[fic] Sailor Moon, "Choices"

Oh, hey, LJ's back! In the meantime, I've been watching lots of GetBackers with Kels (...for an internet-style loose definition of 'with') and lots of Sailormoon R with eoan (for a 'sitting together and making lazy comments' definition of 'with'). I'm not sure if I should say watching or rewatching because R is a series I've seen 98% of dub-only, and this is the subtitle we're watching now.

And, see, I'm understanding so much more about the characters and why they behave how they do -- both in this season and in LATER seasons, things I never got from the dub because it was never properly established/cut out/whatever. Like how Usagi plays hot and cold on whether she wants the other senshi to help her in battle throughout R -- made no sense in the dub, when at the end of the first season nothing bad had happened, but in this? She's remembering seeing how their corpses looked as they died one after another and going between the usual OH YEAH GUYS COME SAVE ME and NO NO IT'S OKAY I CAN HANDLE IT MYSELF STAY SAVE KTHX. Chibi-Usa is just SO MUCH MORE BEARABLE in the sub as well -- I find that anime dubs tend to have badly-acted children overall, but, man. In this she has the maturity of a good upbringing and determination but is, at the same time, SO OBVIOUSLY just a little girl, who cries when things get to be too much (but not for too long, doing that crycry-hiccup-stop things little kids do) and who's alone and scared and knows her dad's dying and her mama's in a coma and has been told she's the only one who can help, in not just a world but an entire technological era she doesn't know, in a huge city she's unfamiliar with... and she's well-acted for that scenario, something 'Reeny' never made me feel. And then some stuff with Endymion's issues and why Mamoru seems to suddenly lose personality after he hooks up with Usagi again, and I was GOING to just type that out but realized that fic would probably show what I was thinking better. So.

Choices
Sailormoon
Usagi/Mamoru, King Endymion POV
Spoilers for the episode where the senshi all go to the future (78? 79?)
Worksafe


It's Endymion's job, he's decided, to terrify the shit out of Mamoru before he can do something stupid and lose Usagi.

There's a lot of reasons for it, and few of them selfish -- yes, he loves her, this Usagi-who-has-become-Serenity-Incarnate, the beautiful woman who maintains hints of her old self but who is cool, competant, everything years and years and years of battle has shaped her into. Yes, he wants to have her now, and wants his lovely little girl, his poor lonely little girl.

But more, it's for the sake of the world.

When the entire world fell into cold sleep, it was Usagi who took on the mantle of Neo-Queen Serenity and sacrificed herself to the Ginzuishou's healing, caught herself up in the crystal of its existance to wake the world and rule over it. But he remembers how it happened:

"Mamo-chan, Mamo-chan, I'm scared." Tired and alone and shaking, her senshi unconcious around her -- him lying there, trying to remain awake, one hand stretched out towards her. She'd woken them for a little while, but they kept falling asleep and, half-alive as it was now without her fully connected to it -- a part of it as it was a part of her -- the ginzuishou couldn't keep waking them, not and wake everyone. She's crying, the crystal in her hand and leaving her brooch empty, her legs bent at the knee as she folds down against his chest. Don't leave me again, don't leave me.

And he'd found enough breath to murmur, "Usako..." and reach out to touch the crystal; though he couldn't draw on its strength, it had reached to him the way she did, and he roused himself enough to half-sit up. "We'll do this together."

And before that, so many other battles they wouldn't have won if she hadn't had him to turn to. He was, Endymion had to admit, fairly useless in the small, day-to-day battles, though he'd attend them regularly just in case he could help and because he couldn't deny the part of himself that demanded he be there for her -- having already lost her once, blasted apart with their first deaths and not able to hold onto her hand then, he couldn't let himself do it again.

But he also knew his younger self, who was barely twenty years old and while he did love Usagi, he resented her. He wanted freedom -- hardly out of high school, he wanted to date around, be like the other men around him, enjoy his youth while he had it. He wanted not to be caught up in destiny, wanted to have solved the mystery of the woman who whispered in his dreams and then moved on to a normal life. It had seemed, back then, like the world had done everything to ensure he couldn't be happy: The loss of his parents, the amnesia, the alien, the woman in his dreams who demanded he steal and steal and steal to make her happy, the blackouts he first had when he became Tuxedo Mask.

And most of it revolved around Usagi.

And Mamoru, young Mamoru had loved her, with a childish, twenty-year-old sort of love, and she had loved him like only a fourteen-year-old could, selfish and needy and loud. And they were destined, after all, and young Mamoru had tried, tried hard, but he couldn't help but resent her, even as he wanted her and loved her. If he hadn't been Prince Endymion in a past life, Mamoru would never have considered Usagi, and those two sides of himself -- two literally different people -- fought as often as Princess Serenity, gentle and devoted, fought with self-centered lazy Usagi.

It had been hard for Mamoru to give Usagi what she'd needed to get by. It was hard for all Japanese men to properly show affection, particularly in public; a cultural thing, King Endymion thought. He remembered how strictly aware of other people's eyes he'd been every time he'd put an arm round her, and how even Motoki had teased him for being 'whipped' by his girlfriend just because he used a petname for her. It wasn't manly to be that affectionate with their girlfriends in public -- private was another matter, of course. But Usagi was a public girl, a social girl, so Mamoru had given half-hearted distracted attempts whenever he could.

There was no way it would have lasted, and it needed to last, so King Endymion, a millenium later, sent his mind back into Mamoru's dreams -- Mamoru's psychic defenses as shredded and ripped and fragile as they'd always been -- and set out to terrify Mamoru into changing.

It started by separating them -- because while it had almost been a relief for Mamoru to scorn her and tell her he didn't love her, it also hurt him like a bitch. Moreover, Endymion thought, Mamoru was pretty stupid about it. A new enemy shows up at about the same time that he starts having dreams telling him to stay away from Usagi, and yet he doesn't think to talk to her or the other senshi about them, to sit down and try to figure out what it means. Endymion could have left him alone to grow up and become himself so much earlier if he hadn't been so much stupider about Usagi when he was younger, he thought. It wasn't until, nearly desperate, he managed to send Usagi the same dream that things poured out into the open, that they discussed the risks of it, did some actual planning for the future, and even when Mamoru turned away, Usagi went after him to take him back.

And, as Endymion knew he would, Mamoru caved and pulled her into his arms and kissed her with the desperation of a truly lonely man in love and scared.

It was a start, good enough to get Mamoru's determination moulded, but not enough to save the world, and so Endymion waited until his daughter brought Usagi and Mamoru -- Moon and Mask -- and the other senshi to the future. And then he gritted his teeth around the gaping belly wound slowly draining his life, and sent his consciousness out to greet them.

Once there, he explained, quite simply: The two of them would rule the world in the future, and had to, to protect it. Everything revolved around the two of them. And Chibi-Usa is their child; if they do not remain devoted, a girl they've grown to love will never even exist. He doesn't say it in so many words, but he watches the meaning sink in.

They do not have a choice.

Fortunately, it's something they want -- even if there are times they DON'T want it, if there's times Mamoru wants to live a normal life or Usagi wants a chance to daydream over other men and just be a normal girl, they still do long for each other, deep down, both from bonds of affection they'd made in this life (enough for a good relationship that, if they were normal, would end after a year or two and they'd say it had been good, and smile, and move on to other things) and from the pact they'd made in a past life that enforced they couldn't leave. A relief, at least, that they'd wanted it at least a little. But whether or not they had, they didn't have a choice.

And Endymion smiled sadly as he saw realization cross Mamoru's faces and knew, from his own distant memories of a millenium earlier, what it was:

A thousand years is a hell of a lot of time to go without some sort of breakup.

He watches Mamoru realize, red-faced and terrified, that if he doesn't do everything in his power to stay with Usagi, no matter how uncomfortable or awkward, he'll lose out on an entire future he's had a chance to see bits of. The world will lose out on it, and maintaining the Earth's happiness has always been his domain, in this life and the earlier. Endymion remembers this moment, remembers the blind terror he felt at that moment, that everything hinged on him being happy with one girl when nobody could usually guarantee a relationship's happiness. And he remembered steel forming under that terror, a determination to rush out and keep her no matter what, no matter how embarrassing, no matter what he had to do to himself and his public image.

It's going to be awkward for Mamoru for the next few years, Endymion remembers wryly, full of pain and hurt and even death, now and again. He remembers years of trying too hard -- being honest that he loves her, of course, but trying to show it too much, so much that his usual self, his relaxed, sarcastic self, isn't even visible. He's seen it in others -- seen friends ignore things like studying and exams to go be with their friends, just in case the other person didn't want to stay friends if they didn't come first. Mamoru is such a small child, Endymion thinks, in so many ways; from here, he'll overplay the role of the lover because he doesn't want to risk Usagi forgetting his love.

It would relax, in time, to what he shares with Serenity now: something gentle and honest and affectionate, easy-going displays of it without needing to go overboard, able to snap and argue if they want to, able to be sarcastic, because by then there would be no doubt left between them about how they felt for each other. But now, when they're still honestly children, he has to guarantee that they'll make it to that point where neither of them could possibly doubt the other.

"It's strange," Endymion tells him as they stand face to face, "to be talking to my past self."

And it is, as they stared at him, wide-eyed and red-faced and Endymion a thousand years older, because all Endymion can think is they're so very young to have all this pressure on them! Let them live a normal life for a while, they can grow into us later--

But he can't, because he has to guarantee it, and so he simply smiles at them in their puppy earnestness and reminds himself that this was, in the end, his choice.