fall away, and for once, she looked only at him, not superimposing her memory of his past selves onto this new face. His smile wavered as he stood there with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, wondering why something about those ocean blue eyes made every nerve in his body scream with recognition.
All along she had never intended to talk to him, but she hadn’t been able to bear not seeing him again. Now, she wanted to ask if he was happy, but the words died on her lips. The light in his eyes, the warmth of his greeting to a stranger, the unmarred purity of his aura told her more than his words ever could. And she had been gifted with the sound of his voice.
“You already have, more than you know,” she told him, and the sweet wistfulness of her voice hooked into his memory, like a skein of blue silk snagged on the corner of a rough wooden peg.
She turned and set off at a brisk pace, walking just slowly enough to avoid alarming anyone.
“That was strange. Do you know her, sweetheart?” his companion asked, peering over his shoulder.
“Never seen her before in my life,” he responded, unable to stir himself to retrieve his keys.
“Do you think she’s lost?”
“I think she came looking for something that belongs to her,” he answered absently, his gaze fixed on the lithe form disappearing into the distance.
“I don’t see how you would know such a thing,” she said uncertainly. These eccentric turns of his mind, the quicksilver brightness of his thoughts, were what had initially attracted her to him. They both entranced her and led her to despair, for he never seemed to exist wholly in the same time and place as she did.
He squeezed her hand affectionately and agreed that it was merely another one of his strange notions as they headed into the city center for the start of another workweek.
**
As she left behind the man whose eyes she knew better than her own face, she didn’t realize that the tears were flowing freely down her cheeks, running faster than the water rushing swiftly under the bridge.
We have each had more than our fair share of being cruel to each other, beloved. So this is the last time I will ever interfere in your life, bestowing something mightier than my powers and worthier than my love: the chance to live a normal life.
The ebony-speckled green stone fell from her fingers, so lightly that the answering splash from the river could barely be heard over the sound of her shuddering breaths.
My greatest gift to you.
Fin
Description: What more is there to say, when everything else has been said?
A/N: Crystal Tokyo in the far future, an idea that's been rattling around for awhile.
“Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.”
-William Maxwell
“He who lives happiest has forgotten most.”
-Robert Anton Wilson
She dragged her fingers along the park bench, relishing the feel of scarred wood and flaking paint against her skin. The bench was the last of its kind in the city, maybe in the entire world, and it was a change she had helped bring about in one of her many past lives. Perhaps the most important past life, the one that had given rise to Crystal Tokyo, even if she did not recall many happy moments from that era.
The breeze rustled through her hair as a voice she knew better than the one she used now whispered in her mind, No one ever promised we would be happy.
A bittersweet smile flitted across her lips. That was Venus for you, always ready with some idea of how you should be running your life even though she had never quite figured out how to manage her own. To be fair, she was usually right, but that didn’t make her advice any easier to take.
Her fingers tightened their grip, and the ancient wood, gray under green, let out a mild groan of reproach. Some things never changed - like Venus being the leader, their senshi powers, and the color of her eyes. She wondered how much of that was a blessing, and how much was a curse.
Looking back across the endless span of years gave her a bizarre sense of vertigo, as if all along she had been slowly draining away into the sands of the past while her consciousness was forced to exist in the present. No matter what Pluto said, there was never any future. And yet, it seemed like so much of their time, so many of their lives, had been spent in an effort to secure the future. It reminded her of a ridiculous game she had played once in her second life, where the goal was to carry a bubble on a pink plastic wand to the finish line. You were promised a prize if you made it there with the bubble intact, but you spent so much time looking out for the things that might trip you up that by the time you reached the endpoint, you never really got a good look at those gorgeous colors hiding inside their insubstantial shell. And the prizes were never as good as you were led to believe.
Even worse than the perpetual strain to exist for even a second in that ever-intangible future was the constant worry, the looking behind her shoulder and around each shadowy corner for the next thing that would go wrong. Because in as many lives as she had lived through, something always went wrong. There was no chance to savor the sinus-tickling scent of fresh grass, to feel the soft caress of warm sunshine on her cheeks, to hear the carefree laughter of her dearest friends. Not that there was much of that. Laughter and joy were the two sides of the coin with which they had purchased the future, a cost they had been willing to endure before they had measured its weight.
They had reached a time when the fall of the Moon Kingdom was no longer the greatest tragedy of them all. Sometimes, she thought she would rather relive every day of her Silver Millennium lifetime up through the very last day, every day, rather than go on as she was. Nothing felt less real to her than this park bench supporting a body that felt more insubstantial by the second, and yet it was the most real thing in the city.
She sighed regretfully, reaching into her pocket to touch the slip of paper that had been folded so many times it was starting to separate along the fault lines as easily as her love had fractured. In hundreds of her other lifetimes, she had experienced a bubbling sense of expectation, exhilaration, and ill-contained impatience at this moment. She couldn’t remember when she had stopped feeling that way, but she knew she hadn’t been the first. No, it had been Jupiter who had given up earlier than the rest of them. Jupiter, who had wagered all her hopes and dreams on the promise of true love, had fallen the hardest. There was only so long a heart go on hoping, only so many times those hopes could be shattered, before the heart forgot what hope was entirely.
Just as Serenity and Endymion’s souls were joined by an unbreakable bond, so too were their guardians destined to find each other in each new life. Like but not like. No matter how fevered or cool each subsequent reunion was, they never managed to stay with one another for long, while their prince and princess always managed to remain together. It went against the laws of probability, but then again, she had long since accepted the fallibility of the laws of mathematics.
She hated being the one to find him. At first, he would look at her with those brilliant green eyes, so vividly alive every time they reencountered each other, and she would feel the blood careen wildly through her veins. She would be a teenager tasting her first kiss, the princess before the midnight stroke, a child who still believed in miracles and this-time-things-would-be-different. But before long, she would remember the hard truth again when his eyes burned down to faded jade and they went their separate ways.
She knew Venus and Kunzite still kept track of who found whom first, a never ending game of one-upmanship. Except this time, it was the end. Pluto had warned them that this life would be the last, that the chain of reincarnations ended here, and that it was time for the mantle of the senshi to be passed on at last. She wasn’t sure she really believed it, and part of her shrank away like a rabbit fleeing the most dangerous predator of the forest. The other part of her embraced that knowledge and held it closer to her than she had ever been able to hold her own restless soulmate.
What she did understand, on some level, was that she had just one more lifetime in which to find Zoisite, one final chance to make things work, and the precious moments were ticking by. Even Mars, who hadn’t spoken to Jadeite in the last fifty-five of her reincarnations, was out on the streets of Crystal Tokyo searching for him.
She had the advantage of knowing exactly where he lived, what he did, and what he looked like in this time and place. The question was, what would she do with this knowledge?
**
As the incurious eyes of strangers flicked over her and away, she felt herself fading more and more into the early morning fog. She was effectively invisible to all these people and the billions more who owed their existences to her, in some part, and they would never miss her when she was gone.
Her feet carried her to her destination without much conscious direction on her part, and she found herself standing before a little house with a pocket of artificial grass and shuttered windows. It looked exactly like all the other houses on the street and somehow nothing at all like them.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, machines, machines walking animals, and even more rarely people passing her by without realizing she was there. Her breath caught when the front door opened, and the veils of mist fell away from her without her command.
A man with green eyes stepped out, accompanied by a slender woman with dark hair. A choked laugh filled her throat. Even when he wasn’t yet awakened, something within Zoisite always seemed to gravitate towards his memory of her Silver Millennium self. She had been called a homewrecker more times than she could count by women who looked more like her first incarnation than she did.
“Good morning. Can I help you with something?” he called when they noticed her, his tone friendly and his smile coming quickly and easily.
Her eyes met his, letting the world fall away, and for once, she looked only at him, not superimposing her memory of his past selves onto this new face. His smile wavered as he stood there with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, wondering why something about those ocean blue eyes made every nerve in his body scream with recognition.
All along she had never intended to talk to him, but she hadn’t been able to bear not seeing him again. Now, she wanted to ask if he was happy, but the words died on her lips. The light in his eyes, the warmth of his greeting to a stranger, the unmarred purity of his aura told her more than his words ever could. And she had been gifted with the sound of his voice.
“You already have, more than you know,” she told him, and the sweet wistfulness of her voice hooked into his memory, like a skein of blue silk snagged on the corner of a rough wooden peg.
She turned and set off at a brisk pace, walking just slowly enough to avoid alarming anyone.
“That was strange. Do you know her, sweetheart?” his companion asked, peering over his shoulder.
“Never seen her before in my life,” he responded, unable to stir himself to retrieve his keys.
“Do you think she’s lost?”
“I think she came looking for something that belongs to her,” he answered absently, his gaze fixed on the lithe form disappearing into the distance.
“I don’t see how you would know such a thing,” she said uncertainly. These eccentric turns of his mind, the quicksilver brightness of his thoughts, were what had initially attracted her to him. They both entranced her and led her to despair, for he never seemed to exist wholly in the same time and place as she did.
He squeezed her hand affectionately and agreed that it was merely another one of his strange notions as they headed into the city center for the start of another workweek.
**
As she left behind the man whose eyes she knew better than her own face, she didn’t realize that the tears were flowing freely down her cheeks, running faster than the water rushing swiftly under the bridge.
We have each had more than our fair share of being cruel to each other, beloved. So this is the last time I will ever interfere in your life, bestowing something mightier than my powers and worthier than my love: the chance to live a normal life.
The ebony-speckled green stone fell from her fingers, so lightly that the answering splash from the river could barely be heard over the sound of her shuddering breaths.
My greatest gift to you.
Fin