onepassingnight | [011 ☿] Silent Planet Mercury

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[011 ☿] Silent Planet Mercury

Unearthly quiet falls over everything. This place is empty and barren; nothing grows in its desolate grey soil. It's a void without atmosphere, but those who arrive here find themselves able breathe normally and withstand the incredible heat of planet Mercury's sun-turned side.

To the daughter of this planet, it's breathing the nostalgic air of thousands of years ago. Here, she is at her strongest and her best. She thrives in the sun that appears several times larger than it would on Earth, she basks in its intense rays despite the dark sky of space.

Without turning around, Mercury speaks with her eyes fixed on the sky. "Watch," she insists. She nods to where the sun travels towards its highest point - and stops for several long moments before beginning to unwind its arc backwards. It's a sight only seen here, and only now while it's been sped up enough to be observable.

Before she can say more, a second brightness flares so strongly that it almost overshadows anything else. Mercury suddenly lets out a pained whimper and shields her eyes from the holy light of Venus. She has that flesh-crawling feeling of a nightmare somehow.

(ooc: artist conceptions of Mercury sunrise. The effect described with the sun's path is due to Mercury's orbit and happens over the course of a Mercury day - about two months of our time.)

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"You remember that." The words are spoken neutrally, with her back still to Cloud as she leans over the console to reach a few of the controls, but she's pleased.

The view shifts - and a different castle (http://www.wikimoon.org/index.php?title=Magellan_Castle) fills the screen. It seems much like Mercury's own, except for its shape and design: a floating castle in orbit in space. No anomaly, despite that bright light. It's so hard to be sure of anything, and she needs to be sure.

She turns around. "For something to stay in your mind like that, you must have wanted to see it."

"Yeah."

He doesn't elaborate. It's the answer for both of her statements really. He does look curiously at the castle on the screen though. He's got a suspicion of whose it must be if Ami has one and he saw bits of what was probably one when he was dreaming of Usagi's future while still in his ex-SOLDIER memories. He can't imagine a baby being born into a barren castle like this though. Babies belonged with their mom and dad, happy and loved and safe. Ami has mentioned her mother enough that he suspects it isn't any different for the other girls like her.

"How old were you? When you first realized you were Mercury?"

These castles were given to them at their birth, as a place tied to their power, the homes of their guardian selves, and a gift from Queen Serenity, the princess' mother; they aren't the castles of their kingdoms. Mercury has since decided not to resent the gift for its giver, but to consider the power - always the important thing - her fair due, and scant recompense for what's been suffered at the moon dynasty's hands.

How old she was is another of those questions that's so much harder than it seems.

"When I went to the Moon Castle, I was seven years old. This time, I awakened my powers when I was fourteen." Again, the power is what she focuses on now. Yet she remembers it, the bright and smiling face of Tsukino Usagi: that's why we should be senshi together. She'd only wanted that, nothing else, never wanted her. And so Mizuno Ami had refused, only to finally speak the words that sealed her fate once the two were cornered by a youma and might have died otherwise. She'd become Mercury.

It's her turn for the question. "Why are you asking this?"

Edited 2011-11-11 11:04 (UTC)

"I was fourteen when I joined the army." His gaze drifts from the screen to the woman in front of him. "I was sixteen when they started turning me into what I am now."

He leaves off whether that was a good thing, whether it was voluntary, how long it went on for. He has vague recollections of her in one of his nightmares, struggling to free him from one of the tubes, losing herself in mako as well... he doesn't know if she remembers it and if she does he doesn't know that she'd connect it to how he ended up with his eyes or the strength he has.

It doesn't matter really. She saw his nightmare and she's still willing to stand in the same room as him. Though - maybe that's why she's suddenly unwelcoming of his touch. His hand rubs absently at the pain in his covered arm and he frowns.

"Why not?"

The first words to her mind are but it was your choice. Pride forbids speaking them. She pretends she was never the girl who didn't want to, never the girl who changed her mind only for the chance to have a friend, and never, never the girl taken from among them and made into a simple tool of the war between the senshi and Dark Kingdom.

She doesn't make all the connections, but she remembers the dreams and that's enough to tell her what she tried to break him out of had a part in it. Yet again, she's interfered. She will keep interfering. She wants his touch, the simple touch of a... well, she never says 'friend' without so many heaps of sarcasm. But right now, they'll both settle for the same room. Despite all that's happened.

Despite all that's happened, do you still rely on me over him?

"Because," she says simply, "There's no reason for you to get to know me."

She doesn't say 'no reason to want to'. She still doesn't understand why he has, why he's here as often as he is, why he's willing to be a support. But she'll never forget, couldn't forget, that first mad ride on Fenrir when they met. It started something that baffles her.

"We are just a part of a dream to each other. Isn't that so?"

His shoulders shrug. It doesn't bother him.

"Maybe. But you're a dream I keep coming back to."

There's not a lot in his life that Cloud can come back to and even less that he wants to. But friends -- and that's what he considers her -- friends he'll always come back for. For as long as he's able to. Time's suddenly limited in that area though.

"Most of the people I see regularly in my dreams are dead friends."

She dreams about that girl. And it's a measure of her own obsession that this is her first thought, and not the other people she's found in dreams. But she thinks of them next. She thinks of the tantalizing feeling that she could be accepted, and the frustration of the fact that it can only be in the dream world.

He's a dream she keeps coming back to anyway.

"Even if they're gone, your mind goes back to them," she reflects. "So they appear here in your dreams."

"I owe them both. It's my fault they're dead."

Not exactly a light subject and not something he'd usually talk about. He's at the end of things though and what used to be a mild gnawing inside him has taken over a lot more of his life now.

"Now I see them in my dreams more than I see the people I know that are still alive." He's no shrink but even he thinks that's probably a bad sign. With a quiet exhale, he shakes his head, running fingers through the hair at the back of it. "Even in my dreams, Zack won't let me apologize to him though."

"If you're giving yourself the burden of that sort of guilt, it's not strange that you'd keep seeing them." She'd say, of course, that this does not reflect on her own situation at all. She sees the princess time and time again simply because that is the nature of the nexus, just as she's seen Beryl.

Then she finds advice to give, advice that might well be stirred up from what she wants to happen.

"However, apologies won't change anything. If you have regrets, make something different."

Blue eyes come up and for a minute, just a minute, they hold all the torture he's slowly been letting himself sink into since he realized he's dying. That the second chance (third chance? fourth?) he'd hoped for isn't coming for him. There's a quiet fervency in his voice as he asks:

"You know how to do that?"

She might not be the best person to take advice from in this area. It's been known to warp and twist worlds other than her own, all spreading out from the taint that started with her.

"I changed my world completely," she says, no reassurance but a simple proof of her words.

His brows sink and his face tips down too. He's not interested in changing his world. He's already done that. For good or for bad. It's something simpler - and more complex - that he needs the key for.

"How do you find forgiveness for past sins?"

Edited 2011-11-27 14:06 (UTC)

"That..." There's a long pause before she finds the rest of her words. "...is something I can't do."

She turns her head, facing Cloud directly. "I don't look for it. I've known from the start, that isn't a possibility for me."

His chin dips just a little more and even if he doesn't nod, there's the same feeling of the gesture in the way his eyes sink and he inhales.

"Yeah. That's what I figured for me too. Just - needed to hear it from someone else, I guess." His head comes back up and he looks at her. "Thanks. For showing me this place. I'm glad I got to see it."

It hadn't been her intention to make him sink as well; she'd been speaking and thinking only of her own self, her own actions. She glances at him quickly, and says only two words. "We're different."

He still has a chance to be something else.

He looks at her, a quick shift of his eyes and his face softens a little.

"Not that different, Ami."

"For something like 'forgiveness', I'd have to change something, and turn around. That's what the word 'repent' means." This vocabulary lesson brought to you by Mizuno Ami, no matter how much she's in Mercury's form.

"That's something I won't do. If I went back, I'd make these same choices." And thus, there is no forgiveness for her. She can never repent and ask for it. Her path remains this path, no matter how many sins it makes her commit.

The alternative is worse.

"There's no one left that can forgive me."

He's realizing that, realizing that he's hit the end of his road sooner than he expected and that there's no chance for redemption before it. She won't change things, he can't. The end result is the same. His voice softens.

"I'm sorry. About your planet. I'm glad you're still here so I could get to know you but it means you had to live with losing it. I know words don't mean much but - I'm sorry you were hurt that way."

That itself was probably the princess' doing: the wish of the girl who only thought of the prince so strongly that she often thought she wanted to be born on the same planet with him. This time, she was; and her senshi from the past were born there as well, to one day remember - and to one day learn the truth.\

She doesn't answer his sympathy right away; she's not good at that. But she nods, and turns to him as a woman with her mind made up.

"I already know I can't stay here forever. Shall we go?"

"Time to wake up?" he asks, in no hurry to but aware that morning always comes whether he wants it to or not. Time is even more limited than he'd once thought and he's more aware of it than before. His dreams are running out.

"You could say it that way." She'd be willing to go somewhere else; but she can't stay in a dream forever, either.

What she wants to tell him is that they have time. The blessing of dreams is that he'll never be gone from them, because she can dream of him even when he's gone from his waking world. But she's no longer good at those types of speeches.

"Shall we go?" Into the next room will bring them out of the dream.

"Yeah," it's a nod. It's her home though and he lets her lead. Maybe he should say something else about the kid - but he trusts her to make the right decision even if she doesn't know it yet. And maybe he should say one last thing about her home or the ruined planet below - but he can't think of anything that would be worth that pain. Maybe he should say goodbye - but he hasn't, won't, say goodbye to anyone. So instead he follows behind her, boots making soft sounds on the floor. When his words fail, all he's got left is his presence. That, at least, he can give her for a little while longer before it's gone too.

It's his presence she wants, and she hesitates just a second, to have more of it, before finally stepping through the doorway. She gives one final look to the castle behind them; she'll be here again, and there's no regret at leaving, but the chances are rare. Then she's ready.

"Hn." With a nod, he steps through the door with her. Come what may, he doesn't have any regrets about these times spent with her.

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[011 ☿] Silent Planet Mercury

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